The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Even as late as May 1921 the flying-column men’s healthcare was still poor. Bad hygiene – simple ‘lack of cleanliness’ – was the reason that scabies, nits and foot infections were ‘very prevalent’. GHQ urged that all column men should carry field dressings, and that columns should set up field dressing stations ‘in a safe place where a member of Cumann na mBan should take charge’. All company captains needed to instruct their men to take care of their feet, and change their socks regularly. Men with scabies should be isolated, and not allowed to go back to the column until passed fit by a doctor. After-treatment was too often neglected. Each province needed to compile a list of surgeons ‘who will volunteer to operate in the country’; this evidently had still not been done by June.77

  The ‘continuous blocking of roads’ mentioned to Donnelly by O’Connell was becoming the most prominent ‘unarmed’ strategic action. GHQ eventually called it the ‘offensive against communications’, though it began as a defensive strategy, to restrict the movement of Crown forces and protect ASUs. The targets in this were roads and bridges, which began to be systematically blocked or broken from January 1921 onwards. The British army first noticed this in Kildare and Meath, and it soon spread. Seamus Robinson claimed to have had the original idea: noticing that Crossley tenders often broke their axles in potholes, he suggested to GHQ that the holes might usefully be enlarged. GHQ came back with a ruling from the Local Government Department that there was to be no ‘destruction of the people’s property’, but Robinson’s argument that it would have real military uses eventually prevailed. His own brigade orders specified that gaps be left between pits to allow small local vehicles to pass.78

  At the end of February 1921 GHQ added a more aggressive dimension to the offensive with an instruction that ‘enemy transport shall henceforth be subjected everywhere to a vigorous and persistent offensive.’ It was to be ‘attacked wherever found, and searched out where necessary’, to make it ‘impossible for it to move unescorted in town or country’. The target here was not so much motor transport as the supporting transport hauled by animals: GHQ stressed that ‘in this connection mules are far more valuable than horses.’ It sombrely added the advice that ‘in cases where animals are attacked with the Revolver it is essential that where possible a .45 calibre revolver is used.’79

  Other units evidently followed Robinson’s idea of digging pits that would halt military vehicles without preventing movement by ordinary people, but some ingenuity was needed for this. (Ernie O’Malley sketched several possible designs in his pocket books, eventually preferring ‘a new style of Road Pit 7 × 8 × 3 in series of 3’.) More and more energy was applied to the contest, as the British responded by rounding people up to refill the trenches. Dublin District wryly noted that ‘troops were instructed to invite the local natives to repair the cuts’ (the damage to bridges, though, was often ‘irreparable except by experts’). Volunteer units soon found that ‘the majority of the men in the local companies were engaged nightly on these activities’.80 Eoin O’Duffy, the Monaghan brigadier, still a civil engineer by profession, earned useful bonuses by supervising the repairs to damage caused by his own men overnight.

  Some British military units started to carry bridging equipment with larger patrols, and to sweep the surrounding hills for snipers. GHQ’s Engineering Department explained how to counter this with ‘covered road pits (improperly called trenches)’. Pits were to be ‘dug diagonally across the whole (or portion of the) road according to local circumstances to a depth of about 2ft, by 3ft wide’. The excavated material should not be left in view. ‘Across the top should be placed strong laths, say 1½ inches square, at intervals of not more than 1 foot. On top of these should be stretched canvas, or cardboard, or very light timber,’ with a 2-inch topping of road stones.81 Other British units ‘evolved a nasty habit of leaving grenade traps behind’ in road repairs; after that, ‘partly repaired trenches were … left untouched and new ones opened.’82 Ever a fount of useful stratagems, Mulcahy suggested that local units sometimes ‘select for cutting a point in a road not so much because of its being a suitable point for cutting, but because it is a point which you can command from some very suitable position at a distance of, say, 500, 600 or 700 yards from it’. Then put ‘half a dozen or ten of your picked shots’ there.83

  Road cutting could certainly be a key tactical device, and it became possible to calculate its impact on British movements. When Mulcahy criticized a northern unit for being surprised by a British ‘drive’, he asserted that ‘in the most active areas such as Munster this work has been systematised and will delay the enemy not less than 35 minutes.’84 Even so, not all units were convinced. Whereas in east Clare the brigadier emphasized in April the ‘utter impossibility of campaigning under present circumstances in level country unless the roads are made impassable’, his Leitrim counterpart took the opposite view: ‘I do not believe it is much use cutting the roads.’85 Tipperary No. 2 grumbled that the only result of intensive road trenching had been the strengthening of enemy patrols ‘and the sending of an armoured car ahead to reconnoitre’.

