The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Cumann na mBan was the first separatist group to mobilize against the Treaty: they were the only organization demonstrating outside University College on Earlsfort Terrace in December. Wyse Power complained that the Dublin branches had been posting anti-Treaty bills around the streets even before the organization had officially taken up any position on the issue. They went on to circulate all branches to urge them to do all they could to ‘secure the adherence of every Sinn Féin Cumann and Comhairle Ceanntair for the Irish Republic’ at the upcoming Sinn Féin Ard-fheis. Cumann na mBan’s own Special Convention, called for 28 January but postponed until 5 February so that Markievicz could attend, was actually convened in the name of the Republic. In mid-January the Executive publicly ‘reaffirmed’ its allegiance to the Irish Republic and declared that it could not ‘support the Articles of Treaty signed in London’.42 It seems likely that most of the rank-and-file membership of Cumann na mBan were in favour of the Treaty. Markievicz and MacSwiney, however, were determined to place the organization in the republican vanguard.43 At the Special Convention (the delaying of which seems to have caused the absence of many pro-Treaty delegates – perhaps deliberately) the organization’s leadership was purged.44 Markievicz was elected president, and after a motion to support the Treaty had been rejected by 419 votes to 63, pro-Treaty members were, as Macardle delicately puts it, ‘requested to resign’.45

  Women’s prominence in the anti-Treaty resistance became, if anything, more marked as that resistance became more uncompromising and, ultimately, violent. Ernie O’Malley noted the contrast between the ‘Tan war’, when ‘the girls had always helped but had never sufficient status’, and the onset of hostilities in 1922. ‘Now they were our comrades’: ‘loyal, willing and incorruptible’; ‘indefatigable, they put the men to shame by their individual zeal and initiative.’ (Here, though, in the word ‘individual’ lurked a critique of the whole anti-Treaty movement: collectively, initiative and indefatigability were in short supply.) Even so, their role remained essentially what it had been in the Tan war: carrying dispatches, supplying food and clothing, and (as at Clonmel, for instance) ‘assisting in every possible way’ – short of actually fighting.46

  ‘OUR CIVIL SERVICES HAVE SIMPLY PLAYED AT GOVERNING A REPUBLIC’

  Had the ‘band of brothers’ at GHQ already, as some republicans believed, admitted defeat long before the Treaty was signed? The suggestion sometimes made that no military plans were prepared for a renewal of hostilities, if the negotiations broke down, might be taken to support this. In fact, GHQ did contemplate a second phase of the war. One staff memorandum, on ‘Divisional Offensives’, echoed the original reasoning for the creation of divisions. ‘Upon the resumption of hostilities it is best to have the Division the operative unit’; each ‘should be self-centred and capable of carrying out a vigorous offensive by itself’. They should ‘seize and retain the initiative’. Decentralization of command would be ‘the keynote of future successful operations’. The GHQ perspective was clear – ‘if the divisions fail in their part, too much work will fall on GHQ.’ ‘If each division acts dependable [sic] then GHQ will be able to deploy them in mutual support.’47 At local level, there were plans to carry on as before – ‘to mine roads at suitable ambush positions and to prepare bridges on all roads for demolition by explosive charges’ so that ‘our columns could take the initiative at short notice’.48

  A second memo, produced in late November by the Director of Training, Emmet Dalton, assessed the operational prospects on termination of the Truce, but it focused primarily on likely British action. The brother of the Squad’s Charlie Dalton, and a former officer in the Dublin Fusiliers (who had been beside Tom Kettle when he was killed in France, and presumably mentioned this often, since he was apparently nicknamed ‘Ginchy’), Dalton was the only member of the staff with direct experience of front-line fighting in the war. He seems to have been the author of another paper discussing the likely struggle for public support if war was renewed. Suggesting that the destruction of the British administrative departments in the Custom House had ‘never received the attention it deserved’, it argued for much more concerted action against the enemy civil administration. But this argument turned into a lacerating critique of the republican civil administration itself, which needed a ‘complete overhaul’. If there was to be ‘a sort of national call to arms’ in the next round, ‘the Nation cannot be fairly asked to rally to institutions that have not stood the very moderate tests to which they have been subjected.’ The government ‘must give the Nation a lead’, but had not done so. ‘No single Government Department has been the slightest assistance to the Army and some of them have been a serious drag.’ If they could not function ‘standing on their own legs’, they should abdicate. ‘The Army can no longer afford to dissipate its energy in bolstering up any Civil Department without getting a return in kind.’49

