O’Shiel himself paid tribute to the tricolour’s power when he first saw it some time in 1914, as a student at Trinity College (where, incidentally, he ‘never met one who avowed himself a Sinn Feiner’, and ‘regarded such as being either idealistic idiots … or designing mischief-makers, paid and employed by the Castle to subvert and destroy the Home Rule movement’). He was intrigued by ‘an arresting and attractive miniature flag … sticking out of an empty flower vase’ in the rather depressing sitting room of his digs, and also – since he prided himself on knowing the ‘flags of all the nations’ – baffled. When he eventually found out what it was, he was astounded: ‘Words can convey little idea of the effect’ of realizing that it was the flag of the republicans of 1848. Almost half a century later he vividly recalled his ‘emotional reaction to that significant bit of cloth’. ‘So there was an Irish Republic possessing its own distinct flag proclaiming its sovereignty … And what a fine, bright flag it was – I thought – like a flame of hope. As I gazed on it, how dull and inanimate like a dead fish, Home Rule of any degree appeared vis-a-vis an independent republic.’78
Flying the tricolour – called the ‘Easter Week flag’ at first, then the ‘Sinn Féin flag’ – quickly became a craze. In Kerry in April 1917, the Volunteers hoisted one on the monument to the Earl of Kerry in Lixnaw. In Armagh, Frank Aiken’s path to eventual high military command began with hoisting a flag opposite the RIC barrack in Camlough.79 On 26 April a large ‘republican flag’ was raised over Sligo Town Hall. In Galway, ‘flags were always very prominent at meetings, football matches and all national functions. They were flown high from telegraph poles, buildings and high trees.’80 Altitude not only improved the flags’ visibility, but helped to protect them from the police. The Anabla company in Kerry sent four men to Kenmare wood to cut an 18-foot pole to mount a ‘Republican flag’ outside the schoolhouse; the RIC tried and failed to remove it, and it stayed flying for a year.81 In Abbeydorney, when they found that ‘every time [national flags] were hoisted they were burned down by the RIC’, they ‘decided to paint the flag on a piece of sheet iron which we erected on the steeple of the Abbey’. This finally defeated the police efforts to get at it.82 Some Volunteers claim even to have booby-trapped tricolours to protect them from destruction. This was a craze in which fun combined with real political point-making. When the journalist Sidney Czira ‘introduced the flag to New York by flying it at the top of a Fifth Avenue bus’, she was interested to see ‘that the cops already recognised it as, at every intersection of the streets, they stood to attention in salute’.83
The flag was a banner both of passive resistance and of physical force. The distinction may have been blurring in 1918, though Seamus Robinson thought that ‘the pacifism of Sinn Féin was gaining ground.’ (It was, he admitted, ‘a very vigorous sort of pacifism, if you like, but it was certainly not a military force’.) The Sinn Féin programme, resting primarily on the creation of the ‘constituent assembly’ advocated by Griffith – on the Hungarian model – and the projection of Ireland’s case to the postwar peace congress – the Italian model – was perhaps increasingly persuasive. Robinson worried that the senior Sinn Feiners he knew in Reading gaol – men like Ernest Blythe, Arthur Griffith, Darrell Figgis, Seán Milroy and Seán T. O’Kelly – ‘had their own good sound reasons for thinking that a united passive resistance policy was all-sufficient to win our independence’ (or the kind of independence they wanted). But he concluded that, since Sinn Féin ‘had such immense support from the people’, the Volunteers did not need to ‘waste their time on it’. For people of his outlook, Sinn Féin was ‘the cloak for Volunteer meetings’.84
‘JACK, THE FIGHT COULD LAST A HUNDRED YEARS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS’
The Irish Volunteer organization had been decapitated by the 1916 rebellion. Even where no arrests were made, as in Carrigaholt, Co. Clare – later the 5th Battalion area of the West Clare Brigade – local companies seldom met. ‘Drilling resumed but only in remote places.’ In some areas, such as Limerick, where serious disagreements over the Volunteers’ action (or lack of it) in 1916 had paralysed the command, nothing would be done until separate new battalions had been built up.85 But the release of prisoners quickened the pulse of the citizen militia and boosted its prestige; mere survival ‘gave us an opportunity to show that the 1916 Rising was not another ’67 failure’.86 The men seem to have come out with no definite idea what to do next. Seamus Robinson insisted that ‘nowhere in camps or gaols did anyone ever suggest how or when “a beginning must be made”: it would have been foolish.’ But it seems that even those Volunteers who had, before Easter 1916, been unsure about the need to fight no longer questioned it.
