The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The question whether this could outweigh Collins’s value in Ireland itself has led to some speculation about the President’s motives. Did he see Collins as a political rival? Or did he, as has been suggested, want ‘to eject another rotten egg from his “basket” ’?15 The motives of Harry Boland – de Valera’s presumptive successor as ‘special envoy’ – were clearer. ‘It would be a very good stroke for Gould [a codename for Collins] to come,’ he thought, even though he could see that the mission would be bound to expose him to publicity that might be awkward: ‘it will be very hard for him to be in this country and to remain quiet.’ Quite apart from his personal friendship with Collins, Boland had a particular reason for wanting the movement’s leading ‘genius for organisation’ with him in the USA. After a series of mistakes – including buying 600,000 rounds of Colt .45 ammunition in the wrong format – he had secured the most spectacular of all republican arms deals. Early in January he ordered a hundred of the state-of-the-art Thompson sub-machine guns (first produced in 1919) at $225 each. GHQ immediately saw the enormous potential of these weapons and Collins told Boland that Seán MacMahon, the Quartermaster General, said ‘they should be got at any price.’ At the end of March Boland accordingly ordered another 653 of them – a huge batch which even after negotiating a 20 per cent discount still came in at the awesome total of $133,000.16 He understandably ‘hesitated for long’ before committing to the purchase, and his action would come back to haunt him later when Cathal Brugha heard of it. But still the biggest difficulty remained – storing the guns secretly and shipping them to Ireland. Given his complaint that he had previously had to use men of unknown capacity to transport ammunition, and that it was really GHQ’s responsibility to send out reliable men for such work, it is not surprising that he was eager to get the Republic’s outstanding executive officer on the case.

  Collins, however, had other ideas. He stalled for some weeks on the (fairly plausible) excuse of being unable to find safe passage, and eventually the project of sending him to America was quietly put on hold. Boland succeeded to the post of envoy, but the task of getting the Thompson guns to Ireland remained formidable. Thirty of them reached Cork late in April, and another fifty were landed in Dublin just before the Truce. But in June there was a disaster: after he had successfully spirited a vast batch of 495 into the bunkers of an American ship (chartered by the Irish White Cross to take coal to Dublin) at Hoboken, they were discovered shortly before it sailed.

  ‘THE MACHINERY OF THE REPUBLIC’

  At the start of the year the republican effort to control local government was faltering. ‘County Council and other public bodies functioning under the Dáil Local Government Department were having a bad time … Raids had been made by Crown Forces on Offices and premises of individual [rate] collectors and public money confiscated.’17 Up to this point the British had done remarkably little – certainly with remarkably little success – to inhibit the Republic’s implementation of its local government policies. These focused on slashing expenditure, which ‘the young puritans and Tammany-bashers of Sinn Féin’ saw as inflated by nepotism and corruption. (Since 1898 the Irish local authorities had operated in a climate of British largesse.)18 Sinn Féin’s solution was to close workhouses and amalgamate hospitals. The first of these policies was sensible and generally popular, but the second ran into local resistance. Progress was erratic; only Roscommon had put through a comprehensive scheme by the time of the Truce.

  Cosgrave’s Local Government Department has been seen as one of the most effective instruments in turning the Dáil administration from ‘another Irish exercise in “let’s pretend” ’ into ‘an everyday reality outside Dublin and some of the bigger towns’, where the old regime clung on.19 Cosgrave and O’Higgins ‘found themselves, in effect, running a local government system under the noses of the Castle and the Custom House’. They had to grapple not only with the British system, but also with local ratepayers and vested interests – entrenched councillors and officials. In the new year, this battle reached a critical point. Just before Christmas O’Higgins had written to all rate collectors reminding them that the Dáil had decreed the complete break of public bodies from the LGB in September after the ‘enemy Government declared its intention to set the so-called “grants” against damage to persons or property’. To remain in office after that was ‘a tacit acceptance of the new situation and all the duties it involved’. The threat of dismissal of rate collectors was a bluff – ‘considering that the English LGB has itself been dismissed by the Public Bodies of Ireland, this bluffing should not impress anyone.’ Unfortunately it did. Some rate collectors had met in Dublin and advised their colleagues ‘to cease work of collection until the Councils come to terms with the English LGB’. This, O’Higgins declared, was ‘an utterly impossible position for officials of Public Bodies to adopt’. They must either carry out instructions from their councils or resign.20

