Seán T. O’Kelly was followed as envoy to Paris by George Gavan Duffy, and eventually moved on to Rome as envoy to the Papacy. The vital London office was entrusted to Art O’Brien, a man with aspirations to turn his post as envoy into a full ambassadorship. A Londoner by birth, and a former civil engineer, now in early middle age he was manager of the Music Trade Review, a leading figure in the Gaelic League and President of the Sinn Féin Council of Great Britain. He constructed a complex network of undercover contacts to spread information, gather intelligence and acquire arms, as well as an open pressure group, the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain. In the process he spent a lot of money – keeping up the style he believed was necessary to the dignity of the Republic’s representative. Cars waited outside while he took tea or dined at the Savoy. (His secretary, who thought he was ‘more concerned with the official dignity attached to his position than with the national cause’, would eventually resign in disgust when O’Brien admonished her for offering a cup of tea to one of the many messengers he kept hanging about his office.)215
Kerney was proud of his achievements in Paris – such as getting Irish toilet soap on sale in France (and importing French household soap to Ireland), and establishing a trade in rabbit skins. He ‘met with some success’ in getting ‘jambon de York’ relabelled as ‘Irish ham’, though perhaps his greatest feat – ‘not easy’, as he said – was to get the French commercial guide to give Ireland a separate entry, distinct from Britain. In general, as Briollay noted, the Irish envoys in Paris were ‘at first repulsed because of the fervour of the Anglo-French Alliance’, but a growing French ‘bitterness begotten of English selfishness’ led them to take a new interest in Ireland’s claims.216 Even so, no concrete action followed.
The Republic’s apparently most promising bids for external recognition targeted America and Russia. Though Irish opinion inevitably expected more from America, such expectations were rooted in a common delusion about the nature of big-power politics. In reality, the US would never directly dispute Britain’s view of the position in Ireland. In 1919, the weak and isolated infant Soviet Union was actually a better bet. There were a number of contacts that year (including a loan of $20,000 from Irish-American funds against the security of some supposed Russian Crown jewels), which eventually crystallized in summer 1920 in a draft treaty. But the Republic’s Ambassador-designate, Patrick McCartan – previously the envoy to Irish-America – did not set out for Russia until December 1920, by which time the USSR’s position was strengthening and the Bolshevik interest in stirring up anti-imperialist activity weakening. The delay killed the Irish–Soviet treaty. McCartan blamed it on de Valera’s hesitation, and the President’s belief in the possibility of gaining US recognition of the Republic dominated all his actions for nearly two years following his decision to travel to the USA shortly after being sprung from gaol (as we shall see) early in 1919.
De Valera’s twenty-month American mission was the most high-profile effort to set the Republic on an international stage. Many have wondered, then and since, whether the results justified such an extended absence. The mission took out of the republican leadership in Ireland not only the President himself but also Harry Boland, who had crossed the Atlantic as envoy to the Clan na Gael in mid-May. Patrick McCartan had already been sent there by the IRB to lead the effort to secure recognition. Other exiled 1916 veterans in America included Diarmuid Lynch – deported in 1918 for his part in organizing the ‘food control’ scheme – and Liam Mellows (though Mellows eventually became disenchanted enough with America to go back to the rigours of life as a rebel leader). Boland had barely begun to navigate the shoals of the fractious Irish-American leadership when the unexpected news of de Valera’s arrival reached him on 11 June. Suddenly demoted from envoy to ‘valet, shepherd and manager’ of the socially awkward President, he stayed on – with a month’s break in Ireland in May 1920 – until after the 1921 Truce. (When he returned in August 1921, Collins wryly christened him ‘the Visitor’.)
