The reaction to this fighting call in Dublin was cautious. Ernest Blythe, one of the few northerners in the republican leadership, warned the Dáil that ‘an economic blockade of Belfast would be the worst possible step’ – it ‘would destroy for ever the possibility’ of a united Irish nation. Moreover it was highly doubtful that it would have anything like the intended effect – Constance Markievicz thought it could not be made effective, and would be ‘playing into the hands of the enemy’. Desmond FitzGerald bluntly said that a blockade would be ‘a vote for partition’. Collins even condemned the attempt by MacEntee ‘to inflame the passions’ of the members of the Dáil, insisting that ‘there was no Ulster question’. Arthur Griffith denounced the motion as ‘practically a declaration of war on one part of their own territory’, and urged instead that it be declared ‘illegal for any employer to impose a test on an employee’. Then if the Belfast employers refused to comply within seven days, ‘a blockade of Belfast could be declared.’ The Dáil, the great majority of whose members, Blythe thought, had at first been quite ready to consent to the boycott, accepted these arguments.161 But the pressure kept on mounting, and five days later the ministry authorized a boycott of banks and insurance companies whose headquarters were in Belfast. To get maximum local involvement, this was to be implemented by the Local Government Department via the General Council of County Councils. Support was not hard to drum up, since the threat of partition in the Government of Ireland Bill had already triggered spontaneous boycotts in Galway and Mayo early in the year. (On 4 February, Ballinrobe District Council had called on traders to close accounts with north-east Ulster firms that failed to ‘declare themselves anti-partitionist’.)
By September, boycott resolutions had been passed by local authorities all over the country, and enforcement by Volunteers in some places was enthusiastic. Local enthusiasm directed the boycott not only at Belfast but at a range of northern towns – such as Lisburn, Dromore and Newtownards – where there had been anti-Catholic violence. It also quickly went beyond the limits of bank and insurance companies; the Volunteers proscribed ‘goods manufactured in or distributed from Belfast’.162 Orders from Belfast suppliers were cancelled, and Volunteers heaved a carload of such stuff into the River Erne at Ballyshannon. It seems clear that the campaign focused a lot of instinctive hostility towards the industrial north, but lack of organization lefts its exact logic vague. Even before the director of the Central Committee for the Belfast Boycott, Leo Henderson, was arrested in October, there was little co-ordination of the actions of the eighty or so local committees, and no blacklist of firms was drawn up until the following year.
Some localities applied the boycott more enthusiastically than others. Eoin O’Duffy, for instance, backed it strongly from the start, so that it was enforced more effectively in Monaghan than anywhere else. His forces picketed Protestant stores, imposed fines on blacklisted businesses, harassed Catholics who patronized them, set alight delivery vans from Belfast and sabotaged the Great Northern Railway (most of whose workers were Protestants). Intimidating railway workers on this line meshed with the enforcement of the munitions embargo.163
The boycott of ‘Belfast goods’ was intended to emphasize the industrial city’s dependence on its Irish hinterland. In political terms, though ‘it was easy for linen to burn’, the bonfires had the opposite effect, heightening the unionist sense of alienation and accelerating the process of partition. In mixed areas like Monaghan, the fault line in the tacit coexistence between the two communities was sharpened. The two commercial groups, the (unionist) Traders’ Association and the (nationalist) Traders’ Committee, diverged gently but unmistakably. The former passed a resolution condemning the victimization of Catholics, but insisted that it could not give any undertaking to limit its members’ business activities in any way that would compromise their commercial freedom. The latter found itself reluctantly ‘compelled to take all measures within its power to prevent the sale of Belfast goods in the town’. The result was ‘a temporary rupture of the good feeling hitherto existing between Protestants and Catholics in the district’, and the rupture would not be as temporary as the local paper optimistically suggested.164 By the end of the year, indeed, sectarianism had reached a level at which the police warned that violence was ‘likely to occur on the slightest provocation’. In Meath, just as ominously, the refusal of the Dundalk Property Owners’ Association to condemn events in Belfast, on the grounds that ‘there was no intolerance in Dundalk’, provoked the burning down of three Protestant stores, in which three people died.165
