The ‘second Sinn Féin party’, as the post-1916 grouping has been called, was a loose one. The tension between the party founders’ commitment to passive resistance and the Sixteeners’ belief in armed action was potentially unstable. The replacement of Arthur Griffith by Eamon de Valera as president of Sinn Féin in October 1917 symbolized the movement’s reorientation. But, as Michael O’Flanagan pointed out, the balancing of old and new was evident all the way across the Executive elected at the 1917 Ard-fheis. Griffith and O’Flanagan himself became vice-presidents. Darrell Figgis and Austin Stack were elected secretaries, William T. Cosgrave and Laurence Ginnell became joint treasurers. The poll for the Standing Committee was headed by two men of opposite ideas, Eoin MacNeill and Cathal Brugha. Brugha, with Constance Markievicz, had urged that MacNeill should be kicked out of the organization, yet MacNeill topped the poll comfortably. O’Flanagan did not mince words in saying twenty years later that ‘the split was there from the start.’51 The coalition was held together by what may be called ‘elective affinity’ – the term borrowed by Max Weber from Goethe – rather than formal ideology. The fact that four out of the seven members of the new Executive (including de Valera and Griffith) were former pupils of Christian Brothers’ schools testified as much to the power of common socialization as to formal ideas.52 Griffith’s decision to step back was just the most striking instance of a sense of unity that deflected personal differences – at least for what the republican publicity chief Frank Gallagher was to call the ‘four glorious years’.
Sinn Féin’s social conservatism was of a piece with the nationalist party – and indeed the IRB. The ‘new’ movement has been seen by some as largely a repackaging of the ‘old’ constitutional movement.53 The rapidly growing membership of Sinn Féin in 1917–19 did not, on this view, come from nowhere; it came primarily from the old Irish party.54 There was certainly a substantial haemorrhage of personnel from the United Irish League and Ancient Order of Hibernians, and a more or less direct transmission of the UIL’s local organizational structure.55 But the Sinn Féin leadership cohort was significantly different from that of the UIL – perhaps more like that of the IRB. At local level the difference was most obvious – 45 per cent of leading Sinn Feiners in Connacht were farmers, as against only 20 per cent of the national leadership. It seems likely that there was also a significant mobilization of new, especially younger participants – certainly in the west. In East Galway, in December 1918, ‘the middle-aged businessmen, large farmers and shopkeeper-graziers who had dominated the UIL … were dramatically pushed aside by the young professionals, small farmers, artisans, and landless labourers of Sinn Féin.’56
‘EVERY SOD OF RANCH LAND’
Sinn Féin’s first move in conjuring up a counter-state was made even before the conscription crisis. Food shortages during the winter of 1917–18, though brought about not by crop failure but by exports to Britain, revived still-raw memories of famine. One leaflet issued by the Women’s Delegates Committee specifically called on people to ‘REMEMBER ’47’ and (invoking the ‘Land War’ of the 1880s for good measure) ‘HOLD THE HARVEST’ – urging farmers to ‘stand by the townspeople now’ as the townspeople had stood by the farmers in the 1880s. The Irish Food Council, part of the wartime food-control machinery, could not prevent Irish food supplies from being sent to Britain. Sinn Féin appointed its own food controller, Diarmuid Lynch, who used direct rather than bureaucratic action. On 21 February he intercepted a herd of thirty-four pigs on their way to the North Wall docks, had them slaughtered and distributed the meat to deprived households. This bit of Robin-Hood-style social banditry was dismissed as mere criminality by the authorities – Lynch himself was arrested, convicted and deported to the USA – but it demonstrated a canny awareness of publicity. ‘It certainly greatly enhanced the prestige of Sinn Féin’ as ‘the party of action and not of talk’.57 A new ballad, ‘The Pig Push’ – dedicated to the Sinn Féin Food Controller – notable for lumpen jollity (‘We’ll have pig’s cheeks and pork chops enough for you and me / there’ll be rashers for our breakfast and some sausages for tea’) also contained a rather chilling prophecy, linking the noise of the doomed porkers to the future fate of the political police: ‘they’ll hear the “G” Division squeal as far off as Berlin’.58
This sort of exploit was uncomplicated in comparison with the challenge of the land issue – land hunger and hostility to ‘landlordism’ – that had inflamed the west of Ireland for more than a century. The Conservative government’s land reforms of the early twentieth century, enabling tenants to buy their farms, had defused some of the issue’s explosive potential, but plenty of pressure remained. For one thing, the land-purchase process had been slow, and at the end of the war as much as one-third of untenanted land remained unpurchased. The Congested Districts Board owned at least 70,000 acres in 1917, and instead of letting this land to ‘uneconomic holders’, it maximized its profits by leasing it to ‘graziers’ – farmers who used the land for cattle rather than crops. The CDB’s motive – to reduce the eventual price paid by buyers – was sensible in principle, but in practice its policy racked up rural tensions. Graziers or ‘ranchers’, as the bigger graziers were exotically labelled, were fiercely and often violently resented; cattle-driving, the dispersal of herds by crowds of landless men, had flared up during the so-called Ranch War after 1906. Over a thousand cattle-drives took place in 1907–8, and though the agitation petered out, drives continued sporadically after that. By the last year of the war pressure on the land, aggravated by the suspension of emigration, was intense – above all in the west – and the sense of agrarian crisis was exacerbated by fears of famine, as exports of food to Britain went on rising.
