The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Wilson somehow got the impression that Macready himself wanted to ‘draft these mobs over to Ireland at once & split them up into lots of 25 to 50 men over the country so there would be no hope of forming & disciplining this crowd of unknown men’. (‘It is truly a desperate & hopeless expedient,’ he fumed, which was ‘bound to fail’.)65 In fact he was quite wrong about Macready, who took exactly the same view as he did. Macready chaired a War Office committee that met at the same time Wilson was raging, and pointed out that police discipline would be ‘too weak in the circumstances now prevailing in Ireland’ to control the kind of men they were expecting to recruit, who would ‘need the strictest discipline’. It proposed to create eight ‘garrison battalions’, which could be deployed only within the UK, but which would be under full military discipline. Though the Cabinet was uneasy about this proposal on political grounds – ‘it would be represented as the beginning of a reconquest of Ireland’ – it was never definitively turned down, but it disappeared into a kind of administrative limbo. A month later, Tudor was able to head it off with the argument that ‘the formation of ex-soldier battalions would probably militate against recruiting for the RIC.’66 His contention that it was far better to ‘very largely increase the RIC’ chimed with Churchill’s ideas, and he was eventually able to set up a force according to his own recipe. This would become ADRIC, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC.

  Tudor’s appointment was as ‘police adviser’ (presumably to the Irish Executive, though this was never exactly clear). Eventually – when the last Inspector General was finally retired – the inspector generalship was placed in commission and he adopted the title ‘chief of police’, whose unEnglish ring said much about Tudor’s assumptions and policy. The government clearly wanted to rein back French’s power, but in Tudor it provided a full-blooded enthusiast for French’s long-held belief that the police must be stiffened for the fight against ‘Sinn Féin’.

  ‘YOUR COUNTRY SUFFERS FROM CANCER’

  British policy contained a fatal contradiction. It was committed to Irish self-government, but it required that the Irish people follow British rules of constitutional behaviour. It rested on the assumption that the great majority of Irish people remained law-abiding moderates, who would accept a Home Rule settlement that fell far short of independence. Militant opposition was dismissed as extremist – the Volunteers were always described as fanatics, gunmen or thugs. Even those who took the ‘Volunteer Army’ more seriously assumed (like the GOC in March) that the arrest of its leaders would cripple it. Yet little was done to encourage moderate nationalists. Thus the new Home Rule measure, intended to set up two separate Irish parliaments in Dublin and Belfast, was not launched until February 1920, and then pushed slowly through parliament as the year wore on. Key provisions such as the size of the area to be governed by the Northern Parliament had not been decided until the last moment. There was no sense of urgency, because the government held that a ‘return to constitutionalism’ was a vital precondition for the concession of Home Rule, even in the restricted, partitionist form of the 1920 Government of Ireland Bill.

  Britain’s fourth attempt at a Home Rule measure was a sad admission of its inability either to find a way through the impasse created by unionist resistance or to give definite shape to the proposed devolution. The fact of partition, giving the six north-eastern counties equal status with the other twenty-six, was a heavier blow to nationalist expectations than anything considered possible before 1916. But the powers to be conceded to the Irish parliaments were also disappointing. Early drafts of the bill restricted them so sharply that even the Cabinet recognized that the new parliaments would be little more than glorified local councils. The ‘reserved services’, to remain under Westminster control, included not just defence and foreign policy, judiciary and income tax, but also postal services, transport, agriculture and health. There was a striking novelty in the new bill, the provision for a Council of Ireland, a device seemingly designed to encourage the two parliaments to unite. If they co-operated to form such a joint Council, it would be given enlarged powers – notably over the judiciary, post and income tax. But not many people took this prospect very seriously, and with some reason. Ministers had grumbled that conceding such powers would give Ireland something akin to Dominion status – and that ‘had never been contemplated’.67 Yet Dominion status (the favoured model was Canada) was by now, almost certainly, the minimum concession that constitutional nationalists could hope to sell to their voters. In effect, Britain was proposing a measure of conciliation which could be imposed only by coercion.

