The ‘military side’ was to be co-ordinated with the civil, but what military action was to be taken? During the final spasm of the conscription menace, the language was becoming more openly belligerent. In mid-September 1918, An tOglaċ counselled its readers, ‘don’t argue, but shoot!’ If conscription was imposed, martial law would ‘be imposed on both sides’. It would be in effect a state of war: ‘the military authorities of the Irish Republic will become the persons to whom all Irish Republicans, whether combatants or not, must look for light and leading.’ So every Volunteer officer must ‘contemplate the possibility of finding himself called upon to act as the chief military authority in his district, to undertake the administration of all public affairs during a time of crisis’. Under this military rule, ‘ordinary civilian pursuits and conventional political methods will be practically suspended, and schemes of “passive resistance” based on the theory of normal conditions, must prove unworkable.’ Everyone of military age (not only men, it appears) who accepted the ‘republican ideal’ would be required ‘to enlist in the Army of Ireland, in a fight of self-defence’.232
A month later, An tOglaċ published one of its most resonant articles, ‘Ruthless Warfare’, warning that the coming struggle would be ‘more and worse than war’. War, as it pointed out, was ‘the combat of one armed force against another’, but a conscription campaign would be ‘an onslaught by an army on a civilian population’. It would be an ‘atrocity’, and if ‘England’ decided on it, ‘then we must decide that in our resistance we shall acknowledge no limit and no scruple.’ Whether this deliberately shocking essay was intended primarily to warn the British government or to prepare the minds of the Volunteers themselves it is impossible to say. But it launched a series of radical statements. After the Declaration of Independence, An tOglaċ explained that it was ‘the will of Ireland’ that ‘the state of war between this country and England shall be perpetuated until the foreign garrison have evacuated our country.’ The responsible government that thus expressed the people’s will ‘sanctions the employment by the Irish Volunteers of the most drastic measures against the enemies of Ireland’.233 By this point the full battery of warlike language had been deployed.
Still, these were declarations of intent rather than a specific programme of action. That would take time to put together. The formula developed by An tOglaċ was to combine rousing exhortatory editorials (written by Béaslaí) with technical columns (‘Notes from H.Q.’, mainly by J. J. O’Connell) that could be used by local units for training and planning, and these offered clues to the kind of military action envisaged by GHQ. So the very first number, which spelt out the mission of the ‘Army of the Irish Republic’, also carried a feature pointing out that ‘for the first time in the establishment of an Irish Volunteer Army, a serious and systematic effort is being made to incorporate an Engineering arm.’ The implication was in part that reliable mines and ‘bombs’ (as hand grenades were often called) would make more ambitious operations possible. But as later ‘Engineering Notes’ would make clear, sabotage should also play a part in hampering British action. Envisaging large-scale railway demolition, An tOglaċ advised that the ‘ideal point to damage’ was a single-track section either on a short, sharp curve or on a bridge, as far as possible from any highway. In the same issue as ‘Ruthless Warfare’, GHQ offered notes on ‘Hedge-fighting for Small Units’, as it did at several points over the following months. Among the defensive devices suggested was one used by the Turks in Mesopotamia – trous de loup, pits filled with sharpened stakes, simple and deadly, but also slightly barbaric. These, sensibly perhaps, seem to have stayed on paper.
GHQ may have declared war on paper, but in terms of encouraging actual violence it was cautious. Mulcahy told Michael Brennan, even late in 1919, that ‘the people had to be educated and led gently into open war.’ Seamus Robinson had an interesting take on this. Arguing that ‘nothing would be done by a large body of Volunteers until a lead was given by a few,’ he suggested that ‘GHQ would not give permission before the whole country was ready.’ By that time, though, ‘commonsense dictated that … they would probably all be in jail.’ Robinson claimed to have developed by 1918 a clear vision of the kind of military campaign that should be fought. ‘It became abundantly clear to me that we could hope to survive and win only if we were a ghostly army of sharpshooters operating all over the country combining to deal with small bodies of the enemy and making Ireland too costly to hold; always choosing our own ground, and our own targets.’ The sophistication of this admirably concise formula may have owed something to later writing on guerrilla warfare, but Robinson had a simpler and more urgent justification for taking immediate small-scale action rather than waiting until the country was ‘ready’. ‘It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep proud young men merely drilling and getting jailed or interned for it.’ To this he added a telling political point. While protesting that ‘we all heartily desired the formation of a Republican government,’ he worried that ‘once formed, being our moral superiors, a state of stalemate would be inevitable unless war was begun before the Dáil could take over responsibility.’ What this slightly odd phraseology seems to mean is that the republican government would be bound for political reasons to prohibit or delay violent action, unless responsibility had already been taken out of its hands.
