The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Collins may have set the government’s overall strategy, but its implementation does not seem to have suited his skills. He certainly ‘spent little time drawing arrows on maps or reading up on the art of war’. His policy was simple enough – to win as quickly as possible, ‘but with the least possible nastiness’.173 The man who was ‘for ever pouring [sic] over maps’ was Eoin O’Duffy. ‘Full of brains and determination’, as one journalist thought, he provided the main supply of energy in prosecuting the campaign. More hawkish than Collins or Mulcahy once the fighting started, he did not flinch from the ‘nastiness’ that he believed would be inseparable from internecine conflict. O’Duffy’s early action in forcing the issue with Frank Aiken, driving him to declare against the Provisional Government, was the kind of thing Collins found exceptionally difficult.174

  The government’s stance was increasingly set by Kevin O’Higgins. He had already signalled his sense of the revolution as a process in which social order balanced on a knife-edge. He has been depicted as a counter-revolutionary, though he was a dedicated Sinn Feiner of the Griffith stamp. He was one of the Treatyites – a minority no doubt – who genuinely saw the Treaty not just as a regrettable necessity but as a remarkable achievement. As a lawyer he may have been particularly alert to the weight and significance of its title. Though its content may have more or less equated to ‘Dominion Home Rule’, its conveyance in the form of a Treaty was (as in the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty) a concession the British would certainly have preferred not to make. It emphasized the real capacity of the Free State to redefine the relationship in future. O’Higgins might be described as a practical separatist, like Griffith. His understanding of the revolution was limited to the replacement of British rule by Irish self-rule, and for him that rule could be effectively exercised only by responsible, professional people – like himself. The threat, even before the British left, was that the revolution would trigger a breakdown of order, as he had made clear at an early stage, during the struggle to establish the republican courts in 1920. For him the government was, as he put it in January 1923, ‘simply a body of men out to vindicate the idea of ordered society and the reign of law’.175

  Later O’Higgins would famously evoke the confrontation in vividly personal terms – ‘eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole’. His derogatory view of the republicans aside, his estimate of the situation was sober enough. ‘No police force was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.’ As a lawyer he perhaps unsurprisingly recognized the working of the legal system as the foundation of civilization in its battle against anarchy.

  In this he was of course not alone. There was a sense that guerrilla actions were producing ‘a widening deterioration of public morale’. The Catholic Church spoke out at an early stage in words that O’Higgins himself could hardly have improved on. Ten days after the occupation of the Four Courts the Hierarchy called on ‘the young men connected with the military revolt’ not to ‘make shameful war upon their own country’. If they did, they would be ‘parricides, not patriots’ – ‘murderers’ if they shot ‘their brothers on the opposite side’, and ‘robbers and brigands’ if they commandeered public or private property. Six months later the bishops labelled the republicans as ‘a section of the community’ who had ‘chosen to attack their own country as if she were a foreign power’. What they called a war was ‘morally only a system of murder and assassination of the national forces’. They spoke of young minds being ‘poisoned by false principles’, falling into ‘cruelty, robbery, falsehood and crime’. Any ‘priests who approve of this Irregular insurrection’ were ‘false to their sacred office’.176 The charge of falsity echoed through the pastoral.

  (Republicans answered this with their own vision of the moral conflict. ‘Ireland can never be free until we win the spiritual battle,’ Aodh de Blacam wrote. ‘We cannot have spiritual solidarity while the Bishops are against us.’ ‘The Bishops always smash the national movement at the critical moment for simoniacal reasons, by creating schism in the national spirit.’ He thought that ‘the clergy themselves realise that the Bishops initiated the civil war,’ and was confident that ‘a crime like this’ – ‘the greatest scandal in the history of Christendom’, no less – would ‘deliver the Hierarchy into our hands’.)177

  At the risk of being seen as the successors of the discredited Home Rule ‘constitutional movement’, the Provisional Government laid heavy stress on the republicans’ violation of constitutional norms. A recruiting proclamation for the National Guard in May 1922 accused the republican leadership of ‘arrogating to itself powers of legislation, contrary to all Constitutional practice’, and so ‘openly challenging the right of the Irish people to express their will through the medium of the popular franchise’. Republicans had interfered with the rights of free speech and ‘threatened to subvert the authority of the Sovereign Irish People duly expressed in accordance with Constitutional practice’.178 The attempt to identify the concept of constitutionalism, long dismissed by separatists as a byword for compromise, with sovereign authority was bold but risky. Collins, by contrast, tried to take the resonant concept of sovereignty out of the public debate entirely by dismissing it as a ‘foreign word’.179

  The Home Affairs Ministry drew up a formidable list of the threats to public order: ‘the peace of the country is at present menaced by the operation of armed bands engaged in robberies of Banks and Post Offices; armed interference with public meetings, suppression of free speech, and of the press. Trains are being held up and goods stolen; business premises are being raided and large quantities of goods removed by force; and large money levies are being made on proprietors of also business premises.’ It suggested that ‘whatever differences of opinion may exist on other matters, everyone must agree that it is in the public interest that Order should be restored, and life and property respected.’180

