The Irish Revolution and its Aftermath 1916-1923: Years of Revolt 0716526336, 9780716526339

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THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

For my wife Anne and our sons Eoghan, Emmett, Conor and Ronan

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH 1916-1923 Years of Revolt

FRANCIS COSTELLO

IRISH ACADEMIC PRESS DUBLIN • PO R TLA N D , O R

First published in 2003 by IR ISH ACADEMIC PRESS 44 Northumberland Road, Dublin 4, Ireland and in the United States of America by IRISH ACADEMIC PRESS c/o ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland Oregon 97213-3644 Website: www.iap.ie (Q) Francis Costello 2003

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Costello, Francis J. The Irish revolution and its aftermath, 1916-1923: years of revolt t. Ireland - History 1910-1921 2. Ireland - History - Civil War, 1922 1923 3. Ireland - Politics and government 1910-1921 4. Ireland Politics and government - 1922-1949 5. Great Britain - Politics and government - 1916-1936 I. Title 941.7'0821 ISBN 0-7165-2633-6

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Costello, Francis J. The Irish revolution and its aftermath, 1916-1923: years of revolt / Francis Costello, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7165-2633-6 I. Ireland-History-Civil War, 1922-1923. 2. Ireland-History-Easter Rising, 1916. 3. Ireland-History-1910-1921. I. Title DA962.C67 2002 9 4 1.5082'1-d c 2 1

2002032735

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vi

Preface

vii

1 A Storm Builds within the Calm: the Preludeto Revolt

i

2 War by Any Other Name

29

3 Britain’s Dual Policy: Politics with Coercion

61

4 The Stalemate

104

5 The Irish Revolution, Labour and the Social Order

151

6 The Republican Courts and the Breakdown of British Rule

186

7 The Search for a Negotiated Settlement

205

8 The Anglo-Irish Truce

222

9 The Anglo-Irish Treaty

241

10 The Bitter Harvest 11

'

283

Epilogue: Ireland’s Evolution

320

Notes

338

Bibliography

365

Appendices

Index

Chronology, Treaties, Agreements, Joint Declarations and Legislative Acts of the British Parliament and Dáil Eireann related to Anglo-Irish Relations from 1920 to date

373 441

List of Illustrations 1. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic (page 185). Between pages 212 and 213 2. IRA leader Liam Lynch. 3. IRA leader Dinny Lacey. 4. The IRA Flying Column in Tipperary. 5. Irish Volunteer Dan Breen. 6. Sean Treacy, another leading member of the Tipperary IRA. 7. Newsreel camera footage of Lieutenant Price firing at Sean Treacy on Dublin’s Talbot Street on 14 October 1920. 8. Terence MacSwiney (Lord Mayor of Cork). 9. Terence MacSwiney’s body being brought back to Cork. 10. Eighteen-year-old Kevin Barry. 11. The crowd outside Mountjoy Prison in Dublin awaiting word of Kevin Barry’s fate. 12. Michael Collins throwing in a ball at a Croke Park Hurling match. 13. Michael Collins in 1921. 14. Arthur Griffith in 1921. 15. Provisional Government Troops firing on Anti-treatyite positions. 16. October 2001 State funeral for Kevin Barry and nine other IRA men. 17. Royal Ulster Constabulary members after arresting de Valera in 1924. 18. Mailing labels depicting Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, and a postage stamp of Collins. 19. Statue commemorating the Rebellion of 1798. vi

Preface

Although it is now more than seven decades since the Irish Revolution, it remains an era that can still be touched by those living in the present. This is so if for no other reason than the inescapable fact that the decisions made at that time to wage war and then to end it continue to colour not only Anglo-Irish relations, but the daily existence of ordinary people on the island of Ireland and particularly those in Northern Ireland. The momentous ‘Good Friday Agreement’ endorsed overwhelmingly on both sides of the Irish border in 1998 was in large part an effort to prevent the past from continuing to shape the future. For that reason the events spanning the years 1916—22, which gave rise to an armed revolt against British rule and subsequently to the creation of two separate jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, remain very close to the surface. At the time of writing this volume, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dáil Eireann has taken place with little notice in Ireland itself. Likewise, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State passed with little public commemoration. Both non-occurrences in the way of sig­ nificant public events or public forums at the very least aimed at assessing the state of Irish democracy may indeed suggest a certain ambivalence in modern Ireland about the origins of the State itself. Indeed, efforts may be undertaken to rewrite Irish history, to try to sanitise the events of those years, or even to attempt to characterise the Irish Revo­ lution as irrelevant to modern Ireland. But its achievements are nonetheless felt in Ireland today. Ireland today operates as an independent state within the European Union and as á member of the United Nations. Since the start of 2001 it has held a seat on the UN Security Council and its army is an effective contributor to UN peacekeeping activities. This may in part be due to the fact that many of the key actors who participated in the Irish inde­ pendence effort, or who were involved in charting the course of an indepen­ dent Ireland immediately afterwards, were still among the living until quite recently. For example, Eamon de Valera, the last living link to the leaders of the Easter Rising; Richard Mulcahy, who had been the IRA ’s Chief of Staff, and later leader of the Fine Gael Party; Ernest Blythe, ardent nationalist and

