The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  ‘IN DEALING WITH THE IRISH YOU MUST SHOW THAT YOU MEAN TO GO ON’

  The failure to achieve unity of command, and the persistent divisions between military and police, now threatened to wreck British policy. King George V spoke for many in his dislike of police methods and of the police chief himself – telling Wilson that he wanted to ‘abolish all Black and Tans’, and that Wilson’s predecessor as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, had a low opinion of Tudor. But several ministers – including, crucially, the Prime Minister – took the opposite view. Even as the Cabinet agreed to the programme of reinforcements, Lloyd George insisted that the ‘Irish job’ was ‘a policeman’s job’. The military should support the police, not the other way round – if ‘it becomes a military job only it will fail’. He backed up Churchill’s assertion that ‘on balance Tudor and his men were … getting to the root of the matter quicker than the military.’216

  Macready (perhaps intentionally) colluded in this by firing off alarming warnings about the resilience of the army itself. In late May 1921, just as the surge was being launched, he presented the government with a deflating assessment of the prospects. Even when strong reinforcements arrived they would need a long time to adapt to Irish conditions. The scope for offensive action was limited. The troops themselves were being stretched to the limit. Officers would soon be unfit to serve without a ‘very considerable period’ of leave; soldiers, mostly young and ‘fine drawn’, were under punishing physical and mental strain, worse than conventional warfare. (As Churchill’s successor as war secretary, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, explained, ‘there is no back area into which they can be withdrawn.’) Unless ‘the present state of affairs’ was ‘brought to a conclusion’ by October, virtually the whole force would have to be relieved. Since Macready was ‘quite aware’ that there would be no troops to replace them, this was a grim ultimatum. Again, in mid-June, as the surge was well under way, he treated the Cabinet’s Irish Committee to an even gloomier view. He told them he was ‘losing his self-respect’ – ‘it put him in an absurd position,’ for instance, that though he was commander-in-chief of the British forces he was ‘unable to buy English goods in Dublin’. He felt he was losing the confidence of his men, and asked ‘the Government to bear in mind the personal feeling of the tools they were using’ – otherwise ‘those tools would break in their hands.’

  The King had also queried Macready’s suitability, and though Wilson defended him – by blaming the army’s underachievement on the ‘frocks’ who would not permit ‘unity of control’ – the monarch did have a point. Macready never gave the impression of bursting with energy and ideas for developing the counter-insurgency campaign. His pervasive negativity – verging on fatalism – and repeated assertions that the only possible solution must be political and not military had tried Wilson’s own patience. His preference for large-scale operations blinded him to the real challenges of guerrilla warfare. In his May report he had noted the use in some places of ‘little expeditions of a couple of subaltern officers and from 12 to 20 men’ without apparently realizing that this was the most promising tactical adaptation yet tried by the army.

  Worthington-Evans interpreted Macready’s assessment in almost apocalyptic terms: unless ‘full advantage is taken of the opportunities of the good weather of the summer months’, there was ‘a grave risk of failure’. In essence they had three months to ‘break the back of the rebellion’.217 After two years or more of ‘virtual stalemate’, this was asking a lot. In military terms, it may not have looked entirely encouraging that almost a year after the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had pronounced driving ‘a childish expedient’, the key method identified for taking advantage of the summer weather was that ‘drives and other similar intensive operations should be inaugurated.’ It is interesting, though, that when news of this was leaked to Collins, the plan sounded more substantial. After the dissolution of the Southern Parliament, martial law ‘of the most rigorous’ nature would be proclaimed (and Collins was told that the proclamations had already been printed), and civil courts would be put out of commission. Three times the present military strength would ‘operate on a scheme of investment of areas, search and internment. All means of transport from push bicycles up will be commandeered and allowed only on permit.’218

  With a commander-in-chief so committed to ‘a generous and definite offer to Ireland’, it seems hard to argue that the eventual decision to negotiate a truce represented ‘the dominance of political over purely military considerations’.219 Purely military considerations had never played a part in the British response to the Republic, and indeed it would (as Clausewitz would say) have been absurd if they had. More to the point, it is hard to argue that there was actually a decision to negotiate. Rather, the British government had inadvertently closed off its options when it set the timetable for the implementation of the Government of Ireland Act. If the Southern Parliament was not inaugurated by 12 July, ‘Southern Ireland’ would revert to Crown Colony status and be ruled, in effect, by martial law. Though a few ministers may actually have relished this prospect, for the majority it was unattractive if not unthinkable. It is hard to believe that they had paid any attention to these remote contingencies when the bill was being drawn up – nobody seems, for instance, to have noticed the significance of the 12 July deadline. The Cabinet’s discussions in early June of how martial law would operate cannot have rendered the prospect more inviting.

