The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  On his way to that meeting, early in the morning of the 10th, Liam Lynch, with a group of officers including Frank Aiken, was caught in a large-scale search operation near the Tipperary–Waterford border by troops of Prout’s Waterford Command. Lynch’s group climbed along a stream bed towards the grey-brown uplands of the Knockmealdown hills, but when they emerged at the top on to a bare ridge Lynch was hit by a single rifle shot. The others had to leave him, because as Aiken said, ‘the papers we carried must be saved and brought through at any cost.’224 Lynch was picked up by National troops – who first thought he was de Valera, and had to ask him who he was – and died of his wounds in Prout’s headquarters town, Clonmel, that evening. Even with Lynch gone, it was not easy to end the military campaign. Aiken, Lynch’s successor as IRA chief of staff, took soundings among republican commanders, confirming the pessimism thay had already expressed. But when Austin Stack called a group of them together to sign a statement they all refused to take the responsibility, despite agreeing that it was ‘neither politic nor sensible to carry on the war’. Todd Andrews remembered ‘seeing the agonising effect Stack’s sense of responsibility was producing on him’.225 A fortnight after Lynch’s death, de Valera issued his order to the ‘Soldiers of the Republic, Legion of the Rearguard’, declaring that ‘the Republic can no longer be defended successfully by your arms.’ Military victory ‘must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic’. Nearly a month after that, on 24 May, Aiken issued the final command to the IRA to dump its arms. There were no negotiations, no truce terms: the Republic simply melted back into the realm of the imagination.

  Conclusion

  ‘We have declared for an Irish Republic and will not live under any other law.’ Liam Lynch’s famous assertion was made even before the formal declaration of independence by Dáil Éireann. For him, and many others, the Republic was an actually existing entity; it had been created by the action of the Irish Volunteers. The first Republic had lasted five days in 1916, the second had lasted nearly two years when the vote on the Treaty was taken. When the crunch came in 1922 many Volunteers plainly believed that they owned it. They had some grounds for this belief. It was obviously the case that ‘the Republic had crystallised around the army’, and could only exert state-like functions where the army operated successfully. Otherwise it remained a projection of political imagination rather than a functioning political structure.

  Paradoxically, though, it was the most enterprising ‘republicans’ who accepted the Treaty. Those diehards who stood out most vehemently against it had mostly been less committed to the task of turning the Republic from an abstract concept into a functioning machine of representative government. They were and remained hostile to everything that smacked of ‘politics’. Those who had worked to make the counter-state a reality were more likely see the point of making the Free State work, to deliver actual self-government rather than imagined ‘freedom’. Among the republican leadership, nobody did more to make the Republic a reality than Michael Collins. His energy and what Frank O’Connor called his ‘genius of realism’ let him conduct his multifaceted executive business almost as if the British authorities were not there. ‘He would be made aware of the English garrison as a sort of minor interruption and hit out at it as a busy man hits out at a bluebottle.’ ‘The word “cannot” was not in his vocabulary,’ as the Republic’s house solicitor said.1 Collins grasped, as many of his colleagues did not, that the counter-state was not just a publicity stunt: it had high propaganda value, of course, but ultimately that value would rest on its effectiveness. ‘Our propaganda can never be stronger than our actions.’2

  The Republic’s actual performance was crucial to the process of convincing the British that the game was up. In some departments it was impressive, but it could never be more than partial. Ultimately, the Republic was unable to create the means to secure its survival. Republican diehards blamed the failure on lack of will, but it was in the battle of wills of the civil war that they themselves fell short. The will of the Staters to create a functioning structure outweighed the republican will to prevent them. The republicans lost the civil war as soon as they slipped into this negative posture, in effect battling against ‘the security of the people, or the security of their lives, and the value of their money’, as Cosgrave put it. An assertion like that of Kevin O’Higgins – ‘the ceasing of the bailiff to function is the first sign of a crumbling civilisation’ – dull as it might sound, represented a passion as vehement as that of any idealist. The Free State’s repressive action was more violent than the British had been. From a republican perspective, this should have condemned it to the same fate as the British regime; but it did not.

  Fighting wars can, as is all too well known, be a source of national and personal pride. But fighting civil wars usually produces a sense of shame rather than of pride, for victors as well as losers, and Ireland’s was not an exception. For many, the response was a deep silence. The lone republican survivor of the Ballyseedy massacre did not speak publicly about it for over forty years. Robert Barton, as the historian R. F. Foster was once ‘courteously told’, never discussed the civil war at all. The Free State and its successors were hardly more forthcoming; no official history of the revolutionary period was ever produced. Even academic historians shied away from the divisive topic for generations, and the few who addressed the war of independence usually took 1921 as a natural end point. There were good or at least weighty reasons for this. As F. S. L. Lyons wrote in 1971, the civil war was ‘an episode which has burned so deep into the heart and mind of Ireland that it is not yet possible for the historian to approach it with the detailed knowledge or the objectivity which it deserves’. Things have changed since then. The knowledge deficit, primarily due to that collective silence, has been greatly reduced. Objectivity may still be more difficult to achieve. The fundamental issues of the Treaty split have not been fully resolved, even if they have been eventually set aside by the mainstream.