Sinn Féin may have been short on social radicalism but it was drawn by the persistent power of agrarian agitation, with its huge political resonance. The Land War of the 1880s had been the most intense public conflict since Wolf Tone’s 1798 rebellion, and the Land League had acquired quasi-governmental status by giving national leadership to a mass campaign to cut rents. By contrast, the Ranch War of the 1900s, led by the nationalist MP Laurence Ginnell, had been stifled, in part, by the Irish party’s coolness towards it. Even so, the movement had shown the depth of hostility that persisted in the west. In 1914 land agitation had subsided to unusually low levels, but three years later it grew again, and the winter of 1917–18, the hardest of the war, saw a sharp upsurge. Some Sinn Féin leaders were deliberately arguing for a renewal of the Ranch War early in 1917. Ginnell, who had been expelled from the Irish party in 1909 (for demanding publication of its accounts) and now sat as an independent, joined Sinn Féin in 1917 and relaunched the movement. ‘Young landless people can easily be ready … to clear cattle off every ranch, and keep them cleared until distributed,’ he suggested. In a speech at Elphin in January that year (a resonant echo of his speech there in November 1907) he urged his listeners to ‘seize the present opportunity to have every sod of ranch land broken up’. Eamon de Valera called on all Sinn Féin clubs ‘to divide the land evenly’.59
Sinn Féin branches in the west weighed into the renewed Ranch War by passing resolutions setting rates for conacre – eleven-month – tenancies (£4 per acre for residential land in Ballymote, Co. Sligo, £2 an acre on ‘ranches’). Early in 1918 the Sinn Féin Standing Committee endorsed the policy of breaking up grazing estates and replacing them by tillage. In East Galway, Sinn Féin declared that ‘the land is a question of national and vital importance’, and the people had ‘a grievance in not getting the land they are able and willing to till’. There could be ‘no peace until this economic hardship is removed by just and equitable distribution of the ranches’. In effect, Sinn Féin in Galway ‘was an agrarian movement’, and its dramatic expansion in the spring of 1918 was largely due to this. (Even before the conscription crisis, membership – as logged by the police – leapt from 4,742 to 6,343; nothing like a majority of these can have come from the old party.)60
In many places
local Sinn Féin leaders headed mass occupations of farms whose owners refused to accept the rental rates determined by the organization. Crowds – often 500 strong – marched in military style under the Sinn Féin banner, and land was taken ‘in the name of the Irish Republic’.61 The posting of placards by fields occupied ‘By Order of the Irish Republic’ in February 1918, if not before, may represent the earliest public appearance of the counter-state.62 In this agrarian guise, the Republic could quickly generate plenty of support, but it also risked unleashing forces beyond its control. Constable Jeremiah Mee of the RIC watched one such occupation – billed as a ‘Monster Meeting’ – at Ballintogher, where the Sinn Féin club had announced that a farm was to be divided among ‘deserving small farmers’. Its secretary, faced with an impossibly large crowd of deserving individuals, played for time by taking a list of names and promising to announce a selection at a meeting a week later; the police obligingly arrested him before the deadline for the promised decision came.63
