In the repressive backwash following the Easter rebellion, republicanism appeared to have been condemned by yet another failure. But the British reaction, above all the execution of the republican leaders, ensured that it would survive. Ironically, General Sir John Maxwell, the military commander responsible for the executions, saw their effect more quickly than most politicians. He had spent several years commanding in Egypt, and that experience had certainly alerted him to the threat of nationalism. Just a fortnight after Pearse’s surrender, he warned the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, that ‘the younger generation is likely to be more revolutionary than their predecessors,’ and that ‘though the rebellion was condemned, it is now being used as a lever to bring on Home Rule,’ or even ‘an Irish Republic’. A month later he told Asquith that it was ‘becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a Nationalist and a Sinn Feiner’. In the event of a general election, ‘very few, if any, of existing Nationalist MPs would be re-elected’.10 He no doubt had little liking for the Home Rulers, but could see that they were preferable to any group that was likely to replace them.
Whether Asquith could have responded to this unexpectedly perceptive advice we cannot know: at the end of the year he was forced out of office and replaced by David Lloyd George. After the rebellion, Lloyd George had led a further round of Home Rule negotiations, which merely forced the nationalist party to acknowledge that some form of partition was inevitable, and accelerated its loss of prestige. The brief flurry of interest in Ireland that the British government had been forced to take was soon replaced by its traditional inattentiveness. The war that had justified Britain’s crushing reaction to the rebellion remained to be won. Only then might Home Rule, pushed through by the Liberals under the party truce after the outbreak of the world war, but suspended for the duration, finally come into force.
Part One
THE IMAGINED STATE: 1918–1919
Ireland in 1918 hung, like the rest of Europe, on the edge of an epoch. The tide of regime change that would transform the postwar world had already started to run with the collapse of the Tsarist empire in Russia. In January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the ‘fourteen points’ on which the new world order was to be based. Their most resonant concept was national self-determination. This had profound implications for empires like the British, and even for the multinational state that was the United Kingdom itself. The Union of 1801 between Great Britain and Ireland had never been accepted as legitimate by Irish nationalists. The governing structure that it had created had never worked, as even its supporters admitted. Ireland sent 105 MPs to the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, the sole source of Irish legislation. British statutes formed the corpus of Irish law, yet the hundred years of the Union were littered with exceptional legislation that recognized that Ireland was indeed different. The Westminster parliament was notoriously uninterested in Irish affairs, and British governments seldom put together a coherent Irish policy. The government of Ireland was exercised through an awkward arrangement in which a lord lieutenant (colloquially called the viceroy) in Dublin and a chief secretary in London shared power. The Irish administration, ‘Dublin Castle’, was famously dysfunctional. The attempt, such as it had been, to integrate Ireland into the UK had undoubtedly failed.
Yet Britain’s strategic interest in Ireland was intense and dominating. The force that had originally brought Norman-English rule to the sister island had only increased in the following eight centuries. In an age of global commerce and naval contestation Ireland, ‘the Heligoland of the Atlantic’, was regarded as the keystone in the arch of British world power. ‘The channel forbids union, the ocean forbids separation’ as even the Irish Patriot leader Henry Grattan accepted. Losing control of Ireland was unthinkable. The Home Rule project was the attempt to give Ireland autonomy while preserving the UK state in its vital sphere of security. Yet even Home Rule, designed to placate unionist fears of Irish nationalism, had created the most severe crisis in the history of the modern British state. Unionists had dismissed it as a sham, an unworkable compromise which could never prevent Ireland from moving on to independence. After the war broke out in 1914 it had been enacted, and placed on ice for the duration of hostilities. Whether it could ultimately square the circle of Anglo-Irish relations was perhaps the greatest question to face Britain at the end of the war.
As the world war entered its fourth, climactic year, Ireland was superficially at peace. The eruption of Easter Week 1916, decisively crushed in physical terms, had been widely dismissed in political terms as a crazy aberration. Indeed, if the British government had possessed the composure to consign its leaders to an asylum rather than putting them in front of a firing squad, what followed might have been very different. Many Irish people, especially the families of the 100,000 or more Irishmen serving in the British army, remained as committed to the war effort as the British were.1 Recruitment, which had fallen away, seemed (to police eyes at least) to be improving again. The Irish nationalist party, supporters of the British government’s Home Rule policy, had lost a handful of elections to Sinn Féin, but still appeared dominant. The Irish Convention, set up by Prime Minister David Lloyd George to work out a form of Home Rule that would be acceptable to unionists as well as nationalists, offered optimists the prospect of a final political settlement.
The long protraction of its discussions – it met in July 1917, and went on until April 1918 – at first seemed encouraging rather than depressing. At least the unionists went on talking, even if they showed remarkably little inclination to compromise. Very few people could imagine that Sinn Féin’s exclusion would mean that any eventual agreement would be nugatory. Sinn Féin, a party with just three MPs, had demanded that the Convention’s terms of reference should allow it to recommend complete Irish independence, and that ‘political prisoners’ should be treated as prisoners of war. It was assumed, though, that once a settlement was reached, Sinn Féin would fade away.
