The Volunteer General Staff issued no operational orders during the conscription crisis, merely instructing Volunteers to try to avoid arrest. If an attempt was made to arrest them ‘while in possession of arms … the arms should be used’ (to defend the weapons as much as the men).100 In Westmeath, GHQ’s policy was understood to be ‘to display … strength and determination … as much as possible, knowing that the RIC would report’ such things as parades and meetings. These were held daily. In Leitrim, ‘apart from drilling, very little was done to meet the threat of conscription,’ though the Volunteers made lists of all houses that had arms ‘so that they could be easily got if the crisis came to a head’, and also of local food stocks.101 Other units did develop more ambitious plans, envisaging large-scale conventional action. In Beaufort, Co. Kerry, for instance, the local unit thought that ‘being situate at the foot of the Gap of Dunloe, we held the entrance to what would have been the main hideout in South Kerry if the British had attempted to enforce conscription.’102 The Dublin Brigade adopted the ‘Block System’ (worked out by Joseph O’Connor), in which battalion areas were divided into blocks in which Volunteers threatened with arrest would ‘open fire or resist enemy activity by whatever means they possessed’.103 In south Roscommon ‘we constructed several dugouts to accommodate our men should the thing come to a head.’ In Ahane, Co. Limerick, ‘we drilled three times a week and had lectures on our plan of battle under different circumstances.’104 Cork Brigade orders indicated the scale of ‘active service’ operations envisaged: each company quartermaster was urged to ‘look round his district, fix in his mind’s eye the best place to billet men not on duty’, and also ‘fix mentally, central farmhouses to be used for cooking purposes’. Hot food and drink was ‘an absolute necessity’ for men ‘on arduous military work’.105
There is some evidence that guerrilla thinking was in the air during the crisis. Interestingly, the nationalist MP Arthur Lynch, who had ‘seen a good deal of the Sinn Feiners’, told Lloyd George in May that ‘they really thought that they could beat the British army, not by regular fighting, but by guerrilla methods … They did not intend to fight in the towns, but to withdraw at once to the country where they had lots of clever guerilla leaders.’106 Whoever he had been talking with was more far-sighted than most. Seán Moylan thought it lucky that conscription was never imposed, because there would have been an orthodox ‘text-book type of fighting’, with disastrous results, whereas the averting of the conscription threat took the pressure off and ‘permitted the development of an altogether different and more effective method of fighting’.
The most universal military idea of the Volunteers was the determination to hang on to their weapons, and get more wherever they could. Since the prewar crisis, Volunteers had come almost to fetishize the modern service rifle as the pre-eminent symbol of military credibility, and indeed of national manhood. The Irish Volunteer journal had intoned in 1914 that the ‘man who has once handled a rifle and is not smitten with a desire to own one is not an Irishman’. The 1916 Volunteer who resigned when told by his commander to protect his rifle ‘as he would the honour of his mother or his wife’ seems to have been unusual.107 Even the imposing single-shot ‘Howth Mausers’ acquired in 1914 had been discounted by some – not entirely without reason – as antiques. But, apart from a few survivals from Easter 1916, the prospects of securing magazine-loading rifles like the Lee-Enfield were limited to the occasional careless or co-operative soldier on leave. The first service rifle acquired by the Thurles company was bought for 50 shillings by the brigade quartermaster from a British soldier, who ‘did not appear to be in any way concerned about what might happen to him when he reported back without his rifle’. Joseph Clancy of the Munster Fusiliers (who later became the training officer of the East Clare Brigade) came home on leave with his short Lee-Enfield, complete with bayonet and twenty rounds of ammunition. He arranged with his brother and the local Volunteers that ‘they could have itself and the ammunition by holding me up as I was on my way to Sixmilebridge railway station returning to France.’108 It took the British army a surprisingly long time to tumble to such ruses, but even so the pickings were nowhere near enough to equip more than a handful of men.
