The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  When Collins met Craig at the Colonial Office on 21 January, there did appear to be the basis for a working relationship. Not only did Craig agree that the expelled shipyard workers should be reinstated in return for the abandonment of the boycott, he even proposed a kind of all-Ireland convention to determine the relationship between north and south. The two also agreed to replace the Boundary Commission by a direct bilateral agreement. Collins could maintain that ‘we have eliminated the English interference’ and north and south would ‘settle outstanding differences between themselves’. Within a few weeks, though, it was clear that the outstanding differences remained as wide as ever. The all-Ireland conference was immediately dropped, and Craig was forced to reassure the Ulster Unionist Council on 27 January that he would not agree to any boundary change that left ‘our Ulster area any less than it is’.

  The volatility of the northern situation had been explosively demonstrated just before the Craig–Collins meeting, when the commander of the 5th Northern Division, Dan Hogan, and several of his officers were arrested by police in Tyrone while travelling with the Monaghan Gaelic football team. Early in February the IRA seized forty-two leading local loyalists as hostages, and took them across the border to Clones. On 11 February, in an armed clash at Clones station, a Volunteer officer and four Ulster Specials were killed. The scale of the crisis can be seen from Craig’s inquiry whether there would be ‘any legal obstacle to our sending a flying column of 5,000 constabulary to recover the kidnapped Loyalists’. Churchill, clearly startled, came up with a political objection – such action might cause the fall of the Provisional Government ‘thus creating chaos and leaving the extremists in control’. To limit the damage, he tetchily warned Griffith that ‘if your people are going to pop into Ulster and take off hostages every time the Northern Government enforces the law in a way you dislike … we will have a fortified frontier,’ which would have to be garrisoned by ‘Imperial troops’. Churchill set up a triangular Border Commission, with the menacing explanation that it was the alternative to the ‘drastic steps’ he would otherwise be expected to take ‘for securing the area of Northern Ireland’. But this, one more example of London’s unrealistic hopes of co-operation, was predictably ineffective, and was abandoned after a couple of months. Still, the border at least remained an open one, for the next half-century.

  The Belfast Boycott was wound up, and Collins was probably happy enough with this. Though there were still some believers in its effectiveness, there was also a growing lobby that maintained it was counter-productive. Months earlier Erskine Childers himself, together with the writers George Russell (prominent in the agricultural co-operative movement), Alice Stopford Green and others, had urged that ‘continuance of the boycott is not in the interests of Ireland as a whole.’ It ‘injured the innocent as well as the guilty’, and the most guilty – the shipyards – were ‘not seriously hampered’ by it. People were being driven out of business, and unemployment was hitting Catholics harder than Protestants. Others put it even more strongly: ‘in this movement our friends have unwittingly helped the Pogromists’; ‘Surely the Boycott weapon was not forged to punish the victims of the Pogrom!’86

  At some point in January, Collins set up an Ulster Council Command – whose name might be seen as another unconscious genuflection to the unionist doctrine of Ulster’s separateness – to co-ordinate the military policy of the northern IRA. Historians have divided sharply over whether this meant that Collins had a serious military strategy for the north, or was simply trying to hold on to the support of northern units on the Treaty issue. At the September meeting in Armagh, Eoin O’Duffy had fulminated characteristically that ‘if necessary they would have to use the lead on them’ (the unionists), and Collins presumably agreed. But he probably did not share the simple belief – which Frank Aiken, the head of the new Council, admitted that he and others still possessed – ‘in the power of the gun alone to cure all evils’. The Council’s first function seems to have been to choke off any spontaneous outbursts that might fuel a new round of tit-for-tat violence. As the failure of the first Craig–Collins pact became clear, the Council authorized a series of barrack raids in three border counties.