  The contrast between the heady communion of the ‘four glorious years’ and the dismal descent into fratricidal violence in 1922 was hard for the ‘band of brothers’ to grasp. Some – like Michael O’Flanagan – came to think that the split had, in effect, been ‘there from the start’ in 1917. Surveying the correspondence between Collins and MacSwiney in 1919 led Frank O’Connor to think, as we have seen, that ‘within the revolutionary organisation there were already two worlds, two philosophies’. Were the allegiances of the civil war, in essence, predetermined? When the split began, though many people tried to stop it, and many suffered real anguish, very few seem to have had no fundamental conviction about the Treaty. Even Frank Aiken, who hesitated longer than most, clearly could never have actively supported the Free State. The protracted negotiations certainly have an air, in retrospect, of merely delaying the inevitable.

  The ‘heavily built, Falstaffian’ irregular who passed by W. B. Yeats in his Sligo tower, ‘cracking jokes of Civil War’ as though ‘to die by gunshot were the finest play under the sun’, perhaps represented that 60 per cent of ‘Irregularism’ that Kevin O’Higgins attributed to ‘sheer futility’. Yeats called him ‘affable’, and like the lieutenant and his soldiers ‘half dressed in National uniform’ who also passed by, and with whom the poet chatted about foul weather and storm damage, he brings home that this was a domestic conflict, an intimate, neighbourly war. As in many civil wars, the dynamics of local action were often loosely related, or even unrelated, to the great issues which preoccupied actors at the national level.3

  O’Higgins’s argument, of course, was that in national terms the fight was pointless, and many at the time and since have shared this view. Indeed some have extended the judgment to the ‘war of independence’ as a whole. As one leading historian has written, ‘whether the bloody catalogue of assassination and war from 1919–21 was necessary’ to get the Treaty terms ‘may fairly be questioned’.4 C. H. Bretherton of the Irish Times pointed out in 1922 that ‘
the two things at which the Catholic Irish were supposed to baulk were Partition and the King. By the Treaty they accepted both. Had they accepted them in 1914 they could then have had all the self-determination that they are now getting.’ Some parliamentarians went further, holding that if partition had been swallowed, even ‘more than was got under the Treaty could have been got then’.

  The catalogue of blood is grim enough. Some 7,500 people were killed or injured by armed action between 1917 and 1923.5 In Cork alone over 700 people were killed, 400 of them at the hands of the IRA. Over a third of the dead were civilians. The IRA killed 200 civilians – innocent or not – and seventy of these were Protestants. Many more were driven out by direct or indirect threats of violence. In Peter Hart’s words, the ‘single greatest measurable social change of the revolutionary era’ was the dramatic reduction of the non-Catholic population in the south. The numbers recorded here may be trivial in comparison with the massive dislocation of peoples in Europe, starting with the Greek–Turkish conflict in the early 1920s. Compared with the unrestrained violence so common in civil wars, Ireland’s violence was constrained by social mechanisms we do not yet fully understand. This was a mercy, but in other ways the Irish civil war was fully as destructive as most of its kind. There was more to the damage than simple bloodshed. It represented the culmination of a process in which, over three years of guerrilla conflict, violence permeated society. By 1922 many leaders on both sides of the split were concerned about what they saw as a general public demoralization.

  While there can be no question that Protestants as a community felt the threat of harm and dislocation with particular acuteness, a sense of apprehension ran much wider as the fighting went on. Normality was unhinged by continual violence, and Ireland became in a sense a war zone. Although observers were often struck by the way ordinary people calmly went about their business while gunfights were erupting near by, the quality of life was degraded by the atmosphere of generalized apprehension. ‘The night can sweat with terror,’ as Yeats said. We have seen how commonly the armed police loosed off their guns at random, but even the British army, which prided itself on its control of weapons, admitted that in the winter of 1920, in Dublin, ‘shots are fired at any time of day or night now and there seems to be little check on ammunition.’6

  The military inquest files are full of personal tragedies, people caught in the crossfire – not all ‘innocent civilians’ certainly, but more than enough to spell out the grim hazards of war. None of those killed by Crown forces ‘in the execution of duty’ was unluckier, perhaps, than Hannah Carey, a worker at the Imperial Hotel in Killarney, who was shot in the throat on the day of the Truce by a policeman, driving a car with a revolver in his hand. ‘When turning at the end of College Street, I mechanically gripped the wheel tighter, making the turn, and it was then my revolver went off, I suppose I must have pressed the trigger … we were all rather excited at the time, it was just after two military sergeants had been shot in the street.’7 A situation in which driving with a loaded pistol had become normal behaviour was, without doubt, a deeply abnormal one. Of the dozens of people shot for ‘failing to halt when challenged’, many were probably too frightened to realize they were making the wrong choice. One car driver (John Kenure) was shot by troops at 500 yards’ range – at which distance he could certainly not have heard the order to halt. Another man who was shot by a military post for failing to halt was at that moment trying to make himself known to another military post near by.