The internment camps, and big military prisons like Wandsworth, were, as J. J. (‘Ginger’) O’Connell – Chief of Inspection on the pre-1916 Volunteer Headquarters Staff – argued, a crucial factor in ‘the “militarization” of the Volunteers’. He meant by this the development of a military ethos. ‘The entire surroundings were absolutely non-civilian; the prisoners now became familiar with precisely the side of military life of which they had never had any previous experience – guard duties, escorts, interior economy, inspections, cooking, sanitation, and military routine generally.’ This knowledge was acquired ‘by the way, and very unwillingly’, but ‘it sank in nevertheless and left its mark.’ It would produce ‘a great homogeneity amongst the released Volunteers’, an unconscious shaping that created far-reaching possibilities for the future.87
But even while hundreds of the organization’s leading figures remained in gaols or internment camps in Britain, local initiatives to rebuild it began. The pattern set up then would reverberate over the years. A key role was played by junior Volunteers like Ernest Blythe, a Belfast journalist who had moved to Kerry to improve his Irish and become captain of the Lispole company. He had been an organizer in Clare before 1916, and now began to tour the whole area, equipped with nothing more than a list of possible names.88 Another was Seán Treacy of Solohead, Co. Tipperary, who had tried to rouse his county to action but had not made enough of an impression on the police to merit arrest in the aftermath of Easter Week. The son of a small farmer (his widowed mother employed one labourer), he seems to have played soldiers with unusual professionalism as a child, before becoming an enthusiast for the language movement. The military failure of 1916 changed Treacy’s priorities. His commitment to the Gaelic League was sidelined, and he threw all his energy into establishing Volunteer companies. He was a natural activist, who vitally combined personal charm with iron determination and a daunting work-rate. As his warning to his brother Jack that ‘the fight could last a hundred years’ showed, he was ready for the long haul.89 The rebuilding of the Volunteers would depend heavily on men like these, and they were not found everywhere.
Another grassroots organizer was Eoin O’Duffy, a younger son who had had to leave the family farm to make a living, starting as a clerk in the county surveyor’s office, and then by dint of hard study – and without engineering qualifications – being accepted as a surveyor. A ‘true Gael’, Gaelic Leaguer and Gaelic Athletic Association stalwart, he was twenty-six years old at the time of the rising, but took no part in it. Only in 1917 did he commit his energies to the Volunteer movement, recruited, on his own account, by a chance meeting with Michael Collins after a GAA match at Croke Park. Collins told him that the Volunteers were ‘not so strong in Monaghan as they should be’, and O’Duffy was provoked to do something about it. He became a section commander in the Clones company, then the only Volunteer unit in the county. Four months later, with its strength at twenty, the company held a ‘new election of officers’, and O’Duffy became captain. At that point, he ‘got directly in touch with GHQ and acting on their instructions I succeeded in forming Companies at Newbliss and Scotstown … These Companies were formed into Battalions of which I was appointed Commandant. Early in 1918 I succeeded in forming outposts at Carrickmacross, Ballybay, Castleblayney and Monaghan … thus forming t
he nucleus of five Battalions.’ At the beginning of August a Monaghan Brigade was established, and O’Duffy was ‘unanimously elected Brigadier’. By the end of the First World War in November, his brigade boasted ‘56 Companies and 5 Battalion Councils, and a Brigade Council fully staffed’ – every one of which had been ‘organised by myself alone and unaided’.90
This bald account – O’Duffy was no stranger to self-promotion, but here was recounting simple fact – tells us a lot about the resurgence of the Volunteer organization in the last year of the Great War. Its formal structure was modelled on the regular armies of Europe, notably Britain’s, but it was built from the bottom up. The core unit was the local company – the smallest viable piece of the jigsaw: smaller groupings did exist, called outposts, but these were originally regarded as too small to have any function. The underlying logic of the organization was steady expansion – sections would come together as a company, companies as a battalion, battalions as a brigade. Critics have sometimes mocked its pseudo-regular structure, as a kind of self-deception as much as a propaganda device. The reality was, though, usually more informal. G Company of the 7th Battalion of the Kilkenny Brigade, for instance, rarely used its formal title: the Volunteers ‘usually referred to our Company as the Callan lads or the town lads’.91
