The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Nationalism was a simple but, for believers, all-embracing creed. It has been well said of the Cork Volunteer leader Liam Lynch that he ‘made himself a leader out of the force of his own convictions’.166 He was ‘possessed by a sense of mission and by revolutionary ardour’, and if nobody surpassed him in the intensity of his faith, many were like him. Explaining Lynch’s embrace of the national cause, Florrie O’Donoghue threaded territorial affinity (‘the Galtee countryside wove a spell that never lost its magic to the day of his death’) together with the master narrative of expropriation (‘three hundred years of Irish history is reflected in miniature in what happened in this locality’).167 And he instinctively reached for organic metaphors rather than ideology in explaining the process of mobilization: ‘powerful spiritual forces stirred the heart of the nation.’

  But though national consciousness, or nationality, seemed simple and self-evident, nationalism was a different, more problematic issue. Nationalism has proved hard to define, but it is undoubtedly a political programme, assuming that nations are natural entities that must become sovereign polities to ensure their survival. But the famous question, ‘What is a nation?’, has produced many answers. The language issue in Ireland – the Gaelic League’s effort to reverse the gradual extinction of what had recently come to be called (in English) ‘the Irish language’ – pointed up key differences between Ireland and Europe. Continental cultural nationalism regarded language as the vital defining feature of nationhood. The national language determined the national consciousness. The fact that in Ireland the majority of people – both Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and unionist – spoke English, the ‘language of the oppressor’, was problematic both in theory and in political practice. For nationalists, following Daniel O’Connell, using English was simply a matter of practicality, but for many unionists the non-use of ‘Irish’ was a political point: they came to see the Gaelic language as the emblem of a hostile political movement.

  Though the death of the old language might be mourned by unionists as well as nationalists, its revival was a divisive project. As the language became a symbol of national revival, it signalled a redefinition of Irishness. The politicization of language reached an extreme in the thinking of Terence MacSwiney, who explicitly identified language, together with the sea, as one of Ireland’s two ‘frontiers’. He argued that an ‘Irishman’ who spoke English was now ‘asked to adopt the language for Ireland’s sake as a nation and for his own sake as a citizen’. MacSwiney did not mince words in spelling out the exclusionary implication of this: ‘if he prefers English civilisation he should go back [!] to England.’168

  The new separatist leaders did not see it as necessary to analyse the ‘self’ that was to exercise self-determination, or to waste many words in defining the republic that would give it political form. Sinn Féin’s 1917 formula almost reduced the title to a token. There was clearly more to it than this, but exactly how much? What future did republicans really envisage? Though there was some enthusiasm for the creation of a ‘Gaelic state’ – Darrell Figgis wrote a book on the topic in 1917 – the contours of such a state remained vague. Gaelicists believed that devolution of power to localities could recover the primitive democracy of clan society, a system more like the Russian than the English version. Some indeed squarely rejected western representative democracy as a sham, embracing the kind of local corporativism that had sprung up in the Russian soviets in 1917, and would briefly flower in the German councils movement just after the end of the war. Proto-communism and proto-fascism commingled in Aodh de Blacam’s What Sinn Féin Stands For, the nearest approach to a coherent republican political-theoretical tract. ‘That parliamentary government … is played out, seems to be agreed by all advanced political thinkers.’ The answer would be, in the first instance, ‘something of a state-socialistic policy’. He predicted that ‘revolutionary conditions’ would produce the same government ‘by centralised and iron-handed authority’ in Ireland as in Lenin’s Russia. ‘So backward and disorganised a country as Ireland requires an iron Bismarckian phase.’ But eventually it would be followed by the decentralization that fitted ‘Irish instinct’.169

  The schoolteacher Seán Moylan no doubt knew what he meant when he spoke of ‘men of a more intensely Irish character and outlook’, but since he assumed his readers did also, he did not explain it. Irishness was obviously not a negative quality, but much of the Irish-Ireland movement had framed it in terms of de-Anglicization that set Englishness as the negation of Irishness and vice versa. Urbanization, for instance, was, if not anti-Irish, at least unIrish – Aodh de Blacam argued that all Irish social thought saw Gaelic society as essentially rural. Irish nationalists often expressed a visceral hatred of ‘England’ rather than Britain. The slippage between the words Britain and England was ‘one of those little traps … into which many of our people unconsciously fall’, Art O’Brien thought. ‘Our fight is against England,’ as he insisted to Collins.170 But disentangling them was not easy. When Thomas Ashe graphically told Florrie O’Donoghue, ‘I never see that flag but I want to piss on it,’ he was of course talking of the Union, not the English, flag.171 He may well never have seen a St George’s Cross in his life.