For the northern Volunteers, and the nationalist community as well, the most critical single event of the summer was the killing of RIC District Inspector Oswald Swanzy on 22 August. Swanzy, named by the coroner’s jury as one of those responsible for the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain, had been transferred to Lisburn, Co. Down – where Collins had little difficulty in finding him. Collins’s determination to avenge Mac Curtain was almost ostentatious: he sent up a leading member of Cork No. 1 Brigade, Seán Culhane, to carry out the killing, and presented him with Mac Curtain’s own revolver for the purpose. Culhane initially took a party of no fewer than four men of his brigade, but, after the first assassination attempt had failed, sent them home and did the job with just one, Dick Murphy, assisted by two local scouts. Swanzy was shot down as he left Lisburn Cathedral after matins. The relationship between the Cork and Belfast contributions to the attack would remain contentious. Some of the Belfast men contended that ‘the Cork men were guests,’ and one of the supposed scouts, Roger McCorley, claimed that they actually took part in the shooting.166
Militarily, the Volunteers saw this attack as a striking success. Revenge was sweet, and Collins (emphasizing his ownership of the operation) brought the two Corkmen back to Dublin, where he and Richard Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff, were ‘profuse in their congratulations’. But as Culhane left Belfast he could see the fires in Lisburn as his train passed.167 Whatever fears the Belfast commanders had of reprisals were amply fulfilled in the onslaught on the Catholic population, nearly all of whom were driven out of the town, with over 300 of their homes left in ruins. The famous UVF gun-runner Fred Crawford was reminded when he visited ‘of a French town after it had been bombarded by the Germans’; he was told that there were ‘only four or five RC families left in Lisburn’. He picked up a small pair of nail scissors lying in the street, which had survived the destruction, ‘as a souvenir of the event’.
Any brief sense of triumph on the Belfast Volunteers’ part was followed by the realization that the mass violence had ‘shown them up’ as ‘inactive, small in number and hopelessly isolated’. They had been unable to do more than respond episodically to the ‘ebb and flow of sectarian violence’.168 Even that passive role was resisted by the Belfast command, which tried to sideline it as ‘a purely sectarian affair’. Roger McCorley recorded, with characteristic venom, that ‘Brigade Headquarters even went as far as to courtmartial one officer for taking part in the defence of his own particular area against the attacks of the Orange mob.’ His defence, that to stand by and allow someone else to defend his home would be undignified and unbecoming a Volunteer officer, pointed up the absurdity of the official policy. Under pressure the brigade relented to the extent of authorizing Volunteers to fight British troops if they were directly attacking the civil population. In reality, it was unthinkable that Volunteers would not take part in the battles with the ‘disciplined and undisciplined Orange factions’, as Seamus McKenna of 1st Battalion put it – ‘if the Catholic population were to survive at all’.169 The real problem was not whether but how to play any effective part.
The summer violence in the north-east, harrowing as it was, was recognizably part of a longstanding tradition of sectarian conflict. In political terms there was some justification for the Belfast Brigade’s pious wish to ignore the whole bout of ‘fratricidal strife’. The Lisburn assassination was different, and its impact had a baleful influence on the nature of
the emerging Northern Ireland polity. Though Macready reflected that ‘it rather shakes one’s faith in the “discipline” of the Ulster people when one sees the destruction in Lismore [sic], and no attempt made to stop it,’ his objections to ‘arming the Protestants’ were finally overcome.170 Greenwood – ever the political simpleton – had wanted to ‘enrol loyal men in the North as Special Constables’, but both Macready and Anderson rejected this as virtually an official recognition of civil war. Not that anyone doubted that a kind of civil war was indeed in progress – but as the local police and military commanders protested, ‘to arm one side and not the other in civil war of this sort is madness.’171 Mark Sturgis found it a ‘comfort’ that ‘they have not yet sold Belfast to the Ulster Volunteers.’