  Another response to the cutting of roads was for British troops to make more use of bicycles on patrol. GHQ offered helpful advice on how to deal with the cyclist patrols of eight to fourteen men that had been observed in April. Ambushing these would require at least three men to every two-man file of the patrol; twenty-two men would be needed to ambush a patrol twelve strong. It suggested that if the patrol was ambushed in the open, its lack of cover should make ‘our cover less important’. Maybe the rearguard alone might be attacked. ‘Where men are picked shots and have thorough knowledge of one another’s positions and are calm masters of the situation, risks may be taken with one another’s fire which in other circumstances might not.’ ‘Technical games’, such as having attacking parties on opposite sides of the road, could be played. In any case, ‘the operation of small bodies of picked shots at long or short range against enemy cyclist patrols should provide very interesting and instructive work.’86

  The IRA’s own mobility might well have been improved. Collins, who had heard that ‘in Cork No. 3 the enemy has already commandeered 50 bikes in a district’, suggested in mid-April that across the MLA ‘on a particular night, as soon as possible, all civilian bikes should be commandeered by us.’87 He was by no means the first to see that ‘a plentiful supply of bikes would increase the efficiency of our Army,’ but little had been done about it. Although units such as the 2nd Battalion of Cork No. 1 had in fact seized large numbers – ‘hundreds’ – of bicycles due for delivery to the British army in late 1919, this seems to have been a random event.88 Collins was (unusually) unspecific about the efficiency he envisaged, and he was probably not thinking of forming cyclist units as such. This was something the pre-1916 Volunteers had favoured, though they were preparing for a more open kind of warfare than their successors in 1921. Then, bikes were used all the time by many couriers (and of course, famously, by Collins himself). They were commonly used by scouts – Cumann na mBan women on bikes had scouted for Tom Barry near Kilmichael, and the British army recognized the effectiveness of IRA cycle scouts in Dublin ambushes like those on Terenure Road and at Rathmines Church in early 1921, and on Great Brunswick Street in March. In fact, the British seem to have paid more systematic attention to their utility than the Volunteers did. When a British cycle patrol was ambushed in Kilkenny, and the troops abandoned their fifteen bikes, the Volunteers ‘were afraid to keep [them] as they were easily identifiable, so [they] decided to break them up’ (though they did not all agree about this).89 Units that followed Collins’s suggestion and seized all the bicycles they could find ‘for use by our own forces’ seem to have had no clear ideas about such use.90 It is possible that rural column men might have been hampered as well as aided by them. In favourable terrain, though, they might well have had the military efficacy Collins seems to have had in mind. No unit appears to have complained that shortage of bikes was a problem for them,
however.

  ‘NO IRISHMAN HAS A RIGHT TO A POSITION OF NEUTRALITY’

  Republican military operations undoubtedly ran against the grain of local feeling in many places. This reality jars with the dominant nationalist story of the independence struggle, a story that has been widely echoed by later writers. By 1920, it has been maintained, ‘the Irish were a people in arms, committed to the IRA.’91 But that commitment was not universal. Certainly when active units moved outside their comfort zones they could be dismayed by the attitudes they encountered. After billeting itself on some distinctly hostile farmers early in the new year, Cork No. 2 column plaintively asked, ‘what is to be done with such people?’92 When the East Clare Brigade column moved into south Galway in the early spring to attempt an ambush, it ‘met nothing but lies, inaccuracies, disappointments, and incompetencies of the worst type’. (‘To make it more sickening,’ the brigadier added, ‘heavy rain fell the whole time’.) After sending home most of the local Volunteers he decided to make an example of one ‘notoriously bad district’ – ‘we rounded up all the passers-by and imprisoned them in the lodge’ (of Dolystone House), reasoning that ‘such a display would have a good effect locally’. He urged ‘a wholesale wiping-out policy for people associating with the enemy’.93 In one west Donegal village ‘all persons found abroad were subjected to a search and questioning.’ As the people were ‘on good terms with the RIC, no quiet measures were taken, but everyone was roughly handled.’94 When Tom Barry’s West Cork column went into Skibbereen to confront the police, it was ‘compelled to hold up over 100 civilians, most being anti-Sinn Féin’. But, Barry noted with grim satisfaction, ‘they were all loudly singing “the Soldiers Song” when we left three hours later.’95