Patrick Pearse’s revolution seemed to have ground to a halt, and republicanism seemed to remain as marginal as it had ever been. Many people saw the 1916 insurrection as the last nail in the coffin of the physical-force doctrine. But the calm was illusory. Revolutionaries may still have been few, but they were oddly undismayed by the failure of the rising. They had been energized by the heady experience of Easter Week, and still more by its repressive aftermath. Those who might have identified themselves as ‘United Kingdomers’, united against the Germans, as one 1914 cartoon had optimistically suggested, were in decline. It is hard not to see the death of Thomas Kettle – the home ruler with the deepest commitment to the war – on the western front in September 1916 as a symbolic moment in this process. Although recruitment trickled on, opposition to it was becoming ever firmer. Anti-recruitment activity, even – perhaps especially – where it was unpopular, brought together a range of more or less radical nationalists and bound them into a cohesive grouping under the Sinn Féin banner. Literally, indeed – the green-white-orange tricolour devised by the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s sprang up everywhere now as the ‘Sinn Féin flag’. Three Sixteeners fought and won by-elections under the SF banner in 1917, the first of them while still in prison.
The death of the 1916 leader Thomas Ashe on hunger strike (imprisoned for anti-recruitment campaigning) in Dublin’s Mountjoy gaol in September unleashed an emotional tsunami. The ‘outburst of popular sympathy created the greatest possible stir throughout the country’, as the Chief Secretary lamented. Ashe’s funeral, carefully stage-managed to take its place in a succession of intensely emotive manifestations of ‘separatism’, also demonstrated a new practical capacity among the state’s opponents. The Irish Volunteers took temporary control of the capital city as the cortège passed through to Glasnevin cemetery, impressing the British military commander in Ireland. Sinn Féin, General Mahon noted, was ‘exhibiting discipline to a degree which is perhaps the most dangerous sign of the times’. The simple, single-sentence funeral oration by Michael
Collins, in deliberate contrast to earlier, highly wrought nationalist rhetoric, pithily projected a new spirit of no-nonsense activism.
The quickening of separatist mobilization was apparent at the first Sinn Féin national convention (Ard-fheis) on 26 October. This demonstrated not just the growing scale of the organization, but also its increasing radicalism. In the election to its presidency, Arthur Griffith – a famous national figure since the time of the Boer War, and the organization’s chief inspirer – stood aside in favour of Eamon de Valera, who had been virtually unknown until he commanded a Volunteer battalion during the 1916 rebellion. Fighting the by-election in East Clare in July 1917, he had said that ‘although we fought once and lost, it is only a lesson for the second time.’ The organization set out its aim as being to secure an independent Irish republic, with the proviso – a concession to Griffith, who was not a convinced republican – that after achieving independence the people could choose their own form of government.
Less public, but still more important, was the convention of the semi-underground militia, the Irish Volunteers, held the following day. Temporarily paralysed by the large-scale arrests that had followed Easter Week, the Volunteers had been rebuilding locally even before the majority of the arrested Sixteeners were released in mid-1917. At the October convention, de Valera’s election as president of the Volunteers signalled the fusion of the military with the political organization, while elections to the Executive projected 1916 men such as Cathal Brugha, its chairman, and Michael Collins, its director of organization, into key roles. Richard Mulcahy, who had planned Thomas Ashe’s funeral (and had been Ashe’s deputy in 1916), and now became director of training, had exactly the kind of methodical administrative capacity that worried General Mahon. The twin organization had shown itself able to survive an apparently major setback. By the second anniversary of the Easter rebellion it would have been a significant challenger to the dominant nationalist party. A few weeks before that anniversary, though, its standing was radically transformed, not by its own actions but by the decision of the British government to enforce compulsory military service in Ireland.
‘THE COUNTRY IS THOROUGHLY ROUSED’
The venerable Fenian mantra of ‘England’s difficulty’ – a deceptive idea in 1916, when Britain was armed to the teeth – fitted reality much better in the last years of the war. As British resources dwindled, the conscription issue became ever more pressing. Compulsory military service had been a highly contentious issue in Britain itself. The ingrained liberal tradition of anti-militarism had been strong enough to fend it off for a year and a half, and the eventual decision to impose conscription in 1916 split the Liberal government. In Ireland, the issue was dramatically more explosive. Resistance to even voluntary recruitment had been a keystone of separatist-nationalist activity ever since 1914. Recruitment had caused the split in the Volunteer movement in 1914, and even though the constitutional nationalists of the Irish parliamentary party still supported voluntary enlistment, they knew that compulsion would never be accepted in Ireland. At first, the government (seemingly unconcerned to shore up its Irish nationalist allies) ignored this, but after the 1916 rebellion Ireland was hastily excluded from the new Military Service Act. For the next couple of years there was a tacit consensus that – quite apart from the likelihood of major long-term political alienation, a prospect the government was able to ignore – raising conscripts in Ireland would need more troops than it would produce.