  O’Higgins reported the problem to the Dáil ministry with more than a hint of alarm, declaring that ‘A crisis has arisen in Local Government affairs.’ The Dublin rate collectors had resigned in a body without handing in the council funds they had collected. They had since ‘been visited, placed under open arrest, and compelled to sign bearer cheques for the full amount of rate money in their possession’ (totalling some £10,000). But ‘this merely solves half the problem,’ since ‘many ratepayers will refuse to pay the new collectors who will have to be appointed’ by the Dublin Corporation. Outside the capital, the issue of treasurership was becoming critical – ‘the position in the North Riding of Tipperary was so bad yesterday that I wired the Chairman agreeing to a tentative resolution passed by the Council reappointing the Bank as Treasurer.’ But O’Higgins confessed, ‘I do not see a way out of the present difficulties.’ County councils were ‘clamouring to be allowed to reappoint the bank as official treasurer’, promising that ‘this will not be a step towards reopening communication with the English LGB.’ But O’Higgins doubted whether ‘under existing conditions in the country it is possible to so stimulate and mobilise public opinion as to ensure that the rates will be got in to any extent that will appreciably alter the situation’. All the consequences of the financial shortfall were ‘being laid at our door’.

  The basic issue was that ‘to attempt with a small staff and working in secret to exercise the control and supervision of local administration hitherto exercised by a huge staff of officials at the Custom House is a difficult undertaking.’ ‘Frankly,’ he admitted, ‘the problems of this Department are becoming too great for me.’21 But his ministerial colleagues were not entirely sympathetic. The Local Government Department’s report was scathingly criticized as showing ‘no appreciation of the point of view of the Ministry as a whole’. It took no account of the fact that the Dáil government had agreed to grant a loan of £100,000. ‘The whole thing ought to be rewritten with some spirit and vigour’ – ‘Its melancholy defensive is very disheartening.’22

  Cosgrave’s department eventually responded with a fighting manifesto aimed at the recalcitrant collectors. (Though its drafting was again criticized, as ‘not nearly as telling as it could be made’, the proposed circular was ‘of tremendous importance’ and its terms would be ‘quoted both at home and in foreign countries’; ‘really the Department should have a document like this almost perfect before it is sent for final sanction.’) Declaring that ‘the rates struck and the monies levied by the local governing authorities are for the express purpose of providing essential services for the community,’ it warned that ‘to divert these is to make war on the sick and the helpless poor, the mother, the infant, and the aged.’ Those who acted ‘as agents and instruments of the enemy in this attempt’ were ‘guilty of the highest crime against the State’.

  ‘SKATING ON VERY THIN ICE’

  The musculature of the Republic was still primarily provided by the army; but the progress of the military campaign was a cause for concern. Mulcahy was once again advising local commande
rs – in line with the realism of GHQ’s overall strategy – not to attempt too much, just to keep going. ‘A little action wisely and well done must be our motto at present,’ he wrote to the Mid-Clare Brigade in February 1921. Such sober limits were imposed by necessity as much as by choice in many places, and they implied a reassessment of the flying columns’ ability to transform the war. Far too many columns had been set up in the heady enthusiasm of the autumn, and too few of them were really effective.

