Though Labour polled weakly in the north – winning only two seats – Sinn Féin itself managed to secure just six (tying with the old nationalist party) against thirty-six unionists. No Sinn Féin candidates were ‘Ulstermen’. This marginal presence was in sharp contrast to the resounding endorsement of the Republic in the south. British electoral reform had endowed the second Dáil with significantly more members than the first, and its 125 deputies were less like Sinn Feiners than before. Nearly a third were Volunteer officers – up from a bare fifth of the first Dáil – including six members of GHQ, three divisional commanders, two divisional staff members and seven brigadiers. (Even more – 42 per cent – were Volunteers.) Of the seventy-seven TDs who were currently at liberty, fifty-two were on the run, and as Diarmuid O’Hegarty noted, ‘the task of bringing together ninety [sic] members including several well-known ladies’ for meetings would be ‘a big one’. Various ways of coping with this were mooted: Collins thought that no more than half of them should meet at any one time, de Valera proposed creating a series of twenty-strong committees, and the Cabinet opted for a grand committee of thirty-one.
De Valera took control of the process of winding up the first Dáil ministry and inaugurating the second, holding that as president he stood above the national assembly. Ministers would ‘resign their portfolios through the President’, who would summon the new Dáil. Whether this was strictly constitutional was an issue that did not bother people at this stage (though it would have ramifications later). Though de Valera had been routinely called the President of the Irish Republic while in the USA, and had come to think of himself as such, he was actually President of the Dáil, in English terms prime minister (‘Príomh-Aire’ in the ‘original’ Irish version). The constitution had not yet provided either for a head of state or for a dissolution of parliament. Nor had the issue of pay been worked out. TDs – unlike Westminster or indeed Belfast MPs – were unpaid, but quite a few of the second Dáil held paid posts either in the administration or in the army. Collins thought that paid administrators should give up their jobs to be TDs, though he did not make the same demand of Volunteer GHQ or divisional commanders.
In fact, it was not always easy to get these officers to accept salaries. Ernie O’Malley had the distinction of being the first paid field commander in the Volunteers, at £5 a week. Although he must have shared the aspiration towards professionalization that underlay the proposal to pay divisional staffs, he refused the salary, no doubt influenced by Seamus Robinson’s view that ‘it looks as if they want to have men in charge of divisions they can call [G]HQ men.’171 He received a stiff note from the Director of Organization, Eoin O’Duffy – ‘As regards you not accepting a salary, you at least shall be paid direct from here. You are our Officer and represent GHQ in No. 2 Division.’ All divisional officers devoting ‘their whole time to responsible Army work’ must accept an allowance as decided by GHQ. (O’Malley had of course been a paid GHQ organizer for several years.) He was bluntly instructed to ‘forward a covering address’.172 Mulcahy saw this (as Eamon Price told O’Malley) as a disciplinary issue, but even after being charged with ‘indiscipline’ O’Malley remained defiant. He himself said that he eventually accepted the money on behalf of his unit. But the Department of Defence accounts show that ‘owing to some disagreements between the senior officers of [2nd Southern] Division’, the first payment of £20 – four weeks’ pay in advance – was returned. Since ‘it was felt that it was only a question of verbally explaining certain outstanding questions’, the money was not passed back into the accounts. The dispute clearly continued over the following months. ‘A number of letters passed between the Director of Organisation and Commandant O’Malley’ about this and the general question of payment of divisional staffs, ‘but agreement had not been reached before the Treaty was signed.’ The cash seems to have remained in limbo.173
THE MILITARY BALANCE
Even though the Crown forces had not come up with ‘decisive results’ in time for the May elections, they believed they were now getting the upper hand. Admittedly, Macready maintained his professional pessimism. (‘Whatever we do, we are sure to be wrong,’ he had glumly said when the question of postponing the election was being discussed.) But in the most active commands, the Martial Law Area – which Macready never visited – and Dublin District, the military leaders were distinctly optimistic. ‘By the beginning of April,’ 6th Division said, ‘the initiative had passed definitely to the troops.’ The following weeks were a period ‘of almost unbroken success’, Irish Command later claimed. ‘Assisted by the fine summer weather, encouraged by the promise of further reinforcements and increased powers in July, everybody threw themselves with still greater energy into the struggle … Large Mobile Columns and small Officers patrols scoured the country … No place, however remote, could be regarded as a safe retreat for the “wanted men”.’ In Dublin a series of successful raids in late April netted four machine guns, thirty rifles, some 150 revolvers and over 20,000 rounds of ammunition in the space of a few weeks – a huge blow. At the end of the month no fewer than forty Dublin Volunteers were captured in a raid on Blackhall Place.174 In 6th Division area, ‘the rebels had suffered severely, and were in no mood to join issue with the troops’, while the military forces were ‘spoiling for a fight’.175
