One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  The US president Woodrow Wilson had popularized the concept of ‘self-determination’ in Europe after the war, but there was no consensus between Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists about how and where that right should be exercised. The settlement imposed by the Government of Ireland Act resolved this dispute by giving the Unionist Party everything that it asked for. With backing from their Conservative allies, who were also Lloyd George’s coalition partners, the Unionist leadership had decided that a six-county area was the largest chunk of territory they could safely manage. If there were any more nationalists inside the boundaries of Northern Ireland, its stability could not be guaranteed.45

  There was no county or large town in the South where unionists were in the majority, yet two of Northern Ireland’s six counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, had a nationalist preponderance. Alternative ways of subdividing the island to establish local preferences – by Westminster constituencies, for example, or county and city boroughs – would all have assigned a smaller area to Craig’s party.46 In private, Lloyd George acknowledged that the case for his government’s preferred model of partition was weak, and he sought to keep it off the agenda for talks: ‘Men will die for throne and Empire. I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh.’47

  The Treaty negotiations concentrated on two issues: the political status of an independent Ireland, and its relationship, if any, with the area that remained under British rule. The British negotiating team offered Dominion status that would put the new Free State on a par with Britain’s white colonies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This was considerably more than John Redmond had expected to receive a decade earlier, but under those terms the government in Dublin would still be subordinate to the British Crown.

  Arthur Griffith privately agreed to accept a Boundary Commission on the status of Northern Ireland, rather than local plebiscites. He argued that the commission’s findings were bound to ‘give us most of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and part of Armagh, Down, etc.’ Michael Collins took a similar view, believing that a truncated Northern Ireland would soon come under the authority of an all-Ireland parliament.48

  Lloyd George hustled Griffith into accepting the draft Treaty by revealing his Boundary Commission pledge, and threats of immediate war created the right atmosphere for the rest of the delegation to sign.49 Sinn Féin and the IRA both split over the terms of the document: the Dáil voted in favour by a slender margin, but the majority of IRA brigades were opposed.50 A steady drift towards conflict began, during which the British government applied intense pressure on Griffith and Collins to take action against their republican adversaries.51

  On 28 June, the new pro-Treaty army began shelling IRA units that had occupied Dublin’s Four Courts, inaugurating the Irish Civil War. For many years after, conventional opinion in Britain credited Lloyd George with bringing peace to Ireland. His real achievement was to have brought peace to Westminster, for which a war between Irishmen was an acceptable price to pay.

  Historians have often explained the split between pro- and anti-Treaty camps in psychological terms, as a division between realists and idealists, practical men and ‘die-hards’.52 It was certainly not a straightforward clash between opposing political blocs like the civil wars in Russia, Spain or Greece. The leading figures in the two camps had a shared nationalist outlook. Insofar as ideology played a role in the split, it was a question of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tendencies within the movement, which could sometimes be difficult to parse. Many observers expected Éamon de Valera to be more accommodating than Michael Collins when the negotiations began, but de Valera became the political figurehead of the ‘die-hard’ cause, while Collins used his position as IRB chief to promote the Treaty.53

  The Civil War also resists any easy categorization as a class conflict.54 However, the Treaty did receive overwhelming approval from the elites of Catholic Ireland, and there was more than a simple desire for peace behind their attitude. The War of Independence coincided with a tremendous wave of land and labour agitation that swept through the country. Membership of the ITGWU increased from 5,000 in 1916 to 120,000 four years later.55 The Irish Labour Party, founded before the war by Larkin and Connolly, took on real substance for the first time. After Labour stood aside in the 1918 election to give Sinn Féin a clear run, the Dáil voted to accept a blueprint for social reform drafted by the Labour politician Thomas Johnson. Politicians who later deplored the ‘communistic flavour’ of Johnson’s Democratic Programme praised it effusively at the time.56 For the Church, the press and the business class, it was vital to establish a new authority capable of holding the line against social upheaval. The precise terms of its relationship with Britain were a secondary concern.