  The authorities in Ireland may have dimly grasped that the task of crushing extremism without antagonizing the moderates on whom the viability of the Home Rule policy rested might be difficult, if not indeed impossible. Certainly Warren Fisher recognized how faulty the measures of the previous year had been. He deplored the blanket ban on Sinn Féin and Dáil Éireann, and the failure to distinguish between Sinn Féin and the violent activists – ‘as if retired warriors and dowager ladies who denounce socialism in England were to secure the banning of the Labour Party’. Sinn Féin was a political party ‘however much people may dislike it’; if parties were required to have programmes containing ‘nothing anathema to people of different political complexions, then I can’t imagine any party which ever could be recognised’. Military and police methods were just as faulty as political policy – no better than ‘blind hitting out’. Fisher thought only Macready himself was opposed to the use of indiscriminate violence.68

  This fierce critique delivered by the state’s top official was more or less ignored. Hamar Greenwood as chief secretary proved energetic but less politically alert than the new military commander. As a Canadian – like the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook only without the ability – he supplied a useful transatlantic gloss to the government, but beyond that he offered little. His style did not work with the senior civil servants at the Castle, notably Anderson himself, who was all too conscious of his own intellectual superiority. They quietly hoped that his more intelligent (and socially acceptable) wife would influence him. He was described by one of the officials who came over with Anderson as a man of ‘one idea at a time’. Some have thought this meant that he was ‘incapable of handling more than one idea at a time’, though in fact it was a New Liberal nostrum which called for policy to be tightly focused.69 (Irish Home Rule had once been the Liberals’ ‘one idea’.) Greenwood did strike some as a crude thinker, but Anderson’s assistant, the perceptive Mark Sturgis, who at first thought him a ‘play actor’, came to see him as ‘much more than that’, even if he lacked the ‘instinctive’ grasp of things that his wife had. Greenwood was well aware of the need, in principle, to hold some balance between coercion and conciliation, but in practice he concentrated on the restoration of order. His monument in Ireland would be a law bearing that title.

  It was certainly an odd situation where the head of the civil government was a greater believer in the effectiveness of force than the head of the army. Macready was not just against ‘indiscriminate violence’, he was deeply pessimistic about the viability of any repressive policy. Much as he might try to humour the hawkish Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff – and an aggressively unionist Ulsterman – their views were basically opposed. ‘In one sense you are right in saying we must go deeper down, and hit harder, before we get to the root of the matter,’ Macready wrote in May 1920. ‘But I feel very strongly that your country suffers from cancer, and though you may operate severely upon it, it grows again in worse form later.’ For him, the only possible ‘cure’ was political; ‘drastic measures would leave a fresh wound on the already scarred body of this blooming island of yours.’ Characteristically, though, he added a hesitant gloss: ‘whether it is your business or mine to look ahead, or only to do our blind duty, I am not quite sure.’70

  Macready’s first experience in Dublin was a serious crisis. The hunger strike of republican prisoners in Mountjoy gaol launch
ed on 5 April created an electric public atmosphere. The strike, led by Peadar Clancy, vice-commandant of the Dublin Brigade, demanded that DORA internees should be treated as prisoners of war – an issue skilfully chosen by the propaganda chief Frank Gallagher. They called for ‘proper’ food, separation from ‘criminals’, no compulsory work, access to books, a weekly bath and the right to smoke as well as to have five hours’ exercise in the open air each day. The term ‘political prisoner’ was to be applied to all those convicted of unlawful assembly, possession of arms, drilling and making seditious speeches.71 The strikers turned down an offer of ‘ameliorative’ treatment, and by 9 April ninety men were on hunger strike. Two days later Mountjoy’s medical officer warned the Castle that fatalities were imminent. The pressure was intense; and the potential impact of any deaths was certainly not underestimated. Sir Edward Troup, the top Home Office official, had reacted to a threatened hunger strike in Wormwood Scrubs prison by warning the Home Secretary that if any prisoner died ‘his death will be made an excuse for the attempted murder of Ministers in this country.’ (In spite of this, the government had stood firm against concessions there.) On 13 April the Irish party MP T. P. O’Connor brusquely told the House of Commons that Thomas Ashe’s death on hunger strike was ‘the reason we have seven representatives here today instead of 77’. The Cabinet lectured the authorities in Dublin that ‘if these men die one by one, there will be an outcry in this country which will become exceedingly dangerous.’ Its predictable conclusion was that ‘if we were then forced to make any change the effect … would be much worse than if a change were made now.’