Even Boland’s skills as a fixer, though, were not enough to smooth relations between the ‘stubborn’ de Valera and the imperious Irish-American leaders – the hard-bitten Fenian veteran John Devoy, President of the Clan na Gael, and Judge Daniel Cohalan, who effectively controlled the new Friends of Irish Freedom – who themselves were at loggerheads with McCartan. The Irish leaders were fortunate to have one ally on the Clan Executive, the Philadelphia liquor trader Joe McGarrity, who became a crucial supporter and consistent confidant over the following years. ‘Great soul’, Boland called him: ‘love him more and more.’217 A gifted businessman, and dogged tax avoider, McGarrity shifted from liquor to real estate when prohibition came in in 1920. His lantern jaw and solid build (the writer Padraic Colum described him admiringly as ‘a Donegal gallowglass ready to swing a battleaxe with his long arms’) unfortunately disguised a less robust constitution, and his ‘breakdown’ in spring 1920 set limits to his political activity. But he had a ‘deep reverence’ for de Valera, and ‘spent fortunes on the Irish cause’, among other things founding the Philadelphia Irish Press.218
The Friends of Irish Freedom, through its Irish Race Conventions and fund drives, was raising $2,000,000 for its Irish Victory Fund. It financed the three-man delegation that was sent to Paris. But it proved very reluctant either to disgorge its funds in the direction of Dublin or to support the idea of the Dáil Loan when it was launched later in 1919. One of the delegation’s members estimated (on the basis of the activity he had seen on his way back from Paris) that the republican government would not cost more than $50,000 a year to run. Cohalan also argued that it would probably be illegal for an unrecognized state to issue bonds. It was not until late 1919 that an accommodation between Cohalan and de Valera allowed the Dáil bonds to be sold from January 1920 onwards. But tensions persisted and the Irish-American effort was never fully unified, even after the two chief protagonists formally composed their differences in a pact ‘ratified in the most solemn manner – all present kneeling and receiving the blessing of Bishop Turner of Buffalo’.219
On the face of things, de Valera’s American mission looked triumphant in mobilizing public support. ‘If cheers and parades mean anything we have won,’ Boland noted in October 1919; but he added, ‘Wish we could translate cheers etc into deeds.’220 De Valera’s presidential status became informally recognized – ‘governors, Senators and Mayors pay court to him and do him honor.’ His speeches had a big impact on audiences often reaching 30,000. As McCartan put it, ‘de Valera as President issued and sold bonds of the Republic of Ireland, and as President of that Republic asked the American people to recognise it.’ (Indeed it was this personification of ‘the cause’, McCartan lamented, that ‘left us without the power to challenge him’.)221 His prestige as ‘the Chief’, backed by efficient organization, ensured impressive success in fundraising: over a quarter of a million Americans subscribed to the ‘external’ Dáil Loan in 1920, and over $5,000,000 was eventually raised. Even though much of this money did not reach Ireland in time to help the Republic (half remained ‘buried in American banks’ through the 1920s), it transformed the counter-state’s resources. But the ‘deed’ the republicans desired above all, formal US recognition, remained elusive. De Valera had probably done little to advance it by denouncing the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson’s most cherished international project, as an ‘unholy alliance’ in his first statement to the American press.222
De Valera lacked one big advantage that the original ‘Chief’, Charles Stewart Parnell, had possessed, as had Roger Casement: he was not a Protestant. American Protestant sentiment was worryingly vulnerable to the anti-Catholicism of a well-organized unionist mission demanding self-determination for Ulster. De Valera’s assertion that ‘religion is involved only as a rack on the pegs of which England exhibits Ireland’s political differences before the world’, and his assurance that the Irish nation was ‘as homogeneous as any nation upon the earth; but under England’s influence
the elements of Irish life are made to appear to repel each other’, were likely to convince only those who had already adopted the nationalist view.223 Though he won his long feud with Cohalan, the bitterness of the feud itself was worrying. So, though it did not leak into the public sphere, was his long bickering with the Dublin leadership – Collins in particular – over such issues as the date from which interest on the Dáil Loan should be payable.224
‘DON’T ARGUE, BUT SHOOT!’