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

defender of the Free State; Sean MacEntee, member of the First Dáil, oppo­ nent of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and later high-ranking minister in several Fianna Fáil governments; and General Tom Barry - these, among others, all lived well into the 1970s or 1980s. On' more personal levels, memories linger of grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, fathers or mothers who by one means or another challenged British rule. And there are also, for others, the memories, equally valid, of family members who served in the Royal Irish Constabulary or in the trenches for the British Army in the Great War and other conflicts. In addition, unlike other epochs in Irish history, we can still see incidents and actors from this period come to life. In the newsreel footage many of those from the Irish Revolution, both British and Irish, Catholic and Protestant, continue to cast a presence. Michael Collins is seen collecting funds for the Dáil Loan, using the chopping block upon which Robert Emmet was beheaded, as the widow of the more recently executed Irish patriot Tom Clarke offers her subscription money for the cause. He cranks his head back offering his nonchalant, boyish smile. Then he hands her a receipt more like the bank clerk that he was before he became a revolutionary, doling out death to his opponents. We see the body o flR A guerrilla fighter Sean Treacy lying in the back of a British lorry after a deadly encounter with detectives and Auxiliaries on the streets of Dublin. Young men wearing caps and trench coats are questioned with hands raised by ‘Black and Tans’ on a windswept Irish country road. The Irish Delegates in another segment move briskly from their cars to enter No. to Downing Street to begin negotiations with their British counterparts. Later, Collins’ funeral cortege moves slowly down Dublin’s O ’Connell Street. The film archives of the recent ‘troubles’ also reflect the living connection with the earlier period of upheaval in Ireland. In a recent television doc­ umentary on the 1974 Dublin/Monaghan bombings in the Irish Republic one of the worst atrocities emanating from the Northern Ireland conflict to date - the viewer sees a stately old man kneel in prayer at a funeral for some of the victims in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral. The image is that of Eamon de Valera, then the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising. Unlike previous insurrections, the Irish Revolution was a revolt that would not be suppressed after a skirmish or two in a few Irish towns between poorly armed rebels and the local constabulary. Instead, it caught the British Empire’s attention in a way which no insurrection in Ireland had previously. British rule was driven into retreat as the tools of terror and counter-terror were employed by IRA flying columns and Crown forces to deadly effect. From this grim, savage and often grindingly slow course of events emerged the current political configuration on the island of Ireland: a twenty-six County Republic and a Northern Ireland state now emerging from twentyeight years of direct rule from London. vm

PREFACE

As one of the first conflicts for national independence in this century that featured the large-scale use of guerrilla warfare by an organised rebel force with popular indigenous support against the might of an Empire, the AngloIrish War of 1919-21 has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Memoirs and autobiographies by those involved - particularly on the Irish side —histories of Ireland and Britain covering this period, and more detailed analyses of the Anglo-Irish War published in recent years, have shed further light on that violent revolt and the British effort to suppress it. Within these pages the effort is made to chronicle many of the events of that war. But an analysis of the British government’s effort to pacify Ireland through the combination of political and military force during 1919-21, and of the IRA’s guerrilla campaign during what is known as the ‘Black and Tan W ar’ and the ‘Irish War of Independence’, must be placed within the context of other developments. As important as the campaign of guerrilla warfare waged by the IRA during 1919—21 was in forcing the British Government at least into a position of stalemate in Ireland, it was but one key factor that resulted in the decision of the British Government to reverse its policy by mid1921 and seek a negotiated settlement with the representatives of Sinn Féin. It is my intention herein to shed new light on British policy in Ireland, both civil and military, during the Anglo-Irish War, along with providing addi­ tional insight into the Irish revolutionary effort at all levels. For Britain itself, it should be seen that its sights were not focused on Ireland alone at this time. O ther problem areas requiring British attention in the aftermath of the Great War included the question of world dis­ armament, German war reparations, intervention in Russia, threatening situations in Silesia, Greece, and Palestine, as well as efforts to set in place a Commonwealth system by which the Empire itself might be preserved. In addition, the Indian subcontinent was a source of colonial unrest. Downing Street understood that Britain’s success in dealing with Ireland could have a profound long-term effect on the Empire. Closer to home, British domestic unrest, particularly the protractèd and costly railway workers’ strike of 1919, added further to the burdens of the Coalition. In effect, the attempt to prosecute a policy of official coercion in Ireland amounted to more than a draining away of British energy and resources from other spheres of interest. A wider examination of the efforts of Sinn Féin, through Dáil Eireann, and in defiance of the Crown, to set in motion institutions for Irish self-govern­ ment is also in order. The popular support it garnered played a critical role in the British Government’s ultimate policy reversal in Ireland. Similarly, the social and economic forces with which Sinn Féin had to contend during 1919-21 while confronting the British Empire also require attention, along with a closer look at the use of propaganda by both sides at home and abroad. In an analysis written less than a decade after the signing of the Anglo-Irish IX

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Treaty of 1921, Winston Churchill asked the following series of rhetorical questions concerning Ireland’s relationship with Britain: How is it that the great English political parties are shaken to their founda­ tions and even shattered in almost every generation by contact with Irish affairs? . .. Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come? It is a small, poor, sparsely populated island, lapped about by British sea power, accessible on every side, without iron or coal. How is it that she sways our parties, and inflicts us with bitterness, and deranges our actions? How is it she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire to debate her domestic affairs?'