After Swanzy’s death, though, the idea gained a heavyweight supporter – Winston Churchill. Just as crucially, a separate under secretary, Ernest Clark, was placed in Belfast in September to lay the groundwork for a six-county administration. Clark immediately accepted the need for a local security force, and set about energetically constructing one.172 A special constabulary would be enrolled; the only remaining question was whether it would be an all-Ireland force. Even those who supported this principle accepted that, since in practice the force would recruit only in the north-east, it would only serve to emphasize the virtual partition of the country. By now, though, this seemed inevitable. Finally, on 22 October, the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) was inaugurated – two months before the Government of Ireland Act created the polity it would serve. Its three-tier structure – Class ‘A’ of paid full-timers, the part-time Class ‘B’ and the elderly reservists of Class ‘C’ – was planned to provide no fewer than 32,000 men in total, three times the strength of the old RIC.
The USC was a potent force in making virtual partition a reality. Its title enshrined the separate Ulster identity that had been mobilized for unionism and supercharged in the political drama of 1912. Macready’s alarmed opposition to ‘raising Carson’s army from the grave’ rightly identified its political significance. He was wrong, though, to imply that the old UVF had died. It certainly became quiescent after 1914 – though the idea that it was transformed wholesale into the British army’s Ulster Division and killed en masse at the battle of the Somme is a myth. In 1920 its veterans were plentiful. One of the most senior of them, Brigadier Hacket Pain, who had been chief of the UVF staff, became the RIC divisional commissioner for Ulster. The Irish Office in London, hard as it may be to believe, had no idea ‘what position (if any) he held in Carson’s Army’.173 After the war, there seemed to be some reluctance to reconstitute the UVF formally; one or two leaders tried to raise unionist militias under different titles (like Basil Brooke’s Fermanagh Vigilance, or the Ulster Imperial Guards formed in the Belfast shipyards). But the UVF reappeared in July 1920, and a fair proportion of its members joined the USC. The new force, however, particularly the ‘B’ Class, recruited strongly among younger men who had missed out on the great Ulster crisis. As one Londonderry USC commander put it, ‘the younger and wilder they are the better.’174
THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
The oath of allegiance to the Dáil, even if only partially adopted, was a key symbolic instrument in cementing the claim of the Volunteers to be the Irish national army. Though the title IRA was only patchily – and never apparently officially – adopted, the military side of the republican movement was increasingly described as ‘the Army’. The question of how far, in reality, it could develop the machinery of a regular military force was one that preoccupied many at GHQ, above all Mulcahy himself. It was well enough understood that a regular system of top-down command was for various reasons either impracticable or undesirable in the circumstances of guerrilla warfare. Just how far GHQ could control local units has remained uncertain. Some localities were clearly very independent-minded, but others – such as Longford – preferred to follow GHQ’s lead. Significant action began there only when GHQ sanctioned attacks on RIC barracks at the start of 1920, and according to Longford’s outstanding military leader Seán MacEoin, the first attack was planned in conjunction with GHQ. ‘There is evidence that GHQ was directing much of the activities of the Longford IRA throughout 1920,’ and GHQ was ‘involved in the escalation of the war in Longford’ towards the close of the year. The key point here is probably not so much what GHQ itself did as that the Longford Brigade ‘was willing to submit itself to GHQ direction’.175
Others were less willing. All local units certainly deferred to GHQ in principle, but since the intensification of the shooting war the early practice of seeking authorization for any action had lapsed in the most active areas. In some, feelings of (barely) concealed animosity towards GHQ emerged, starting from the sense that it was hampering the initiative of local units, and bolstered by a sense that it was withholding supplies of arms – something Collins certainly tried to do to encourage local action. GHQ marked out the general structure of the army, and fretted endlessly about the need for uniform standards of command. Though it could sometimes replace unsatisfactory local officers with its own appointees, this was not a simple or systematic process. It had two primary means of influencing the action of local forces: it could send them organizers, and it could send (or deny) them arms. Neither was ever done on the scale that Mulcahy would have thought remotely adequate. Until 1921 organizers were thin on the ground, and even then their arrival could easily create tensions with the local men, and ‘proved counter-productive in many cases’.