  Thousands (on 12 April the army estimated 5,000, the police 10,000) of keening women surrounded the prison; scuffles with the troops on guard outside became menacing. ‘The futility of committing troops to hold back such a crowd … was soon obvious.’ Improvised barricades ‘were soon trodden down by the leading ranks of the crowd being pressed forward from behind; even tanks were no obstacle.’ The army turned to the desperate expedient of having aircraft buzz the crowds on the 13th – despite a 50 mph gale – one ‘flew along a broad street below the eaves of the houses’. Even the use of Lewis machine-gun fire from the air seems to have been considered.72 That day Dublin was paralysed by a one-day labour strike. French, who had dismissed the demand for prisoner-of-war status as absolutely unacceptable, was driven by the Cabinet’s logic to concede it, only to be confronted with the demand for the release of all the hunger strikers. Next day, sixty-six men were certified as being in ‘immediate danger’, and, though later experience would suggest that this was unlikely, French and Macready – knowing that the government was rattled – decided to release them on parole. The official who wrote the release order failed to note that half the parolees, as sentenced men rather than internees, were ‘in no case entitled to be released on parole’, as Bonar Law helplessly explained to parliament.73 The error delivered a dramatic republican triumph and a correspondingly staggering blow to the morale of the forces of order. The military programme of searches and arrests since January, whose impact had been steadily growing, was thrown into reverse. Military and police ‘secret service’ agents were ‘virtually driven off the streets, owing to those whom they had arrested now being free, and in many cases able to identify’ them. Imminent republican defeat ‘was turned into unqualified victory’.74 Its impact on the behaviour of the police would be far-reaching.

  ‘THROTTLING THE RAILWAY SYSTEM’

  Republican resistance was supported, at one remove at least, by industrial action. Meeting on 20 May, a group of Dublin quayside workers declared that they would not handle ‘certain war material’ being brought into Ireland. Shortly afterwards the dockers at Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) refused to unload a freighter, the Polberg. The cargo had to be taken off by troops – and was then left at the docks when the railwaymen there refused to take it on. (It eventually turned out not to be munitions, but tins of bully beef.) This action was not, officially at least, initiated by the Irish labour leadership, which carefully avoided direct engagement in the republican campaign. Though Tom Johnson had played a leading part in the anti-conscription movement, and produced the original draft of the Dáil’s Democratic Programme, the ILP/TUC and its affiliated unions did not recognize the Dáil government. To be able to go on negotiating for their members, they could not risk British retaliation. Nora Connolly, who took a dim view of Johnson’s and William O’Brien’s (and even Cathal O’Shannon’s) neutralism, snorted that ‘building up the bureaucracy of the ITGWU … seemed to be all that mattered’ to them.75

  The transport workers’ action revealed the limits of organized labour’s revolutionary ideas. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) certainly supported them, instructing all its members to back the embargo. But the railwaymen’s own union, the London-based National Union of Railwaymen, took a different line. When the railwaymen appealed to the NUR for support, citing the embargo imposed on munitions exports to Poland by British workers as part of the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign, the NUR Executive – ‘up against a very difficult test case of the use of the strike for political purposes’, as one journal put it – urged them to go back to work while it negotiated with the government. No strike funds were released. By early June, railwaymen at the North Wall alone had lost over £5,000 in wages, while barely £100 had come into the Munitions of War Fund launched by the ILP/TUC. (One local magistrate noted with exasperation that month, however, that even ‘Government Officials have given large sums to the Munitions Strike Fund.’)