Sadly, this cheerful picture contained one annoying blemish – it was still ‘very difficult to “get at” the extremists, except by hunting them down’. However keen the troops might be, 6th Division recognized that ‘the one problem confronting the military authorities was how to run the various rebel bands to earth.’ This might be portrayed as just a single problem, but it was really crucial. General Strickland might predict that ‘One good encounter, where heavy casualties are inflicted on them, might bring their activities to a speedy end.’ But without accurate information such an encounter remained impossible to engineer. Pressure exerted on the community through collective punishments (including the closure of such co-operative creameries as had survived police reprisals) touched people’s pockets, ‘but in most cases they took no action to stop outrages, and merely gave vent to their woes.’176
Police indiscipline was becoming ever more worrying. At the end of February, the commander of the RIC Auxiliary Division, Brigadier Frank Crozier, resigned when his attempt to discipline the men he held responsible for wanton damage during a raid in Trim was overruled by Tudor. This was a publicity setback, since Crozier proved highly vocal in giving his version to the press (though he waited nearly ten years before publishing his account in book form). There was another in April, when a party of Auxiliaries raiding a hotel in Castleconnell killed a police sergeant who was drinking at the bar and one of themselves in a burst of firing in the courtyard outside. They were accused by one guest of rampaging around ‘like demented Red Indians’, and leaving dum-dum cartridges at the scene, and since the guest was the brother of the eminent Liberal peer Lord Parmoor the issue was brought (complete with dum-dum bullet exhibit) to the floor of the House of Lords. The army fumed that the Auxiliaries ‘had the wind up, blood up, and did what they used to do in the trenches in France’. They might not, in the circumstances, be criminally responsible, but ‘they are not fit to be policemen.’177
Time was almost up for the reprisals policy. At the beginning of June the Cabinet heard Macready’s admission ‘that we were getting into a difficult position’ – ‘if the military burned a cottage, then the Sinn Feiners burned two, then the military four, and so on’. In Cork, for instance, when four houses were destroyed in Blackpool by troops as a reprisal for an ambush in which three policemen had been killed, the IRA burned down the houses of four prominent unionists next day, as well as that ‘den of imperialism’ the Douglas Golf Pavilion.178 The 6th Division claimed in mid-May that ‘there has been no recurrence of counter-reprisals by the rebels,’ thanks to ‘our determination to increase the ratio of destruction indefinitely’.179 But this seems to have been dangerous bravado. Cork No. 2 Briga
de was pressing for a wider targeting of ‘Active Enemies of Ireland’: such families ‘should be ordered out of the country and their lands confiscated’ (though they would be ‘allowed to dispose of their stock’). Mulcahy was concerned that unionists and Orangemen should be classified thus only if they were ‘actively anti-Irish in their outlook and actions’, but this limitation was alarmingly vague.180 In June the IRA was formally instructed to answer British reprisals with counter-reprisals, ‘stopping only when the district has been entirely cleared of active enemies of Ireland’.181
When the Cabinet’s Irish Committee had asked Macready why he could not simply stop reprisals, he said that he would then have to ‘get something else’ – he would have to enforce the order against carrying arms ‘by punishment of death’. He had not done this so far because it seemed ‘difficult’ with martial law only partially in force. But soon afterwards, on 3 June, official reprisals were indeed abandoned. One brigadier in the MLA reassured his units that this Cabinet decision had ‘not been arrived at because of the vapourings of some insignificant member of the House of Commons’ – it was largely due to the King’s influence, ‘so we can all be perfectly happy about it.’ Instead there would be drumhead courts martial for possession of arms – the Fermoy commander instructed his officers to ‘regard the Drumhead Court Martial as one of the most important weapons in your armoury’, to be treated as being ‘as important as a tactical operation’.182 Pressure in Cork No. 2 Brigade area was mounting; in March a search operation in the Boggeragh Mountains narrowly missed capturing the brigade HQ at Nadd, and the brigade commandant, Seán Moylan, was arrested on 16 May (carrying among other documents a cheque for £115, which was gleefully cashed by the HQ of the Kerry Infantry Brigade.)
