The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  in the main street, in front of the Moy Hotel, a number of the most respectable citizens and men who were whole-heartedly Sinn Feiners … and after handcuffing them … tied the Tricolour to the last prisoner, trailing it in the mud of the streets and with an itinerant musician marching in front, took them to the Market Cross where the prisoners were beaten and kicked to their knees in an effort to make them kiss a Union Jack placed on the roadway.140

  Their frequent bursts of drunkenness were in one sense an even more shocking lapse from the standards of the old police than brutality, but it was sustained violence that inevitably generated most resentment and hostility. Beatings were regularly vicious, and mock executions seem to have been alarmingly frequent. Even less serious assaults were conducted as deliberate humiliation, and as one man who had been whipped told Hugh Martin of the Daily News, ‘the indignity was worse than the pain.’141 But there were moments of truly gruesome violence. The Loughnane brothers, arrested on their Galway farm in November 1920, were taken away by Auxiliaries, and found ten days later in a pond – one of them ‘a mass of unsightly scars and gashes; two of his fingers were lopped off; his right arm was broken at the shoulder, being almost completely severed from the body … nothing remained [of his face] save the chin and lips’. Harry Loughnane’s suffering had a dramatic sequel: his shattered and long-dead corpse was seen to bleed when it was pulled from the water, and ‘hundreds dipped their handkerchiefs in the martyrs’ blood.’ At the brothers’ funeral, the Volunteers fired three volleys over their grave.142

  Women were targeted less often, though dozens of members of republican families or of Cumann na mBan had their hair cut off with scissors or razors – in mirror images of Volunteer assaults on women who were seen with policemen or soldiers.143 Many more were verbally abused and intimidated, usually deliberately, though of course any night raid was inescapably alarming to the women who experienced it. Kathleen Clarke, a highly prejudiced witness, nonetheless has the ring of truth in her account of a raid in which a ‘Black and Tan’ (Auxiliary) ‘armed with a rifle … put the muzzle resting on my chest. He was so drunk it seemed as if he was keeping himself standing by holding on to the rifle resting on my chest … he kept on saying “I’ll teach you”.’

  There must also have been some sexual violence, though it was much less well attested. There were undoubtedly cases of rape, probably more than the few that were formally reported – which may indeed be ‘surprisingly few’, certainly by the depressing standards of the contemporary world.144 As one witness told the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland, ‘we were so accustomed to hearing of sex excesses in Belgium’ that the ‘marked contrast’ in Ireland was striking. Ellen Wilkinson (representing the Women’s International League) told the commissioners that she had ‘found no case at all where sexual outrages on women have occurred’. International comparisons will not have meant much to Irish people, naturally, and even a few cases will have spread fear and alarm. The truth remains obscure: as the Cork Gaelic Leaguer Caroline Townshend said, ‘it is very difficult to get facts about such cases.’ In November 1920 Lady Gregory heard from her doctor in Galway that ‘the family of the girls violated by the Black and Tans wish it to be hushed up,’ and ‘another case of the same sort in Clare’ was also ‘to be kept quiet’.145

  Police brutality converted countless moderate nationalists into separatists. The journals of Lady Gregory vividly demonstrate not just the construction of a popular myth, but also how ‘establishment’ people came to use the word ‘terror’ to describe government policy rather than republican activity. Throughout the autumn and winter she recorded seemingly endless instances of Black and Tans dragging young men out and whipping them, forcing men to salute the Union flag, stealing money and livestock, staging mock executions, getting drunk and loosing off their guns. ‘Such a thing could hardly happen in savage lands out in Turkey,’ as one friend said of the Loughnane killings. By December 1920 Yeats’s sister Lily would write, ‘As you know I was no Sinn Feiner a year ago, just a mild nationalist, but now –’146 For her brother, the autumn of 1920, and in particular the murder of Ellen Quinn, seemed to herald a new barbarism. When ‘a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; / The night can sweat with terror’ – as if we had never ‘pieced our thoughts into philosophy’.