Moderate Sinn Feiners like Darrell Figgis might complain that the displacement of politicians by soldiers in the Dáil ensured ‘the shock of violence where violence might conceivably have been avoided’. But, from the standpoint of fighting men like Seamus Robinson, things looked quite different: there was still far too much avoidance of violence. Calling them ‘fighting men’ may seem premature, since no serious fighting had yet taken place, but they had already made up their minds to dedicate themselves to soldiering. Robinson ‘had taken a solemn resolution on Easter Monday morning … that I’d soldier for the rest of my life or until we had our freedom’. The notion of soldiership was absolutely central to the attitudes and actions of the group – formed really by this outlook rather than by any direct links – that would press the Volunteer organization on into guerrilla warfare. (Dan Breen would describe himself as ‘a soldier first and foremost’; Sheila Humphreys would say that Ernie O’Malley was ‘a soldier, above all’.) Since 1916 Peadar Kearney’s song, ‘Soldiers are We’, adopted by the Volunteers before the Easter rising, had become the unofficial national anthem of the Republic.
Soldiership meant military-mindedness, but this did not necessarily mean militarism. It was a matter not so much of rejecting politics as of embracing the professional dedication necessary to make the use of violence effective and give it some prospect of success. All Volunteers were well aware of how little they knew about military matters at the outset, and most were eager to learn. In the words of Seán O’Sullivan, a Longford company captain, ‘The work went on powerful every man make himself a better soldier and even yet I feel the pride knowing I was a sworn soldier of Ireland, and same I could see in both officers and men.’225 This was not just a matter of mastering military technology and techniques, vital though these were – O’Malley’s notebooks were filled with fieldcraft diagrams and instructions on dismantling various weapons – but still more of internalizing military values. This was not easy for an organization that could make only restricted use of traditional military symbolism, such as uniform. The 1916 rebels had sported all the paraphernalia they possessed, but in the kind of guerrilla actions their successors were limited to, uniform would be a liability (useful, indeed, only to decoy the enemy). Its importance at the kind of events where it could feature, like weddings and funerals, can hardly be missed. Still more importantly, as in all citizen armies, Volunteer leaders were quite well aware of the difficulty of inculcating the central military value, discipline, into soldiers who could not experience the total bonding of regular military units. Here the local nature of the army, and the personal familiarity of its members, was a key asset. When it failed to work, the risk of insubordination, and even the breaking away of whole units, was always present.
The boundary between military-mindedness and militarism was a fragile one, though. Seán Moylan felt that the mantra ‘You must think militarily’ had its downside: ‘as an instruction given to men who had come to despise parliamentarianism, it was not wisely conceived.’ Its least pernicious product might be the apparently sensible prioritization of Liam Lynch’s dictum ‘the army should hew the way for politics to follow.’ But at its worst it could lead to a perilous Coriolanus-like contempt for the very people whose freedom was the cause, and even to a belief that only the fighting men were entitled to political power. Ernie O’Malley would reflect bitterly during the Truce that popularity was worse than contempt – ‘the crowd cheering you today would cut your throat tomorrow, if they had the pluck.’ At the height of the civil war Lynch would reportedly dismiss the ordinary people as ‘merely sheep to be driven anywhere at will’, and O’Malley would brand them as ‘slaves’ with the ‘slave mind’, ‘slaves’ meannesses and lack of moral qualities’.226
Attending training lectures was one thing; fighting was another. ‘The Volunteers would have to be brought by gradual stages to the sticking point –’ as Seamus Robinson put it, before adding, ‘I mean the bayonet-sticking point.’227 Volunteer activity had started to become violent in many places in 1918 – in February the Volunteers in Ennistymon, Co. Clare had attacked two RIC men escorting a family which was involved in a land dispute, and seized their carbines. In March the first shot fired in anger at the police had been fired at an ‘officious’ constable there, who had been keeping a close watch on arrivals at the railway station. ‘The shot lifted him like a wounded rabbit,’ according to the man who pulled the trigger of the shotgun, Tosser Neylon. ‘Although it did not kill him, it put him out of action for a good while and he gave no trouble after that.’228 That month the RIC barrack in Eyeries was raided and four rifles taken, Westport RIC barrack was attacked with a bomb, and British soldiers were stoned in Limerick city. In April, Volunteers seized 250 pounds of gelignite at Newtownbarry in Wexford, and in June a policeman was wounded when an RIC patrol was attacked in Tralee, Co. Kerry. Sentries had been disarmed in several places. So far, though, the only policeman to be killed had died in a prank, when he was shot by one of his comrades while pretending to be a rebel raider.