  Such factors did not produce the Civil War, but they helped determine its brutality. One minister in the new Provisional Government, the arch-conservative Kevin O’Higgins, famously described it as being composed of ‘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’.57 A display of force would help those foundations to set. His fellow Treaty-ite Eoin O’Duffy urged Michael Collins to ignore talk of peace from ‘the Labour element and Red Flaggers’. For O’Duffy, a glittering prize now lay within reach: ‘If the Government can break the back of this revolt, any attempts at revolt by labour in the future will be futile.’58

  In August 1922, Collins died in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces in Cork, where he was directing the war effort. Collins had been more conciliatory towards the republican ‘die-hards’ than most of his fellow ministers, and his death removed the last inhibitions on the Provisional Government leaders. There were seventy-seven official executions of republican prisoners, three times more than the British carried out during the earlier phase of conflict, along with an unknown number of extra-judicial killings.59

  Facing a government that, unlike the administration at Dublin Castle, could not be stigmatized as an alien presence on Irish soil, the anti-Treaty forces soon lost the military initiative. On the eve of the Civil War, James Connolly’s son Roddy went to Moscow in search of assistance for Ireland’s fledgling communist movement. The Bolshevik leader Mikhail Borodin told him that the Treaty’s opponents would soon be crushed: ‘It is really laughable to fight the Free State on a sentimental plea. They want a Republic. What the hell do they want a Republic for?’60

  The IRA’s chief of staff Liam Lynch brushed aside a proposal from his imprisoned comrade Liam Mellows for a social programme that could mobilize support among workers and small farmers.61 Mellows was dispatched to the firing squad soon afterwards. Lynch soldiered on, making no attempt to build a political movement that could explain why a struggle against the Treaty was necessary. After Lynch’s death at the hands of government troops in April 1923, with the military situation clearly hopeless, his successor Frank Aiken gave the order to dump arms.62

  ‘Our Question Isn’t Finished’

  The debate in the Dáil over the Treaty had concentrated on the status of the Free State, not the question of partition.63 Many nationalists believed that the Boundary Commission would resolve the issue, but that confidence proved to be badly misplaced. The terms of reference for the commission required it to ‘determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’, without specifying what those conditions might be. In practice, the matter would be settled by considerations of power, not justice, and Northern Ireland’s nationalist minority was sorely lacking in such clout. When the Boundary Commission completed its work in 1925, it recommended some minor territorial exchanges that would have left James Craig’s mini-state substantially intact. Embarrassed by the outcome, the Irish leader William Cosgrave readily agreed to the report’s suppression.64

  There was no ideal solution to the problem of Ireland’s conflicting identities, and the partition settlement m
ade no attempt to provide one. On formal democratic grounds, the outcome was clearly illogical, as John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary have pointed out: ‘A 30 per cent minority in the island (in the 1918 voting returns) was able to prevent one area from seceding, but this area in turn contained a 30 per cent minority (in the same voting returns) in favour of the secession of the whole island.’65 However, the case for partition had never rested on such premises.

  For British politicians, an unshakable conviction that ‘Ulster must not be coerced’ sat alongside a will to coerce the rest of Ireland into recognizing the Crown’s authority – not to mention those parts of Ulster that wanted to join the new Irish state. Irish nationalists, painfully aware of this double standard, often used it as an excuse for not thinking about the challenge Northern Ireland posed to their worldview. Future historians had no trouble pointing out the blind spots in that outlook: its reliance on geography, not history, to constitute the ‘Irish people’, and its tacit exclusion of most Ulster Protestants from the imagined community of Irish nationalism.66 The force of such criticisms should not obscure the one-sided character of partition, or the vital role of British power in making that imbalance possible.