  The calling of the Army Convention (see p. 392 below) threw the northern IRA’s position on the struggle over the Treaty back into the balance. Roger McCorley believed that the army should follow the Dáil, and disapproved of the Convention. But he became suspicious of GHQ’s motives when it first backed and then banned it, and decided to attend. He disliked the way a ‘certain element’ took control of the proceedings, making no effort to look for any agreement with GHQ. But since GHQ had done little, in his view, to supply the northern units with arms, he decided to support the Executive. Only when he visited Beggars Bush and had an interview with O’Duffy, who promised him that GHQ would do more to support him, did he change his position. When a majority of his brigade council decided to follow GHQ, the minority almost all fell into line – there was no split.87

  The sense of latent civil war in the north was intensifying. After the Clones incident, there was a storm of gunfire in the Kent Street area of Belfast that even the hardened Belfast Telegraph found ‘awe inspiring’. On 11 March Collins protested to Churchill that three police officers, including DI Nixon, who were ‘up to their knees in the crimes of 1920–21’, were ‘the men who keep the “peace” in Belfast today’. Within a fortnight, Nixon had once again proved the point. On 24 March the killing of a Catholic family, the McMahons, by gunmen who broke into their home on the Antrim Road in Belfast – branded ‘the most terrible assassination that has yet stained the name of Belfast’ by the Belfast Telegraph – sent shockwaves that reached beyond the city, as far as London.88 This act of terrorism, which seemed more alarming because the victims were a well-known middle-class family, jolted the unionist community’s sense of moral superiority, and seemed to presage all-out war. Churchill called another north–south meeting in London on 30 March. A second Craig–Collins pact was drawn up (oddly enough, Arthur Griffith signed it alongside Collins and O’Higgins ‘on behalf of the Provisional Government’). Verbally impressive enough – eleven articles filling two dense pages – the agreement could scarcely live up to its dramatic Churchillian first article: ‘peace is today declared.’ Forward-looking provisions such as that ‘special police in mixed districts’ should be ‘composed half of Catholics and half of Protestants’, and that a committee (‘of equal numbers Catholic and Protestant’) should investigate complaints of intimidation and violence, never got beyond the verbal stage.89 There is little sign that the traditional nationalist dismissal of the credibility or legitimacy of loyalism was changing. The Treatyites held on to the belief expressed by Mulcahy on the North-Eastern Advisory Committee that carrying out all the terms of the Treaty ‘will ultimately unify the country and destroy the Northern Parliament’. That committee had been set up in February to monitor northern opinion, but predictably perhaps it heard only from nationalists.90

  In just over two months, from 10 February to 21 April, 127 Catholics were killed and some 300 injured in Belfast.91 The Northern government’s security measures themselves seemed, to nationalists, to deepen their insecurity. After the passage of the Special Powers Act in April, in effect reviving the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act, Collins told Churchill, ‘if these offensive not protective measures are taken against our people … I cannot be responsible for the awful consequences which must ensue.’ The meeting of the North-Eastern Advisory Committee on 11 April, called by Collins to discuss the Craig–Collins pacts, presented a bleak picture. However reluctantly, the sectarianism of the northern conflict was reflected in the ‘Catholic ethos’ of this meeting.92 Alongside the Dublin leadership (Collins, Cosgrave, O’Higgins, Griffith, Mulcahy and O’Duffy) and the northern IRA commanders (Seamus Woods and Frank Crummey) were three northern bishops and ten priests. Woods frankly declared that though ‘the IRA have the support of the whole people, of every Catholic in Belfast … you
could not fight.’ Outside the Falls area (where ‘there could be a fight’), people were simply ‘striving for existence’. ‘Sooner or later we [the IRA] will have to clear out of Belfast.’ The veteran republican Fr John Hassan of west Belfast said, ‘it is generally admitted that the Catholics in Belfast are on their last legs. They are not even holding on. They are going to Dublin and elsewhere. And the only reason why they are not all leaving is because we can’t get away.’93 The general recognition that, during the ‘temporary period’ before the Boundary Commission, the only hope for the northern nationalists lay in the Craig-Collins pact foreshadowed the gradual abandonment of the policy of non-recognition of Northern Ireland.94