  Separatist republicanism was primarily constructed in moral rather than ideological terms. ‘Manliness’ was the most vital quality of true Irishmen; degeneracy was the distinguishing mark of their enemies. Seán Moylan suggested that it was the ‘demand for a recognition of their manhood and for their rights as men’ that had been ‘the real source of revolt in Ireland’.172 (Admittedly, he was arguing deliberately against the idea of economic motivation.) This echoed Joe Plunkett’s assertion in early 1914 that with the launching of the Volunteer movement the Irish people had ‘reassumed [its] manhood’.173 Englishness was marked by immorality, ‘obscenity and Birmingham-filth’. Anti-conscription propaganda extended prewar condemnation of the British army as the most immoral in the world, riven with ‘loathsome diseases brought on by personal immorality’. In 1918 nationalists raised energetic alarms about the likely return of servicemen suffering from ‘the vilest diseases known’ – more specifically, syphilis, ‘this foulest and most shameful of diseases’.174

  Republicans always asserted, and probably believed, that republicanism was non-sectarian – heir to the United Irish aspiration to replace denominational labels with ‘the common name of Irishman’. But the Enlightenment atmosphere that had nurtured that secularist movement had long since been submerged in a tide of religious revival – both Catholic and Protestant. Ireland was not like the west European Catholic countries where ‘anti-Catholicism or anti-clericalism were almost inevitable concomitants of radical or revolutionary ideology’.175 By 1916 the handful of advanced nationalists from a Protestant background can have been in no doubt that republicanism was unambiguously, and almost assertively, Catholic in ethos. One authority has called the republicanism of 1916 ‘expressly Catholic’, another has observed that the meaning of the Irish national community ‘was derived from its Catholicism’.176

  This was in one sense simply a reflection of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Irish people outside Ulster were Catholic. When Volunteer companies paraded after mass they were doing what was convenient. Likewise the church provided the obvious place (at least until the town halls fell under Sinn Féin control in 1920) to take the anti-conscription oath, or subscribe to the Republican Loan (see p. 90 below). But the connection went further. The instinctual Catholicism of republican organizations could be seen, for instance, in the fact that the nationwide meetings for Lá na mBan ended with the women reciting the rosary in Irish.177 Seamus Robinson set his memoir in the frame of his Catholic philosophy, starting from the declaration ‘as sure as life there is a God.’ He wanted to prove that all his actions from the Soloheadbeg ambush through to the civil war in 1922–3 ‘were carried out … not only in good faith but as an incumbent duty’ – a religious duty that was, he held, denied only by the ‘Jansenistic-Gallican
ism’ of the majority of the Irish Hierarchy. For Todd Andrews, the ‘profound Catholic faith’ of the Volunteers meant that any nationalist beliefs had to be essentially religious, since ‘it would have been quite impossible for us to imagine ourselves breaking the First Commandment.’178 Atheists, especially militant ones like Frank Busteed of Blarney, were extremely rare among republicans. Busteed, whose father was a Protestant, was brought up as a Catholic, but felt that his Protestant name impeded his progress in the Volunteers. He seems to have thought that his atheism did not produce such discrimination. Even anti-clericalism was less prominent than it had been among nineteenth-century Fenians. The IRB man P. S. O’Hegarty, urging Terence MacSwiney that ‘nothing but strong determined actions will break’ the clergy of their political habits, remarked that ‘it is only when a man leaves Ireland that he starts to see straight on some things, this among them.’ ‘We have to put them in their places if we are going to do anything.’179 O’Hegarty, originally from Cork, worked for the Post Office in London. His childhood friend MacSwiney, who did not leave Ireland (except to be interned in Frongoch camp in Wales in 1916), simply equated anti-clericalism with atheism.