  Mid-Clare was typical in this. It was ‘a desperate wish … to do something big, as big as what had been done in other counties’, that pushed it to assemble a large column in late 1920. One of the more aggressive column men, an ex-serviceman who had led the ambush at Rineen, ‘regarded the Barretts [two brothers, Joe and Frank] … as men who wanted to be officers without having to do any fighting’, and had threatened to start his own column if they did not fight.23 Joe Barrett assembled an impressive-looking brigade column, ‘practically the flower of Mid-Clare’, including most of the brigade’s battalion officers. Fewer than half of its fifty-five men were armed with rifles, though its shotguns were made more deadly by a simple technique of pouring molten candle wax into the shot (a technique that seems to have been confined to Clare).24 The captain of the Ennistymon company, Tosser Neylon, suggested that though the column was ‘the cream of the brigade’, many of its members had never met or worked together when it was sent into action at Monreal in late December. Joe Barrett had, Neylon thought, been ‘too much influenced by the pressure … [and] was a bit forced in his decision’.

  The target at Monreal was a British joint military and police patrol, expected to be in one or two lorries, but which turned up in three. The column had no mine, and though it had some captured grenades, no attempt was made to use them. The first lorry was able to drive through the ambush position under heavy fire, and the third stopped short of it, so Barrett’s column was quickly threatened on both flanks. His choice of ambush position meant that the column had to retreat across ground with little cover. Four of its men were wounded in the process, and, perhaps worse, one of its rifles was lost. 25 After two more attempted ambushes with no greater success, the column was eventually split up into three smaller units. The intelligence problem evident at Monreal afflicted the Mid-Clare Brigade as a whole. Over a seven-month period up to June 1921 it succeeded in only fourteen out of over 140 attempts to make contact with the enemy. Its commanders alleged that the British forces had stopped coming out of their posts, but Mulcahy evidently disagreed. He sternly lectured the brigadier, Frank Barrett, that his April operational diary indicated ‘the absence of practically any military intelligence or technique’. The Volunteers had been watching constantly for the enemy ‘in a district in which there is almost daily activity on the part of the latter, yet contact with the Enemy is only established on three days in the month’. And he warned that ‘if there should be found in the heart of Clare anything like stagnation or inefficiency’ it would be ‘a disastrous thing’.26

  A new organizational structure laid down in March disbanded several brigade columns and set out a pattern for new, smaller ASUs. ‘The men for the ASU will be drawn from each Battalion, and will consist mostly of officers, possibly experienced ones. Men from the ranks will not be drawn upon save – (a) When their area is too hot to hold them; (b) When they possess technical knowledge, e.g. motor-driver, machine gunner; (c) When they have had considerable fighting experience; (d) When they are likely to assume commissioned rank.’27 Brigades would be ‘responsible for supplying the necessary arms, ammunition and equipment and military books’, battalions would provide the men with ‘necessaries’. The strength of an ASU would be twenty-one, including a unit commander and two squad commanders. The men should be numbered, and ‘generally known by their numbers’. Each of the squads was to be capable of independent action. The new instructions stressed the need for battalions to provide billets, and for the units to develop night-defence schemes. On the move, ‘men will always move in Patrol Formation.’ (This would ‘need to be insisted on’.) Marching from one place to another, or going into action or retiring, units must be ‘properly protected against surprise’. And because intelligence organization was important, local battalions ‘might’ provide a daily intelligence report to the OC unit. A communications system ‘would need to be perfected’.28

  Next month an even more substantial guide to ‘the Function of A.S. Units’ came from the Director of Training. This said that ASUs had a dual purpose – to act not only as ‘a standing force of Shock Troops’ but also as ‘training units’. The latter, in fact, was ‘their most important function’: the hope, evidently, was that they would accelerate the diffusion of GHQ’s ideas of regularization into the provincial units. ‘Even on active service, only a very small proportion of a soldier’s time is spent in actual fighting: as much as possible of the rest must be devoted to training.’ The ASUs should be ‘Officers Training Corps on active service’. Every officer in an ASU’s area should spend a period of service with it, and when all officers had passed through, the NCOs should follow them, and finally ‘the best men of the rank and file’. That way, ‘we can count on a uniform standard of command.’29

  The size of ASUs was fixed accordingly – ‘as large as can conveniently be trained and supervised by an Officer under A.S. conditions’. They should be strong enough to ‘take care of themselves under all ordinary circumstances’, but were never meant to be ‘suitable for operations on a mass scale’. (So the suggestion of conventional warfare in the term ‘shock troops’ was clearly unintentional.) Their characteristics were ‘hardiness and mobility’, and their motto should be ‘Everywhere all the time, but nowhere at a given moment’ – another Lawrence-like mantra. The Director of Training handed out yet another sermon on the vital need for formal discipline – the erosion of differences of rank found in one ASU by a GHQ inspector, where ‘Battalion Commandants and simple privates were cheek by jowl’, was ‘altogether wrong’.