  ‘THE FIRST DIRECT ATTACK MADE UPON THE IRISH REPUBLIC’

  For a long time, even before Eoin MacNeill published his famous article ‘The North Began’ in 1913, it had been difficult to fit that ‘North’ into the trajectory of the Irish revolution. MacNeill had to resort to some counter-intuitive, even sophistical arguments to attempt to contend that, by arming themselves to resist Home Rule, the unionists had ‘knocked the bottom out of Unionism’ and become, in effect, home rulers. Though the north was claimed – especially by northern nationalists like MacNeill – as an integral part of the Irish nation, the majority of its inhabitants saw things differently. The differences between Protestants and Catholics were more than simply political: in their social complexity they amounted to two distinct cultural systems.147 Nationalists resolutely ignored this awkward fact, and Sinn Féin had not put together any coherent northern policy, beyond an insistence that unionists had no right to secede from the ‘Irish nation’. De Valera’s threatening attitude was typical. In 1918 he had likened the Ulster case for self-determination to a ‘robber coming into another man’s house and claiming a room as his’. The alienation in this view was more than implicit. Unionists ‘represented only English interests, and as they were in the minority they had nothing to do but give way to the majority’. This was public rhetoric, intended to provoke nationalist cheers, but as critics like the parliamentary party leader John Dillon repeatedly warned, all the more dangerous for that. Its only effect was to solidify Ulster hostility to republicanism.148

  Sinn Féin quietly accepted the distinctness of ‘Ulster’, the only province in which it failed to bring down the old Irish party in the 1918 election. Though it had struggled in one or two party strongholds in the south (notably Waterford), the task in the north was doubly difficult. The strength of the unionist opposition forced it into an electoral pact under which the eight marginal seats were divided equally between Sinn Féin and the Irish party. (Some local republicans, admittedly, saw this as a panic measure that lost some seats that could well have been won.) Occupying the front line in Ireland’s most vicious battles over two generations had produced a resilient nationalist organization, backed by notoriously tough – and sectarian – street-level enforcers in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Ulster leader Joe Devlin’s public denunciation of Sinn Féin was blistering – their ‘phantom republic’ was a fraud, the abstention policy ‘a false pretence’. Sinn Féin would ‘go down in the ridicule of the nation’. He mocked the Sinn Féin tricolour’s contamination of the old green flag – in which there was ‘no white streak – no, nor yellow streak either’. In East Belfast he trounced de Valera by 8,488 votes to 3,245. This triumph helped to disguise the narrowness of the old party’s majority in other non-pact constituencies – Sinn Féin lost by only 500 in the Hibernian stronghold of South Derry – but it was striking enough.149

  The Dáil had no Belfast deputies, and only a handful of leading Sinn Feiners (Eoin MacNeill, Ernest Blythe and Seán MacEntee) came from the north. There were some signs in 1919 that the seriousness of this problem was recognized. A pushy Ulster Protestant, adoptive Canadian and Sinn Féin convert, William Forbes Patterson, was asked by Sinn Féin in June to investigate the northern situation. His verdict on republicanism there was bleak: it was effectively stillborn. But he believed that unionism was vulnerable to the (slowly) growing labour movement, and Sinn Féin could do worse than support labour. There were signs of cross-communal industrial action – notably the general strike in Belfast early in 1919 – although, as he saw, the British Labour party was unlikely to escape from its ‘English outlook’. The prospects for milit
ary confrontation were grim, Forbes Patterson thought. If faced with a ‘pogrom’, republicans could not cope.150

