The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The week-long negotiations that followed were almost as bruising as those over the Treaty. On several issues the attempt to fudge the explicit acknowledgment of British symbols was defeated. The draft avoided using the title ‘governor general’ for the Crown representative, and also withheld the Crown’s power to dissolve parliament, which could only dissolve itself. The British insisted on both the title and the power of dissolution (though the eventual clause was obscure enough that ‘no one understood’ it).135 After a long meeting on 30 May between the Provisional Government’s law officer, Hugh Kennedy, and the Lord Chief Justice had got nowhere, Kennedy drew up a statement of the Irish position. He argued that the Treaty recognized that the Irish people were to establish a constitution which would be ‘their own creation’, and that traditional British forms were at best meaningless in Ireland and at worst imbued with negative value. Lloyd George simply refused to recognize this interpretation, repeatedly insisting that the Crown must occupy the same position in Ireland as in the other Dominions. The gulf was never clearer than in a private meeting between Collins, Griffith and Lloyd George on 1 June. Collins, whose humour had soured, berated the British as ‘Shylocks’ – an apposite tag in the circumstances, even if it did not fit diplomatic conventions. The normally unflappable Tom Jones found him ‘pugnacious’, ‘belligerent’ and ‘militant’; Lloyd George called him a ‘wild animal’. The Prime Minister claimed that as a Celt himself he was eager to see a Celtic nation play an international role, but repeated that the Crown must be accepted as a mystic term that stood for the power of the people. Griffith’s objection that in Ireland it conveyed just the opposite meaning cut no ice. The Prime Minister’s obtuseness may have been wilful – he was not habitually an obtuse man. His driving of a hard bargain was certainly in part deliberate. His dismissive remarks about Collins after the meeting, however, suggest that he had not troubled to work up much knowledge of the situation in Ireland, and that his understanding of the country remained ‘very limited’.136

  ‘NOT ONLY THE END OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC, BUT THE END OF REPUBLICANISM IN IRELAND’

  The importance of the June election is clear, but just what it represented is less so. It was the Free State’s first general election; but in the republican view it was not a ‘free’ one – not because of the electoral pact, which republicans had signed up to, but because people were in effect coerced by the threat of renewed war into voting against their real beliefs. The threat was certainly an influence, but it had been present to everyone since July 1921, and the Treaty debates had largely hinged on the capacity of the Republic to withstand another, more intense war. Republicans also protested that the Free State constitution was not published until the very last moment before the election – in fact on the morning the polls opened on 16 June. This deprived the electorate of some vital evidence, and it is revealing that Collins earlier admitted (to the British) that ‘if they did not have an election till after the Constitution was drafted, the Treaty would be beaten in Ireland.’137 It can of course be argued that the whole Treaty issue had effectively been put in cold storage by the pact, but republicans also charged that the pact was broken. Collins allegedly repudiated it on the eve of the election. In Cork on 14 June he appealed to his audience to ‘vote for the candidates you think best of,’ those ‘the electors of Cork think will carry on best in the future the work they want carried on’. Admittedly he did not directly urge them to vote for the pact candidates, but his uncharacteristically indefinite phraseology did not immediately strike the press as signalling a break with de Valera. His speech next day in his home town, Clonakilty, was even more ambiguous, asking people to support the pact ‘in the spirit in which it was made’, before telling them ‘their duty was to vote for the people they thought would carry out that policy.’

  Republicans might have tried to prevent the election by force, but when this was proposed at the IRA Executive on 9 April, Florrie O’Donoghue, Seán O’Hegarty and Tom Hales resigned, and the idea was dropped. Some came to regret this. The British-designed PR system used in the 1921 election was carried over, and produced a decisive majority of deputies accepting the Treaty. The long-delayed reappearance of Labour as an independent political party broke Sinn Féin’s electoral monopoly, and by the day of the poll a Farmers’ grouping and a clutch of Independents had raised the number of non-pact candidates to fifty-one. Only thirty-four Sinn Feiners (half of them pro-, half anti-Treaty) were able to run unopposed. In the end, pact candidates won around 60 per cent of the votes cast. Pro-Treaty Sinn Feiners comfortably outpolled anti-Treaty republicans by 239,000 first-preference votes to 130,000 (fifty-eight seats to thirty-six); but the republicans were also outpolled by Labour with 132,000 (though this tally produced only seventeen seats). Altogether Labour, Farmers and Independent deputies brought the pro-Treaty majority to 92 out of 128, with over 78 per cent of the votes cast. Geographically, there was a striking east–west and urban–rural split: republicans won a bare majority in Connacht, and came close in rural Munster, but lost decisively in Leinster and the Ulster border counties, as well as in Dublin and Cork cities. Dorothy Macardle pronounced the result ‘not only the end of the Irish Republic, but the end of Republicanism in Ireland’.138