Confrontation receded along with the conscription threat. Public drilling, for instance, intense in early 1918, became less visible. Some activists who had been given short gaol sentences for drilling, and warned that a repeat would incur much stiffer penalties, had backed off. The Executive advised Volunteers generally not to court arrest. In its effort to construct a national army, GHQ was (and would remain) acutely conscious of regional inconsistencies, striving to push the localities into line with its pattern of soldiering. This could stifle as well as stimulate local energy. The few organizers it sent out across the country were a drop in the ocean, often self-taught officers – like Ernest Blythe – only moderately qualified to impose their ideas. Though GHQ would try to use the promise of weapons as a stimulus, it would never be in a position to guarantee supplies to local units. The experience of John Patrick McCormack’s Belmont company in Galway was all too common: ‘a sum of £18 for the purchase of three rifles was collected … and handed over to the battalion officers’ in 1919, but ‘no rifle was ever delivered to the company.’ McCormack himself (who had contributed much of the cash with three friends, hoping to get first call on the guns) would not get a rifle until he joined the Tuam battalion flying column in 1921.229 GHQ’s hesitancy was sometimes quite justified. The mines it supplied to the Wexford Volunteers were never used, and ‘some companies buried their weapons when the fighting started.’230
GHQ’s prime function was perhaps to transmit a vision of national armed struggle that could provide a template for local activity. Its journal An tOglaċ (the Irish Volunteer), edited by Piaras Béaslaí, and circulated quite openly until the Volunteer organization was banned in late 1919, was the most effective vehicle for this. Its first number set out the Irish Volunteer credo: the Volunteers were ‘the Army of the Irish Republic, the agents of the National will, an instrument framed by Irishmen to further Ireland’s determination to be free’. If there was a hint here that the army might be representative in a political sense, this was carefully adjusted by the insistence that Volunteers were ‘not politicians’ – ‘they were not created for the purpose of parades, demonstrations or political activities’; they did not follow ‘any political leader as such – their allegiance is to the Irish Nation’. This slightly awkward formulation reflected the Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy’s fixed belief (which would ultimately play a key part in the shaping of the Irish state) that modern armies must be utterly unpolitical – political ‘mutes’ in the French army’s famous self-description. ‘The V
olunteer does not talk, but acts.’ Yet the Irish Volunteers were inescapably engaged in a political activity – nation-building. The duty of their leaders was to ‘conform’ Volunteer policy to the ‘National will’ by ‘cooperating on the military side with those bodies and institutions which in other departments of the National life are striving to make our Irish Republic a tangible reality’.231 That Republic, as An tOglaċ reminded its readers, had been ‘established’ by the Volunteers themselves in 1916.
Once the Dáil was in existence, An tOglaċ reinforced the equation of nationalism with republicanism. The election had proved that the Volunteer leaders of 1916 ‘had truly interpreted the heart of Ireland’. Their successors had not only to ‘safeguard the Irish Republic’ but also to ‘interpret the national will, now rendered vocal and authoritative in Dáil Éireann’. (This interesting formulation seemed, perhaps unintentionally, to imply that the Dáil’s voice might need to be ‘interpreted’ by the Volunteers.) Spring 1919 was ‘one of the most critical periods in the history of the country’. ‘The fate of the Irish nation is trembling in the balance’; everything depended on the army. Now the Republic had ‘a properly constituted government, the de jure government of Ireland’, the task was ‘to convert the de jure republican government into a de facto government’.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 11