A new organizational structure was drawn up by Michael Collins and approved at a Volunteer assembly in Dublin on ‘the Sunday of the “black frost” ’ in spring 1917, well in advance of the national convention in the autumn. Though he had fought in the GPO in 1916, Collins had never belonged to any Volunteer unit, and was loosely attached to the Dublin Brigade after his release from prison. Before the meeting, at the Plaza Hotel not far from Parnell Square, Collins energetically lobbied the IRB in support of his scheme. According to Liam Archer (then a company commander in the Dublin Brigade) this led Cathal Brugha – who had been vice-commandant of the 4th Battalion in 1916, and had left the IRB because he believed that the movement no longer needed a secret organization – to oppose it. This, Archer thought, was the beginning of an antagonism that would become much more serious over time.92 Brugha’s opposition to the scheme appears to have had less to do with its technical merits than with the fact that its author was an enthusiastic IRB man. And the brotherhood, led by Thomas Ashe until his death in September, does seem to have been a fairly effective instrument in the reconstitution of the Volunteer structure – as well, of course, as a vehicle for Collins’s personal power.93
After the Plaza Hotel meeting a new Volunteer Manifesto, launched on 22 May, declared their mission to be to ‘complete by force of arms the work begun by the men of Easter Week’. It blamed the failure of 1916 on a ‘misunderstanding’ (an oblique reference to the ‘countermanding order’ issued by the Chief of Staff, Eoin MacNeill). To prevent any recurrence of such conflicting orders, ‘Volunteers are notified that the only orders they are to obey are those of their own Executive.’ It also, in a critical comment on the 1916 strategy that reflected Collins’s own view, declared that the Executive ‘would not issue an order to take the field until they consider that the force is in a position to wage war on the Enemy with reasonable hope of success’. Volunteers would not ‘be called on to take part in any forlorn hope’.
Even so, the structure drawn up by Collins followed naturally from the model constructed by Patrick Pearse before 1916. The image of a regular military system was vital for those who wanted to infuse military values into the Volunteer ranks. The Volunteer General Headquarters Staff in Dublin, usually known as GHQ, reconstituted in March 1918 and filled with 1916 veterans like Richard Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff, naturally took this line. They did not follow Pearse further than this; they did not make the mistake attributed to his HQ staff of ‘thinking in army corps’ – believing the Volunteers could fight a conventional war. Their key aim was to cultivate the sense of being an army, no matter how thin were their ranks or how slender their resources. The sense of regularity they fostered was potent, though it was possibly misleading. The Volunteers were a viscerally territorial force. Only the local company could really function as a military unit: companies were natural local groupings, mostly surviving from the pre-1916 force, and more or less identically twinned with the Sinn Féin clubs. ‘When a Sinn Fein Club has been established … the Irish Volunteers join it in large numbers and the connection between the two is very close,’ at least as far as the Cork RIC could see. ‘In most cases there is little to distinguish Irish Volunteer from Sinn Fein branches.’ In Kerry they were thought ‘practically synonymous’, and that was certainly so in Sneem, where ‘the Volunteers took over the Sinn Féin club.’94 The symbiosis could flow in either direction: whereas in Co. Dublin ‘most of the young Sinn Feiners consider themselves Irish Volunteers though not actually enrolled as such,’ the Inspector General saw many Sinn Féin clubs as simply ‘branches of the Volunteers’.95