  ‘THERE ARE DEAD MEN VOTING HERE TODAY’

  The general election at the end of the war was a showdown not only between Sinn Féin and the Irish party, but also between moderate and radical republicans within Sinn Féin. Darrell Figgis thought that the showdown should have been won by the moderates: the ‘Griffith school’ reaping the ‘harvest of their victories’ over conspiratorial physical-force republicanism in 1917. Indeed the very strategy of fighting elections was a Griffithite victory. The fact that Sinn Féin candidates were abstentionists, promising never to attend Westminster, made it more palatable to republicans, but only a little. In the event, though, as Figgis lamented, the physical-force men of the IRB and Volunteers displaced the moderates from the party platform.180 Figgis himself was a notable casualty of the process, perhaps the most outstanding Sinn Féin figure to miss out on selection. Prodigiously talented, a brilliant writer with an immaculate record of imprisonment (he was swept up in the German Plot arrests, and was in gaol during the election), he suffered from ‘unbounded egotism’. Robert Brennan said ‘he made enemies more easily than any man I knew.’ Whether for this reason or because he was identified as representing ‘old’ Sinn Féin, Figgis would never find a suitable role in the struggle thus redefined.

  Sinn Féin followed the old parliamentary party’s system of controlling its candidate selection from the centre. Harry Boland became ‘chief broker in the allocation of seats’, winning, for instance, a dispute with Austin Stack (SF’s titular election director) over whether to put up Eamon de Valera against Joe Devlin on his home ground in Belfast (Falls Division). He co-drafted the ‘Manifesto to the Irish People’ with O’Flanagan, Tom Kelly and Robert Brennan. The manifesto insisted that Sinn Féin was ‘not a political party’, but ‘the natural successor of that great body of the Irish nation, that never … surrendered the right of Ireland to absolute independence’.181

  Initially, Sinn Féin faced the possibility that the labour movement would challenge this claim by fighting the election in its own right. In August 1918 the Irish Trades Union Council changed its title to Irish Labour party and Trades Union Congress, and its president William O’Brien declared that ‘we are a political party, independent, erect, free … We must secure Labour representation, independent, able, strong, efficient and constructive on all our public elective bodies.’ The Labour National Executive in September unanimously resolved ‘in favour of entering the field at the coming General Election with a number of Labour candidates fighting as an independent political party’. But the leadership was in fact far from unanimous on this crucial issue. While Tom Johnson was in favour of a pact with Sinn Féin, at least for the first postwar election, Louie Bennett denounced the lack of any revolutionary principle in the Sinn Féin programme. Jim Larkin went further: ‘the Irish Republic the Sinn Feiners are after is but the counterpart of France and America where year after year the capitalist sweats dividends out of his helpless workers.’ But though Larkin might rail against Sinn Féin – ‘the Griffith gang’ – and its view of socialists as ‘anti-Christs’, and ask why the Irish labour leaders were allowing it to monopolize the national resistance to conscription, his stentorian tones were muted by distance since he had gone to the USA in 1914. Peadar O’Donnell (who was intellectually qualified to take up James Connolly’s mantle) regretted that when Connolly died in 1916 radicalism died with him. He ‘left no successor’; the Labour leader who best understood Connolly, Cathal O’Shannon, was ‘on the payroll of the Transport Workers’ Union, and was very much under the influence of Bill O’Brien’.182

  Boland himself, still – more or less – a working tailor (like William O’Brien), may have been inclined ‘towards elements of socialism’. But he was happy to assure Cathal Brugha – whose unreconstructed Fenian view was that it was ‘a pity that Labour people have not the intelligence and patriotism to let their class claim wait until we have cleared out the enemy’ – that his overriding commitment was to the Republic.183 Though Boland’s complicated manoeuvres over the selection of candidates in Dublin led some republicans to fear that ‘we were selling the pass to Labour,’ in the end the pressures were all the other way. A special Labour conference in November eventually accepted Johnson’s argument that the movement should change its posture, because the nature of the election itself had changed since the Armistice: no longer the ‘War election’ they had envisaged, it had become the ‘Peace election’. There would be ‘a Grand Inquest of the Nations’, and Labour should withdraw to allow national unity on the self-determination issue to be demonstrated. This was agreed by 96 to 23 – an outcome with far-reaching consequences for the labour movement, and one which satisfied even Brugha, who exulted, ‘Could not be better!’ Labour’s decision to stand aside was probably the most emphatic evidence of Sinn Féin’s transition into a national movement. It was becoming, as has been said, ‘increasingly difficult for any political group to maintain independence in the circumstances of Irish life’.184