Whatever Churchill’s reasons for asking these questions, they offer an insight into how generations of British politicians had come to view Ireland. Ireland in essence was the problem, rather than British misgovernment in Ireland or the refusal to accept that a majority of its people saw themselves as members of a separate nation. The degree to which such concerns as Amer­ ican government attitudes and American public opinion towards Britain’s Irish policy in the aftermath of a World War in which American financial largesse was sought will also be considered in these pages. Likewise, an examination of the competing obligations placed on Britain’s financial, mili­ tary and other resources during 1919-21 in the effort to preserve the Empire is also attempted herein, along with an assessment of the extent to which the Irish independence efforts evoked official British concerns that events in Ire­ land could spark colonial discontent elsewhere under the British flag. In the end, the use of force on the part of the British government to pacify Ireland during these years failed. By mid-1921, the British government sought to accomplish at the negotiating table that which it had been unable to achieve during the almost two-and-a-half-year joint military and police campaign in Ireland, employing a combined force of 100,000 men at its high point. Both sides found themselves locked in stalemate, and both in the end sought a negotiated settlement made possible by the Anglo-Irish Truce that took effect on 11 July 1921. An analysis of the events leading up to the Truce, and of the tenuous circumstances that characterised the period of the Truce itself, will, I hope, provide a clearer perspective on why, by June 1921, the British government and the Sinn Féin regime both came to the conclusion that a negotiated settlement was in their mutual interest. By interpreting sources not previously examined, and by attempting to cast a fresh gaze on some that have been covered elsewhere, I hope to provide the widest possible picture of the 1919-21 conflict and its aftermath. Within the context of Ireland itself, the papers, archives, and correspondence of British and Irish figures - both Nationalist and Unionist - have been consulted, as well as the official records of all undertakings relevant to the prosecution and resolution of the conflict. x

PREFACE

In regard to the Republican effort, the records available from the IRA’s General Headquarters and at the Brigade and Division level have been invaluable. The materials consulted on the British side, in addition to Cabi­ net, Colonial Office and British military reports, include the records of the British legation in the United States. Also most useful in offering a unique perspective were the US State Department files containing the reports of the US Consular staff in Ireland during the period in question. From the Irish standpoint, I have also sought to make use of such collections as those of Richard Mulcahy, Michael Collins, Ernie O ’Malley, Erskine Childers, Ter­ ence MacSwiney, the Dáil Eireann Files and the Minutes of the Free State Cabinet both at the State Papers Office and also the Archives of the Irish Department of Defence. A debt of gratitude is owed by me to the staff of the National Library of Ireland, the State Papers Office, Dublin, the Archives Departments at Uni­ versity College, Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin, the Military History Bureau of the Irish Department of Defence, the O ’Neill Library at Boston College, the Lamont Library of Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the British Public Record Office at Kew, the National Library of Wales, the House of Lords Record Office, the Archival Department at Oxford University and the Linen Hall Library Bel­ fast. At each facility, kind and courteous help was afforded me by all whose assistance I sought. I would also like to recognise the individual courtesies and encouragement extended to me by a range of people over a period of many years, including the late Paul O ’Dwyer, Ray Flynn, Phil Flynn, Liam O ’Murchu, John Owen, the late Liam de Paor, Eamon Phoenix, John Connorton, Sean Cronin, John Cullinane, Jim Lyons, Gerard Kearney, Paul Kelley, Paul Bew, the late Jim Cook, Tony Canniffe, and the late Peter Young. Most of all I wish to thank my devoted wife Anne, and our sons Eoghan, Emmett, Conor and Ronan. A special thank you is given to my devoted assistant Audrey Megquier for her patient and thorough help in preparing the manuscript. FR A N C IS CO STELLO Belfast September 2002

I

A Storm Builds within the Calm: the Prelude to Revolt We do not seek any alternative of the constitution or supremacy of the Imperial Parliament. We ask merely to be permitted to take our place in the ranks of those other portions of the British Empire - some twenty-eight in number - which, in their own purely local affairs, are governed by free representative institutions of their own. John Redmond, ‘W hat Ireland Wants’, McClure’s Magazine, October 1910

It remains one of the paradoxes of Irish history that, despite a range of social and institutional reforms introduced by Britain in the late nineteenth century designed to pacify the country, Ireland nonetheless produced a revolt in 1916 that gave rise to a wider war of independence three years later. By the turn of the century much that had antagonised nationalist Ireland had been ameliorated. The Anglican Church had been disestablished since 1867, and its once vilified Catholic counterpart held control of virtually all levels of education, including the provision of financial aid by the Crown for seminary training, by the turn of the century. Watershed land reform mea­ sures like the Wyndham Act created a nation of small landowners at the expense of the absentee landlords. In addition, the social reforms initiated by Gladstone in Britain were extended to Ireland with funds targeted for relief of the so-called ‘congested districts’. Throughout the period 1880-91 the pro­ spects of Home Rule for Ireland owed more to Charles Stewart Parnell’s parliamentary tactics than to British altruism. Even after the demise of Parnell - ‘the uncrowned King of Ireland’ - the likelihood of Home Rule, sooner rather than later, continued to hold a certain inevitability. Indeed, the success of the Irish Party at Westminster, and the combination of British reforms at virtually all levels of Irish society, resulted in the situation in which, by 1900, Irish constitutional nationalism held effective control of local government and the social institutions of much of Ireland. Why then a revolt in the streets of Dublin in 1916 and the subsequent Irish War of Inde­ pendence? What were the issues and the circumstances that fuelled it? The last decades of the nineteenth century represented the end of the monopoly of economic power which the Act of Union had placed in the I