  But in early 1921 there was still only a loose fit between these formulae and the reality of flying-column activity, even in the most active areas. An attempted ambush near Dripsey by the 6th Battalion column of Cork No. 1 Brigade on 28 January, for instance, carried mixed lessons. The intended target was an Auxiliary supply convoy, usually twenty-five to thirty men strong in seven tenders, which travelled weekly on the same road between Macroom and Cork. As Frank Busteed, the column commander, reported:

  At 7.30am we got into position and remained there until 4.30pm, but during that time no lorry turned up – at that time we got word from the Priest in Coachford that the military were aware of our position but as he is against the cause and ambushes we did not pay much heed to him, but at the same time we considered that there was no use remaining any longer and as we were making arrangements to retreat I discovered a party of military advancing along the road from Dripsey.

  The column took up a fighting position, but when a scout reported that ‘the military were on our left and trying to surround us’, Busteed decided, ‘as the fields were very large’, to retreat. In the retreat three men were wounded, and ‘as far as I can ascertain there are 7 others missing.’ (He was uncertain because they were not men from the attacking party of the column itself, but ‘scouts and flank guards’. At the end of the report he listed the names of six of the missing men.) According to the battalion commandant, Jackie O’Leary, the column lost ‘about three rifles and some shotguns, also some bombs’ (the surprising imprecision here being due to the fact that ‘some’ of these items had been hidden during the retreat, and might be recovered).30

  Part of the column’s problem was one of simple planning and discipline. Busteed later admitted that the operation was ‘a bit of a debacle’. One of the column men, Denis Dwyer, recalled that they were almost surrounded because their scouts, exhausted after being on duty for twenty-four hours without food or rest, had gone into nearby houses for refreshments. Once in retreat, other problems appeared. Th
e column’s line of retreat ‘lay up high ground through a plough-field, which was under enemy fire’. They had to use a narrow lane, in full view of the enemy, and then climb the gate at the end of the lane, which had been ‘locked and barred by the owner, who was hostile to the IRA’. The last man over slipped and trapped his leg, and was saved from capture only by the battalion quartermaster, ‘who came back at great personal risk, and released me’. Dwyer had ‘experienced some very tough and trying situations in France in 1916 and 1917, but this, while it lasted, surpassed any of them’.31

  O’Leary made clear, however, that the key problem was one of intelligence. Because the military had ‘attacked from the front, rear and left flank and also scoured the roads all round’, it was ‘evident that they got information’. They got it, in fact, from Mrs Mary Lindsay, a stubborn loyalist going to collect her motor permit (an action frowned on by the republican authorities). Stopping in Coachford on her way to Ballincollig RIC station, she met John Sweeney, a grocer’s assistant who had been ordered out of his house by Busteed’s men, and who warned her of the danger on the road to Ballincollig. Instead of turning back, as most sensible Protestants would have done, Mrs Lindsay went straight to the RIC, who alerted the army. While a force of seventy men of the Manchester Regiment rushed to the ambush site, she herself went back home, telling the Coachford parish priest of the ambush on the way. Three weeks later she and her chauffeur were seized by Volunteers, and held hostage against the lives of the captured column men. Cork No. 1 Brigade wrote officially to General Strickland – a personal acquaintance of Mrs Lindsay’s, as it happened – that her life would be spared if the prisoners were treated as prisoners of war. They got no reply.32 On 28 February, five of the six men named in O’Leary’s report were hanged, and on 9 March the hostages were shot.