Did this dual authority make sense, and did it matter if it did not? It certainly produced some convoluted official channels. For instance, Mulcahy as minister for defence in the Dáil government ‘arranged with the Provisional Government to occupy for them all vacated military and police posts for the purpose of their maintenance and safeguarding’. Any expenses incurred would be ‘charged to the Provisional Government’.108 To have two governments of the same territory involved an element of unreality which might undermine either or both. Winston Churchill, who was responsible for pushing the Irish Free State (Agreement) Bill through an increasingly fractious House of Commons in London, angered by the violent incidents in the north, was increasingly alarmed about the situation. Pointing out that the Provisional Government was operating without any official British sanction, he saw it as ‘fatal to peace, social order, and good government to have power wielded by men who have no legal authority’. A provisional government ‘unsanctified by law’ yet recognized by the British government was ‘an anomaly unprecedented in the history of the British Empire’.109 This irregularity may be seen as the first definite indication that Griffith and Collins were right in their understanding of the way the future power relationship between Britain and Ireland would evolve.
The Provisional Government took policing more seriously than the republican administration had; it had no alternative. It had to vindicate the authority of the law simply to survive, and to keep the British off its back. The situation at the turn of the year was dire, and something had to be done. But what? It was politically impossible to adopt the old RIC, in the way that so much of the British administrative apparatus was taken over. The force was doomed by its history, and the republicans’ own remorseless denunciation of it as an army of occupation, even though some of those who had battled against it over the last couple of years – Collins in particular – had come to respect its effectiveness as a state instrument. The republican police had never lived up to their publicity image: Collins later excoriated ‘the wretched Irish Republican Police System’ and its ‘awful personnel’, condemning its ‘lack of construction and … lack of control’. Even if its performance had been better, the Treaty split fatally damaged its organization. The Chief of Police, Simon Donnelly, opposed the Treaty and took off with most of his administrative records (and his funds).
In effect, only one police force remained viable. The Dublin Metropolitan Police had mostly been allowed by the IRA to exercise its ‘non-political’ functions during the war. (It had, for instance, arrested Countess Markievicz for driving without a tail-light.) Even though, as an unarmed force, it represented the tradition of ‘English policing’ more accurately than did the RIC, it provided a better model for the new state. The decision to create an unarmed national police force, first named the National Guard, was probably the most crucial one taken by the Provisional Government, and contributed more to its ultimate survival than anything else. It was not a simple one. Ernest Blythe remembered some ministers contending that the police ‘would be hunted out of their stations within a few days if they had not guns to defend themselves’. This was all too plausible; the counter-argument was that arming them ‘would only be to subject them to attack’, and if they were not driven out they would be pinned down in their stations. Then ‘the position would be worse than if we did not attempt to send out police at all.’ The government finally came to the conclusion that ‘the only thing that would get real sympathy for the Guards was to have them … defenceless against armed attack.’ Fortunately, the wisdom of this was quite quickly demonstrated: the public attitude to the new police was ‘very different from their attitude towards the RIC’.110
The new force emerged by a rather irregular process. Some time after the Truce, Collins had set up an ad hoc police unit under Liam Tobin, which did not even have an official name (in 1922 it was simply known as Oriel House, the Westland Row building it operated from). Its responsibilities were at best loosely defined, and included criminal investigation as well as public security and intelligence functions. Since it was drawn primarily from Collins’s old Squad, its policing credentials were slender. It was armed, and its dubious discipline and rough-and-ready methods did not endear it to either contemporaries or later historians. What it clearly demonstrated was that in order to crush opposition the new state was quite prepared to go down the same path as the British had. It was not placed under unequivocal civil control until a month after the attack on the Four Courts. Eventually, in August, it was given a name – the Criminal Investigation Department – but it remained a stopgap unit that could be tolerated only in emergency conditions.
The establishment of a national police force was ordered on 22 January, under the title ‘Civic Guard’, with the 1916 veteran Michael Staines as its commissioner. Both Staines and Mulcahy (representing the Dáil government) set up committees to suggest structures for the new force. They seem to have more or less agreed on a 4,500-strong unarmed police (about half the strength of the old thirty-two-county RIC). Like both the DMP and the RIC it would be entirely controlled by the government – no hint of the decentralization and local control which was so characteristic of British (and indeed American) police organization. It would take over the RIC barracks when they were evacuated in the spring, and would follow the RIC pattern of service outside policemen’s native counties. But, as soon as recruitment began, the force fell victim to the same chaos as afflicted the emerging National Army. For some reason the Provisional Government was, as has been observed, ‘a hopeless quartermaster’.111 The first recruits were unsatisfactorily housed in the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge, and given basic training which included musketry on the old RIC model. Then in April, with the force 1,500 strong, they were moved out to even worse accommodation at the Curragh, where conditions were so bad that the force mutinied on 15 May. For the next month the Civic Guard was under the control of a mutinous committee, and when the Commissioner, who behaved with ‘singular ineptitude’, turned up on 9 June he was shut out. Two officers he sent to negotiate were chased unceremoniously away and had to take refuge with the Kildare parish priest.