The Volunteer leadership worried at first that raiding private houses for arms would risk alienating the public. The conscription crisis changed this, and orders were issued by battalion commanders like Liam Deasy in West Cork that companies should collect all available firearms in their districts. The public reaction seems to have been co-operative – as one Volunteer recalled, it was often a misnomer to call them ‘raids’. The result was a biggish haul of shotguns and a fair quantity of revolvers, though overall totals are impossible to estimate. Shotguns did not rank with rifles as symbols of military status, and it took time for their effectiveness to be understood. Volunteers were often conscious of lacking knowledge of firearms and their maintenance. In some places, where Volunteers ‘had little knowledge of making dry dumps’, guns were only taken from ‘unfriendly’ people: ‘we left the arms with friendly people, on the understanding that they would keep them safe … in good order.’109 This may have meant that the guns got taken away in one of the periodic police swoops. Certainly many ‘unfriendly’ guns were taken out of the picture early on: 20,800 had been surrendered to the police in Ulster by January 1919, and in all some 100,000 were handed in between 1918 and 1920.110 The Volunteers might well have secured at least as many – which would certainly have provided some kind of gun for every man – but subsequent complaints of shortages suggest that they did not.
The most common substitute for guns in spring 1918 was pikes – half the blacksmiths across the country seemed to be turning them out. They were paid for by funds raised at dances. In Clare, ‘money was very scarce at the time and many of the lads could not afford … the price of a shaft. We had some exercises with these pikes but I’m afraid they were more of a novelty than anything else.’111 The notion of using such primitive weapons can hardly have fostered a belief in open combat, though some thought it ‘most heartening to hear the young men … discuss the weapons they would use, such as sleans, pikes and pitchforks, as well as shotguns’. Michael Higgins in Galway remembered pike drill without much affection: he had a hazy recollection of commands like ‘Left Parry’, ‘Right Parry’ and ‘Forward Thrust’ but a strong memory ‘that both the pikehead and the handle were very heavy and that I was always glad when the pike drill instruction was over’. In any event, ‘no use was ever made of these pikes afterwards.’112
The supply of guns would never be sufficient; manpower was less of a problem. Enthusiasm was fuelled by the release of many internees at Christmas 1916, and though recruitment figures stayed quite low overall, this was partly due to careful selection. Companies in strongly unionist areas seem to have been especially choosy about their membership. By late 1917, though, numbers were swelling. Patrick McKenna claims that a general mobilization of Volunteers at the Casement Fort – a prehistoric hill fort near Casement’s landing-place in 1916 – in early August 1917 called forth no fewer than 5,000 men, some on horseback; a crowd of 10,000 people listened to addresses by Thomas Ashe, Austin Stack and Con Collins. The conscription crisis produced a dramatic surge. The Lixnaw company was not unusual in leaping from 84 to 260 strong. When James Keating returned from prison to Fethard during the crisis, he was impressed by the scale of change in the movement. ‘Men were now drilling and training openly and it looked as if a Volunteer company had been established and put on a proper footing.’ In Longford the surge led to the creation of a brigade organization for the county.
This rapid expansion was shortlived: the Lixnaw company fell back to 100, and like many others the Fethard company collapsed. Nearly two years passed before another serious effort was made to establish one in Fethard.113 In some areas an effort was made to limit the surge. North Roscommon accepted no new members: ‘We believed by now we had recruited any man who was any good in the area.’ Others learnt a
disagreeable lesson. The great influx ‘imposed a heavy burden of work on … training officers’; since most of the recruits ‘had not the same ideals or tradition of the original Volunteers’, they had to be ‘trained, disciplined, lessoned to an … understanding of the objective of the Volunteer movement’. Seán Moylan felt that the newcomers clung to the old preference for demonstrations, meetings, oratory and torchlight processions: they did not understand ‘that an entirely different situation had arisen’.114 (Though in Dublin Joe O’Connor charitably judged that the transient recruits ‘were the better for the training they received during their connection with the Volunteers’.) In Tipperary, where ‘we … were swamped’ initially, the roll plummeted – from 120 to 5 parading in 6th Battalion, 3rd Tipperary Brigade – and Seán Treacy concluded that if there was another conscription crisis they should refuse to accept recruits en masse.115 GHQ instructed in June that ‘at the present moment great care should be taken in recruiting’; in the cities of Dublin, Cork and Limerick, men should not be accepted until they had been confirmed by the Battalion Council, and in rural areas recruits should be vouched for by at least ten of the company they were to join.116