From this perspective, the coincidence between the first meeting of the Dáil and the action of Robinson’s Tipperary Volunteers at Soloheadbeg in South Tipperary takes on a different aspect. Robinson found himself in a race against time to strike a demonstrative blow before the Dáil met. Shortly after Christmas 1918 he and Seán Treacy worked out the project. ‘After tea the two of us went out to the haggard [hay shed] where he told me of the gelignite that was due to arrive at Soloheadbeg quarry in two or three weeks.’ Treacy wanted to know if they should try to seize it. There was ‘the possibility of shooting’. Robinson said ‘Go ahead,’ and when Treacy asked him, ‘Will you get permission from GHQ?’, Robinson just gave him a quizzical look ‘to see if he were serious’. When Treacy asked, ‘Who will take responsibility?’, Robinson said, ‘I will.’234
The Soloheadbeg ambush was a small-scale action even in guerrilla terms. Eight men, with a single rifle (a Wild West-style Winchester repeater) and a miscellaneous collection of pistols, waited behind ‘the white-thorn bushes that lined the ditch of Cranitch’s field’ for the cart carrying the explosives, guarded by RIC men.235 The instructions were that, if there were two police, they should challenge them; if six, open fire without warning. Just organizing an action by inexperienced men was a challenge. (Robinson recalled Dan Breen, the brigade quartermaster, ‘declaring with grinding teeth in a very high-pitched excited voice that he’d go out and face them’; ‘I made a mental note that that man should never be put in charge of a fight.’) But just as worrying for Robinson was the issue of timing. Being ‘most anxious not to compromise the Dáil’, he ‘thought long, deeply and anxiously and I almost panicked when I saw the date of the Dáil meeting drawing near and no sign of the gelignite coming’. Would he have abandoned the plan if the gelignite had arrived after 21 January? It seems unlikely, but in the event it turned up just in time. The escort consisted of only two constables; they were both killed.
Soloheadbeg was an elementary, even primitive operation – just a matter of lying in wait and hitting a weak, isolated target. What distinguished it from the bushwhackings of the agrarian struggle was its strategic purpose: the seizure of explosives indicated the vision, however weakly focused as yet, of a new mode of combat. Later targets would become stronger, and compel the ambushers to develop much more sophisticated techniques if they were to have any chance of success. In a sense, the whole dynamic of the war of independence would lie in this reciprocal process. The reaction of the police and later the army – the Crown forces – would confirm the credibility of the republican challenge. As Michael Collins saw with his trademark clarity in the early summer of 1919, ‘as they pass on s
o to speak from the police patrol to the military lorry, they positively put more and more weapons in our hands.’
These words were written five days after the dramatic rescue of Seán Hogan at Knocklong railway station. If the direction of the republican campaign was uncertain after Soloheadbeg, its momentum was restored by this operation, and confirmed by its aftermath. Plenty of doubts had indeed been voiced in the weeks after 21 January – the killing of policemen provoked criticism not just from unionists and moderate nationalists, but also from many Sinn Feiners. British reactions did not go down well: South Tipperary was made a Special Military Area, with burdensome restrictions on travel, and on commercial activities like fairs and markets. Many ordinary people bridled at this. The Tipperary men were determined to keep the campaign going, but seemed uncertain how to go about it. Robinson tried to respond to the military control measures by issuing a proclamation announcing that any policeman in the county after February 1919 would have forfeited his life, but GHQ refused to agree. (At that stage he ‘lost confidence in GHQ’s vaunted “ruthless warfare” ’, and came to regard its caution as ‘the better part of cowardice’.)236 The eventual decisive operation was simply a reaction to the arrest of Seán Hogan, but the speed of its planning, and the ferocity of its execution, catapulted it into the realm of resistance myth and ballad.