  Tensions mounted after the January 1920 municipal elections brought the city of London/Derry back under Catholic/nationalist control for the first time since 1690. This was a shocking moment for unionists, psychologically, and very dangerous in political terms, since it undermined their claim to exclusion from Home Rule. The new Mayor, Hugh O’Doherty, removed Lord French’s name from the list of Derry city’s freemen, and refused to attend any functions involving a declaration of loyalty to the Crown. In April clashes between youths and soldiers sparked ‘wild’ rioting in the city, and the Catholic clergy intervened to patrol the streets and enrol citizen volunteers to keep the peace.151 In mid-June the violence became more serious, and nineteen people (fifteen Catholics and four Protestants) were killed in what Eoin MacNeill labelled the ‘Derry pogrom’ – alleging that the rifles wielded by loyalists had been supplied from London. On 21–23 June, Orangemen (allegedly supported by troops) mounted attacks on St Columb’s Diocesan College, and the attempts by Volunteers of the Derry battalion under Michael Sheerin to defend it ended in humiliation as the Volunteers broke and ran, throwing away their weapons. ‘The discarding of rifles and ammunition and the hasty disappearance of men’, Sheerin later wrote, ‘was not edifying.’ The garrison cowered in the college with the lights out as outside armoured cars with a searchlight ‘drove up to vantage points in the College grounds and proceeded to break every window and outside door’.152

  At this stage, Volunteer operations – however alarming to unionists – were far from formidable. Sheerin’s company of fifty was ‘the only unit functioning’ in Derry, and even that was ‘unenthusiastic’, mainly ‘held together by threats’. As in Londonderry county, nationalists were simply too conscious of the danger that any activity would rebound on their own community.153 When Thomas Fitzpatrick’s battalion attacked some military vehicles in Low Market in March 1920, they took care not to get permission from the brigade, which was ‘averse to activities in Belfast for fear of reprisals on the Catholic population’.154 The first operation ‘carried out against the enemy in Belfast for the purpose of killing’ did not take place until January 1921, according to Seamus McKenna. Roger McCorley thought that coherent military activity of any kind started only at Easter 1920 with the burning of the income tax offices: all but one of the offices in Belfast were burned out, and the last was torched a few days later. (Fitzpatrick’s battalion apparently was not asked to take part.) But armed engagements were much more problematic. An attempted attack on Cookstown barrack in Tyrone failed, and Patrick Loughran became the first Volunteer to be killed in the six counties. No explosives had been available; and those that were used in an attack on the barrack in Irish Street, Armagh were wasted. (These were packed in a box on a cart and rolled up to the barrack wall; the explosion did more damage to the houses opposite than to the barrack.) McCorley’s first serious action was the attack on Crossgar RIC barrack in east Down, carried out inevitably with mostly untrained men with no experience of such actions. Though they were provided with Mills bombs – very sophisticated munitions by the standards of most rural units – using them called for some basic training. The men detailed for the bombing party ‘had no idea of the mechanism’, and McCorley was given the job of instructing them. He was called away to fix a dismantled rifle after explaining to the group that they must ‘keep their hands on the levers after pulling the pins’. He returned to find one of them ‘with the pin extracted … just about to let the lever fly off. He appeared to be under the impression that nothing would happen if he did not throw the bomb.’

  There was near-chaos in the training hall; it was difficult to keep the men under control, and as they moved around they would find themselves detailed to ‘two or three different parties’. It took so long to sort the attacking force out that the operation began late, and never got beyond a ragged exchange of fire. ‘Before the bombs went off one of the party panicked and ran into the street screaming,’ so alerting the police. McCorley decided to withdraw, but could not give the signal – a whistle blast – because ‘the officer in command forgot to bring a whistle.’ In the end ‘the attack more or less broke itself off.’ Though about half the garrison had been wounded, the barrack held out; still the action ‘served a purpose by showing us our own weaknesses’ – and also ‘exposed a certain lack of determination to carry an operation through even at a certain cost in casualties’. The leadership were reluctant to take any risks, in his view, and too inclined to prohibit proposed activities ‘on the off chance that the Brigade would decide to carry out something in the future’.

  The ‘fear of reprisals’ that paralysed the brigade may well have stimulated McCorley and the other younger Volunteers, thinking that reprisals would radicalize the people. The problem in Belfast was the same as elsewhere in respect of central command at least; ‘targets of opportunity were the only ones that could be effectively attacked,’ and operations calling for long-term planning would be ‘few and far between’, and unlikely to ‘put [the enemy] off his stride’.155 But even at a lower intensity than further south, the development of the republican campaign had an explosive impact in the north. The attacks on tax offices triggered the revival in June of Sir Edward Carson’s prewar Ulster Volunteer Force. The ‘raising of Carson’s army from the grave’, as Macready put it with a mixture of alarm and contempt, would have immense consequences, as the authorities looked for a way to contain and channel the upsurge of sectarian confrontation.