  Collins himself was already engaged in preparing a major military action in the north. The rationale of what has usually been labelled the ‘joint IRA offensive’ – a curious locution reflecting both the IRA’s division over the Treaty and its lack of experience of concerted action – is still rather obscure. Some spoke of the planned action as a ‘Rising’, suggesting that significant hopes were invested in it. It was to be ‘a big effort … to bring about, if possible, the downfall of the six-county Government by military means’ – ‘on a given date all the Units in the Six County area were to go into action,’ with supporting actions along the border.95 On 22 February Collins approved the creation of the Belfast City Guard, a paid unit of sixty men – fifteen from each of the four city battalions. (Some saw this as a form of outdoor relief for unemployed Volunteers.) Southern commanders such as Seán Lehane of Cork No. 1 Brigade were sent to ginger up some northern formations. Lehane took over the 1st and 2nd Northern Divisions, assisted by Charlie Daly, who had already been removed from command of 2nd Northern Division for attending the Army Convention. The IRB seems to have played its last part here in bringing pro- and anti-Treaty leaders together in a common effort.96

  Significant arms supplies were promised, on the assumption it seems that weapons handed over to the Provisional Government by the British could be sent to northern units. When it was realized that their serial numbers would reveal their origin, the plan faltered. Removing the identification was a possibility, but a crude and risky one – the motive for removal was likely to be all too obvious. So an arrangement – almost as reckless – was made with Lynch to swap British-supplied guns for those of the 1st Southern Division. ‘General Collins insisted that we were to get arms from Cork No. 1 Brigade, and that he would return rifles instead to Cork from those rifles handed over by the British.’97 This may have produced a few hundred rifles. Thomas Fitzpatrick’s brigade got a hundred, brought in to Cushendall on a lorry which broke down, ironically, a mile or so outside Larne – the site of the UVF’s celebrated gun-running in 1914. The brigade adjutant succeeded in getting the local British commander to have it repaired, telling him it was a load of petrol. But before that the brigade had barely twenty usable rifles.98

  All these developments were too little too late. There was no quick fix for the structural weaknesses of the northern IRA, and most units remained seriously short of arms. If any plans for the joint offensive were drawn up, they have not survived. Its start date seems to have been set for early May, but was then postponed for two weeks or more: the vagueness about such a key part of the co-ordinated action played into its confused execution. Severe damage was inflicted on the Volunteer organization, particularly on 3rd Northern Division, when a big cache of papers, which incredibly enough had been kept at the Belfast Liaison Office, was seized in a police raid.99 The rescheduled offensive was to be preceded by an attempt to seize two armoured cars and 250 rifles from Musgrave Street barracks in Belfast on 17 May. This was nearly a dramatic triumph: with the assistance of an insider, the armoury was actually captured, but the alarm was raised while Woods and his men were bundling up the guns. He decided to retreat, and the attackers all got away, by the skin of their teeth. ‘We had hardly reached safety’, Woods reported, ‘when the area was flooded with Lancias and armoured cars filled with Specials. They swept the streets with machine gun fire and for three quarters of an hour the area was a regular battlefield.’ Even so his men ‘succeeded in driving them off’ with ‘rifles and PPs [Peter the Painters]’.100

  The Belfast Telegraph disapprovingly commented that ‘all the brains, all the audacity, all the enterprise and all the resources’ appeared to be ‘on the side of the rebels’.101 But the appearance was illusory, certainly as far as resources and organization went. The offensive was put off again until 22 May, but communication failures meant that the order did not reach all units. 2nd Northern said it was impossible to cancel since orders had already been issued; there was ‘some confusion in some of the areas’ about the second date. The Antrim Brigade received orders to launch the operation on the 19th, and committed all its four battalions to attack police barracks. It commandeered a large number of cars and ‘for about 48 hours we had complete freedom of movement practically throughout the whole [brigade] area.’ But the premature start meant that ‘all the enemy forces which would otherwise have been engaged in different centres were concentrated in our area,’ and the IRA units were forced to retreat in columns to the hills.102 Elsewhere a debacle reminiscent of Easter Week followed, though on a much smaller scale, with individual units carrying out uncoordinated sniping and arson attacks. The Tyrone IRA, despite receiving a consignment of rifles with ‘a large quantity of ammunition’, was still waiting to act when several of its leaders were arrested in a ‘sudden large-scale swoop’ by British forces on 22 May.103 The idea of an offensive sputtered on in some border counties, notably Donegal, into the late autumn, but the possibility of united action was effectively ended long before that by the outbreak of the civil war. With a mixed bag of units and a weakly defined objective, the doomed northern offensive starkly revealed the limits of the Republic’s capacity to vindicate its claim to the north.