  William Cosgrave and his colleagues averted their gaze from Ulster and concentrated on building up the Free State. Their ruling party called itself Cumann na nGaedheal (‘Band of the Gaels’). Cosgrave’s ally Kevin O’Higgins dismissed the social aspirations of the revolutionary period as ‘poetry’, and there was a distinctly prosaic quality to Cumann na nGaedheal’s rhetoric, although its very bluntness could lend it a certain aura: it would be a long time before anyone would forget Patrick McGilligan’s warning that ‘people may have to die in this country and die of starvation’ if his government was going to balance the books.67 Arthur Griffith’s plan for a protectionist regime to build up Ireland’s manufacturing base was largely forgotten.68

  Sinn Féin refused to take its seats in the Free State parliament, and the task of opposing Cosgrave initially fell to the Irish Labour Party. But the party’s leader Thomas Johnson was anxious, as he explained, to ‘reassure timid people who shiver when they think of Labour in power’.69 Johnson’s cautious approach posed no real challenge to Cumann na nGaedheal. The Labour leader once acknowledged that his party might win popularity by ‘disturbing and disintegrating the existing social order’, while insisting that no politician ‘with a sense of responsibility’ would dream of following that course.70

  Éamon de Valera had a much keener eye for the main political chance. Frustrated with the sterility of Sinn Féin’s opposition to the Free State, he broke away in 1926 to establish a new movement, Fianna Fáil (‘Soldiers of Destiny’). Most of Sinn Féin’s Dáil representatives followed his lead, promising to take their seats if Cosgrave’s government abolished the oath of allegiance to the British Crown. After the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins by IRA members in 1927, Cosgrave brought in a law obliging all Teachtaí Dála (TDs) to take their seats on pain of forfeiture. Dismissing the oath as an ‘empty political formula’, de Valera led his supporters across the threshold.71

  Five years later, Fianna Fáil took power in Dublin, inaugurating eight decades of electoral hegemony, during which the party never found itself on the opposition benches for more than one consecutive term. Contrary to legend, de Valera never uttered the words ‘Labour must wait’ during the War of Independence, and his party took care to incorporate social themes in its programme.72 Those who saw Fianna Fáil as a baffling, sui generis phenomenon usually expected independent Ireland to have a party system that corresponded to the West European norm. In fact, the mould of southern Irish politics was perfectly normal for a post-colonial state with an underdeveloped economy. The Irish party system was different because Ireland was different. Fianna Fáil wanted to remove all traces of British sovereignty over the Free State, but it also vowed to promote economic development by returning to Griffith’s protectionist vision. For workers and small farmers, it offered social reforms that, however modest in scope, still made for a welcome contrast with the grim austerity of Cumann na nGaedheal.73

  It all made for a highly effective formula, especially when it started to deliver the goods. By the end of the 1930s, de Valera had scrapped the oath of allegiance and reduced the British governor-general to helpless impotence. A new constitution adopted in 1937 laid formal claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland and made the state a republic in all but name. De Valera also won back control of the ‘Treaty ports’ from Britain in 1938, enabling his government to remain neutral when war broke out the following year – the ultimate assertion of Irish sovereignty.74

  Employment rose in protected industries, and a public-housing programme brought some relief to the working class.75 The success of Fianna Fáil wrong-footed Labour and the erstwhile ‘Free Staters’, who rebranded themselves in 1933 as Fine Gael (‘Tribe of the Gaels’). When the opposition parties finally came together to form a coalition government in 1948, ejecting Fianna Fáil from office for the first time in sixteen years, they completed de Valera’s project by declaring a republic and taking the Irish state out of the Commonwealth.