Who did join? Sir Henry Robinson, the Vice-President of the Local Government Board, blamed the anti-conscription agitation on ‘the young shopmen in the towns’, and this was not an entirely misleading social analysis of the Volunteer movement. Shop assistants and clerks, who made up only 4 per cent of the workforce outside Dublin, may have formed up to a fifth of active Volunteers. Skilled workers were also heavily over-represented in Volunteer ranks. By contrast, farmers and agricultural workers seem to have formed a minority, at least after 1919.117 If so (the figures are still debated), this was sharply at variance with the belief of many Irish-Irelanders in the essentially rural identity of Ireland. It can be suggested that the social basis of the Sinn Féin–Volunteer movement was modern rather than traditional. Membership statistics would never be comprehensive, especially in respect of the occupational background of Volunteers, but again the dismissive perception of the authorities – that the movement did not include ‘important’ people – was certainly correct. The revolutionary generation was made up of mostly obscure people, whose most obvious common characteristic was their youth. Before 1919 the median age of rank-and-file Volunteers was twenty-three, and of officers twenty-five. After that the average age rose by about a year, but overall no more than 5 per cent of Volunteers were over forty, while an overwhelming majority were under thirty (82 per cent in 1917–19, rising to 88 per cent in 1920–21 and 92 per cent in 1922–3). More overwhelming still was their denominational homogeneity, far exceeding what might have been expected in a national movement with a history rich in iconic Protestant heroes. Though it would be impossible to compile accurate statistics, there can be no doubt that Protestants were significantly under-represented in the Volunteers as a whole, more strikingly in Belfast than in the rural south. It has indeed been suggested that there were ‘far more “pagans” – as atheists or non-practising Catholics were often known – than Protestants’ in the Volunteers.118
‘THE FIRST OFFICERS WERE ELECTED’
In one respect the Volunteers were a truly revolutionary army: they elected their officers. Many units started collectively, without any officers; then, as in Glendine (mid-Clare), a battalion staff officer arrived to organize elections. In many places, leaders emerged naturally: Liam Deasy recorded that when Charlie Hurley organized a new company in Castletownbere, ‘the esteem in which he was held’ led to ‘his immediate election as Captain’. When Joe O’Connor reorganized the 3rd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade, he also ran the brigade – ‘I had not been properly appointed but it was understood that being the senior officer, my orders were accepted.’ He offered ‘to resign command’ of his battalion when de Valera got out of gaol, and de Valera in turn ‘offered to confirm me in the command of the Dublin Brigade’.119 In Miltown Malbay, ‘for some months I don’t think we had any officers,’ but ‘in the spring of 1918 Martin Devitt, afterwards Vice OC [Vice-Officer Commanding] of the Mid-Clare Brigade, came into the area and the first officers were elected under his direction.’120 The ‘first election of company officers by secret ballot’ in the Cashel battalion (later the 2nd Battalion of Tipperary No. 3 Brigade) took place in early 1918. Elections became universal in 1918, and continued in many places right through into 1921. (When 2nd Southern Division was formed in 1921, and Ernie O’Malley was put in command of it, Moylan fretted that ‘the nomination of officers was a new departure.’)121
Election seemed so natural that many Volunteers appear to have been unaware of its significance – most of their recollections speak of election and appointment interchangeably. The Cork Brigade veteran Florrie O’Donoghue argued that the elective system ‘proved itself sound, mainly because of the spirit in which men served’.122 But the problems it could pose were clear to the central organizers from the start. The IRB, which still saw the Volunteers as its own army, made urgent efforts to ensure that ‘no one will be elected an officer of the Volunteers who is not a member of the Organisation.’ Seamus Robinson brushed off the urgings of ‘young fellows with notebooks rushing round buttonholing individuals with anxious whispers’ at a meeting in Parnell Square in 1917. ‘That sort of thing’, he snorted, ‘would undermine the authority and efficiency of the whole Volunteer movement.’ When Thomas Fitzpatrick, a former British army officer who had served at Gallipoli and Salonika, joined the Belfast battalion in 1919 he was told that he would have to join the IRB to ‘be in any position of responsibility’. He duly took the oath, but was slightly surprised that ‘they never bothered about me afterwards.’123 Seamus McKenna was sworn into the Belfast IRB late in 1919, but found that ‘little of importance was discussed’ at its monthly meetings. ‘Looking back I cannot recall any useful purpose served by our particular Circle.’ He knew that the brotherhood’s aim was to ensure that senior Volunteer officers were men ‘who would see that the fight for the Republic was relentlessly pursued’, but again could not ‘recall that this was effective in Belfast’.124
The variable success of the IRB’s bid to regain control of the Volunteers can be seen as a kind of quiet split. In some places it had no difficulty: in Meath, ‘the brigade officers appear to have been appointed from among the members of the IRB,’ and the selection process merely ratified decisions already made.125 In north Roscommon, ‘those of us who were in the IRB and who were organising the Volunteers automatically became Volunteers.’ In Tyrone, ‘the whole directional policy of the Volunteer movement was carried out through IRB channels.’126 But the Head Centre of the Armagh IRB admitted that though the IRB ‘attempted to take control of the newly formed Companies’, it was ‘a difficult job and the IRB lost control’. He thought it ‘only natural that the Volunteers would break away from the control’ of the small organization.127 In South Tipperary, a breaking point arrived when the IRB Centre refused to approve a plan to kidnap the RIC sergeant who had arrested Seán Treacy (on the grounds that the brotherhood ‘stood for something higher than the capture of “a bloody old policeman” ’). Even the county’s top IRB man, Eamon O’Dwyer, reached the conclusion that the old organization should be allowed to die a silent death.128 Neither the first commander of the Belfast Brigade, Seán O’Neill, nor his successor, Roger McCorley, was an IRB man. McCorley, whom Seamus McKenna thought ‘one of the most daring and active Volunteer officers in Ireland, … could not be induced under any circumstances to join the IRB’.
The IRB was losing its grip, but the free election of officers was seen as a problem by others too. Charlie Hurley might be, as Liam Deasy said, ‘a natural genius’, but local prestige did not necessarily translate into military efficiency or energy – too often the reverse. One answer was to have secret ballots in the larger units. In Dundrum, three battalion staff were elected ‘unanimously’ and only one – the quartermaster, John Ryan – by secret ballot. When Seán Treacy came to a Battalion Council meeting as vice-OC of t
he brigade, he ‘insisted on having the first three appointments made by secret ballot’, so the election was repeated – though without any change in the result.129 Sometimes officers recognized their own inadequacy: Frank Hynes’s company captain ‘saw that as such he was a failure and couldn’t get the men to attend’. (At the meeting to elect his successor, one man apparently stood up and dismissed the need for an election – ‘there’s not a man here who will soldier under any man but Frank Hynes. We’ll have him for Captain or no one.’) In Kerry, ‘when the Bealnadeega Company was first formed I was in charge,’ James Daly recorded, ‘but I stepped down in favour of Thomas O’Leary who had resigned from the RIC.’130
The quality of officers was highly variable at this stage. In Virginia, Co. Cavan, when the company captain was arrested the unit was taken over by Phil Wrett, ‘a heavy boozer’ who ‘while in a drunken bout, would give military orders such as “halt” or “form fours” … more often than not … while the RIC were present’.131 The supply of individuals capable of taking up senior posts was, and remained, limited. Even the legendary Tom and Seán Hales of Bandon were severely (though privately) judged by Ernie O’Malley – ‘fond of themselves and of publicity’, decent enough men but ‘neither [was] fit to take charge of a Brigade or even of a Battalion.’132 Not every officer wanted to take up staff posts, indeed (if anything the fledgling Volunteer officer corps was marked by a lack of confidence in its abilities), and they often fell vacant. Local battalions had to be taught that, as the Cork Brigade adjutant, Florrie O’Donoghue, told them, ‘it is necessary always to keep the Battalion Staff complete, and men must be found for these positions.’133 Ernie O’Malley, acting as commander of the Offaly Volunteers, had to round up local officers for a battalion election – ‘see that your officers attend punctually, no excuse accepted.’134
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 7