Bishop Cohalan’s previous history with the Volunteers was ambiguous. In 1916, as assistant bishop, he had put heavy pressure on Mac Curtain and MacSwiney, telling them that to send their men to fight without adequate munitions would be criminal. Some held him responsible for Cork’s resulting inaction, and still more for the humiliating deal he helped to broker, under which the Cork Volunteers surrendered their weapons to the British army at the end of Easter Week. Cohalan indicated that they would be returned later, but in fact the army had not agreed to this and, unsurprisingly, held on to the guns. The effect of his 1920 anathema was mixed. Cork City’s other TD Liam de Roiste had to deal with the fact that Cohalan’s 12 December sermon appeared to justify English rule, ‘and condemn every action on the part of the Irish people to defend themselves or assert their independence’. But he argued that a careful reading of it showed that ‘His Lordship really does not express this view.’ Unfortunately, ‘the censure is very ill-timed owing to the excited feelings of the people.’ De Roiste was right about Cohalan’s ‘real’ view, in the sense that he was an Irish nationalist at the very least. The Bishop went as far as to say, ‘When you come with an army able to fight the enemy and defend the weak and unprotected, I will act as Chaplain.’ But this was to impose a very stern test, which many conventional armies of established states would have failed.
Cohalan’s action was dismissed by some. A Co. Louth priest averred in March 1921 that thanks to his ‘precipitancy and flippancy’ Cohalan was ‘now without a particle of influence over his own people’. His excommunication decree had ‘missed fire’.133 In general, Volunteers seem to have regarded all clerical denunciations of violence as political interventions, and some abandoned religious practice.134 But in Cork some Volunteers were troubled by the decree. When the nationalist Cork Examiner endorsed it, they smashed its presses. Florrie O’Donoghue sought the view of the Capuchin father Dominic O’Connor (who had been a chaplain with the forces at Salonika in the Great War). O’Connor confirmed that those taking part in ambushes or killings were exempt as long as they were acting ‘with the authority of the state – the republic of Ireland’.135 He went further, indeed, airily assuring him that ‘just as there is no necessity telling a priest that you went to Mass on Sunday, so there is no necessity to tell him one has taken part in an ambush.’ But since he had adopted – presumably unofficially – the role of ‘brigade chaplain’ to Cork No. 1, he was a rather untypical priest. The Volunteer leaders who snorted that Cohalan ‘was never taken seriously by us’ (Connie Neenan), and that ‘nobody minds him now’ (Liam Lynch), probably well knew that their men were not immune to ‘the nightmare horror’ of the decree.136
Fortunately for the Republic, Bishop Cohalan was not representative of the Church leadership as a whole. Even the deeply conservative Cardinal Logue had been moved by Bloody Sunday to come off the fence and say that ‘if a balance were struck between the deeds of the morning and those of the evening, I believe it should be given against the forces of the Crown.’137 But any prospect of direct recognition of the Republic by the Church remained a distant one. Although de Valera’s absence in the USA meant ‘he had lost many opportunities to develop … a good working relationship with the hierarchy’, others clearly aimed to make the Republic a more explicitly confessional state. O’Hegarty reported to him in February 1921 that he had received a letter from Cosgrave proposing a ‘Theological Senate’. It suggested that ‘there should be a sort of “upper house” to the Dáil consisting of a Theological Board’ which would decide whether any of the Dáil’s enactments were ‘contrary to Faith and Morals’. There was also ‘a suggestion that a guarantee be given to the Holy Father that the Dáil will not make laws contrary to the teachings of the Church, in return for which the Holy Father will be asked to recognise the Dáil as a body entitled to legislate for Ireland’. O’Hegarty’s opinion of the idea was scathing. Noting that Cosgrave’s letter had been ‘mislaid for a few days’, he added that ‘it would seem to have been mislaid for nine hundred years.’ In his view the Board would not work, ‘and might lead to grave trouble’. Most importantly, perhaps, ‘for the Dáil to admit that there existed a necessity for such a check on their legislation would, I think, be a fatal error.’ Whether or not de Valera agreed, he laconically instructed O’Hegarty to ‘tell Liam MacC that I read his theological proposal, and there is no necessity at the moment to consider it further’.138
