The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The question of which forces were to take over the British posts became crucial. Discipline and control were hanging by a thread in many areas. Con Moloney, the adjutant of Ernie O’Malley’s 2nd Southern Division, was faced with a spate of robberies in mid-Limerick in January. The brigade adjutant, urging O’Malley to call a special brigade council, said that ‘the crisis in the Brigade is getting worse every day.’ Cattle were being seized for non-payment of IRA levies (which had already been prohibited). As O’Malley sardonically noted in February, ‘the bold troops of the “fighting sixth” seem to have a dash of Black & Tan instilled into them.’ One local doctor whose car had been commandeered pressed the invidious comparison further, protesting that ‘bad as the Black and Tans were they never interfered with the cars of doctors.’120

  Beggars Bush was the base for the new force raised by the Provisional Government, which would eventually become the National Army. For the time being, the pro-Treaty command lacked even the clear title possessed by the anti-Treaty ‘IRA Executive’, and was often known merely as ‘Beggars Bush’. The barracks were occupied by the Dublin ASU (the old Squad) and picked Dublin Brigade Volunteers, who marched past Collins on the steps of City Hall on their way. This forty-six-strong group, commanded by Paddy O’Daly, were labelled the Dublin Guards, and would expand to brigade strength by July. Although anti-Treaty republicans took immediate alarm at this development, it was – like so much else in the state-building process – hesitant and confused. This was despite being implemented, under the aegis of the presiding organizers of the old GHQ, Mulcahy and Collins, by the experienced team of O’Duffy, O’Connell and others. The key role was played by O’Duffy, who replaced Mulcahy as chief of staff on 10 January. His biographer calls this a ‘shrewd’ appointment, as O’Duffy ‘was admired by the regional IRA leaders, who perceived him as a fighting man’. But not all did, unfortunately. One who did not was the mid-Limerick brigadier, Liam Forde, who denounced O’Duffy as a traitor on 18 February. ‘We declare that we no longer recognise the authority of the present head of the army, and renew our allegiance to the existing Irish Republic.’

  This triggered a crisis as the British vacated their posts in Limerick. The RIC left their five barracks on 23 February: a demob-happy crowd of Auxiliaries at Limerick station had the station-master ‘frantic with fear’ until they were calmed down by a ‘large party of the old RIC’. Some IRA men, returning from a training camp, were met with gleeful shouts of ‘here are the Sinners!’ and ‘here are some of the invisible army!’ By this time a Beggars Bush force under Michael Brennan was already moving in from east Clare. As soon as he realized this, O’Malley brought up all the men he could gather to dispute the occupation of the city. Limerick’s strategic significance was obvious to both Brennan and O’Malley, though it may not have been fully grasped by their superiors. A full-scale armed clash was imminent, and Brennan, who was already referring to the ‘Executive’ forces as ‘mutineers’, was conscious of his vulnerability. ‘I understand we are to get an ultimatum today,’ he wrote to GHQ on 8 March, ‘giving us 24 hours to clear out.’ Although he had 570 men, only 300 of them were armed, and some of his men had ‘too many associations with the Mutineers to be properly reliable’. They had ‘only fifty rounds of ammunition per rifle which is not nearly enough for what we are up against here’. He wanted ‘a couple of thousand Mills bombs at once as well as 500 rifles’, and ‘at least one more armoured car, two if possible’. Then he wanted ‘a big supply of Thompson ammunition and a few more Thompsons. Any chance of Lewis guns and a few gunners?’ He judged all the barracks ‘weak’ (in spite of three years of British fortification), and thought it ‘a foregone conclusion that the mutineers will be able to lock us in’. ‘However you manage it,’ he urged Ginger O’Connell, ‘send 100 of McKeown’s men here at once – tomorrow if you can possibly do so’; thanks to MacEoin’s reputation they had ‘a name which would be very useful to us’. The garrison should be reduced to 500 reliable men, with at least 150 rounds of ammunition each – and he also wanted a tank and armed launches to use on the river.121 GHQ had no tanks to send (whatever might have been their military utility), but Brennan did receive the first Rolls-Royce armoured car to be handed over to the Free State by the British.