  On 21 June Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, one of the few ministers who seem to have faced the prospect of Crown Colony government with equanimity, made a remarkable speech. His recognition that what was going on in Ireland was ‘a small war’ was unprecedented. He went further, adding that the previous three months had shown ‘the failure of our military methods to keep pace with and to overcome the military methods which have been taken by our opponents’. But he asserted that Britain would redouble its efforts to win. Next day, the King opened the Northern Parliament with a carefully phrased kite appealing to ‘all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation’. (A more ‘gushing’ original draft for the speech by General Jan Smuts had been chilled by the still-hawkish Balfour.) Birkenhead noted the ‘apparently harsh disparity’ between the two speeches, and thought it ‘unfortunate they should come on the same day’. But Lloyd George thought the contrast ‘helpful’ – ‘in dealing with the Irish you must shew that you mean to go on.’220 That afternoon, a military raiding party unknowingly arrested Eamon de Valera in Blackrock, in possession of a clutch of documents including IRA operation reports. He had given a false name (Crown forces had general orders not to arrest him), but when he arrived at Portobello barracks he announced that he was the ‘President of the Irish Republic’. In ‘the sort of absurd farce that does happen in this country’, as Sturgis put it, Andy Cope had at that moment been ‘seeing [Bishop Michael] Fogarty and two other Bishops’ to persuade them ‘to see the said gentleman today and urge peace!’221 The ‘said gentleman’ was hastily released, though not before the military authorities had tried to launch a prosecution for high treason.

  Cope had been on this mission, in fact, ever since he arrived in Dublin in spring 1920. Mark Sturgis’s diary provides a vivid record of a series of peacemaking moves beginning in July 1920 and recurring at regular intervals after that. The most promising, Archbishop Clune’s shuttle at the end of 1920, had, as we have seen, foundered on Lloyd George’s demand that Volunteers surrender their weapons. It may also have been undermined by the Wexford TD Roger Sweetman’s proposal on 30 November of a conference of public bodies to formulate truce proposals. (Sweetman had become strongly opposed to the killing of Irish policemen, and would quit the Dáil in January.) On 6 December the Sinn Féin Vice-President, Fr Michael O’Flanagan, apparently unaware of Clune’s mission, sent Lloyd George a telegram saying that ‘Ireland is willing’ (to make peace) and asking ‘what first step do you propose?’ Lloyd George supposedly told Clune
, ‘this is the white feather and we are going to make these fellows surrender.’ But there was rigidity on the other side as well. Griffith insisted ‘there would be no surrender no matter what frightfulness was used,’ and not only held out against the demand for a surrender of arms, but also held out for the ‘republican demand’: ‘we had a mandate for it from the people and only the people could revoke it.’222 Collins, who met Clune twice, said he was ‘profoundly distrustful’ of the whole initiative, which seemed to him ‘an effort to put us in the wrong’ – both with ‘the world’ and ‘particularly with our own people’. When Collins briefed the newly returned de Valera on the negotiations, though, his comment that Sweetman’s and O’Flanagan’s ‘rushing in torpedoed the efforts’ implied perhaps that he had taken them quite seriously.223 And O’Flanagan himself later said that his intervention had had the ‘deliberate intention of spoiling the great negotiations’, which he thought were under British control.224

  In mid-March 1921, de Valera noted that ‘feelers are being thrown out in all directions just now.’225 A senior Cabinet minister, Lord Derby, went over (ostensibly in an unofficial capacity) to meet de Valera and Cardinal Logue in April, but there still seemed little room for manoeuvre – ‘an Irish republic they would never achieve so long as England had a man left to fight,’ in Logue’s view. De Valera was already signalling that any negotiations would depend on the British government taking the republican counter-state seriously. He archly objected to the ‘hole and corner methods’ being used, which like the ‘unofficial intermediaries to the nth degree removed’ were not the way to approach questions ‘affecting the fate of our nation’.

  The departure of Lord French in April was another indication of a shift in the political atmosphere. Though he had long since lost his influence on policymaking, he was undeniably a public symbol of military coercion. He did not go willingly – for one thing, since his house in Fermanagh had been destroyed by the IRA in a counter-reprisal, the Viceregal Lodge was his only home. His replacement, Viscount FitzAlan, was a firm enough unionist, but like his fellow unionist Lord Midleton believed that coercion had gone too far. The fact that he was a Catholic – the first Catholic ever to hold the lord lieutenancy – was clearly intended to make a public statement, and the fact that his appointment closely followed the retirement of Bonar Law added to speculation that the hardliners were losing ground.

  Some of the shock and mystification caused by the Custom House attack stemmed from its timing – at the exact moment when the peaceniks in the Castle were hourly expecting a dramatic breakthrough. On 19 May Sturgis had fused his two greatest interests, peacemongering and horse-racing, in a ‘Peace Stakes’ – with no fewer than three separate channels of communication, including his own, in amicable contention. Andy Cope was ‘running good and strong right out in front by himself’, followed by James MacMahon, the joint Under Secretary, whose extensive contacts with the Catholic leadership had enabled him to come through after being ‘nowhere early on’, and who now ‘lies second making things easy for Andy’, while the Quin–Sturgis combination ‘are going comfortably about third on the rails’.226 (‘Quin’ was his close friend ‘Dicky’ Wyndham-Quin – the future Lord Dunraven – who was the Viceroy’s Military Secretary.) But though ‘we are assured’ that the republicans wanted peace, they went on ‘risking’ it by intensified military activity. ‘Their mentality has me beat,’ Sturgis noted three days later when ‘these brutes took a poor devil they had wounded out of the Mater Hospital and shot him dead on the porch.’ How could this sort of thing go on ‘in spite of negotiations’? When the Custom House went up in flames he could only wonder ‘how can this make settlement anything but more difficult’ – and in any case burning ‘the finest building in one’s own capital seems sheer lunacy’.227