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

hands of the Protestant gentry. It was James Fintan Lalor, a member of Young Ireland and an early agitator for land reform, who in the famineracked Ireland of 1848 helped articulate the importance of the land issue to the cause of Irish nationalism: The land question contains, and the legislative question does not contain, the materials from which victory is manufactured, and that therefore, if we be truly in earnest and determined in success, it is on the former question, and not on the latter that we must take our stand, fling out our banner, and hurl down to England our badge of battle.1

The combination of the liberal Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, together with the .Ashbourne Act of 1885 and the Syndham Act of 1903, contributed greatly to satisfying the demands of Irish agrarian agitators for ‘a fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale’. Significantly, the transformation of Irish land ownership was accomplished within the context of constitutional politics. However, in addition to the agitation of the Irish Party and the Land League, the scenario for the attainment of these measures was made possible, ironi­ cally, by the awful effects of the Great Famine of 1847-50. Without that famine and the loss of over two million people to starvation and emigration, the establishment of large-scale proprietorship would have been rendered untenable. Furthermore, the agricultural disaster which beset Irish landowners in the 1870s and 1880s contributed to a weakening of the resolve of the entrenched landowners; moreover, the achievement of land reform mea­ sures notwithstanding, the Irish census of 1891 showed a decline of 600,000 people during the previous decade. But while the provisions of land to sig­ nificant numbers of the Irish peasantry reduced agrarian tensions by the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish Party’s desire for Home Rule persisted. Well before Gladstone’s introduction of the First Home Rule Bill in April 1886, Parnell and the Irish Party had featured significantly on the British parliamentary landscape. The County Wicklow aristocrat’s use of obstruc­ tionism within the legislature was ironically enhanced by the fact that, with 105 seats, Ireland held a disproportionately large share of seats in the House of Commons relative to its population. T hat disproportionate number was derived from the grim legacy of famine and emigration. Indeed, if divine wrath was measured out to successive British governments for its previous maladministration of Ireland, it would have appeared at times that the Irish Party’s ability to stalemate Parliament was the divinity’s chief instrument. Parnell’s downfall and the bitterness it provoked within the Irish Party left a serious wound in the Irish Nationalist movement. Without concerted and aggressive pressure on Westminster from a unified Irish Nationalist front, results were simply not forthcoming. The Party was unable to resurrect Home Rule as a likely occurrence with the Liberals’ return to power in 1906. The 2

A STORM BUILDS WITHIN THE CALM

Liberals now had a huge electoral majority and so the Irish Party counted for much less. Likewise, the Liberals were internally divided over what form Home Rule should take. Similarly, after the Liberal landslide of 1906 Red­ mond was in no position to throw out a Liberal government that was recal­ citrant on the Home Rule question. Indeed, even if he had been able to, the alternative would have been an openly hostile Tory regime. Added to this were the changes within Britain’s own political order. O ut of power for almost two decades, the Liberals found a country ready for social reform. The split within the ranks of the Irish Parliamentary Party provoked by the Parnell tragedy would last for almost a decade, until John Dillon and John Redmond achieved unity in 1900. Until then, there were three factions - Redmondite, Dillonite, and Healyite. Yet from this disillusionment came a revival in Irish nationalism that expressed itself in cultural, athletic, economic and political terms. In 1911, owing to the British domestic political crises that occurred between 1908 and 1911, the Irish Party was able to return to its position as the tie-breaker at Westminster. The two general elections held in 1910 greatly reduced huge Liberal majorities. In addition, the Parliament Act of 19 11 limited the power of the House of Lords over the Home Rule Bill. But the measure did not fully calculate the capacity of Unionist resistance both within Ulster and at Westminster itself. While a Home Rule Bill was intro­ duced in 1912, it was not until July 1914 that it reached its full gestation, and by that time developments on the European continent had drawn the British government’s attention elsewhere. Ulster’s resistance was by this time quick­ ening, and becoming more volatile. It was a truism that constitutional nationalism was at its strongest when the Irish Party could coerce a Liberal government. But the final and futile battle fought by the Irish Party for Home Rule laid bare its ineffectiveness. Protes­ tant resistance to Home Rule in Ireland would also provide the out-of-power Tories in Britain —split over tariff reform —with a much needed political vehicle, which in turn conspired to make legitimate Unionist threats to defy the British Parliament. The development of the Ulster unionist resistance proved the major stum­ bling block to the enactment of a Home Rule measure and the government’s later decision not to implement the measure that won passage. On 23 Sep­ tember 1913, 500 delegates of the Ulster Unionist Council approved the establishment of a Provisional Government within the northeast if Home Rule became law. The Provisional Government was to consist of seventyseven members, with Sir Edward Carson as Chairman of the central govern­ ing body. A military council was also established, with specific responsibilities in such areas as business, education, law, customs and the post office assigned to special committees. The effort to form a ‘Provisional Government’ had its roots in the militarism of these same conspirators the year before. 3