As cattle-drives and forcible occupations multiplied, Sinn Féin found itself running with an agitation that was far more socially divisive than earlier anti-landlord campaigns. The approach of auction day for the much disliked eleven-month leases threatened confrontation between landed and landless republicans. The fields targeted for redistribution were by no means all part of big estates: the term ‘ranch’ was distinctly flexible. The conservatives among the national leadership moved in February 1918 to limit cattle-driving to ‘ranches strictly known as such’ (a formula used by the UIL during the Ranch War), and protect ‘land occupied by relatively small farmers’.64 The Sinn Féin Executive ruled that local cumainn were not to become involved in land seizures without the approval of their constituency organization, while the Volunteer Executive (like the IRB Supreme Council during the Land War) pronounced the agitation ‘neither of a national nor of a military character’, ordering that Volunteers should not take part. In spite of this, local units – apparently with approval at brigade level – did just that. ‘It was only natural’, as one Clare Volunteer wrote, that the Volunteers were ‘anxious to back up the popular agitation and … took the leading part in it’.65 The Clare IV commander Michael Brennan noted that ‘all over the county Volunteers took part in [cattle-drives] as organised units’. In West Cork, a number of Volunteer companies were involved in ‘the ploughing of a grabbed farm’ guarded by the RIC near Kinsale. They ‘entered the lands in the early morning, the policeman was overpowered and his rifle seized. The Volunteers then proceeded to plough the entire farm.’ Just as they finished, 400 troops with fixed bayonets allegedly arrived on the scene.66
Where Sinn Féin did try to stop them, it could run into difficulties. In Quilty, Co. Clare, the local priest rallied a group of Volunteers to stop a drive organized by the publican Michael Casey. ‘The mob refused to listen to the appeals of Fr McKenna and actually attacked us with stones; the priest was struck … on the forehead and wounded. After that we retired.’ This humiliation forced the battalion commandant to ‘court-martial’ Casey and fine him, and insist that the local company ensure that cattle-driving was prevented.67 It was obvious that the ‘tillage campaign’ could produce acute social conflict. One local newspaper saw it unleashing ‘a reign of terror similar to that of the Bolsheviks’, while the police spoke of ‘a state of utter lawlessness amounting to anarchy’.68 Yet land hunger could – as the earlier Land League had shown – be viewed as having a national dimension, and agrarian incidents could easily be ‘transformed into significant episodes of the national struggle’. They were linked not just by their own logic but by their common fate at the hands of the police (increasingly supported by troops).69 The political potential lay in the identification of the authorities and the British legal system with the existing tenurial system. An attack on one might not necessarily be, but could easily be, seen to be an attack on the other.
‘A BITTER AND AGGRESSIVE FEELING’
The land struggle could force Sinn Féin into awkward positions, but another of its leading strategies, the boycott of the police, was much less problematic. Boycotting was a classic mechanism of civil resistance: it had provided one of the headline weapons in the Land War. It was the ostracizing of land agents like Captain Boycott, indeed, that gave the technique its modern name. (Before that, Parnell had to use the distinctly unIrish phrase ‘send to Coventry’.) Theoretically non-violent, the Land War boycotts had been sustained in practice by widespread intimidation. Sinn Féin aimed to use the boycotting of English products to assert Irish economic independence, but so far these had proved fairly ineffective – protracted, uneven in application and probably marginal in impact. The social war against the RIC was different: it was truly a knife to the heart of the British state’s legitimacy in Ireland. It was also, just as importantly, a blow to its administrative credibility. Most people still repudiated the idea of violent resistance, partly on moral grounds, but also for pragmatic reasons. Common sense dictated (and the 1916 experience seemed to confirm) that armed rebellion was doomed to fail in face of British power. Many believed that its only result would be even heavier repression, once again setting back the national cause a generation. Before people would support or even tolerate armed attacks on the forces of the Crown, they needed to be psychologically mobilized to perceive them as legitimate targets – and also to grasp their vulnerability.