J. J. (John Joseph, known to republican publicity as Seán) Hogan, a playboy who relished the glamour of the rebel gunman, was arrested after spending an evening at a local dance and going off with a girl – evading his Volunteer minder, Mick Davern, assigned to escort him precisely because his dashing habits were well known to his chief. When Seán Treacy was told, he was angrier than Davern had ever seen him, but decided immediately to rescue Hogan. Treacy and Robinson intended the rescue operation to be a sensational public statement of Volunteer determination. Planning it was not easy; even Treacy found it hard to get information about when Hogan would be taken from Thurles, where he was being held, and where to – Cork or Dublin. His men loafed about Thurles station looking for any sign of his movement. Then, on 13 May, Hogan was put on a train to Cork. At Knocklong halt the train was rushed by a hastily assembled group of Volunteers, and in a fierce gunfight two of the police escort were killed. Hogan was rescued. The aftermath was almost more significant. Dan Breen, who was wounded in the fight, remembered the attackers being ‘vehemently denounced as cold-blooded assassins’, and certainly clerical condemnation was unambiguous. The coroner’s inquest on the dead policemen, however, created a different impression. While expressing sympathy with the men’s relatives, the jury called on the government to ‘cease arresting respectable persons, thereby causing bitter exasperation among the people’.237
The Tipperary leaders made themselves scarce, heading to Cork and then on to Dublin, where they had a telling encounter with Collins, ‘waiting for us on the street with his note book out’. This was their ‘first indication … that if we … were not exactly personna non-grata [sic], at best we were decidedly not warmly welcome in any HQ office’. Collins told them that everything was ‘fixed up’ and they should be ready to leave in a day or two. The assumption was that they would get away to America. Robinson refused, protesting that ‘running away’ would look like a confession that the killings had been murder. When Collins asked what they proposed to do, Robinson said, ‘Fight it out of course.’ At that point, Collins ‘suddenly closed his notebook with a snap’ and strode off with a faint smile saying, ‘That’s all right with me.’
For Robinson’s group, the war had really begun. But their decision to stay in Dublin rather than going back to Tipperary – which certainly puzzled many there – meant that the local war was still on hold. In the summer of 1919, according to the Cork Brigade adjutant Florrie O’Donoghue, ‘the absence of a military policy comprehensible to the average Volunteer’ combined with shortages of arms and ‘the distraction of political activity’ to plunge the movement into crisis. O’Donoghue’s commander Liam Lynch was depressed by the ‘reluctance on the part of GHQ’ to take responsibility for military actions. He thought that arms could never be bought or imported in sufficient quantities, and that only by attacking British military and police forces could a campaign be got going. To O’Donoghue, that campaign started from the pressure put on GHQ, mainly by the southern brigades, to approve such attacks.238
Within the national leadership there was resistance to pushing the campaign forward. Considerable caution was shown by both GHQ and the Volunteer Executive – often assumed to be effectively identical bodies, though the overlap was only partial. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the politicians seem to have been still more cautious. An interesting case in point was the springing of de Valera from Lincoln gaol on 3 February. In conception this operation looks like a classic Collins project, and it seems to have been fully supported by his colleagues. Skilfully planned and executed, it brought into play the special abilities of men who were becoming key – if self-effacing – members of the staff, like Fintan Murphy. Formerly a small businessman, now a full-time (though unpaid) member of the Executive, Murphy was a 1916 veteran whom the British had tried to prosecute for avoiding military service, on the grounds that he lived in England. (He had been successfully defended by George Gavan Duffy.) Now he was literally a ‘key man’, as he carried one of the four cakes with the gaol keys used in the escape, as well as acquiring a rope ladder and bringing it from London to Collins and Boland in Manchester. Just as importantly, he ran the operation control centre in Worksop, linking a chain of safe houses.