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

In Belfast on 28 September 1912, 218,000 Ulster Protestant men signed the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’, pledging to defend ‘for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom’. The Protestant women of Ulster werè not invited to sign, but 228,000 of them signed a separate declaration pledging support to their men. The Covenant's signatories promised to use ‘all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland'. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘Ulster 1912’, served to characterise the outlook of the majority of Ulster Protestants toward the prospect of Home Rule: Believe we dare not boast Believe we dare not fear We stand to pay the cost In all that men hold dear. What answer from the North? One Law, one Land, one Throne. If England drive us forth W’e shall not fall alone.2 The formation in 1912 of the Ulster Volunteer Force, under the instigation of Carson, represented a violent act against the British rule of law. It was aimed at preserving the Unionist minority within the Empire and outside the control of an Irish nation dominated by a Nationalist majority. In April 1913, one year before the arming of the Irish Volunteers, the collier ship Clydevalley made its way from Germany to Belfast for the Ulster volunteers. It is one of the ultimate ironies of Irish history that it was not the Irish separatists who would be the first to arm themselves at this early stage of the twentieth century against the actions of the British Government. It was instead the Protestants of Ulster. In March 1914, Asquith offered an amendment authored by Lloyd George giving an option to the nine Ulster Counties to remain outside of Home Rule for six years, barring an Act of Parliament to the contrary. Carson rejected this on the basis that ‘we do not want a sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years’. But as events will show, he would prove a willing architect of a partitioned Ireland with a six-county Northeast Ulster State.* Five days later, Winston Churchill, then a member of the special Cabinet Committee on the Ulster situation, caused a stir when he stated in a speech * Carson, as early as 1913, had already lent his support to partition in some form, starting first with the Agar-Roberts proposal calling for the exclusion of the four Ulster Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry and Armagh from the provisions of a Home Rule Bill.

4

A STORM BUILDS WITHIN THE CALM

that there were ‘worse things than bloodshed even on an extended scale’. In his view, the Ulster Provisional Government was ‘engaged in a treasonable conspiracy’.3 But Churchill’s words were not backed up by British action. When confronted by Ulster loyalism’s determination to disobey British law, the British Government looked the other way. Indeed, in a sop to the Unionists, the Government eventually appointed Carson as British Attorney General. Redmond was likewise offered a Cabinet position. He refused. Carson’s determination and the lack of fear he exhibited in his opposition to Home Rule had worked to his advantage. His remarks uttered in Newry on 7 September 1913 serve to encapsulate both the level of his defiance of British law and his clever reading of the situation: ‘There will be the danger and difficulties of trying to run a government of our own . . . I am told that it will be illegal ... Don’t be afraid of illegalities.’4 But while Carson’s remarks were not lost on the Unionist faithful, they did contribute ironically to militant Irish nationalism’s efforts to raise the stakes concerning Ireland’s future. Conversely, the emergence of an armed Protes­ tant militia was an incentive to militant Irish separatism, slowly emerging from its dormancy to act. Indeed, as one writer has noted, ‘deep was calling deep’.5 The formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 can be said to have been in large measure the answer of the South to the intransigence of the North. Redmond’s decision to assume the leadership of the Volunteers was in fact a sign of weakness to the extent that it meant the resort to militarism over constitutionalism was the way forward. He was now attempting to stay ahead of the pace the militants were setting. While Irish separatists of Eoin MacNeill’s and Patrick Pearse’s stripe were willing to be part of an umbrella group of armed Irishmen, which might result in Home Rule as a step towards independence, they would not swallow death on the fields of France in service to the Crown as some other Irishmen had. A minority — but significantly an armed one, the breakaway Irish Volunteers —would eventually provide the backbone of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. The unpopularity of the Great War in Ireland and the failure to gain Home Rule enabled Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and their kindred spirits, to gain ground at the expense of the constitutionalists.* In the aftermath of the Rising, the constitutionalists made a desperate effort for a settlement, one that included the exclusion of north-east Ulster. T hat attempt also failed. W hat would be the Irish Party’s, and also Redmond’s,

* The Irish Republican Brotherhood was formed in the United States after the American Civil War. Comprised largely of Irish-American veterans who fought in the Union Army, its aim was to foster physical force driven Irish separatism from British rule in Ireland. An excellent account of the history of the IRB is found in Leon O ’Broin, Revolutionary Under­ ground: the Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858-1924 (Dublin, 1976).