Through May and June 1921 the war of independence hung in the balance. Republican military activity peaked, in numerical terms, and the Crown forces – whose casualty rate had dropped to below thirty a month in March and April – suffered record losses. From the beginning of the year to July, 94 soldiers and 223 policemen were killed, nearly double the totals (47 and 127) for the last six months of 1920. In the last twelve weeks of the conflict, the toll of military and police deaths (48 and 114) amounted to a quarter of all their fatalities since January 1919. On 6 June the Chief Secretary reluctantly acknowledged that there was ‘a very marked increase in rebel military activity throughout the country’. Even though the bulk of that activity took the form of ‘small jobs’, sniping, assassinations and road cutting rather than quasi-regular flying-column actions, it was (as Mulcahy had urged) none the less effective in psychological terms.
Early in June the Dublin Volunteers attacked a military motor transport depot known as the ‘Shell Factory’, destroying forty vehicles (including five of the new Peerless armoured cars) and other stores to the value of £88,000. Nobody was killed, so this operation was not a headline-grabber, but it was a real success, and pointed a new direction in which a great deal of expensive damage could easily be inflicted. So far, and perhaps surprisingly, sabotage had been neglected. A couple of weeks earlier, a different operation had showcased the IRA’s repertoire of skills. In an attempt to rescue Seán MacEoin from Mountjoy gaol, members of the Squad seized a Peerless armoured car and drove it into the prison yard. Emmet Dalton and Joe Kehoe in British uniform, posing as court-martial officers from Dublin District HQ, presented a warrant to remove MacEoin for interview. When the prison governor insisted on confirming this with Dublin Castle they tied and gagged him, but any chance they had of getting to MacEoin ended when firing apparently broke out in the prison yard. Still, they managed to get away – the army, which had no record of any firing, said they had not been recognized as hostile.
Even the crusty Dublin District staff, usually dismissive of rebel capabilities, recognized this raid as a ‘brilliant achievement’. The armoured car had been escorting a lorry delivering meat to the Dublin Abattoir, and its crew (half trained like most of those drafted to man the new Peerless cars) had fallen into a routine, failed to maintain normal precautions and panicked when attacked. They ‘tamely surrendered their arms and their car’. The driver even helped the raiders to restart the machine and advised them on its gearbox – for which he was court-martialled.183 But their attackers were undeniably daring: when the phone in the abattoir office rang, one of them had even taken an order for meat from the Curragh and asked them to ring back in twenty minutes, before hanging up and cutting the line. After driving the armoured car away, they were forced to abandon it on the Malahide road (either because it had overheated or because its fuel line had failed). They carried off its two Hotchkiss machine guns, though they left behind not only two spare barrels and 1,500 rounds of .303 ammunition for the guns, but also three of their own pistols. If they had succeeded in springing MacEoin this would have been one of the most remarkable successes of the war – it was ‘frightfully disappointing that he should have been missed’, as Mulcahy ruefully reflected, since ‘everything went so well … it was only a matter of another 8 or 10 seconds.’ Even so it created a striking impression.