It was the threat of a papal intervention condemning the republican military campaign that did most to bring the Church and the counter-state into line. Even moderate prelates were roused to quite extreme expression. Bishop O’Doherty, in his capacity as secretary of the Hierarchy’s Standing Committee, wrote ‘English violence and oppression our people can endure; English slanders they despise. But … it would be utterly heartbreaking to them if Rome were to step into this quarrel on the side of the enemies of their race and faith.’ Bishop Mulhern of Dromore issued a not very veiled threat: ‘it has often been said that if the Irish people become alienated from the faith and their priests, it will be the fault of the priests.’ The bishops clearly feared British influence in Rome, though in the event the Pope’s letter proved to be a study in the evenhanded condemnation of violence. ‘We do not see how the bitter strife can profit either of the parties’ when ‘on both sides a war resulting in the death of unarmed people, even of women and children, is carried on’. From the British viewpoint, such balance amounted to a publicity disaster. ‘HMG are placed in exactly the same category as the authors of arson and cold-blooded murder,’ as the Foreign Office complained. The letter put the government ‘and the murder gang on a footing of equality’, and the Pope could even be seen as ‘coming down publicly on the side of the forces of disorder’.
DECENTRALIZATION AND DIVISIONALIZATION
On 11 March the Dáil tackled the question of how the republican government could be carried on if, as de Valera put it, ‘their numbers went very low’. (There were actually twenty-five present at this session, only eight fewer than had constituted the Dáil’s first meeting that had issued the Declaration of Independence.) This indirect tribute to the pressure exerted by British military measures produced some interesting reactions. Mulcahy’s proposal that TDs should have a substitute (nominated by them and confirmed by their local Comhairle Ceanntair – Sinn Féin district executive) was turned down. De Valera proposed that, if so many deputies were imprisoned that the Dáil could not function, governmental power should pass to the army. This – not something that Mulcahy can have relished – also failed to gain approval. Instead the Dáil resolved that if its numbers fell to five, these survivors should constitute a ‘provisional government’.
Another line of approach was to reduce the government’s exposure to British repressive action in Dublin by decentralizing the administration. It was noted later that year (by Aodh de Blacam) that the Dáil had ‘initiated a system by which its various works would stand by themselves if the central authority were smitten out of existence’, though just what this involved was not clear. The Dáil apparently did not consider turning the provinces, ‘which would have seemed the most logical basis of decentralisation’, into governmental units.139 What we do know is that the army was, at this time, taking steps to decentralize its own command structure. Mulcahy might not relish having the army replace the government, but he obviously shared the anxiety about being ‘smitten out of existence’.
There were worries about resilience in the provinces as well. Liam Lynch pointed out that military co-operation across local boundaries remained lamentable. Often one brigade might be ‘hard-pressed by the enemy, while neighbouring Brigades are listening to the guns and do nothing, often perhaps allowing enemy reinforcements to pass through unmolested’. He believed that ‘at the present moment the Enemy is out to try and squash our Brigade’; it had ‘too many gun-men on active service while some of our adjacent Brigades are inactive’. It would be an advantage to be able to ‘cross over the border now and then’.
140 Given the persistence of territorial jealousy, the answer seemed to be to create a divisional command. ‘All the officers at the conference were in favour of it except Cork No. 1, but since then the military situation has changed there considerably.’ Lynch characteristically asked Mulcahy not to insist that he should take up this command: it would mean ‘being responsible for the war zone and I consider myself far from being able to fill such a position’. One of the ‘old dogs’ in the area should do it and let him stay ‘with the brave fighting men here’. But the Chief of Staff was clearly less impressed by the alternative candidates, and Lynch was appointed the IRA’s first divisional commander a few weeks later. On 26 April nine brigades – three from Cork, three from Kerry, two from Waterford and one from Limerick – convened at Kippagh, near Millstreet, to constitute themselves the 1st Southern Division.141 (Lynch had advised that Clare should be left out – ‘except one of the Brigades’ – but that a GHQ representative would be a better judge of the situation.)