5

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

last attempt at a constitutional resolution, came a year later at the Irish Convention. In all, the years 1911-16 can be seen as a period of disintegration for con­ stitutional nationalism. Redmond, a màn of great personal integrity, was as much a victim of the difficulties of his times as of his own errors in judgement. He was a parliamentarian caught at a time when Irish parliamentarians of his type at Westminster were no longer needed. The Curragh mutiny in the spring of 1914 and the suspension of Home Rule were especially severe blows to his belief in Parliament.* In effect, the pace of events served to defy the grasp of Redmond and his party. Likewise, Redmond’s decision to offer the Irish Volunteers as a unified force to the battlefields of Europe was rebuffed by many of his own countrymen. During Redmond’s tenure as leader of the Irish Party, one source of dis­ agreement within his own ranks concerning strategy on the national question came from John Dillon. F. S. L. Lyons, who saw Dillon as the ‘archetype’ of young men of the ‘Parncllite generation’, provides a useful description of the parliamentarian’s emergence as a constitutional nationalist. In effect, for young men like Dillon, it was a decision tempered more by pragmatism than a revulsion at physical force. Brought up in the traditions of Young Ireland, in youth an extremist by temperament, his later career is the record of a gradual evolution towards constitutional nationalism ... He did not regard physical force as immoral, rather as unfeasible; and even at that, as his record in 1916 reveals, he could not withhold either his sympathy or his respect from those who were prepared to die for their beliefs.b * The Curragh mutiny within the British ranks took place in March 1914 and affected the 5th Division of the British Army, which covered the whole of the province of Ulster. Led by the Anglo-Irish commander of the 5th Division’s cavalry brigade, Brigadier-General Hubert Gough, almost all the cavalry officers resigned their commission as a protest against any effort to ‘coerce’ Ulster into Home Rule and against involving them in rein­ forcing weapons depots in Ulster for possible use against the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVFi. Gough secured a guarantee from the British Secretary of State that the army would not be used against the UVF. However, owing to a major uproar, the Cabinet repudiated the guarantee and the Secretary of State for War, the Chief of the Imperial Staff and the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland all resigned. Over time the order was rescinded and the resignations cancelled. While no British soldier refused an order, the events were clearly viewed by the German high command as evidence of division in the British Army. It should be noted that not all officers in the Curragh supported Gough’s actions. Indeed, Major-General Sir Charles Ferguson, adhering to strict devotion to the rule of law persuaded the remaining divisional officers not to follow the cavalry’s actions. For further reading on the Curragh mutiny see; Ian F. W. Beckett (ed.), The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (Army Records Society/Bodley Head, 1986); Sir James Fergusson, The Curragh Incident (Faber, 1964); and A. P. Ryan, Mutiny at the Curragh (Macmillan,

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A STORM BUILDS WITHIN THE CALM

Opposition to nationalist violence was also tempered by some constitutional politicians who believed that the British Government was operating under a double standard: Nationalist violence or the threat of it would be harshly dealt with, but lawlessness by the Ulster Unionists was not only left unpun­ ished, it was at times rewarded. The same Prime Minister Asquith who would condemn the actions of Sir Edward Carson and the other Ulster Covenanters on the grounds that ‘a more deadly blow has never been dealt in our time by any body of responsible politicians at the very foundation on which demo­ cratic government rests’ would appoint Carson, along with F. E. Smith and Bonar Law, in May 1915, to his War Cabinet.7 Pearse had been handed a superb pretext for embarking on his revolutionary course. The ‘lawful con­ stitutional government’ had condoned both revolutionary and military action to deny the democratic wishes of the people. It had also secretly committed itself to the partition of a previously united country.8 With the British refusal to implement Home Rule for Ireland, Redmond no longer had anything to offer. The Party’s raison d’etre now lay smashed upon the rocks of political expediency. Redmond and his fellow moderate Irish Nationalists also suffered from the same inability of more radical Irish Nationalists to come to terms with the reality of Ulster unionism. In Redmond’s view, Carson’s efforts were all a bluff. Likewise, in the eyes of the IRB and Sinn Féin the activities of the Ulster resistance to Home Rule were at their core a plot of British manu­ facture aimed at dividing Ireland and denying the island complete autonomy. Erhard Rum pf has written that unionism in Ulster ‘was not merely a political creed of a small social and economic elite, but a mass movement with an extremely broad social base’.9 This analysis explains Ulster unionism in a way that was lacking in the attitudes of Irish Nationalists of all schools. It is also an assessment that is relevant in the present. The Protestants in Ulster could not be termed an elite except in a very special sense that they constituted and still do a disproportionately large element of professional, managerial, and skilled manual workers, and a corresponding smaller proportion of the unskilled and semi-skilled groups. The relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the North was thus not, as it was in the rest of the country, simply a more than virulent form of class antagonism, but an extremely complex structure of sectarian suspicion, animosity, and segregation.10

The inability of virtually all elements within Irish nationalism to understand the determination on the part of Ulster Unionists to remain outside the con­ fines of an Ireland ruled by a Catholic majority would prove to be a source of enduring myopia. The wishful thinking which the Redmondites and Sinn Féin alike held on the subject of Unionist inclusion within a united Ireland framework is also well captured in J. J. Lee’s important work on Ireland in the twentieth century.