  At an early stage Cosgrave labelled the struggle ‘a war upon the economic life of the Irish people’. Griffith asserted that republican action would ‘lay Ireland, dishonoured, prostrate again at England’s feet’. He lamented that six months after the Treaty vote his great economic programme – ‘housing, arterial drainage, afforestation etc’ – had not been begun. ‘Had the Government got the slightest choice, there would not be today an unemployed man in Ireland and the country would be humming with prosperity. But the Government got no choice.’ He bitterly protested that ‘although it represented the people it was assailed and attacked and thwarted, by some of those the people had elected.’ They ‘openly boasted that they would force Ireland back into a state of war with England, although they all knew, none better than the Englishman Childers, that the result of such a conflict would be the physical wreck of the country and the moral destruction of the Irish nation’.181 The persistent invocation of ‘the nation’ was the closest the Treatyites got to finding an emotive counterweight to the Republic. ‘Do you ever think of the poor Irish nation which is trying to be born?’ Béaslaí had demanded in the Dáil debate. Griffith had asked the same question: ‘Is there to be no living Irish nation?’ The Hierarchy argued that the Provisional Government had been ‘set up by the nation’. Factually, this was stretching the point, but rhetorically it was a powerful device.

  The government’s rhetoric exploited the public consent to the Treaty demonstrated in the general election, allowing it to focus less on the positive aspects of the Treaty than on the negative nature of opposition to the will of the people. Its labelling of its opponents quickly became systematic, though the early temptation to call them ‘mutineers’, ‘murderers’ or ‘brigands’ was resisted in favour of the term ‘irregulars’. News reports were required to speak of ‘the government’ (omitting the doubt-raising qualification ‘provisional’) and ‘the Irish Army’
, ‘national troops’ or ‘forces’, in contrast to ‘irregulars’, ‘bands’ or ‘bodies of men’. Kevin O’Higgins suggested that it would be ‘a generous estimate to say that 20 per cent of the militant opposition to the Government is idealism’, and a generous estimate to say that only 20 per cent of it was ‘crime’. Most of it, the remaining 60 per cent, was ‘sheer futility’.

  Harping on the democratic nature of the government allowed it to go further than its British predecessor in calling for direct public assistance. While Cosgrave maintained that republican attacks on communications were a recognition that ‘the Irregulars cannot hope to offer successful military resistance to the National Army’, he insisted it was ‘the duty of the people to act in their own defence and prevent the economic weapon from being used to force them to reject the Treaty’. The government urged the clergy and ‘public men’ to impress on everyone the importance of ‘taking steps to clear the roads wherever they have been obstructed’ and repairing bridges. ‘The best way to stop the campaign of outrage and destruction is to let it be seen that it is arousing the people to opposition.’182

  This clearly made sense, so public involvement – in the form of vigilance committees or a citizens’ guard – seemed an obvious line to encourage. But things proved more complicated in practice. Collins first backed the idea of a citizen militia for ‘preventative’ work to supplement the ‘corrective’ work of the soldiers and police. Local committees would ‘promote a feeling of confidence’ and help ‘the people themselves’ to ‘become actively interested in the new life of the Nation’. He thought that this would strengthen their ‘loyalty to the Government’, but began to worry that the local guards might ‘develop into a casual Police Force without proper training and without the due responsibility in their work’. The ‘wretched Irish Republican Police System and the awful personnel that was attracted to its ranks’ showed what could go wrong: its ‘lack of construction and … lack of control’ had led to ‘many of the outrageous things which have occurred throughout Ireland’. This pungent morsel of historical revisionism meshed with a larger point about the task of state-building – ‘the vital necessity of building up their foundations rather than building quickly’. Organizations that might be ‘helpful in the initial stage’ might in the longer term ‘weaken Governmental control’.183

  ‘GIVE THEM NO REST’

  The rapid collapse of republican offensive action enabled Mulcahy to assure Collins on 4 August 1922 that the only ‘definite military problem’ was the Waterford–Cork–Kerry–Limerick area. Everywhere else the problems were minor, and the army should really be operating in support of the police. It was ‘essential that the Civic Guard take up their police duties’ as soon as possible. Even in the south, the problem was ‘not so much the military defeat of the Irregulars … as the establishing of our Forces in certain principal points … with a view to shaking the domination held over the ordinary people by the Irregulars’. He was confident that ‘the establishing of ourselves in a few more of these positions would mean the resurgence of the people from their present cowed condition’ and the ‘immediate demoralisation of the Irregular rank and file’.184 A week later Piaras Béaslaí suggested that ‘the Censorship can safely be abolished in about a fortnight … The crisis is now over.’185