This was a dramatic step. Over the next three months another six to eight divisional commands were set up, half of them in the north. The idea did not come out of the blue; the notion of establishing divisions had been discussed as early as 1918, and in mid-1920 a number of southern brigades had been identified as capable of benefiting from a joint organization, though it was clear that any extensive co-operation would be difficult to implement in practice.142 Psychologically, the idea cut both ways: it was attractive as a sign that the Volunteers were steadily growing more like a real army, but less so insofar as it threatened to disturb the tight military groups which had proved their capacity to survive in sometimes difficult environments.
The primary justification was to rectify the kind of problem Lynch had identified, or as Mulcahy put it in his somewhat ponderous autodidactic military language, ‘the necessity for harmonising the nature and direction of operative activity in adjoining Brigade areas which are so placed as to influence the Military Situation in one another’.143 A secondary but also vital function was to push on professionalization via the ‘Divisional School of Administration and Training’. The underlying aim was systemic resilience. Mulcahy later acknowledged that a series of successful British raids meant that ‘we never knew when the blow would come and … GHQ might be wiped out.’ ‘We therefore set out from the beginning of 1921 to divisionalize the country … we had about 15 divisional areas where we knew there was military capacity among the people there … so that if Headquarters here was wiped out there would be sufficient authority and prestige attached to local groups to … get on if they were driven to get on without us.’144
At the time, he headlined more positive arguments. ‘Diminishing the number of units coming directly in contact with GHQ’ would enable ‘more attention to be given to the main problems of each individual area’, and also facilitate ‘much closer cooperation between the several Divisional areas’. As he instructed one western brigadier, ‘the immediate primary object in the setting up of Divisional Commands’ was ‘the harmonising of operations in contiguous areas, whose operations react on one another’. It was ‘essential that the Divisional Commander have the power to transfer arms and men from time to time’ when he judged it necessary. So he could ‘dispose of [sic] any arms in your Area’.145 Paradoxically, given that a new tier of command was being created, it was argued that ‘the machinery of administration will be greatly simplified, and there should be a very pronounced increase in speed and efficiency of working.’146 This would be because the brigades could be in closer contact with divisional HQs than they had been with GHQ. Decentralization would reduce GHQ’s contact points and free it to concentrate on strategic planning.
Mulcahy held that ‘each Division must come more and more to regard itself as a definite Unit capable of carrying on a formidable campaign unaided … an army in miniature.’147 Divisions are of course the basic strategic elements of regular armies, but in a territorial guerrilla force like the IRA the same terms could just as well be applied to brigades or battalions, if not indeed even smaller units. Its local resilience meant that, unlike in regular armies, its units had no real need to co-operate. Greater acceptance of higher authority might well go some way to bringing them together, but nothing like the integration implied by the divisional concept could ever really be achieved as long as units remained essentially local. Another argument rolled out as the programme expanded was that divisionalization would bring ‘quiet areas’ under closer control and stimulation. GHQ was acutely conscious of the contrast between the War Zone and the main part of the country, which it blamed primarily on inadequate leadership rather than objective conditions. It had stepped up its own efforts to gee up the laggards over the last year, but the results were meagre.