The idea of boycotting the RIC predated the reorganization of Sinn Féin, and some Irish Volunteer officers began to call for it almost as soon as they were released from prison at the end of 1916. Indeed de Valera, who is often credited with launching the strategy during the East Clare election, may not at that point have been a member of Sinn Féin. Volunteers at local level certainly played a leading part in pressing the policy – and quite possibly enforcing it by intimidation. In a speech in December 1917, nominally under the banner of Sinn Féin, the IV leader Eamon O’Dwyer in Tipperary directly warned the RIC note-takers that if they were sensible men they would join their fellow countrymen’s bid for freedom. The alternative might go beyond mere ostracism: ‘at the present time there was a great movement afoot to secure the independence of Ireland by “passive resistance” which was all very well in its way, but it was necessary that this movement have the support of rifles and machine guns.’ All young men should ‘train and make themselves efficient and be ready to act their part when the time came – as surely it would come’.70
The process of levering the police apart from the community was decisively accelerated by the conscription crisis. Throughout the midlands and the south in March 1918 ‘a bitter and aggressive feeling’ was ‘gradually … being manifested towards the police’.71 The prospect of mass clashes in which they could be overwhelmed pushed the RIC on the defensive. In North Tipperary, police ‘are practically always confined to their barracks fearing an attack’; the south was no less hostile, and Limerick was ‘seething with hatred for the government’. The anti-conscription movement brought large-scale meetings, as at Castletownbere in Cork where Mary MacSwiney administered the women’s pledge, and went on to declare that ‘the police were worms – no decent girl would walk on the same side of the road with one of ’em.’ An Englishman watching the event at Castletownbere noted that ‘the police who had been listening with approval up to this point got a severe shock at this.’72 Women’s attitudes were vital, and Cumann na mBan organizers like Bridie O’Mullane in Sligo worked to solidify them, even urging mothers to pull their children in off the streets if policemen approached.73 The conscription issue allowed priests as well as political leaders to target the police, pushing on the tilt of opinion against them; Father Dennehy of Eyeries declared that ‘any Catholic policeman who assisted in conscription would be excommunicated and cursed … the curse of God would follow them in every land.’
The RIC had always depended, in the last resort, on the use of firearms to quell serious disturbances; and its constables now clearly lost the confidence to confront crowds alone. In West Cork by April
, ‘the general unrest, the rancour versus the police, the probability of attacks on them and their barracks, the raids for arms’ made it ‘necessary to concentrate the police’. Already eight permanent stations and protection posts and one coast-watching post had been ‘discontinued’.74 Boycott actions became further-reaching as time went on: anyone who drove the RIC or provided them with supplies became liable to boycott or attack themselves.75
The confrontation with the RIC clearly provided a crucial basis for insurgent military action. While the boycott ‘had not the success that it was hoped for’, in that the vast majority of RIC men were not induced to resign, it did ‘draw a distinct demarcation line between the people and the police’.76 Surprisingly few Volunteers, though, seemed to recall the boycott as part of their activity, and historians of ‘public defiance’ have not seen it as part of that process. Boycotting was, in a sense, instinctive, and it worked in part because its enabling logic – that the armed RIC was an ‘army of occupation’ rather than a legitimate police force – had been widely propagated long before the war. (The unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police, which was not subject to the boycott, was a different case.) The more deadly implication – that RIC men were traitors to the national cause – was probably not so widely accepted until after 1916. ‘Now they would be treated as outcasts.’ This would be crucial to the individuals who eventually took the decision to use lethal weapons against the police.
‘AN IRISH REPUBLIC POSSESSING ITS OWN DISTINCT FLAG’
The revivalist atmosphere of the movement was vividly reflected in the explosion of tricolour flags in 1917–18. Kevin O’Shiel wryly noted the way it shifted the balance of public displays in his northern home town, Omagh, Co. Tyrone. Previously nationalist displays, mounted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians – ‘Hibs’ – had been a monochrome green. The ‘inexorable laws of patriotism confined them to one colour – green – and forbade any display of “England’s cruel red” … It took Sinn Féin to add orange to the depressing traditional green, thus giving nationalist processions a tiny touch more of colour and brightness’ (even though the colours were still ‘far from the dazzling, if somewhat barbaric splendour of those of their Orange rivals’). This may seem a mere cosmetic point, but it was not trivial. The tricolour was a revolutionary banner. The flag of Ireland, to which the 1916 proclamation summoned ‘her children’, was of course not the tricolour. Pearse and O’Rahilly had debated the issue of the precise symbols that should stand on the solid green ground – a harp, uncrowned and possibly winged.77 Three different flags (only one a tricolour) seem to have been flown over the GPO during the rebellion, but tricolours had sprung up all across the city. They voiced a political message, even if it was often misread – as it seems to have been. The green and white caused no problems, but many saw the orange as gold. This perhaps reflected the gold and white sash worn by Robert Emmet in a portrait that adorned so many homes, or – less happily – the papal colours. One of Sinn Fein’s early propagandists, the Clare priest Patrick Gaynor, repeatedly invoked the ‘Green, White and Gold’ tricolour as the flag of the Republic in his 1917 pamphlet The Faith and Morals of Sinn Fein. Some indeed saw it as yellow, an even more puzzling perception (unless deployed as it was by the veteran parliamentarian Joe Devlin, waving the old green flag during the South Longford by-election with the defiant boast that ‘there is no yellow streak in it’).
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 5