  Many things, from political disagreement to the fear of reprisals, could combine to set people against the republican forces. In 1921 the Volunteers’ need for funds was bearing more heavily on local communities. The Waterford Brigade was occupied in May and June 1921 collecting a ‘levy imposed by order of the brigade on farmers and business people’. Over £300 was collected in the 4th Battalion area. ‘As a rule the people paid up’ – whether cheerfully or not – but some farmers refused outright. When this happened, local commanders sometimes ‘took cattle in lieu of payment and used the cattle to feed the men’.96 When the 4th Battalion of Cork No. 1 struck a levy ‘according to what the local company believed a man could pay’, it had to deal with organized resistance, whose leader was tried by a republican court and fined for ‘having attempted to prevent people from contributing to the levy and spreading false reports about the IRA’. (The recalcitrants had alleged that the funds were being siphoned off by rogue Volunteers.) When he refused to pay, they seized some of his livestock – a punishment that seems to have produced a ‘good collection’ in the end.97 Some units imposed a tax on ‘young men who are not in the Volunteers’. The OC of the 5th Battalion of Cork 1 noted that ‘Whitechurch is one of the richest districts in the county and it only paid £49 to the Brigade.’ (He estimated that, on the rates subscribed elsewhere, it should have coughed up about £1,000.) When he took command, ‘the Volunteer movement was ridiculed by farmers’ sons in this area.’ It was ‘good enough for the labouring class but beneath them’. Though the Volunteers levied ‘a tax according to means’, they ‘would not pay neither would they fight’. One dismissively said ‘he would not be made a cock-shot of.’ The only way the battalion could collect the ‘tax’ was to make a blacklist and instruct the owners of threshing machines to turn these men away until they paid up. At the end of October, some had still not done so.

  The ‘offensive against communications’ also brought ordinary people into the fight more directly. By and large they seem to have put up with the disruption. The mid-Clare brigadier noted that although road cutting definitely affected the life of the community, ‘as far as I can ascertain they see the matter in the proper light and accept the consequences in a grand spirit.’ But people did not resist British demands that they repair the damaged roads. In May, Liam Lynch complained to Mulcahy that the enemy’s commandeering of labour for this purpose was threatening to ‘nullify the advantages gained by the cutting of roads’, and suggested that ‘the civil population should be asked to make a united stand against doing this work for the enemy.’ Lynch thought that if only Volunteers were so instructed they would be arrested en masse, but a call by the Dáil to the people at large would be ‘unanimously obeyed’. Then the enemy might be deprived of all heavy transport. Just as important, as the Adjutant General commented, was the pressing need to ‘get away from the “thin Green Line” which holds the enemy at present. Every citizen of the Republic should help.’98 GHQ issued a clarion call for public support, An tOglaċ declaring that ‘no Irishman has a right to a position of neutrality. It must be all or nothing. Money, time, goods, houses, lives must be placed freely at the service of the Republican State.’99

  Reading between the lines, we may suspect that there was more public ‘neutrality’ than the republican leadership found entirely comfortable. Such neutrality might take many forms, of course, ranging from lack of support through covert to open opposition. The motives for it might be equally varied. A dislike of revolutionary taxation, such as the Volunteer levies, did not in itself represent political dissent, and most of the non-cooperation that Volunteers found objectionable or inconvenient probably also stemmed from the simple wish to be left undisturbed. But political differences undoubtedly existed. Even Sinn Feiners were not united in support of the military campaign, many disliking the use of violence on either principled or pragmatic grounds, and many apprehensive about the implications of the army’s increasing domination of the separatist movement. The kind of pessimism about the physical-force campaign that suffused Eimar O’Duffy’s 1920 novel The Wasted Island must have been shared by many. The same must have gone for the voters who gave Sinn Féin control of local government in 1920: to vote for the republican counter-state was not necessarily to vote for the military campaign. Old party people may have deserted wholesale to Sinn Fein after 1918, but a minority must have maintained their critical view. Occasionally they did so publicly. Two of them had defied the republican call for a national day of protest when Terence MacSwiney’s remains were returned to Ireland in November 1920. William Kennedy refused to close his chemist’s shop, and T. J. O’Dempsey started a legal action for intimidation. Both had been active Redmondites (O’Dempsey a close associate of Tom Kettle) and both were shot dead.100