On the night of 3 February Collins and Boland cut through the perimeter wire, while de Valera with Seán Milroy and Seán McGarry let themselves out with the duplicate keys. The operation was not flawless, but the prison staff seem to have been fairly lax – or so the disapproving de Valera thought – and the escapees and organizers got away unscathed. The escape was a brilliant success, but its aftermath was less impressive. Collins wanted to arrange a ‘state entrance’ into Dublin for de Valera, crossing the Grand Canal at Mount Street Bridge (where an outpost of de Valera’s 3rd Battalion had staged an epic defence during Easter Week). The police picked up a Sinn Féin Executive announcement – signed by Harry Boland – that ‘the Lord Mayor … will receive him at the gates of the city, and will escort him to the Mansion House … it is expected that the homecoming … will be an occasion of National rejoicing.’ Recognizing the tremendous symbolic force of this project, the British authorities moved swiftly to ban this ‘first act of acute defiance of His Majesty’s Government in Ireland’.239 The Chief Secretary berated the Lord Mayor for his intention ‘to receive, as His Majesty alone should be received … a man who claims unlawfully to be the President of an Irish Republic’.240 For Collins this was a moment when it was vital not to be intimidated, but the Sinn Féin Executive turned down his plan. De Valera and Brugha took the lead in this, with vocal support from Darrell Figgis, who had retreated from politics into journalism. De Valera publicly explained that ‘the present occasion is scarcely one on which we would be justified in risking the lives of citizens.’ (‘We who have waited know how to wait.’) Collins sharply disagreed. ‘We are having our “Clontarf Friday”,’ he fumed; ‘it may not be as bad [as Daniel O’Connell’s disastrous abandonment of his Monster Meeting at Clontarf in 1843 under a similar threat] but it is bad and very bad.’ (Joe O’Connor made the same point to Arthur Griffith, who ‘needless to say … did not agree’, asserting that while O’Connell had actually been afraid of defying the government, ‘fortunately we could not accuse De Valera of being afraid.’)241
‘THIS INVISIBLE STATE’
Sinn Féin had had plenty of time to prepare its plans for civil resistance. Fifteen years had passed since Arthur Griffith had completed the laying out of his ‘Hungarian policy’, and a decade since Bulmer Hobson’s Defensive Warfare (a booklet that should have had the same effect on its generation as Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare would have on the revolutionaries of the 1960s) had shown how t
he ideal of ‘self-reliance’ could shape strategies for building a counter-state. Indeed, when Sinn Féin was founded in December 1905, Griffith and like-minded people had already been exploring and debating ideas about a new Irish society for half a lifetime. At least some of the many hours occupied by the weekly meetings of Sinn Féin clubs must have been spent in discussing such issues. There was a general sense of what had to be done. The passive-resistance policy had to work both negatively and positively. It would involve refusing to co-operate with the authorities, and also trying to replace them. Undermining the already fragile legitimacy of the UK regime might not be too difficult, but it was crucial to construct an alternative focus of legitimate government. Nobody put this more clearly than Diarmuid O’Hegarty – not a minister in the new Dáil government but its secretary, the head of the embryonic alternative civil service (as well as Director of Communications at Volunteer GHQ). ‘Actual constructive work will leave a bigger mark on people than political work. It makes them think more, and besides it invests the Government with tangibility.’242 This would prove crucial.
On 10 April 1919 – nearly two years after it had begun – the boycott of the RIC, ‘England’s Janissaries’ as de Valera described them, was officially confirmed by the Dáil. The form of words drafted by O’Hegarty pronounced them ‘guilty of treason to their country’, and ‘unworthy to enjoy any of the privileges or comforts which arise from cordial relations with the public’. Constance Markievicz achieved one of her many periods of imprisonment for publicly urging the ostracism of the police. (At her trial, a police sergeant told the court that he had heard her instructing people to treat them like ‘leepers’; it took her a while to work out what he meant.) There were wilder allegations that she had preached ‘a general pogrom of the police’, though she insisted that the aim of the boycott was only to ‘render them harmless, and prevent them getting information, and also make them ashamed of themselves’.243 But when local Volunteers set about enforcing the policy, the tone certainly changed. South Tipperary’s proclamation threatening the RIC with death might have been forbidden, but in their mouths the declaration that the police should be ‘treated as traitors deserve’ was far more menacing than the Dáil’s formulation. When Frank Thornton addressed the assembled battalions of the Longford Brigade later that year he told them that the RIC had ‘taken arms against the IRA by orders of England’, and that the IRA were to ‘meet this force with a vengeance, we were to give no quarter whatsoever until we wiped them out’.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 12