Complaints and charges of unequal or unfair distribution of arms tend to be impressionistic: hard statistics are few and far between. A rare snapshot of central arms distribution has survived in the GHQ arms ledger kept by Fintan Murphy, meticulously logging all transactions for May–June 1920. This shows that GHQ had £355 worth of stock on hand on 19 April, and over the next five weeks spent £493 on arms and £88 on ammunition: these included twenty-one Lee-Enfield rifles (at a cost of £112) and 2,469 rounds of .303 ammunition (£27 7s 6d). Over that period it sold on £508 worth of arms and £113 worth of ammunition to local units. Eighteen brigades bought arms: in all, thirteen Lee-Enfields went to Cavan (two), west Clare (three), Dublin (three), Offaly (one), North Tipperary (two) and north Roscommon (two). Twenty-two brigades bought ammunition. The biggest consignments by far went, unexpectedly perhaps, to Mayo. In mid-April south Mayo spent almost £80 on twelve Webley revolvers (at £6 each), 300 rounds of .303, thirty rounds of .45 ammunition, and five dozen sticks of gelignite. Next month it bought one .32 and sixteen .45 revolvers at a total cost of £98. Cork No. 1 Brigade, by contrast, received a single Parabellum and two .45 revolvers (all at £6 apiece); Cork No. 2 got fifty rounds of .45 ammunition and ten bundles of gelignite.176 Though it is isolated, this fragmentary record suggests a fairly comprehensive arms-distribution system.
The greatest military change for the army was what may be called the transition from essentially brief local actions by part-time forces to mobile operations by full-time units. The shift was impelled by the stalemate that emerged in mid-1920. Barrack attacks became increasingly difficult if not impossible for local units as the police concentrated in more substantial stations. But the Volunteer army remained a part-time organization whose members naturally wanted to hang on to their jobs and homes. The fact that it could operate only at night imposed strict limits on its operational repertoire. Its enemy’s fixed points were becoming too strong to attack, but it was unable to engage his moving forces consistently. Gradually a way out of the impasse emerged, but, as Michael Brennan was at pains to emphasize later, this was not a deliberate policy conceived at command level. His account makes clear its elementary logic. In east Clare there were only three or four ‘wanted men’, who kept themselves going as best they could.
As the year wore on the pursuit became tougher and we were inclined to drift together, partly for company, but mainly because the ‘safe areas’ were now fewer and we usually met in them. The local Volunteers always posted men at night to wa
rn of raids, and it was as easy to warn four as one and much easier than to get a message to four widely separated men … We very quickly discovered that moving around in a group gave greater security and without any actual orders being issued other men ‘on the run’ drifted to us and our numbers grew.177
This was the genesis of the ‘flying columns’ that began to appear, impelled by the same logic, in various south-western areas as the tempo of the British counter-offensive heightened in the early autumn. Exactly adapted to the circumstances, their organic development governed their capacity. ‘The problems of food and billeting prohibited a very large group, and it was necessary to keep the regular column men down to about twenty.’ Whether these columns, officially labelled active service units (ASUs), were originally conceived at GHQ level remains a matter of disagreement. According to Artie Barlow, the concept was discussed as early as June 1920, and was another of Collins’s bright ideas. Mulcahy was ‘not too keen’, but Collins insisted, ‘We’ll have to get these bloody fellows [on the run] doing something.’ As Ernie O’Malley noted, at that time they were too often ‘a bloody nuisance’, lounging around, sleeping late, eating local units’ food without contributing any work for them. A number of battalion ‘columns’ seem to have been set up over the summer, but on too small a scale to have much effect.
Eventually, on 4 October, GHQ issued a general order suggesting that ‘the most effective way of utilising’ the ‘large number’ of officers and men on the run in various parts of the country ‘would seem to be by organising them as Flying Columns’. The reason offered, in what looks like Mulcahy’s cast of thought, was that ‘instead of being compelled to a haphazard and aimless course of action, they would become available as standing troops of a well trained and thoroughly reliable stamp’; their actions could be ‘far more systematic and effective’. The attraction of ‘standing troops’ had clearly overcome any initial reservations Mulcahy might have had. ‘Permanent troops of this kind’, the order went on, ‘would afford an exceedingly valuable auxiliary arm to the remainder of the Republican Army,’ which was still largely a ‘part-time militia’.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 25