Only after this drama did the mutineers receive their pay arrears, though not before Rory O’Connor sent over a republican group from the Four Courts to pick up the Civic Guard’s rifles. At least the men themselves did not go over to the other side. Collins visited the mutineers several times, trying to reassure them of their public value, and promising an inquiry into their grievances. Eventually, the civilians got a better grip on the force, and on the whole policing issue. In mid-July a committee of inquiry headed by Kevin O’Shiel began a considered assessment of the formidable problem of law enforcement in a country with deeply embedded traditions of resistance to the law. It decided that the new police force was altogether too much like the old RIC, with ‘a militaristic instead of a peace outlook’ that could not ‘assure the public that militaristic and coercive policing was at an end’.112 What was needed was ‘a police body that shall be the servants of the people, and have the confidence of the people’. Its ‘principal body’ should be unarmed, but there should be ‘a semi-military body trained to the use of arms’ as an HQ reserve, as well as a detective force shared with the DMP. Central control might be modified to the extent that local councils could reasonably ‘hold the local police body directly responsible for certain local duties’, as long as they did not interfere with ‘police duties proper’. Addressing the causes of the mutiny, O’Shiel found that the men had objected to the prominence of ex-RIC men among their instructors. He thought that the new force should be commanded at the top by ex-Volunteers, leavened with one or two highly experienced officers from abroad – preferably ‘American, French or German’. RIC officers would be needed to advise the leaders, but such appointments should be seen to be temporary. The most crucial issue for the immediate future, though, was who should be commissioner. O’Shiel proposed that this should not be a role for a politician, offering a decorous way of persuading Stain
es to give it up. This meant that, with no pool of experienced police officers to draw on, the solution would probably have to be found in the army.
‘MANY MORE OF US WILL DIE’
One of the most poignant expressions of ‘realism’ in the Treaty debate was Seán MacEoin’s remark that in fighting for the Republic ‘I did not succeed but I did my best.’ Other leaders with equally impeccable military credentials were not prepared to accept this. Nor, just as seriously, would they accept the right of the Dáil to decide the issue. On 6 January 1922, just before the final vote, Seamus Robinson called for a Volunteer Convention. If the Treaty was ‘forced on us without our consent as an Army of Volunteers’, ‘certain terrible action’ would follow. On the same day, as we have seen, Liam Lynch warned the Chief of Staff that he could ‘not carry out any order against IRA principles’ which were in ‘danger of being given away by our unthankful Government’.113 After the vote, for Todd Andrews as for many rank-and-file Volunteers, ‘nearly all the members of the Dáil overnight became … “politicians”.’
Ironically the subordination of the Volunteers to the Dáil, including the winding-up of the Volunteer Executive, had been pressed by Cathal Brugha, the leading opponent of the Treaty. The anti-Treaty group now needed to undo his achievement, reasserting both the inherent independence of the army and its essentially political nature. Both these ideas flew in the face of the professionalization that Mulcahy had been striving to foster. But they clearly echoed the beliefs of many Volunteers. Over the following weeks the new Defence Minister trod an awkward path as he tried to insist on the unconstitutional nature of an army convention without pushing its advocates into open defiance. There was no doubting the point made by Liam Mellows on 4 January: not only had men given their lives for the Republic, plenty were ‘still prepared to give their lives’. (Mellows had already predicted to Seán Moylan, ‘Many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised.’)114 Immediately after the 7 January vote the senior officers opposed to the Treaty – four members of GHQ staff, six divisional commanders and the two Dublin brigadiers – held ‘a series of consultations’. They reached the more or less agreed view that ‘the Army should revert to its status as a Volunteer force under the control of an elected Executive.’ The Executive would be elected by a convention; the fact that no convention had been held since 1917, and that the Executive had ceased to meet, had not ‘abrogated the constitutional right’ of the organization to hold conventions.
Florrie O’Donoghue thought that ‘the best hope of keeping the Army united and faithful to its allegiance lay in the preservation of its democratic and voluntary character.’ The sponsors went to great efforts to clarify the purpose and mechanics of the convention. On 11 January they formally requested the Defence Minister, Mulcahy, to call ‘a Convention of the Army … not later than Sunday, 5th February’, to debate three resolutions. The army should ‘reaffirm its allegiance to the Irish Republic’; it should be ‘maintained as the Army of the Irish Republic under an Executive appointed by the Convention’; and ‘be under the supreme control of such Executive’. The Executive would draft a constitution to be considered by a later convention. Delegates to the Convention would consist of all divisional commandants ex officio, and others selected from brigade conventions. Mulcahy pointed out on 13 January that the ‘supreme control of the Army’ was vested in the Dáil, which was ‘the elected Government of the Irish Republic’; the proposal to change this was beyond the powers ‘vested in the Dáil Executive by the Dáil’. He proposed a conference to discuss the issue, and this met five days later. After the arguments for and against a convention had been aired, Mulcahy surprisingly agreed to hold one within two months, and promised that the army would still be the Army of the Irish Republic. Only Frank Aiken, who wanted to wait until the Free State constitution was published, stood out against the idea.