  ‘POWER WIELDED BY MEN WHO HAVE NO LEGAL AUTHORITY’

  The Treaty created a complicated authority structure. Some believed that the Treaty vote effectively disestablished the Republic, though most appear to have accepted the republican contention that the Dáil had no authority to do this. Legally, the Treaty had been approved, but not yet ratified: only a new parliament could do this. Until a general election was held the Republic stayed in being, and a system of dual authority emerged. Collins foreshadowed this when he proposed on 3 January 1922 that the Treaty be passed and ‘the Provisional Government come into being, subject to Dail Eireann’. (Béaslaí sardonically suggested that the dual set-up would allow ‘the opposition’ to ‘redeem the country … and take all the kudos’, while the Provisional Government could take ‘all the shame and disgrace’.) The issue triggered the final fracture of the Dáil. When de Valera resigned as president of Dáil Éireann on 9 January, the proposal to re-elect him as ‘President of the Republic’ was, as we have seen, lost by only two votes. The pro-Treaty side actually denied that such a post existed – although the title had been in common use since at least August 1921 – holding that such a president could be elected only by the people, not by the Dáil. When Collins proposed Griffith as president of Dáil Éireann, de Valera insisted that his oath of office would bind him not to subvert the Republic. Griffith undertook to maintain the Republic until the people decided the issue, but de Valera said that his commitment to carry out the Treaty would put him in an impossible position, simultaneously maintaining and subverting the Republic. Before the vote was taken, the ex-President and the anti-Treaty deputies walked out.

  The ambiguity of authority went beyond the Dáil. Within days of the signature of the Treaty, it was all too clear to the British that there was a ‘remarkable misunderstanding’ about the powers to be exercised by the Provisional Government. Griffith and Collins clearly thought that it would be able to spend money ‘on other things than those for which the British parliament had given authority’.104 They had also ‘not faced the fact that the treaty does nothing to create any organ in Ireland capable of giving a legal sanct
ion to the Irish constitution when framed’.105 These misunderstandings as the British saw them were in line with the interpretation Griffith and Collins were offering the Dáil: the Treaty would allow bigger powers in practice than a strict reading of it might suggest. The crucial question was whether Britain would be able to compel the Provisional Government to follow the procedures required by British law. On the legal issue, it failed. Without legislation the British government could not give the Provisional Government financial powers, but no new legislation could be brought in before the end of the parliamentary recess in February 1922. The only legal route around the problem was to use the Crown Colony clauses of the Government of Ireland Act, but Griffith and Collins would not tolerate this. So the British were forced to accept an ‘admittedly irregular’ arrangement in which a ‘makeshift’ provisional government was said in law to be an ad hoc executive committee advising the Viceroy. This fiction would fill the gap until the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act could be passed.

  On 14 January Griffith – in his capacity as chairman of the plenipotentiaries – convened the House of Commons of Southern Ireland to approve the Treaty and elect a provisional government to implement it. This second and final meeting of the Southern Parliament brought the four Trinity College members (the only ones who had turned up at the abortive first meeting in May 1921) and sixty pro-Treaty TDs together. Though the assembly had been established by the Government of Ireland Act, and met in accordance with the requirements of the Treaty, it might possibly have been regarded as the Dáil. In the event, Collins as chairman of the Provisional Government, and Griffith as president of the Dáil, set up two parallel governments. Mulcahy, who became minister for defence in the Dáil Cabinet, had (like Griffith) no position in the Provisional Government, which had no defence minister. Immediately after the Treaty vote, under pressure from de Valera, he had been induced to assure the Dáil that ‘the Army will remain the Army of the Irish Republic.’ For six weeks or so, this useful fiction held up; in mid-February, though, Mulcahy started to attend Provisional Government meetings, so the government could be in ‘closer touch with the Defence Department’.106 Collins retained his old Finance portfolio in the Dáil government, and Cosgrave, O’Higgins and Duggan occupied the same posts in both executives. This meant that the Provisional Government could be seen as deriving its authority, whether formally or informally, from the Dáil – not from Britain via the Treaty.107