  Kevin O’Higgins described the collapsed public structures of Ireland in 1922 as ‘battered out of recognition by rival jurisdictions’. At the personal level the clash was disorienting. When District Inspector Gilbert Potter was killed in Tipperary in April 1921, his widow received a weirdly informative letter of explanation from the local IRA commander. ‘Your husband was charged with and found guilty of waging war against the Republic. We offered to release your husband if the British Government would release Volunteer [Thomas] Traynor who was similarly charged. Personally I don’t believe the offer went past Dublin Castle. Traynor was hanged on Monday, the law had, therefore, to take its course.’8

  What, in the end, had violence achieved? Terence MacSwiney once quoted Mazzini’s warning that a new order of things established by violence ‘is always tyrannical even when it is better than the old’ – a paradoxical warning from a physical-force man, and one which might well have been heeded by republicans (his sister included) when the IRA set itself up as an independent authority in 1922. In fact, and perhaps against the odds, the emergent Irish state – however tyrannical it seemed to its republican victims – became a remarkably stable democracy. It may even have been too stable. The Staters who battled the Republic to a standstill seemed to have their imaginative horizons shrunk by the experience. Men like Cosgrave, Blythe and O’Higgins became so conservative as to be seen by some as counter-revolutionaries from 1922 on. The stolid caution they showed, particularly in the fiscal sphere, cast a pall of gloom over the early decades of independence. Blythe’s 1924 budget cuts, notably in welfare spending, have even provoked an eminent historian to describe him as ‘launch[ing] an attack on the old and blind’.9

  It may be that if Irish nationalists had been more flexible over partition there would have been no Anglo-Irish war; and if Britain had been more flexible over the Free State’s constitution there would have been no civil war. But such flexibility is not usually attractive to politicians, especially when (as in both these cases) they fear being outbid in conviction by more radical groups. At both these moments it was the ‘extremists’, not those ‘in power’, who determined policy. In 1914 Ireland, like much of Europe, was spoiling for a fight. In 1921, like Europe, it was war-weary, and this weariness allowed the ‘realism’ of those who accepted the Treaty to have a purchase on public opinion.

  Violence had not initiated partition, but it certainly cemented it. The advance of republicanism after 1916 paralleled the process of establishing a separate northern state, and not by accident. The non-denominational or freethinking origins of republicanism in the 1790s were long since forgotten. The republicans who took control of the nationalist movement as it reacted to Ulster unionist resistance to Home Rule were seen by the majority of Protestants as aiming at Catholic majority rule. In 1916 the future of both republicanism and partition hung in the balance, but the subsequent republican guerrilla campaign produced a violent reassertion of Ulster identity. If any chance remained of reconstructing the unity of Ireland after 1918, it depended on the British government’s commitment to implementing the Council of Ireland project in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, and ensuring that the Boundary Commission envisaged in the 1921 Treaty operated as the negotiators had assumed. As long as the Lloyd George coalition remained in power, both these were possible. But as the Free State sank into civil war, Lloyd George was overthrown with almost shocking speed and finality. During the Treaty split, and through the civil war, the partition issue remained secondary to the issue of ‘the oath’; it could be still sidelined because nobody on either side really believed partition could endure. Only when the Boundary Commission set to work in 1924 did reality begin to dawn for most nationalists.

  The cementing of partition in the 1920s had consequences for the idea of the Republic. Republican Sinn Féin fell apart after the civil war, and when de Valera led a new party back into parliament its republican credentials were relegated to an appendix (in English) to its Irish title. Even after Fianna Fáil (‘the Republican party’) gained power and moved in the 1930s to dismantle the symbolic structures of Crown supremacy that had proved so lethally divisive in 1922, de Valera maintained that the Republic could not exist while Ireland was divided. The state he redesigned through his 1937 constitution was essentially republican, but it had to wait until the descendants of the pro-Treaty side returned to power a decade later before it was formally designated a republic. By that time, the real political independence of Ireland had been conclusively demonstrated. Brit
ain responded to the declaration of the Republic in 1949 with the Northern Ireland Act – guaranteeing that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK as long as a majority of its population wanted this – but not with violence. More crucially, the assertion of Irish neutrality during the Second World War had been maintained in spite of intense British (and American) pressure. The old belief that only direct control of Ireland could guarantee Britain’s security had been finally scotched. It had proved, as Collins believed, that Britain no longer had the power or the will to coerce Ireland. The fight for independence had, in that sense, been truly won.