What would have happened if the Convention had met on this basis? O’Donoghue implies that the fact that each side ‘would have had representation roughly proportionate to its numerical strength in the Army’ offered ‘a reasonable probability of preserving Army unity’. This is not easy to follow, especially in light of his account of Liam Lynch’s position. Lynch ‘could see the difficulty that any democratic Government would have in accepting the position that the only military force in the country was not in any way under its control; but he was at all times unwavering in the conviction that the Army should not in any circumstances abandon its allegiance to the Republic’, or ‘be committed to support of the Treaty’.115 Did he somehow think that these points were not irreconcilable?
In the event, Mulcahy was forced by Griffith and his Cabinet to reverse his position on the Convention. But he still moved hesitantly and reluctantly. In early March Liam Lynch made several trips to Dublin to discuss the issue, and ‘although a note of acerbity and partisanship was beginning to appear in public statements, these conferences were not so affected.’ Lynch and Mulcahy remained on comradely terms. On 15 March the Cabinet forced the issue, proscribing the Convention on the ground that ‘any effort to set up another body [than the Dáil] in control [of the Army] would be tantamount to an attempt to establish a Military Dictatorship.’ Mulcahy, out on a limb, still went on looking for a way through the impasse, travelling to a council of the 1st Southern Division at Mallow on the 20th, and securing an agreement to hold yet another meeting – of all brigadiers and divisional commanders – to elect an eight-strong council that would frame proposals ‘for associating the IRA with the Government elected by the Irish people’. (Using the concept of ‘association’ was an interesting parallel with de Valera’s alternative to the Treaty.) But this was conditional on the demand that the Civic Guard be wound up, which was inevitably rejected by the Cabinet. When the Republican Military Council of some fifty senior officers responded by formally summoning the banned Army Convention, Mulcahy issued a less than severe rebuke. While the summoning of the Convention ‘breaks definitely, to some extent’, the ‘solidarity and organisation of the Army’, it did not, he suggested, break its ‘wonderful brotherhood’.116 At the same time, his instruction to O’Duffy that ‘any officer or man attending the Convention will thereby sever his connection with the IRA’ surely did – O’Donoghue saw it as ‘a disaster, worse than any defeat in the field’.
The echo of that brotherhood did persist even after the ‘sectional Convention’ eventually met on 26 March. The 200-plus (O’Donoghue says 211, others 223) delegates, representing some 60 (O’Donoghue claims 80) per cent of the army, elected a sixteen-strong IRA Executive (to be elected annually) to exercise ‘supreme control’ over the army in the name of the Republic, and draw up a constitution for the army. It immediately repudiated the authority of the Minister for Defence and Dáil Éireann itself, pointing out that although the Volunteers had ‘agreed to’ come under the control of the Dáil, they were never ‘formally called together to agree’.117 A fortnight later the Convention met again to ratify the new army constitution, and the Executive created a new GHQ staff headed by Liam Lynch. (The exact positions occupied by the others – including Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey – do not seem to have been recorded.) The constitution declared the army’s object to be ‘to guard the honour and maintain the independence of the Irish Republic’, and to ‘place its services at the disposal of an established Republican Government’.
THE TAKEOVER
While the army debated, the pace of events was creating its own dynamic. Whether or not Mulcahy was maintaining the army as the Army of the Irish Republic – some republicans were disputing this – he was evidently creating ‘a distinct pro-Treaty force’, which Liam Mellows charged was ‘being superimposed on the Army of the Republic’. As soon as the British began to hand over military installations the question of who would occupy them became urgent. This evacuation – the most visible and symbolic fulfilment of a key pro-Treaty argument – began remarkably soon after the Dáil vote. A big convoy of baggage left Cork on 16 January 1922,
and four days later the first infantry unit to leave – the 1st Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment – sailed from Dublin port. Their embarkation on the SS Rathmore aroused ‘very little public interest’, with no spectators apart from ‘a few railwaymen, press photographers and cinema operators’.118 The first army barrack, at Clogheen in Tipperary, was handed over on 25 January, followed by the legendary Beggars Bush barracks in Dublin, the HQ of the Auxiliary Division, on the last day of the month.
At this point the formal procedures for transferring installations had still not been agreed. But the process was amicable, especially after the British realized that the Provisional Government’s authority was under challenge. Emmet Dalton, in charge of negotiations on the Irish side, noted in late February that the British C-in-C wanted to retain Naas barracks until the Curragh had been evacuated. He put the case for immediate transfer ‘strongly’, so that they could ‘send Officers to be trained correctly and in the right environment’, to be able to take over the ‘cantankerous areas’. ‘They appreciated this of course,’ Dalton reported to Ginger O’Connell, ‘and I am sure they will endeavour in every way to help us.’119 One simple fact was that the new Free State could not afford to maintain the number of installations that the British army had: closures were inevitable, but local interests made them a politically sensitive issue, and the choice could not be made immediately.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 52