Above this local level, structures became less visceral and more notional. Though the Volunteer battalion was modelled on the equivalent regular formation – usually around 500 men strong – the collection of companies that actually constituted one was somewhat arbitrary. Geography as well as numbers played a part in deciding the issue. By late 1918 Cork county contained eighteen battalions. When the Cork Brigade commandant, Tomás Mac Curtain, told one of his battalion commanders, Frank Hynes, that his battalion was ‘too big for Scally and yourself … I’m thinking of splitting it up’, Hynes ‘thought that what he intended doing was to take a few of the companies and form another [battalion]’. Instead, ‘he dissolved the whole Battalion and held an election for two Battalion staffs.’96 Battalions of several hundred might possibly be assembled for occasional meetings, but could hardly hope to take the field as units. They, and still more brigades – the ‘highest’ organizational level of the IV – were, in a sense, imagined entities.97 Brigades became, none the less, arguably the most crucial structural tier of the Volunteers. Brigade boundaries were ‘sacrosanct’, as one senior officer put it, with only slight exaggeration. They were rarely crossed or shifted. The recasting of the brigade structure by GHQ in 1918, dividing most counties into two and some, like Cork and Tipperary, into three, was probably its most influential intervention in local activity. A few adjustments were later made – as when southern County Dublin (where two new battalions were set up in 1920–21) separated from the Dublin Brigade to join with north County Wicklow shortly before the July 1921 Truce that halted the Anglo-Irish war. Some adaptations were strategic, like this, others were driven by local power relations rather than GHQ blueprinting. Clare was a well-known instance, divided into three via some painful negotiations to accommodate the three leading local families, Barretts, Brennans and O’Donnells.98
When the structure was established, its contents were still at the fluid stage but, as they gradually solidified, brigades came to represent the functional limit of the intense localism that animated the organization. The fixity of the brigade areas also reflected in part the slow pace of the organization’s development in many places. Though the larger formations operated only at the staff level, they played a vital role in generating a sense of both identity and purpose. Battalions and brigades had commandants, vice-commandants, adjutants and signalling and engineering officers, and battalion and brigade councils met regularly to conduct administration. The localism of the citizen militia, in one sense a limiting factor, was also a source of great resilience and flexibility. What was needed was a military doctrine suited to these strengths.
No suitable doctrine was ready to hand. At the 1917 Volunteer Convention there was no mention of a ‘renewal of hostilities’, according to north Cork leader Seán Moylan, because no units bigger than companies existed. ‘Hostilities’ were still assumed to be large-scale actions. As brigades were formed (Moylan would command Cork No. 2), the first ‘hypothetical plans’ were mooted. Moylan – a schoolteacher by profession – believed that the Volunteers ‘luckily escaped the direction of professional soldiers’, and eventually ‘
reverted to the traditional guerrilla warfare of the locally organised clans’.99 But the logic of action took time to emerge. ‘One of the difficulties was that no one had any clear idea as to what form our activities would eventually take,’ as Roger McCorley in Belfast wrote. ‘There was a general idea that some day the signal for a rising would come and we would drive the enemy into the sea at one fell swoop.’ Seán Moylan was still ‘thinking in terms of a nationwide military effort on the lines of Easter Week, and from discussions I had with other Volunteers it seems to me that the same idea was widely held.’ As Todd Andrews remembered it, ‘to the extent that any of us thought about the future of the Volunteers, or what we were training for, it was to start another and perhaps bigger 1916 insurrection. But in fact I don’t think we gave any thought at all to the future military objectives of the Volunteers.’ He was clear that ‘guerrilla tactics were never mentioned.’ Things may have differed from place to place. One of the leading exponents of ‘hedge-fighting’ in the pre-1916 Volunteers, Ginger O’Connell, after his release in mid-1917 went to Sligo and started a series of lectures for local Volunteers. Though we do not know what he told them, it may well have followed his earlier thinking.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 6