  Although railwaymen offered to work normally on all trains not carrying armed troops, police or munitions – so technically were not on strike – the railway companies responded by dismissing all those who had taken part in the embargo: over a thousand were out of work by August. The result was a large number of immobilized trains, as the action spread across Ireland (apart from Belfast) in June. Troops and police were ordered to stay on trains until they were moved, even though Irish Command was unhappy at being forced ‘to have recourse to such undignified methods’, on the principle that if they could not move, nor could anyone else. Unfortunately, as Anderson reported on 26 July, there were simply not enough of them to ‘bring things to a standstill’, and ‘at the present rate, we shall be broken sooner than the railway companies.’76 Next month the Cabinet was told that, although some 1,000 railwaymen had been dismissed, dismissals were now ‘being conducted in a half-hearted manner, and there was no doubt that the officials and men were being subjected to intimidation’. The idea of closing lines down one by one was mooted, but found to be too expensive since the government would still have to ‘make up the [companies’] receipts under guarantee’.77 Instead it racked up the pressure on the companies by threatening to withdraw their subsidies, for failing in their obligations as ‘common carriers’.78

  It seemed obvious to republicans as well as unionists that the transport workers had, as the Irish Times fumed, ‘declared [their] alliance with those endeavouring to institute an Irish Republic’. The Dáil contributed £5,000 to the Munitions of War Fund, and Sinn Féin instructed all its branches to organize collections, which helped to boost the fund eventually to some £120,000. Funds were also raised locally to support dismissed railwaymen – as at Carrick-on-Suir where a committee collected around £2,000.79 The Volunteers, who clearly saw the military as well as the propaganda value of the embargo, weighed in with direct action. In some places they provided alternative transport for civilian passengers stuck on immobilized trains. A sharp-eyed foreign observer of the situation saw this happen at Dundrum, where he shared the platform with ‘three RIC with a sergeant, forty infantrymen in full war equipment under an officer’, waiting for a train. When the train arrived, ‘the four policemen get into a compartment – the guard gets out of the van.’ While a bystander took the guard to the bar for a drink, ‘a young man with nothing about him to indicate his importance, save the instant obedience which he commands – he is the commandant of t
he local volunteers – exerts himself to make order out of chaos, regulates the despatch of the passengers, women first, to the nearby town of Tipperary. Side cars and motors have been procured, and each individual goes off in his turn, as he is told …’ His counterpart took no interest in all this: ‘All the time, in the background, beside the fixed bayonets, the British officer stands against the wall, inactive, ignored, inexistant and seemingly bored.’80

  The army was keen to strike back at this republican mobility by imposing a counter-embargo on motor fuel, but the Cabinet would not agree. ‘Although … the IRA were commandeering cars and lorries freely for moving about the country, we were unable to stop them from getting petrol.’ The Volunteers went beyond the provision of relief transport. Their encouragement often took the negative form of intimidation, ‘pour encourager les autres’. Although the notice allegedly sent to railwaymen in the name of the ‘Government of the Irish Republic’, forbidding them to ‘assist in any way, the transport of armed forces of the English Government’, was possibly a forgery – it was signed ‘Ministry of War’, a British rather than republican title – there is no doubt that a policy of this kind was implemented.81 The Chairman of the Great Northern Railway reported that ‘generally speaking, the staff know that it is safer to refuse to work government traffic than to do their duty.’ The IV Cavan Brigade (whose area did not contain any major rail lines) reported that ‘on three occasions’ drivers who had replaced dismissed men ‘were arrested and tried by courtmartial’, and usually given ‘a fine of £10 with the necessary undertaking not to drive the British Forces again’. The third man so arrested, an engine driver named McGuigan, who ‘refused to pay the fine imposed and give the necessary undertaking’, was ‘held in custody for some days’.82 Likewise in Cork, in the ‘few instances where some weaklings refused to obey the call of the “Munition Strike” … they were severely dealt with’. Blacklegs were arrested and released only when they signed a declaration that they would not reoffend.83 Some drivers who – whether for political reasons or simply to save their jobs – drove troop trains were tarred and feathered.