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH The essential assumption was that Ulster Protestant attitudes were basically the consequence of British duplicity. The Unionist mentality was attributed to the divide and conquer policies pursued by Britain. Oncç, the British notified the Unionists that their interests would be satisfactorily guarded in a home rule state, the scales would drop from their eyes and they too would enter the promised land. Ulster Unionists, on this assumption, were the creatures of Westminster, utterly incapable of objectively assessing their own situation, puppets dangling from British strings.11

Conversely, the collective self-image of Ulster Unionists was equally fanci­ ful. Despite the initial objections of figures such as Carson, many Protestant leaders proved ready to accept a partition arrangement which would guar­ antee the maximum degree of Protestant hegemony possible. This was so even if it meant excluding large numbers of other Ulster Protestants in Counties Monaghan, C'.avan and Donegal. To the significant Unionist minorities of these three Ulster counties - all signatories to the Ulster Covenant - it was, to say the least, a jolt to the cherished values of honour and the belief that the collective word of unionism was tied to an unbreachable bond. Realpolitik had prevailed and their future as British citizens was scuttled in the equation, except for those who would later vote with their feet and move into the ter­ ritory of the six north-eastern Ulster counties. But while the contentious issue of Home Rule loomed large across the Irish political scene, the impact of certain cultural movements also began to take root in the new century. The last decades of the nineteenth century had wit­ nessed the emergence of a number of literary societies and cultural organisa­ tions extending down to the grass-roots level. Donal McCartney has observed that ‘out of these tiny seed-beds, which were half literary and half political, sprang such influential movements as the Anglo-Irish literary revival, the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin’.,a These developments on the cultural and intellectual front during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, through the intervention of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in both the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin, eventually provided the basis for the creation of revolutionary Irish govern­ ment. This new entity proclaimed and asserted its independence from Britain. One organisation which demonstrated a commitment to developing a sense of Irish identity, as well as staying power, was the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Founded in 1884, the organisation’s overriding objective was the institutionalisation of the Gaelic games of football and hurling from the parish level up. From the outset the RIC, at least, viewed the Gaelic Athletic Asso­ ciation as a Fenian plot.*3 One IRB sympathiser at Dublin Castle, who would eventually work as an intelligence source for Michael Collins, wrote that the election of Michael Cusack to a position of prominence in the GAA was engineered by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Cusack was favoured at a meeting of a leading IRB cell in Blackrock, County Dublin in 1883, because 8

A STORM BUILDS WITHIN THE CALM

it was felt that ‘prominent anti-constitutionalists should not, in the initial stages at all events, openly appear to dominate’. '4 His own separatist cre­ dentials were apparently held in very high regard by the IRB. The situation confronting the Gaelic League was somewhat different. The decline of the Irish language in the nineteenth century is best illus­ trated by census figures showing that between 1861 and 1891 Ireland as a whole contained fewer Irish speakers than the province of Connaught (the smallest Irish province in terms of population) had during the pre­ vious thirty years. A lion-hearted effort at turning this tide was launched on 31 July 1893 at a sparsely attended meeting at No. 9 Lower O ’Connell Street when the Gaelic League was founded. Its founder and first President, Dr Douglas Hyde, was both a Protestant and a nominal Unionist. The Gaelic League would grow to have a great impact on the course of Irish separatism. The organisation was to prove itself as more than an agency for Irish instruction. It’s role grew to include stimulating native Irish economic devel­ opment and the study of Irish history, together with organised social and cultural activities, Irish in character. Both the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin became important tools for the adherents of physical force, because they formed, as Richard Davis notes, ‘both the cover and the starting point for later violent efforts’. '5 The eventual domination of these movements by the separatists who joined and had slowly taken over would leave their respective founders, Hyde and Griffith, bitter, although both would play a role in the creation of an independent Irish state. In July 1915, Douglas Hyde resigned his Presidency of the Gaelic League because of its politicisation as a vehicle for extreme nationalism. The IRB gained control of the Executive, adding a political definition of freedom rather than a cultural one. Such notables in the 1916 Rising as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke, with good reason, saw the value of the Gaelic League as a binding agent for Irish separatism. In February 1914, Pearse called the organisation the ‘most revolutionary influence that has ever come into Ire­ land. The Irish revolution really began when the seven Gaelic Leaguers met in O ’Connell Street . .. The germ of all future Irish history was in the back room .. .’. '6 While its founder, Dr Hyde, wanted the organisation to have a major impact, he was less than enamoured by the League’s takeover by the IRB and its adherents. At the time of his resignation in 1915, he wrote to a friend: ‘My work for 22 years was to restore Ireland to her intellectual inde­ pendence. I would have completed it had I been let. These people queered the pitch on me, mixed the physical and the intellectual together, interpreted my teaching in terms of bullets and swords, before the time, and have reduced me to impotence.” 7 Hyde was undoubtedly even less comforted by the knowledge that the man elected Secretary of the Gaelic League, Tom Clarke, did not even speak the language. 9

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Hyde’s views on the IRB and other Irish separatists were subject to change over the years. Later, perhaps based on the level of success attained by the Irish separatist movement in the aftermath of 1916, Hyde moved away from the accommodations he felt he had to make with Irish moderates. While he may not have been a nationalist in the political sense, Hyde struck a tender chord in many ordinary Catholics seeking a sense of cultural identity. In a later view, expressed in an unpublished account, Hyde wrote revealingly about his own contribution and the role played by the physical force separa­ tists who essentially ousted him from his leadership position in the language movement: I am not sure that the turn things have taken may not be the best thing for the language movement . .. It has put an end to my dreams of using the lan­ guage as a unifying bond to join all Irishmen together, but it at least rendered the movement homogenous .. . I am not at all sure that the League did not do the right thing for the language in practically throwing me over. I did not see it at the time, however, for I did not foresee the utter and swift debacle of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the apotheosis of Sinn Féin . . . ,8