In between these successes, Dublin staged an attack more in tune with de Valera’s idea of warfare. Arguing the need to ‘deliver a smashing blow’, the President had persuaded the GHQ staff to look at the possibility of attacking either Beggars Bush barracks (close to the site of de Valera’s garrison in 1916) or the Custom House. Asked to investigate, the Dublin brigadier reported that the first target was unfeasible.184 Accordingly, on 25 May some 120 men of the Dublin Brigade entered the Custom House, spread petrol throughout the vast building and set it alight. This really was a big operation, and the destruction of a mass of local government, Inland Revenue, Stamp Office and Stationery Office records could be portrayed as a lethal blow to British rule. An tOglaċ proclaimed it as signalling ‘the final collapse of English civil administration in this country’, even though the Land Office records were actually as useful to ordinary people as to the government. It was a spectacular action in the grandest part of official Dublin: the image of the great building in flames across the river was unforgettable. But it came at a high price. Though the operation went on for three-quarters of an hour without attracting attention, a passing group of Auxiliaries were fired on by scouts outside the building, and a general affray broke out. Six men were killed and over eighty captured. If this was a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one; after follow-up arrests had brought the total to over a hundred, the 2nd Battalion effectively ceased to exist.
British intelligence raided one of Collins’s offices on 26 May and found a letter written that morning regretting ‘that we lost all those gallant fellows yesterday at the Custom House’. Charlie Dalton and his surviving colleagues ‘spent a very gloomy night thinking of the serious losses we had sustained’, and the following weeks were ‘very trying for us’.185 In an attempt to ‘conceal our crippled state from the enemy’, the survivors stepped up the tempo of their activities. The arrival of two Thompson sub-machine guns opened up new possibilities for demonstrating republican strength, but when Dalton was selected to make the first use of one in an ambush of a train at Drumcondra on 16 June, he was given no instruction on how to fire the weapon.186 In fact, he had never had one in his hands until the time came to open fire, and ‘it took me a minute to locate the various gadgets,’ by which time the target had passed by. He did not get another opportunity to use one in action.
The intensification of republican military activity was more ambiguous than it might look, however. Flying columns made a sharply declining contribution to it – indeed it has been suggested that most of them found their position ‘untenable’ in spring 1921, as British activity increased and night hours diminished.187 Many had as much difficulty in making contact as their opponents did. The Galway Brigade’s 2nd Battalion column ‘prepared six ambush positions which we occupied and remained in position all day, but no enemy forces came … on [the] routes which we expected the enemy would travel’.188 A GHQ strategic assessment had identified
Longford as ‘a very valuable focus of action in the North-Midlands’, and on the basis of the success of Seán MacEoin’s north Longford ASU, GHQ planned to ‘make the Longford Units the nucleus for working up the entire region’. It had already sent Seán Connolly to organize Leitrim, and now wanted to encourage neighbouring units to send men to get experience with the column. Just at that moment, however, MacEoin had been arrested (at Mullingar, returning from a meeting with Brugha in Dublin). Connolly was ordered back from Leitrim, but before he could leave he was ambushed and killed at Selton Hill. Some infighting over the succession to MacEoin seriously damaged the cohesion of the north Longford force.189
At the same time Leitrim went from bad to worse. Ordered to investigate how Connolly’s unit had been ‘given away’, the brigade intelligence officer identified a culprit – on rather circumstantial evidence. He ‘did not contact [him] before he was shot’, since ‘that would have shown me up.’ After apparently receiving compensation for his death, his family ‘deserted their farm’. GHQ sent an inspecting officer, Captain Paddy Morrissey, to reorganize the brigade. He took a dim view of it, telling the 3rd Battalion that ‘the South Leitrim Brigade was the worst brigade in Ireland and that the 3rd Battalion was the worst battalion in the brigade.’ The brigadier resigned along with his whole staff. (One of them, the vice-OC, returned to the ranks as a scout, emphasizing that this was ‘none too safe a duty … you did not know what you would run into in front and you did not know what you were going to get from behind either’.)190
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 39