  The election was a historic moment. The dramatic enlargement of the franchise in the 1918 Representation of the People Act – which trebled the Irish electorate – and the lapse of time since the last general election in 1910, meant that three-quarters of voters had never previously cast a vote. Women (over thirty) were enfranchised for the first time, and a last-minute provision in November confirmed that women could stand for election – paving the way for Countess Markievicz to become the first woman elected to Westminster. (Sinn Féin put up only two women candidates, in fact, and the other – Winnie Carney – stood for the Victoria Division of Belfast where, with ‘neither personation agents, committee rooms, canvassers or vehicles’ to support her, she could muster only 395 votes.)185 These structural changes were not decisive in themselves – in Longford, for instance, they merely cemented Sinn Féin’s already established dominance – and probably did not secure Sinn Féin’s victory, though they helped to increase its margin. The result was one of the greatest electoral landslides of the century in western Europe.186

  Volunteer election activity was well established by this time – the Dublin Brigade had mustered 100 men to send to south Armagh ‘to prevent the blatant [loyalist] intimidation that was going on’. Joe O’Connor noted that election duty was popular with officers – it enhanced the men’s ‘sense of discipline’, and gave officers practice in handling them in public. This was normally risky, but ‘the British could not very well interfere with our endeavours to keep order’ at election meetings.187 This time Volunteer activity was systematically planned. In mid-November GHQ issued orders that brigades should appoint a director of elections for every constituency to take charge of all Volunteer activity. It instructed that ‘for election purposes only’ all battalions ‘and odd companies’ should ‘respond to the orders’ of this officer. Volunteers were to guard ‘Republican Candida
tes’ Committee Rooms’ and provide protection for candidates at election meetings. They were to provide ‘peace patrols’ – GHQ reminded them that the organization was ‘a national one, and the freedom that is desired for ourselves must not be denied to others’. They would guard polling booths to prevent intimidation and molestation of voters, escort the ballot boxes to the place they were deposited between polling day and the count, and guard these depositories. (All these functions would usurp the role of the police.)188 In Dublin they threw themselves enthusiastically into more directly political activity like canvassing. In College Green Division ‘Volunteers … spent whole nights addressing envelopes, sending off literature, as well as preventing … ex-soldiers creating any disturbances.’189 Elsewhere ‘Volunteers carried out a thorough canvass of the area and on polling day acted as personation agents and also organised transport to bring voters to polling booths.’190 Cumann na mBan ‘made and distributed a large amount of flags and emblems’, catered for the Volunteers on election duty, and ‘personated extensively’. Those who, like O’Connor, were less happy about Volunteers taking on electioneering work were relieved when ‘as the day of the polling approached we were able to draw off the Volunteers into more soldierly duties’ such as maintaining order.

  Despite a mini-run of by-election victories in the preceding months, the old parliamentary party was faced with annihilation. Even so, the election was a strangely quiet affair compared with the ferocious contests of the past. There were exceptions: in the Redmondite stronghold of Waterford, for instance, Volunteer election parties were fired on by ex-servicemen armed with rifles, ‘a couple of our lads who had revolvers replied to the fire and dispersed the attackers’; but they had to use sticks or hurleys ‘on many occasions’.191 And Kevin O’Shiel (who contested both South Antrim and North Fermanagh) had his most violent election experience in Falls Division at the hands not of loyalists but of the old party’s enforcers – ‘I shall never forget that wild, yelling, maddened Hibernian mob that pelted us for two hours with sticks, stones, rivets, rotten eggs, dead cats and rats.’192