  The crisis never came to the crunch. It is no doubt true that, as has been said, ‘old friends made reluctant fighters’. But the men on the spot, Brennan – ‘puffed out in his uniform like a peacock’, as Oscar Traynor snorted – and O’Malley, were clearly up for a fight. O’Malley urged Rory O’Connor to press Seamus Robinson to act more decisively, arguing prophetically that if the republicans failed at Limerick they would quickly be turfed out of all significant posts and lose whatever military advantage they started with. On the other side, Arthur Griffith took the same view of Limerick’s significance as an issue in vindicating the authority of government. When the issue was under discussion, he addressed his fellow ministers for nearly half an hour, the only formal speech he ever delivered in Cabinet. The government must live up to its responsibility to defend the people: ‘these men challenge our authority and right.’ With a verbal pungency more akin to his old journalism than his recent statesmanship, he fumed that ‘if we let this situation through our fingers we will be looked on as the greatest pack of poltroons that ever held the fate of Ireland in their hands.’ But Collins seems to have been ‘lukewarm’, and Mulcahy argued that the government’s forces were ‘not yet ready’ either psychologically or militarily to act. Failure would be even more disastrous than inaction. Mulcahy believed, as he would for some time to come, that Lynch would be a force for reconciliation and indeed Lynch saw the situation as ‘a disgrace to both sides’, and was ready to join Oscar Traynor in a mission to broker a compromise.122

  Although Traynor celebrated the ‘amicable settlement’ which led ‘about 700 armed troops on each side who were about to engage in mortal combat eventually [to] leave Limerick as comrades’, the Limerick clash showed that civil war had already, in effect, begun, and there was nothing to stop it spreading. (Even Traynor, who had ‘an awful job’ persuading Tom Barry to walk away, found he could do so only by telling him ‘that there would be fighting at some time’.)123 It was only disguised by the leaderships’ desperate efforts to hold the issue back from its logical conclusion. A notch down from the top, some were dismayed by the fudge. GHQ was unhappy; on 12 March a group met at the Gresham Hotel to protest against the decision of ‘the Staff … in connection with the Limerick Mutiny’. They demanded that GHQ meetings be ‘properly constituted’ and that if any members of the staff voted to ‘refer any matter of importance to the Dáil Cabinet’, such a course would be adopted.124 Ginger O’Connell protested directly against the Limerick compromise, and later bitterly reflected that ‘all the territory we light-heartedly gave up to the mutineers had later to be hard fought for.’125 O’Duffy seems to have been more complaisant, and O’Connell certainly blamed him for the failure to create an effective national force in time to get a grip on the situation. ‘Worse waste of what was once promising material would be hard to find,’ he reflected: ‘all because the High Command was totally unfitted for its task’.

  Thus far, the republicans’ course of action was obvious enough, and effectively unanimous. None dissented from Rory O’Connor’s statement in a press interview that ‘our view is that [the government] has abolished itself – not exactly abolished but it has done something it has no moral right to do … The Dáil, in deciding that the Irish Republic shall go into the British Empire, has committed an act of national dishonour that we won’t stand.’126 But if the logical implication was that the republicans must set up their own government, there was less agreement about that, or about whether the next step should be some kind of open military action against the Provisional Government. The only action that followed the Executive meeting on 9 April was an attack on the pro-Treaty press, through the destruction of the presses of the Freeman’s Journal and the occupation of some big buildings in
Dublin. The biggest and most symbolic was the vast bulk of the Four Courts. Despite its formidable appearance, the Liffeyside building had effectively buried the men of Ned Daly’s battalion who had occupied it in 1916. One of them indeed had been driven mad by the grim experience.127 Sixteeners among the 130-odd republican troops who shuffled into it on 13 April do not seem to have had a sense of déjà vu, at least to begin with. This was a gesture rather than a military initiative. In a purely military sense, seizing buildings was as suicidal in 1922 as it had been in 1916. It made sense politically only on assumption that either the Treatyites would come to their senses or – more likely – the British would take military action that would bring public opinion back behind the republicans.