  Nearly two-thirds of those killed in the civil war died in its first three months (just a seventh would die in the final five months). But, though serious fighting had effectively ended, it takes two sides to end a war, just as it does to start one. Republicans were not ready to accept defeat, and guerrilla action went on. In December a group seized Sligo Town Hall and held it for several hours, making off with twenty-one rifles and 1,300 rounds of ammunition; and on 10 January 1923 a forty-strong republican force comprehensively destroyed Sligo railway station. As in all irregular warfare, the government needed much larger forces to exert effective control. Seán MacEoin, head of Western Command, announced his intention to ‘stick it and keep up the pace until the country is pacified’. The plan had been ‘to allow no rest. To keep at them the whole time.’ This was ‘more trying on our troops than on the enemy but the superior discipline of our troops allows us to force the pace’. The enemy’s morale had been ‘broken’, he claimed, and ‘if we could get them to surrender their arms on any pretext it would be of great advantage and would shorten the war by two months perhaps by three.’186

  Keeping up the pace was trying indeed, and there was no sign of any arms surrender. Several Free State commanders were criticized for not pressing their military advantage – as was Prout for not keeping up the pursuit after capturing Kilkenny. In Mayo there were complaints that action against irregulars was so slow and ineffective that ‘now they are going about threatening this and other towns and harassing the people in the rural districts by living on them and ill-treating those who refuse to comply with their demands.’ Roads were blocked, bridges destroyed, trains attacked, fairs and markets ruined; business was at a standstill. ‘Why not use artillery to drive these marauders from their hiding places?’ asked Canon d’Alton. Could not General Mckeon [MacEoin] come and follow them up? Instead ‘there is nothing but drift.’ The local TD complained that failure to deal with roadblocks gave the people a false impression of irregular strength. He urged that ‘there is one way to deal with them – General Lawlor’s way – follow them, follow them, give them no rest.’187

  Sporadic and indecisive military actions might be trying to the patience, but were at least mercifully light in human cost. For instance, as many as 400 National troops, with a field gun, were involved in the attack on Collooney in Sligo, where the defenders had two Lewis guns, but not one was killed, and only one republican defender received fatal wounds. Strategically, the classic recourse of retreating from high-value centres to low-value, inaccessible peripheral areas allowed guerrilla units to retain some credibility, and in different political circumstances this level of armed resistance might have been enough to threaten the stability of the new state. But as always the key question was whether the public blamed the government or the insurgents for the disruption of normal life. Now people, including no doubt many who may well have disapproved of the original Volunteer guerrilla campaign, felt freer than before to voice their opposition. People were certainly antagonized by the republican renewal of the ‘war on communications’, a strategy pursued with unusual consistency – railways above all were attacked much more intensely than during the war against the British. ‘Owing to the use of railways by the Free State for the conveyance of troops and war material, the destruction of railways under Free State control is an essential part of our military policy.’ Nearly a fifth of republican operations took the form of railway sabotage of some kind, and the objective was clearly not just to deny the railways to government forces, as with the 1920 embargo, but to paralyse the whole system.

  Republican inactivity has often been blamed on public hostility, or even apathy. But it is difficult to measure public attitudes amid the fighting. The Free State army’s intelligence service usually (in an uncanny echo of its British precursors) insisted that ‘the people’ would be basically sound but for republican terrorism. Thus in Limerick, even as late as the spring of 1923, though ‘the people show no love for the Irregulars, information is slow in coming in’ – because of ‘fear of the Irregulars having [sic] reprisals afterwards’. National troops were certainly often unimpressed by the level of public co-operation they received. Seán MacEoin complained, for instance, that ‘it is very difficult to understand the civilian population of Sligo, as one day they would appear with you and the next against you.’188 When National troops were ambushed outside Dungarvan in Waterford on 10 December 1922, a crowd of people attending a funeral ‘did not tell the officer. They were waiting to see the ambush.’189 Republican commanders often remained upbeat about the level of public support. Shortly before Christmas Liam Pilkington even felt able to claim that the civilian population was ‘generous and sympathetic to us in most of the area
’, and that ‘if our fight is maintained it won’t be long until we have the people wholeheartedly with us in our struggle for the life of the REPUBLIC.’190

  Efforts to reunite the erstwhile comrades of the IRA went on even after the assault on the Four Courts. Frank Aiken, who held his 4th Northern Division in a position of neutrality, wrote to Mulcahy – whose authority he still acknowledged – on 6 July 1922 ‘to ask you to call a Truce immediately’. This would allow an army convention of ‘all sections of the IRA’ to meet and elect an army council, and the ‘Third Dáil’ to frame a new constitution. His reasoning was that:

  although Miceal O Coilean has broken the pact made with E. de Valera, to such an extent that we under GHQ Beggars Bush are only an Army of a political section instead of the Army of the Dáil; although the present position is probably a result of the bad tactics of Rory O’Connor and some of the Executive, if it goes on it will become a war; it will break the republican tradition of the IRA, lessen the morale of all Irishmen and retard or perhaps prevent the gaining of our ideal of an Irish republic.191