  On 18 June, before the results of the election were announced, the third Army Convention debated further reunification proposals. Seán MacBride had returned from a mission to Germany to find that a split had developed within the Executive – ‘and it became more and more apparent … that this split was on an absolutely fundamental decision of policy.’ Lynch, Seán Moylan and Liam Deasy were ‘ready to work the Treaty’ and allow the IRA to be ‘controlled by the Free State Army’. The mood was sombre – Lynch’s speech was ‘very depressing’, and ‘everybody was depressed and solemn.’ In middle of the debate Tom Barry proposed a motion to resume the war against the British (actually to deliver an ultimatum to withdraw all their forces in seventy-two hours). Though Lynch and Brugha were against it, and both O’Connor and Mellows thought the motion ‘a huge mistake’ at that point, it was narrowly carried. Then (as MacBride, one of the tellers, recorded) the vote was challenged on the ground that ‘there was a Brigade there which wasn’t represented at the last Convention.’139 Eventually the motion was defeated by 118 to 103. The minority split from the Executive, and made Joe McKelvey their chief of staff. There were now two anti-Treaty IRAs, and as O’Donoghue put it, ‘the state of the Army was chaotic.’140

  ‘OUR BOAST OF CIVILISATION IN THESE ISLANDS IS STULTIFIED’

  British inflexibility, rooted in an entrenched suspicion of Irish separatism, denied the Provisional Government the political advantage of being able to demonstrate that Collins’s interpretation of the Treaty was valid. The British were convinced of Griffith’s commitment to the Treaty, but it did not take much to persuade them that Collins remained a covert republican. The British government had already ensured the ruin of its most committed allies, the Redmondite nationalists, through a similar lack of political imagination. Luckily for Britain, the Treatyites did not meet the same fate as the Redmondites. But the British could take little credit for securing the outcome they needed. Not only did they insist on a rigid implementation of the Treaty, they became increasingly strident in their insistence that the Provisional Government take direct action to crush republican defiance. Ignoring the potentially fatal risk of confirming the republican charge that the Provisional Government was a British puppet regime, they hustled it on to an open military confrontation.

  In June Churchill bombarded Griffith with ‘specimens of letters which were pouring into this office’ deploring the state of affairs in Ireland: ‘Rich and poor turned out of their homes on two hours notice … leaving behind them the inheritance of generations and generations … The cattle are killed, the lonely white peacocks hunted to death – some of the scenes are like those of the French Revolution.’ Churchill boomed portentously, ‘Until somehow or other we find a means of putting an end to this state of affairs
, our boast of civilisation in these Islands is stultified.’141 British pressure reached a peak after Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated by anti-Treaty IRA men in London on 22 June. This sent a shockwave through Westminster and Whitehall, even though Wilson’s extremism probably posed more of a threat to British mainstream politics than it did to Irish republicanism. Lloyd George fired off a formal warning to Collins that:

  the ambiguous position of the Irish Republican Army can no longer be ignored by the British Government. Still less can Mr Rory O’Connor be permitted to remain with his followers and his arsenal in open rebellion in the heart of Dublin … organising and sending out from this centre enterprises of murder not only in the area of your Government but also in the Six Northern Counties and in Great Britain.

  If this stayed just about in the realm of request rather than instruction, the following words crossed that fine line: ‘His Majesty’s Government cannot consent to a continuance of this state of things.’142

  Belligerent language was almost followed by actual belligerence. Though many provincial military garrisons had been withdrawn, British forces remained in strength in Dublin. When Collins, on a trip to Cork, failed to reply immediately to this ultimatum – in fact the Provisional Government never replied to it – the British Cabinet instructed General Macready to prepare a full-scale assault on the Four Courts using tanks and aircraft as well as field artillery. On 24 June it decided that the attack should go ahead the following day. Macready, unsurprisingly, took a dim view of this project. In his view the assassination had thrown the Cabinet into a panic: he sensed ‘suppressed agitation’; ‘considerations of personal safety’ were contending with ‘a desire to do something dramatic’. (Churchill actually took refuge in his attic at Chartwell with a loaded revolver for the night of the 22nd, barricading the door with an iron sheet.) The Cabinet’s ‘ignorance of the Irish situation blinded them to possible results’. An operation like this could not be carried out without civilian casualties, and would almost certainly backfire fatally.