  Dalton considered that the only department ‘pulling its weight’ was Publicity. (This in itself formed a striking contrast with Liam Lynch’s view that ‘the press has ruined the country’, and that ‘it is the action of Fitzgerald [sic] and his type that has brought us to our present position’.)50 The task of the Local Government Department, by contrast, had ‘never been tackled’, even though it was ‘simple enough’. It had only to ‘order its permanent officials to have no dealings with the Enemy departments – and dismiss them if they disobey’. Instead of which it had been swayed by ‘stupid’ humanitarian considerations of not throwing men out of work. Home Affairs was if anything worse: the judiciary had ‘yielded to the first onset of the Enemy when he tried to overthrow our Civil Administration’. Yet ‘these officials might without any personal risk have stood up to the usurping Government, and if not technically effective might at least have had some propagandist value.’ The arbitration system could have been maintained over ‘considerable stretches of the country’, and ‘the way in which these activities lapsed is thoroughly discreditable.’ The conclusion was stark: ‘The plain fact is that our Civil Services have simply played at governing a republic.’ They had merely developed all the vices of functionaries. ‘The calm way our Officials regard their interests as vested for good and all would be laughable if it were not criminal.’ In future, ineffective officials must be sacked – after all, inadequate army officers were ‘dismissed every week’.51

  This withering indictment offers a rather different perspective on GHQ’s ‘defeatism’, if such it was. Most of the arguments then and since have turned on the IRA’s military capacity to withstand and counter a new British offensive. The republican administration’s effectiveness had generally been taken at its own evaluation; but – even with due allowance for the difficulties it operated under – it might clearly be open to question.

  THE BROTHERHOOD

  For most of the previous seventy years or so, it would have been assumed by separatists – and probably nationalists in general – that the IRB would play a central part in deciding whether any political settlement met republican demands. Since 1916 its position had, as we have seen, become less central; and if de Valera and Brugha had had their way, it would have been marginalized if not cast aside entirely. But it had not. The organization still existed, and the ghost of the old IRB principle that its Supreme Council was the provisional government of the Republic still walked. Since 1916 the Council had contained many pivotal figures in the republican leadership, among them Collins himself (who was president in 1921), Richard Mulcahy, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, Austin Stack and Gearoid O’Sullivan, as well as provincial leaders like Liam Lynch. (O’Sullivan, IRB Centre for Leinster as well as Adjutant General of the IRA, typified the knit.) In late 1921 Seán Ó Muirthile was its secretary and Eoin O’Duffy its treasurer. Collins’s position was exceptional, not only because of his key role in the republican administration. It may be that ‘in the back of many people’s minds he was the Young Pretender to a semi-imaginary throne.’52 He seems still to have believed in the brotherhood’s centrality. Mulcahy thoug
ht he saw it as more significant than Sinn Féin and even the IRA. Others thought he valued it as an instrument of his personal power.53

  Even before the Anglo-Irish negotiations began, the IRB was manoeuvring around their likely outcome. Frank Henderson was sent by Gearoid O’Sullivan to Wexford at the August bank holiday, to take the IRB Circles ‘a message from the Supreme Council’. This was a warning that the negotiations ‘might possibly conclude with an offer … of a compromise which could not be accepted by the Republicans, but which would be so tempting that there would be a great danger of its acceptance being advocated by many influential people’. At this point, evidently, the Supreme Council saw itself as standing out against compromise. Who were the influential people it was worrying about? Interestingly, Henderson was told that he would be on the same train as Cathal Brugha, ‘and that I was to avoid him’. This was the first disturbing indication he had of ‘a serious estrangement between the chiefs’.54

  The Supreme Council met on 3 December 1921 to discuss the draft Treaty, at the same time as the Dáil Cabinet – where of course Collins was. Without its president, it debated the form of the oath – arguing for the demotion rather than the removal of the King from it – and partition, which it rejected absolutely. Ó Muirthile met up with Collins as he boarded the ferry back to England that evening and briefed him on the discussion. When the Council met again on 10 December, it seemed to think that the final form of the oath was acceptable, even while it noted the survival of partition. In spite of this, a majority appeared ready to give the Treaty a trial. Liam Lynch’s fierce opposition forced the Council to adopt a neutral position, but Ó Muirthile contrived to issue a note (dated 12 December) to TDs who were members of the brotherhood, reporting that the Council had decided that the Treaty should be ratified. Individual deputies were, however, left free to vote as they thought best. Though the note adduced, plausibly enough, the old IRB policy of making use of any instruments likely to lead to independence, the Council’s tergiversations fatally damaged the organization’s tradition of absolute obedience – as the rider to its decision recognized.

  Some IRB men certainly followed the Supreme Council’s lead: Seamus McKenna, who was still ‘undecided’ in March, finally took the advice of ‘the man whom we regarded as our Republican father’, a member of the Supreme Council. He was ‘sure that many other IRB men accepted the ill-fated Treaty on the advice of their officers’. Many, though, did not. The moment Tom Maguire arrived in Dublin on 13 December he was met in the hallway of his hotel by his superior in the IRB and told that the senior officers supported the Treaty. But Maguire, no doubt like many others, had ‘never had much to do with’ the organization, and had little respect for his superior. He ignored him.55