  Michael Collins’s comment on the day the Four Courts were occupied, that ‘no government in the world could exist’ which did not control its army, set the IRA Executive action in a larger frame.128 When a journalist suggested that the occupations represented a ‘coup d’état’ or a ‘military dictatorship’, Rory O’Connor seems to have assented, though he later denied it. (His easygoing response, ‘you can take it that way if you like,’ does have a ring of truth, but it is worth noting that the phrase ‘military dictatorship’ had already been put into circulation by the government itself.) In any case the anti-Treatyites were drifting in that direction. Their political posture was at best half-baked. In terms of generating a coherent policy, ‘the Executive never fused into an effective unit,’ as O’Donoghue lamented. ‘It never had a common mind.’129

  ‘A REPUBLIC IN DISGUISE’

  The timetable for the general election required by the Irish Free State Act might perhaps have been taken lightly, since it was set by British rather than Irish legislation, but Griffith wanted the election held as soon as possible, by June at the latest. Republicans demanded revision of the 1921 electoral roll, which Griffith refused, but went along with the idea of new elections. In the Dáil on 17 May, Cathal Brugha complained he was ‘sick of politics’, pleading for all to unite in a ‘crusade’ to protect their people in the north-east. But de Valera conceded that ‘the interests of the country demand that there be stable government’ and undertook to ‘give … assistance in any way’ (‘so long as we are not committed further than I have stated’) to make that possible. He had rejected Collins’s idea of a plebiscite to be held on a Sunday outside the country’s churches – a ‘stone age plebiscite’ – but agreed to an electoral arrangement between the two sides of Sinn Féin. Announced on 20 May, the ‘electoral pact’ would divide the seats in proportion to the 64–57 division in the Dáil vote on the Treaty. The contours of the split would be artificially preserved.

  This was pure election-rigging, and Griffith was as dismayed by it as he had been by the Limerick deal. Ernest Blythe remembered that when he was asked to agree to it in Cabinet he seemed to be under ‘tremendous emotional stress’. ‘He worked nervously with his neck-tie in silence. He took off his glasses and wiped them … his hand was shaking so that he could hardly hold them.’ For what seemed like three minutes of dead silence round the Cabinet table, he repeatedly adjusted his tie, put on and took off his glasses, and slowly polished them. Only after this agonizing struggle within himself did he say simply ‘I agree.’ He said nothing more; and from then on, when he referred to Collins, he called him not ‘Mick’ or ‘Collins’, but ‘Mr Collins’, the most distant form of address.130

  The nervous strain of the situation now threatened Griffith’s health. He became convinced that Collins would never nerve himself to take on the government’s opponents directly, and would let the situation slide beyond the point of possible recovery. As Blythe said, it was somewhat easier for him to demand a showdown: he was not faced with the prospect of having to use a weapon against former comrades in arms. But the psychological burden of the split was immense for him: no Treatyite liked being accused of betraying Ireland, but for Griffith it was almost unbearable. His hatred of Erskine Childers, whom he now talked of as a British agent, became obsessive.

  Many believed that the new Irish Free State constitution would be a vital factor in the election. Collins’s assertion that it would be possible to have an essentially republican constitution under the Treaty terms played a significant part in the IRA’s spring negotiations. Frank Aiken had urged that no drastic action be taken until the constitution could be studied. Liam Lynch told his brother on 6 March, ‘if we can force the Treaty party to draw up a Republican constitution we are A1 again.’ This he considered ‘quite possible’. Drafting the new constitution was thus much more than a legal exercise. If it indeed proved possible to combine in it both republican and British symbolic elements, it might succeed where external association had failed. This was a task arguably as important as any on the Provisional Government’s agenda.