One argument that stayed in the background, but clearly carried weight, was that GHQ was simply overloaded. Diarmuid O’Hegarty, the Director of Organization, spelt this out: in the previous summer, as he wrote on 10 March, ‘we were dealing with about 45 units more or less and had about 4 organisers.’ Now ‘we are dealing with 100 units direct and we have to supervise the work of 32 Organisers.’ Considering that ‘this includes dealing with monthly reports from all units, alterations and ratifications of officers of all ranks, general discipline, records and numerous other matters in the case of 100 units, as well as the receipt of and attention to fortnightly reports, queries etc, from 32 Organisers and their payment, it will be readily observed that the increase in this Department’s work is very large’. Two of the voluntary members of his staff had left, and the third had ‘lost much of his utility’ because the curfew regulations stopped him working regularly. He himself found his duties as secretary to the ministry more ‘various and irksome’ since de Valera’s return to the country. He could no longer get any help in his civil work from his Assistant Secretary, who was fully employed on Volunteer work. He had also recently been deprived by ‘an unfortunate accident’ of his Volunteer office. As a result of all this, he had decided to employ a lady clerk (an ‘exceptional girl’ with ‘considerable experience of similar work’) at £3 10s a week. (This brought the weekly expenditure on staff to £12 10s, but as he pointed out ‘it is obvious that a Department which expended between £600 and £1000 per month cannot be effective without a whole time staff’; up to this point, the salary cost of its officers at HQ had been nil.)148 This bureaucrat’s grumble was in part a preface to giving up his double civil–military life in April 1921. But it indicated the knife-edge on which the administration worked.
Some divisional areas decided themselves naturally, while others seemed more artificial. Most of the country was far less developed in terms of military organization than the south-west. While only two divisions were needed for the War Zone, five were created in the north where the infrastructure was much more rudimentary. In some cases, existing brigades were simply redesignated divisions, presumably in the hope that the promotion would inject new energy. (Hitler would do the same thing with his forces in the final months of the Second World War.) Probably only the south was really ready to be reorganized in this way, and the structure may have been extended across the country to give an impression of greater regularity and uniformity than actually existed. This image-creation loomed large in Mulcahy’s mission and vision: it was one of the key reasons for relentlessly pushing proper military procedures (reporting, form-filling) in face of persistent uncooperativeness or outright resistance. There was a dramatic acceleration in the frequency of written reports around this time, often on new proformas (for instance, for intelligence reports and information on the enemy order of battle). New divisional commanders were required to send reports listing ‘criticisms of reports you have received, notes on how you propose to remedy problems and defects, and any suggestions for developing your area’.149 This reflected Mulcahy’s belief in the importance of uniformity, which still left some unconvinced. Not many officers rose to the level of perfection Mulcahy found in, say, Eoin O’Duffy as commander of 2nd Northern Division. T
he Chief of Staff was ‘struck by the excellence and comprehensiveness of your general agenda’, adding that ‘your “unerring instinct” is much appreciated by me and everyone else.’ When he drew Oscar Traynor’s attention to one of O’Duffy’s reports – ‘Isn’t that a magnificent report?’ – the Dublin brigadier brusquely replied, ‘what strikes me about that man is that he must have plenty of time on his hands.’150
But even the exemplary O’Duffy had reservations about the divisionalization process. Trying to set up the 2nd Northern Division in April 1921, he reported scathingly on the state of Tyrone: ‘working here practically in the dark without any orders from GHQ’, he found ‘the standard of efficiency at a very low ebb: very little knowledge of close order drill, no knowledge whatever of extended order. No special services … & absolute ignorance of the care & use of arms’. He calculated that an astounding number of rifles (maybe sixty) had simply been lost and most of the rest, revolvers as well, were ‘in a filthy condition from rust’. ‘Thousands of rounds’ of .303 ammunition had also been lost, and thousands ‘have got useless from damp’. (He blamed this on the fact that units had not had to risk their lives to get their guns.) Discipline was feeble – ‘what would be considered reasonable orders in other counties’ would be regarded here as ‘Prussianism’. The worst battalion in Tyrone (Gortin) was dedicated to poteen making, and O’Duffy ‘scrapped all the officers and made new appointments’. The battalion would recover, he said, though it would ‘be much smaller’.151
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 37