  The IRA watched these developments from the sidelines. By the late 1920s, it was already a shadow of its former self, with barely 5,000 activists: a third of the membership it possessed when the Civil War ended.76 A faction that included such figures as Peadar O’Donnell, Frank Ryan and George Gilmore argued for the IRA to reinvent itself as a movement of the dispossessed. They drew heavily upon Connolly’s writings and the prison notes of Liam Mellows to develop a socialist-republican platform in the hope of winning mass support. At their urging, the IRA launched a new party, Saor Éire (‘Free Ireland’), to take the place of a largely moribund Sinn Féin.77 But the republican leadership soon retreated when the Catholic hierarchy denounced their ‘communistic’ and ‘anti-Christian’ endeavour. In 1931, Cosgrave’s government banned the IRA and its nascent political front.78

  In 1934, O’Donnell and his comrades broke away from the IRA to form an organization of their own. The manifesto of the Republican Congress declared its belief that an all-Ireland republic could never be achieved ‘except through a struggle which uproots capitalism along the way’.79 An early split hobbled the Congress, which faded from the scene within a few years. Many of its activists departed to fight for another Republic in Spain. Their attempt to fuse republican ideology with socialism remained a historical oddity until it was rediscovered by a new generation of activists in the 1960s.

  Meanwhile, the rump IRA carried on in ever-decreasing circles. Fianna Fáil lifted the ban on the movement after coming to power, but drove it underground once again in 1936, this time for good. By the end of the decade, the IRA had lost its most capable leaders and was about to enter the leanest period of its history. Bereft of all political direction, oblivious to what was happening in the wider world, the remaining stalwarts even tried to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Mercifully they lacked the resources to make such a partnership meaningful, and the question of forming an ‘Irish Republic’ on the Wehrmacht’s coat-tails never arose.80

  Fearing that the IRA would compromise Ireland’s neutrality, de Valera cracked down hard on his former allies, who appeared to have shot their bolt. The coalition government of 1948–51 included a new organization, Clann na Poblachta (‘Clan of the Republic’), that sought to capitalize on disillusionment with Fianna Fáil. Its leader Seán MacBride was a former IRA chief of staff, who steered through the declaration of a republic as the coalition’s foreign minister. Denounced by his old comrades as another renegade in the line of Collins and de Valera, MacBride had stripped the IRA of its vestigial raison d’être.

  However, there was still one issue upon which republican purists could bring their energies to bear. MacBride’s government launched a diplomatic offensive against partition in the late 1940s, to be greeted with crushing indifference by a world that had bigger fish to fry.81 That failure inspired some to contemplate stronger methods
. A younger generation of activists took over the IRA leadership and even managed to breathe some life into Sinn Féin’s waxwork figurine. One of those militants, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, later recalled his feelings as he watched Britain’s empire begin to crumble after the war: ‘We were the indomitable Irish that started all this off, when they controlled a quarter of the world. And now our question isn’t finished and all these people have passed us by.’82 After several years of preparation, Ó Brádaigh and his comrades set out in December 1956 to ‘finish the job’.

  Operation Harvest, as the IRA called it, fizzled out long before its formal conclusion. In 1957, there were 341 incidents associated with the campaign; two years later, there were just twenty-seven.83 The internment of IRA suspects on both sides of the border struck a heavy blow against the republican movement, but its greatest problem was the lack of popular support. A statement drafted by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh to mark the end of the so-called Border Campaign deplored ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.84 It wasn’t just the British colonies in Africa and Asia that had passed republicans by. In the eyes of most Irish people, the IRA was a movement that time forgot.

  2

  Fish through a Desert

  Army of the People

  The task of rejuvenating the IRA after Operation Harvest fell on the shoulders of its new chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, a working-class Dubliner who was about to turn forty. From a wellknown republican family, Goulding already had an IRA record dating back to his teens. He had been interned during the Second World War, and watched the Border Campaign unfold from a British jail cell after being captured on a mission to steal weapons from an armoury in Essex. Like his childhood friend, the playwright Brendan Behan, Goulding combined a republican outlook with left-wing sympathies and was not afraid to call the movement’s orthodoxy into question. Now he would have to draw upon all the authority bestowed by his track record, as he guided the IRA’s dwindling core of faithful activists into uncharted territory.