  The drafting committee was headed by Collins himself, with Darrell Figgis, returning to (near) centre stage after a long detour, as deputy chairman. Figgis, who had published several essays on the idea of the Gaelic state, was Griffith’s choice, and had to do most of the day-to-day committee work. Collins obviously hoped at the start that the new cordiality of Anglo-Irish relations after the often frosty Treaty negotiations would allow some corners to be rubbed off. At first, the situation looked promising. The British government made an effort to accommodate the Provisional Government’s wish to ‘contend’, as Churchill put it, ‘that their constitution derived its authority from the Treaty and not from a British act of Parliament’.131 It was ready to include the constitution as a mere schedule to its bill ratifying the Treaty – in effect smuggling it through. But for this to happen the constitution would have had to be ready by the end of February, and this was impossible. And, as Collins found, there were sharp limits to British flexibility. Even in February, before the threat of civil conflict became acute, his suggestion that the Viceregal Lodge might make an admirable cancer hospital failed to evoke a response in kind. Jokes could be ‘so dangerous’, Austen Chamberlain chillingly replied. ‘The question was of the greatest importance to His Majesty’s Government who could not consent to the humiliation of the representative of the Crown.’ This set the tone for future British reactions to the Free State constitutional proposals, which became more rigid as the anti-Treaty republican threat to the Provisional Government intensified. The electoral pact was as alarming to the British as to Griffith, but while Griffith had to choke back his rage, Churchill was able to exploit it to insist on incorporation of the symbols of Crown and empire. ‘Had the proposed election been a bona fide one,’ Churchill noted in May, ‘they could have put pressure on us to stretch the Constitution to suit them’; but ‘as no election of value is contemplated we are in a position to be much more searching in our examination of the Constitution.’132

  Collins told the committee to concentrate on future ‘practicalities’ rather than past ‘legalities’, and to aim for a document that would be both concise and, importantly, easy to adapt as Ireland’s status evolved. It should contain ‘no unnecessary sentiment which might be laughed at’. He was even against the mixing of Irish and English terms (well established by now in republican usage), which he thought had ‘a grotesque effect’. He himself quickly drafted a very short constitution – with just ten basic articles – representing, he believed, ‘the essence of a Gaelic polity … without the trappings’.133 Unfortunately this difference between ‘essence’ and ‘trappings’ bedevilled the entire constitution-drafting process. The committee split three ways, and produced three drafts, all dramatically bigger than his, and with more identifiable ideological freighting. Drafts A (seventy-eight articles) and B (eighty-one) were broadly similar except as regards the structure of the Executive, Senate and Supreme Court. Draft A, for instance, proposed a system of cabinet government on the British model, and gave the Senate more power than B did. The third draft, by Alfred O’Rahilly and James Murnaghan, was a more explicit reflection of Catholic ideas of social justice.

  Collins remained oddly optimistic, perhaps
through a combination of his intense desire to reconcile the constitution with republicanism and ‘breathing the rarefied air of constitutional theory’.134 He reviewed the drafts on 8 March, and the Cabinet decided that Draft B, which included the idea of an appointed upper house (the Senate) designed to enhance minority protection, and brought in the concept of an executive containing non-elected ‘extern’ ministers, should form the basis of the proposal carried to London. It approved a declaratory preface asserting Irish sovereignty, though the delegation removed this before presenting the draft to the British on 27 May. Even without the preamble it was immediately identified by Lloyd George as a ‘complete evasion of the Treaty and a setting up of a republic with a thin veneer’. The Prime Minister fulminated that the ‘republic in disguise’ made the monarchy look ridiculous, ignored the oath of allegiance and rejected the idea of a Commonwealth foreign policy. The British might conceivably have accepted that this was what the political situation required, but they were unable to make the kind of imaginative leap needed. The British signatories undoubtedly feared the political extinction predicted by Chamberlain if they went too far. Lloyd George had, the day before, made clear that ‘the one thing on which the British government could fight was allegiance to the king.’ The government’s law officers now delivered a lecture on the centrality of the Crown as the bond of the empire, a role reflected in its position not only as the supreme executive – acting on the advice of Dominion ministers – but also as the final legal authority. (The Irish draft constitution also left out the possibility of appeal to the Privy Council.)