Patrick Pcarse’s own involvement in the Gaelic League did not have a hidden agenda, his later actions within the Irish Volunteers and his treatment of Loin MacNcill and others notwithstanding. In the 8 November 1913 issue, for example, of An Claidheamh Soluis, the League’s official publication, he out­ lined dearly his view of what the organisation’s utility had been to the cause of Irish separatism. His remarks were also significant in revealing his belief that the League was, by that time, becoming a ‘spent force’ from a nationalist standpoint. This latter point may be useful in explaining Pearse’s actions within the context of the Irish Volunteer movement and the course of Irish separatism from 1914 onward. I have come to the conclusion that the Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, is a spent force; and I am glad of it .. . I mean that the vital work to be done in the new Ireland will be done not so much by the Gaelic League as by men and movements that have sprung from the Gaelic League . . . 19

Pearse was particularly candid, and perhaps even prescient in describing what he saw as likely to take shape in the following years: There will be in the Ireland of the next few years a multitudinous activity of Freedom Clubs, Young Republican Clubs, Labour Organizations, Socialist groups, and what not; bewildering enterprises undertaken by sane persons and insane persons, many of them seemingly contradictory, some mutually destructive, yet all tending towards a common objective, and that objective: the Irish Revolution.20

10

A STORM BUILDS WITHIN THE CALM

Sinn Féin likewise grew to include radical and moderate Irish separatists, while still containing many who were not separatists at all. P. S. O ’Hegarty has noted that Arthur Griffith did his utmost to drive out the physical force men who might frighten away the priests, and moderate businessmen whom he was hoping to conciliate.21 Each year, between 1908 and 1914, under Griffith’s tutelage, the organisation sponsored an annual industrial exhibition empha­ sising Irish domestic development. At the turn of the century Sinn Féin grew from a single Irish separatist club into an organisation that subsumed groups like the Dungannon clubs and Cumann na Gaedheal. In 1903, Griffith had emerged as the most experienced man in the movement upon the death of his mentor, William Rooney. Earlier, Griffith had played a principal role with Rooney in the setting up of the United Irishman, a small but influential Irish nationalist weekly among the IRB and other advanced nationalists. Unlike the IRB, Sinn Féin’s early heroes were not the physical force advo­ cates but intellectuals like Thomas Davis, and Charles Stewart Parnell. Donal McCartney has written that ‘essentially Griffith was more like Davis than Parnell: he was not so much the leader of a political organisation as a pro­ pagandist, a national philosopher’.22 But while Griffith’s thinking followed a path towards Ireland’s national development that was at variance with phy­ sical force, he was anything but a member of the camp of constitutional nationalism in the tradition of the Irish Party at Westminster. While he advocated an Irish constitution in the tradition of Grattan, along with the creation of a dual monarchy between Ireland and Britain on the model of Austria and Hungary, Griffith argued at the same time that those Irish MPs who took their seats at Westminster were, in essence, parties to an act of criminality against the Irish nation. On the grounds that the Act of Union of 1800 which bound Ireland to Britain was achieved only by British Imperial aggression rather than mutual consent, Griffith argued that ‘no lapse of time, no ignorant acquiescence, can render legal an illegal act’.23 It was these latter arguments that eventually made Sinn Féin politically attractive to the IRB as a vehicle for physical force separatism, much as the Gaelic League had attracted them at the cultural level. Soon, Griffith came to realise that, like Douglas Hyde, his own organisation had been seized from him by younger and more militant men. Without them, however, the decline occurring within Sinn Féin prior to 1916 might not have been reversed. Indeed, the revolution they would instigate gave Sinn Féin new life. The framework which Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin movement provided through the advocacy of obstructionist tactics, the boycott of British goods, abstentionism from Westminster, and the development of native Irish legal and local governmental administrative institutions in defiance of the Crown, enabled advanced Irish nationalism to offer an actual alternative to the Irish Party and a basis for building wide public support. This was particularly true after the collapse of constitutional nationalism’s Home Rule effort. By providing 11

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Irish Republicanism with the ideological basis from which to lay the groundwork for a native Irish Government, Irish separatism was taken for the first time beyond the confines of a dedicated group of conspirators committed simply to violent revolt. Griffith's philosophy of non-cooperation with British rule in Ireland found its roots in the policy outlined by James Fintan Lalor in 1847. It was further influenced by the Dungannon clubs later in the nineteenth century. But it would not be until 1919-21 that an effort aimed at boycotting the British civil administration and its courts and replacing it with a native Irish system was attempted. Nonetheless, the attractiveness of the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin to Irish separatists of the physical force side was motivated by far more than the opport uni ties offered by their takeover. There was, at bottom, a fundamental commonality of interests which Pearse, among others, shared with Hyde and Griffith. As in the case of Thomas Davis and the Young I relanders before them, British rule was a source of cultural as well as political domination. Britain, through its laws, its materialism and its educational system as implemented in Ireland along with its ‘depraved’ literature - had effectively polluted Ireland, and at the same time served to eradicate any sense of Ir