This sleeping-dogs policy could not survive the shock of the 1918 German offensive on the western front. On 25 March, four days after the Germans broke through the British lines, David Lloyd George’s coalition government finally took the decision to prepare a Military Service Bill for Ireland. Crisis on the western front begot crisis in Ireland, and both would test the resources of an already malfunctioning administration. Responsibility for implementing conscription would fall on the heads of the army and the police in Ireland. The British army appeared omnipresent in Ireland, but though the country was dotted with military barracks, which were particularly visible in the capital city, the main task of the Irish garrison was not so much to control Ireland as to prepare new drafts for the army overseas. The real control over Ireland, outside Dublin – which had its own unarmed force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) – lay with the armed police of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
The RIC, given its royal title for its part in suppressing the 1867 Fenian rising, was known as ‘the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle’ – the pre-echo of Kafka was perhaps not wholly inappropriate. It was a centrally commanded, semi-military force, created as a primary line of defence against armed rebellion; in 1866 The Times had grumbled that it ‘resembles, indeed, a continental gendarmerie far more nearly than is consistent with our habits of local self-government’. But it also accepted that it gave good value for money: ‘no part of our expenditure yields a better return.’ The government depended on the 10,000 men of the RIC, distributed in thousands of local stations, for the supply of all its information – not only political, but social as well. The RIC County Inspectors’ monthly reports monitored almost every aspect of Irish life, paying close attention to agricultural yields and prices. Everything from the census through the inspection of weights and measures to the issue of dog licences and fishing permits was administered by the police, generally regarded as the most efficient of the thirty-odd departments forming the ramshackle Irish administration in Dublin Castle.2
The fact that RIC men were stationed outside their native counties, to shield their families from intimidation, gave some colour to the nationalist charge that the force was ‘an army of occupation’. But the rank and file of the force were exclusively Irish. The great majority of recruits were farmers’ sons, who joined for a secure job and a guaranteed pension. They were selected for their physique, intelligence and ‘good character’.3 They lived in stations grandly labelled ‘barracks’, and their admirers as well as their enemies saw these, as the conservative Morning Post put it, as ‘those little barrack forts that are the blockhouses of Imperial rule in Ireland’. Armed with cavalry carbines (though not generally carrying them on duty), RIC men were supposed to mix drill and target practice with study of the law. They shared their founder, Robert Peel, with the English police, but whereas English constables were ‘bobbies’, their Irish counterparts were ‘peelers’, reflecting their less amiable image. The long period of peace between 1867 and 1914 had allowed the force to become far more civilianized and integrated with local communities than its organizational ethos – and its nationalist critics – would suggest.4 But the war pitched the RIC back into the front line of defending the state. Its military limits were sharply revealed by the 1916 rebellion, and years of low-level clashes with protesters at military recruitment meetings and anti-conscription demonstrations eroded the sense of consensual policing that had been slowly established. The paralysis of the police was alarmingly illustrated by the Clare County Inspector’s rather helpless (and mistaken) complaint during the East Clare by-election in 1917 that ‘almost every young man carries a revolver.’
The General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Ireland, Lieutenant General Bryan Mahon,5 and the Inspector General of the RIC, Brigadier General Sir Joseph Byrne, now produced a sobering assessment of the prospects of applying the Military Service Bill. Conscription could be enforced, they said, ‘but with [here the Inspector General inserted “the greatest”] difficulty. It would be bitterly opposed by the united Nationalists and Clergy.’ They recognized the unique potential of the measure to provoke a mass national movement. Strikes would dislocate the life of the country, and railway, postal and telegraph communications would be cut. A key decision would be whether to attempt to impose conscription across the whole country simultaneously, or do it district by district. Either way, ‘the country must be put under some kind of military control. Law would have to be dropped, because ordinarily, for the first fortnight at least, there would be bloodshed and a great deal of suffering
to the civil population in every way.’ At least two brigades of troops, in the GOC’s opinion (the IG thought ‘considerably more’), in addition to the existing garrison would be needed, for three months or more.6
This was a charmless scenario. How many men would conscription produce? A year earlier, Mahon had estimated 160,000 (‘with very liberal exemptions’), so he thought that – since emigration remained suspended for the duration of the war – the total should be greater now. Exactly how much greater, he did not say. A more important question was probably what proportion of that total ‘would make good and reliable soldiers’. The two chiefs evidently disagreed on this: Mahon considered that once enlisted the conscripts would be sound enough; the Inspector General, Byrne (who had been General Maxwell’s chief of staff in 1916), thought that only ‘some’ of them would be; ‘a considerable number would be likely to give trouble.’ The first step must be ‘to get all known leaders out of the way at once’; then ‘everyone, irrespective of who he is’, must be arrested ‘on the first sign of giving trouble’. These were drastic measures, the GOC admitted, but the situation was serious – otherwise ‘it would not be considered necessary to have conscription at this inopportune time.’ The government was in a bind: it would consider imposing conscription only in desperate circumstances, but those very circumstances would make the policy even harder to carry out.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 2