  Dissent could carry a high price, and dissident voices have, mostly, been silent in the histories written since 1921. Not only triumphalist nationalist histories but also republican elegies like Dorothy Macardle’s Irish Republic depicted the Irish nation as united behind the IRA in the struggle against Britain. Few people wished to dispute this in later years; dissidents had no interest in drawing attention to their former opposition. Protestants, especially, widely presumed to be passive if not active supporters of the Union, kept quiet – then and subsequently. Speaking out during the war ‘could be terribly dangerous’, and the habit of self-censorship persisted.101 Many recent writers – including specialists on the subject of guerrilla or ‘people’s’ war – have followed the nationalist line. Their argument about the level of anti-republican dissent is essentially negative. Without the support of ‘most of the population’, the IRA could not have survived as long as it did.102 So public opposition must have been marginal. But careful analysis of the operational records shows, as we shall see, that however small the minority was it posed increasing problems for the republican forces in 1921. Non-cooperation could be troublesome, but giving information to the authorities represented a potentially lethal threat.

  ‘DRASTIC ACTION WAS TAKEN’

  In 1921, as many Volunteer units became alarmed at the apparent seepage of information to the Crown forces, a neurosis about ‘spies and informers’ spread across the organization. In some places, whole units were ‘largely occupied’ in ‘observation of ene
my spies’. South Roscommon asserted in January that ‘we must first wipe out spies and informers before any action of importance is successful’. In March, Cork No. 2 suggested that ‘we rigidly put in force’ an order that none of the civil population were to speak to the police or military. ‘We cannot afford to wait to find spies,’ it said. South Roscommon was still looking in April – even dressing in ‘Enemy uniforms’ to visit suspects and question them about Volunteer movements. Once they were found, wiping them out might mean killing, expelling or merely fining them. In one case, that of ‘an extra well-to-do farmer’ who had ‘wired the enemy that rebels had trenched the roads in his vicinity’, Cork No. 2 requested GHQ permission to fine him £50. The brigadier also proposed to have the charge read out at the principal mass in the local Catholic church (the farmer was a Protestant): ‘I mean to have him in the vicinity with the charges pinned on him.’ Mulcahy breezily told him, ‘if you think you could get £100, do so.’103

  Pits in roads were hardly high-grade information, and the point here was one of principle. Where more vital information was concerned, action was more coercive. Cork No. 1’s intelligence officer noted that ‘civilian spies were considered by us to be the most dangerous of all. They were well acquainted with the IRA men in the different localities in which they operated (being natives of the district in certain cases),’ and might ‘create havoc in our organisation’. ‘Drastic action [was] taken to put a stop to their activities.’104 The two men who gave information to the disguised Volunteers in South Roscommon were summarily ‘executed’.105 The killing of Mary Lindsay was an unusually (and unwelcomely) high-profile case; more often the fate of the alleged informers was obscure, as indeed was their precise offence. The concepts of spying and informing were flexible. In Lindsay’s case we know enough to be sure that she was not an informer in the normal sense – she betrayed no trust in giving information. Nor was she a spy in the normal sense (if there is such a thing); she was not using any kind of cover or false identity – indeed she was an openly proclaimed loyalist. Other victims of the spate of killings in early 1921 may also have been ambiguous. In January and February the Cork No. 3 Brigade, for instance, killed at least ten suspected spies. Pinning notices – such as ‘Convicted Spy. Informers Beware. IRA’ – to their corpses underlined the linkage of the concepts. The implication of conviction after due process was, inevitably, often misleading. GHQ certainly worried about the escalating rate of executions, and instructed local commanders to ‘convict’ only on definite evidence. The ‘language of due process’ was clearly vital to the members of IRA military courts, but short of confession – which might be extracted by extreme duress – their proceedings were less exact. A brigade court martial in Limerick, for instance, was set up with considerable formality – a president, two members, a clerk, plus prosecution and defence counsel – but its report showed that the latter two joined the discussion which produced a guilty verdict and a death sentence.106 One general rule – that women spies should not be killed but exiled – seems to have been followed in all but the Lindsay case. Just how many women acted as spies, though, can only be guessed at.