  Tensions were inevitably racked up higher still on the Twelfth of July, and decisive and disastrous events followed a few days later. The assassination of the RIC Munster Divisional Commissioner, Colonel Smyth, in the Cork County Club on 17 July happened a long way away, but had a tangible impact in the north when Smyth’s funeral took place in his home town, Banbridge, Co. Down. Catholic property in Banbridge and other towns was attacked, and loyalist press alarms about the advance of Sinn Féin became increasingly strident. A meeting of ‘Protestant and Unionist’ shipyard workers at Workman Clark’s south yard on the 21st denounced the IRA campaign and the Sinn Féin ‘penetration’ of Ulster. The ILP/TUC were identified as the industrial wing of the republican movement. An immediate purge of socialists and Catholics in the Harland and Wolff shipyards was launched by a force of apprentices and ‘rivet boys’; many were ‘severely beaten’, according to police reports, and some ‘thrown into the water and compelled to swim for their lives’. Gunfire across the city added to what the Irish News called ‘a carnival of terrorism’, and within three days eighteen people were known to have been killed. Within the week, 5,000 Catholic workers had been driven out from the yards and from factories such as the Sirocco engineering works. (There, the workers resolved to refuse ‘to work with those men who have been expelled recently until the Sinn Féin assassinations in Ireland cease’.)156 Mixed residential areas were purged – in both directions, as hundreds of Protestants were also forced from their homes – and the longstanding sectarian geography of the city was more sharply etched.

  Over the next two years, more than 450 people would be killed – over two-thirds of them Catholics – and over 8,000 driven from their homes. More than 600 houses and business premises were destroyed. The most prominent Catholic businesses – public houses – were systematically looted and their contents helped to fuel the rampages. This was a working-class war, but with just a single exception no trade union made any public effort to halt or discourage it. This no doubt reflected the fact that most trade unions represented the skilled trades, and the great majority of skilled workers in Belfast were Protestants. But this is not to say that Protestant workers as such formed ‘an aristocracy of labour’; the majority were still semi- or unskilled.157 Communal violence in Ulster was certainly not in any simple sense a conflict between superior and inferior economic classes. Nor was it a crude sectarian conflict. It was intensely political, framed by national symbols –
as when the unionist leader Sir James Craig urged people to ‘rally’ to ‘shatter our enemies and their hopes of a republican flag’.158 The violence, murderous as it was, was also less extreme than in some of the internecine conflicts taking place in other parts of Europe. The most outrageous, ‘transgressive’ acts, like mutilation and rape, so characteristic of modern ethnic struggles, hardly figured.159 If this was war, it was limited rather than total.

  ‘IT WAS EASY FOR LINEN TO BURN’

  It did not, of course, look this way to its victims. Nationalists were deeply shocked by the explosion of violence and immediately labelled it a ‘pogrom’ – to show the outside world that the real problem was not the attitude of loyalists but the machinations of the British government and the unionist employers. From this standpoint, the republican response was visceral rather than logical. On 6 August 1920 a ‘memorial’ was presented to the Dáil by Seán MacEntee, representing nationalist members of Belfast Corporation, urging action to stop the ‘war of extermination being waged against us’. MacEntee told the Dáil that it was responsible ‘as the only custodian of public order’. The ‘bitter persecution and repression’ in Belfast was ‘a consequence of the establishment of the Republic’, and actually represented ‘the first open act of rebellion against the Republic’ – ‘the first direct attack made upon the Irish Republic’. Republicans were not in a position at that moment to take military action, but ‘there was the more potent weapon of the blockade.’ The Dáil should enforce a commercial boycott, since ‘the chief promoters of the Orange intolerance here are the heads of the distributing trades throughout Ireland.’ This was a slightly dubious contention, but the real intent of the petitioners was more emotively put – to ‘fight Belfast’ (‘the spear head of British power in Ireland’).160