  In early June, Cope and MacMahon were busy enlisting Cardinal Logue’s aid to arrange a meeting between de Valera and the Prime Minister elect of Northern Ireland, James Craig – resting on the vital assumption that, as Logue ‘said definitely, not even the Extremists wanted a Republic’. In mid-June Collins remarked to de Valera that ‘this particular peace move business has been on for some time. They have tried so many lines of approach that it is obvious they are banking somewhat on it.’ When he received, through a back-channel, news of the planned British summer surge, he thought it ‘quite possible that this is part of the peace move’.228 Indeed it seems clear that (as the veteran parliamentarian Tim Healy told his brother at this time) Cope was ‘continually meet[ing] the Sinn leaders, including Michael Collins’.229 The prospect of peace talks had been discreetly waved in the President’s direction for a couple of weeks, but de Valera had not responded – Sturgis attributed this reticence in part to the fact that the republicans were ‘to a certain extent all to pieces’.

  ‘TO LIE DOWN AND BE KICKED BY MURDERERS’

  As soon as the King had opened the new Northern Parliament in Belfast, the British government finally felt ready to deal with the rest of the country. On 24 June Lloyd George sent invitations to de Valera – ‘as the chosen leader of the great majority in Southern Ireland’ – and the new Northern Ireland Premier, Craig, to come to London ‘to explore to the utmost the possibility of a settlement’. Over the next few days several republican leaders, including Arthur Griffith and Robert Barton, were released from prison. Surprisingly, to him at least, the unionist Lord Midleton received a telegram from de Valera inviting him ‘to come to Dublin with three other representatives of the “Loyal South” to discuss the answer to be given to the Government’. At first Midleton (who had never met or even seen de Valera) assumed this was a hoax, but showed the telegram to Lloyd George. The Prime Minister was plainly relieved – ‘they had had no reply whatever to their gesture of amity’ – and urged him to go. Midleton went to the Mansion House on 3 July, not having been given a time for the meeting, and was told that the Lord Mayor’s secretary would see him. ‘A tall spare man with spectacles met us, and in a very friendly way arranged the hour, shaking hands with us warmly at parting and thanking us for coming over.’230

  De Valera was, as he told Lloyd George a few days later, consulting what he called his ‘political minority’ before responding to the Prime Minister’s invitation.231 He had invited Craig as well as Midleton and three other prominent southern unionists, but Craig turned him down. On 1 July the Dáil ministry met, and decided to put forward the truce terms they had outlined in December. Lloyd George originally assumed that negotiations would go ahead in London without any formal truce in Ireland. The 24 June letter (drafted in Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon typically protesting against the ‘tragic futility’ of collective drafting) avoided any mention of a truce. Churchill proposed simply that ‘we should choke off our people and they theirs.’ It took ‘two long days’ debate’ at the Mansion House before Midleton went back to tell the Prime Minister that unless he agreed to ‘stopping all fighting’, it was useless to continue the discussions. The ‘rebels’ had required that, if there was no truce, ‘the troops should be confined to barracks and not show … in the streets of Dublin, as they could not prevent their supporters from taking advantage of them. In fact, the position would be impossible.’ Lloyd George as usual jibbed, but eventually, ‘without recalling the Cabinet, sat down and wrote me a letter conceding the point’.

  On 5 July General Jan Smuts also arrived in Dublin as an ‘unofficial intermediary’ and met de Valera and Griffith, with Eamonn Duggan and Robert Barton. They told him they ‘had made up their mind to refuse’ the invitation because ‘Ulster’ would not be involved. The South African elder statesman advised them that they had ‘no force but a certain measure of public opinion’, which they would lose if they refused this olive branch. Griffith seemed to agree with him, but de Valera ‘spoke like a visionary’, Smuts noted, ‘spoke continually of generations of oppression and seemed to live in a world of dreams, visions and shadows’. They agreed, though, that ‘if they were granted a republic, they were prepared to
be bound down by limitations.’ Smuts deprecated this idea – his experience with the ‘limited Republic’ of Transvaal suggested it would produce continual disputes culminating in breakdown. ‘We fought a three years’ war over the limitations and my country was reduced to ashes.’ Smuts clearly hoped that this apocalyptic warning would persuade them to accept Dominion status, but he found them determined that the British government ‘should make a great gesture’ to show it did not distrust the Irish people. ‘The conflict is only hardening the spirit of our people.’ Any settlement ‘must be an everlasting peace’.