  Three days after the ratification vote in the Dáil, the IRB held an unprecedented meeting of provincial Centres with the Supreme Council, which showed that it was as deeply riven as the rest of the country. Most of the Centres, unsurprisingly, were against the Treaty.56 It is clear that the members of the Supreme Council wanted to head off the looming split: hence the December compromise, which kept the organization nominally united. Mary MacSwiney insisted that without the IRB’s influence hardly 5 per cent of the Dáil would have accepted the Treaty. Brugha stridently declared that the IRB had been ‘prostituted in order to disestablish the Republic’.57 Others were more sceptical, dismissing the brotherhood as ‘semi-moribund’ by the time of the Truce. Certainly, under the pressure of disagreement over the Treaty, the venerable organization steadily disintegrated. O’Donoghue paints a fine picture of the three extraordinary IRB conferences held in Dublin in early 1922 in the hope of keeping the organization together. The leading lights, Collins and Lynch, ‘admiring and respecting each other, but each apparently immovable in his convictions, wrestled with the grim threat of disunity’. Even though ‘each was aware that it had been our fatal weakness in the past,’ and was ‘impressed by the appalling fear that it might be our undoing again’, they could not reconcile their divergent analyses.

  Here, as in the wider debate, the belief that the Treaty delivered the substance of freedom ran up against the belief that ‘for the first time in our history the people would have, by their own deliberate act, accepted foreign domination.’ Assessments of republican military capacity were likewise poles apart. Where Mulcahy frankly acknowledged ‘a defeat’, the opponents of the Treaty thought that ‘we were not beaten in the field; we were in a better position to continue the struggle than at any time since 1916.’58 To Collins and Mulcahy, even if this were true, it was simply not the point. Nor was it, in the end, for their opponents: ‘above all,’ as O’Donoghue said, ‘members of this organisation had bound themselves on oath to maintain and defend the Republic.’ The organization’s ultimate failure can be seen in the fact that by the time of the last of these unprecedented conferences, at 41 Parnell Square on 19 April, the anti-Treaty IRA had already begun military action by occupying the Four Courts, a hulking structure on the River Liffey’s north bank which housed the Irish high court as well as a mass of government archives.

  THE ‘YEAR OF DISAPPEARANCES’

  The self-image of the IRA as a military force, and of its members as soldiers, had been crucial to its performance in the fight against Britain, and it is hardly surprising that – as with all nationalist movements – an overwhelmingly positive picture of the struggle for independence passed into public memory. The failure of generally inept British efforts to brand the Volunteers as thugs, criminals and terrorists proved a long-lasting one. Such dark deeds as were done were widely assumed, not just in Ireland, to have been carried out by the thugs and terrorists of the Black and Tans. That there might have been a seamy side to revolutionary violence itself was not something to be dwelt on by subsequent generations. More recently, though, it has begun to be uncovered. The process was, somewhat surprisingly, begun by the Provisional IRA, reacting against suggestions – common in the 1970s – that its operations were morally inferior to the military campaign of the ‘old IRA’. The British charge of terrorism was sticking to those who claimed to be the Volunteers’ lineal successors. The Good Old IRA, a pamphlet published by Sinn Féin in 1985, painted an unfamiliar picture of the war of independence. It provided details of the killing of dozens of ex-soldiers as alleged informers, many killings of unarmed police and soldiers, and cases of civilians – women and children included – killed in crossfire during IRA fights. Sinn Féin accepted – in fact clearly hoped – that these details would be ‘shocking revelations to those who have a romantic notion of the past’.59 Even though the pamphlet specifically targeted ‘hypocritical revisionists’, its content actually looked remarkably like the so-called historical ‘revisionism’ that was taking shape at the time.

  But this new academic history has gone much further in exploring the darker side of the ‘good old IRA’. It has produced even more ‘shocking revelations’, above all that some of the IRA’s victims were killed for sectarian rather than political reasons. The most notorious case, the so-called ‘Bandon Valley massacre’, occurred in April 1922. On 27 April, James Buttimer of Dunmanway was awoken in the middle of the night, and shot in the face when he came to his door. Two other men living in the town’s main street suffered the same fate. As one of them, a chemist by the name of David Gray, was shot, his wife heard the killers say, ‘Take that, you Free Stater.’ Over the following nights, a total of ten men were killed and another wounded. All of them were Protestants. ‘The spectre of mass murder’, wrote the historian Peter Hart in his reconstruction of the events, ‘had long haunted the unionist political imagination; when it arrived, the reality struck with the force of a nightmare.’ Hundreds of Protestants now went into hiding or fled their homes as a wave of panic swept through West Cork.60

  The title of Hart’s chapter on the killings, ‘Taking it out on the Protestants’, spelt out his view that their motive was not ‘military’, like the executions of ‘spies and informers’, but sectarian. The killings were c
arried out by ‘committed republicans’, members of the anti-Treaty IRA, probably acting on their own initiative but ‘with the connivance or acquiescence of local units’, which ‘must have known what was happening’. The victims ‘were shot because they were Protestants’: precisely because they were loyalists, they could not have been informers, since they would have had no information. This was borne out by the remark in the British army’s ‘Record of the Rebellion in Ireland’ that Protestants in the south ‘rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give’. Indeed Hart held that in the conflict as a whole, ‘the great majority of actual informants were never suspected or punished; [and] most of those shot (or denounced, expelled, or burned out of their homes) never informed.’