  Though Lloyd George declared that he did not want to publish his letter to Collins, and ‘would rather they acted upon their own initiative, rather than with the appearance that they are doing it under compulsion from the British Government’, this good sense was spectacularly ditched in the House of Commons on the afternoon of 26 June. Speaking immediately after Henry Wilson’s funeral that morning, Churchill, tasked by the Cabinet with making clear that ‘the ambiguous position of the IRA must come to an end,’ produced a characteristically resonant parliamentary rhodomontade. He declared that ‘the prime and continuing cause of all the horrors which have taken place in Belfast is the organisation of … two divisions of the Irish Republican Army in Northern territory,’ and that ‘the greedy and criminal design of breaking down the Northern Government … has got to die in the hearts of those who nourish it.’ He threatened that ‘if, through weakness, want of courage’ or, he added, ‘some other even less creditable reason’, the presence in Dublin of ‘a band of men styling themselves the Headquarters of the Republican Executive’ was ‘not brought to an end and a speedy end … we shall regard the Treaty as having been formally violated … and we shall resume full liberty of action in any direction … to any extent that may be necessary’.143 This was dangerously provocative. Churchill told Collins, ‘we had reached the end of our tether,’ but that only underlined the failure of understanding.

  At least Churchill stopped short of broadcasting the hint that Lloyd George had dropped in his letter to Collins, of direct British military aid: ‘assistance has on various occasions been given to dominions of the Empire in cases where their authority was challenged by rebellion.’ It would be difficult for the Treatyites to lay the mantle of ‘rebels’ on their erstwhile comrades. But talks had already begun between Griffith, Emmet Dalton and the British military authorities, about supplying the Provisional Government with the material it needed to eject the republicans from the Four Courts. This massively sensitive issue might have given the government further pause. (Dorothy Macardle would entitle the April–July 1922 section of her epic republican narrative ‘English Guns’.) But any worries about its public presentation were eased by the republicans themselves. On 27 June a prominent anti-Treaty IRA commander, Leo Henderson, was arrested while carrying out a raid on a garage in Lower Baggot Street. This was apparently part of the ongoing republican effort to reinforce the supposedly suspended Belfast Boycott – ‘the only real activity’ of the anti-Treaty forces, Todd Andrews thought. In response, the republicans arrested an even more prominent Treatyite, Ginger O’Connell, and held him in the Four Courts. This ‘kidnapping’ of a senior National Army officer provided a plausible casus belli.

  The Provisional Government now warned the Four Courts garrison that unless they left the building immediately, surrendering their arms along with O’Connell, ‘necessary military action will be taken at once.’ At 3.40 a.m. on 28 June a message (signed by Tom Ennis, OC 2nd Eastern Division) was delivered, requiring them to parade on the Quays by 4 a.m., or ‘the building will be taken by me by force.’ Collins must have consented to this, though the actual decision seems to have been taken by Griffith. Why did Collins accept that attack was inevitable? He could not have known of the British military preparations (such as they were). The most real fear must have been not that – as later alleged – the republicans were about to stage a coup, but that they would attack British troops and throw the British withdrawal into reverse. The 18 June split made this more than likely.

  Overall command of the attack, under the authority of Mulcahy as Dáil defence minister, was given to Emmet Dalton. The precise status of the troops deployed, from Tom Ennis’s 2nd Eastern Division and the newly formed Dublin Guard under Paddy O’Daly, was ambiguous. The need to avoid using any British troops was always, as Andy Cope noted, absolutely clear to the Irish government(s). But the Four Courts building was effectively a fortress, and any direct assault on it would require artillery. Macready supplied two 18-pounder field guns to the Provisional Government – in response, he said, to urgent phone calls from O’Duffy, the Chief of Staff (though O’Duffy later denied this). Another two followed later that day, with a handful of British artillerymen to advise on their use. The National Army troops, not just inexperienced but almost all untrained (many of those deployed had not even fired a rifle), now had to learn to fire them in action. Emmet Dalton himself, the only leader with personal experience of modern artillery warfare, was forced to spend three hours serving one of the guns.

  Unsurprisingly, the first day of the attack did not go well. The guns had to be aimed by opening the breech and sighting the target through the barrel. Dalton realized that several shells had overshot the Four Courts and landed on the British GHQ at Kilmainham; when he went over to apologize he found himself under the same bombardment. Even the shells that hit their target had little effect on the mighty structure. Churchill was keen for the attackers to use 60-pound howitzers instead, but this offer was not taken up. (Macready was in any case reluctant to give his former enemies such powerful weapons, and Churchill had to tell Cope to lean on him.)144 Shortage of high-explosive shells – the British had supplied ten per gun – worried Dalton. Macready ‘agreed to send him fifty rounds of shrapnel, which was all we had left, simply to make a noise through the night, as he was afraid that if the guns stopped firing his men would get disheartened and clear off’. The next day went no better. ‘This is not a battle,’ Cope lamented. Garrison and attackers were ‘each firing … hundreds of rounds with probably remarkably few hits’. Just out of range, ‘the people carry on their ordinary business.’ By the end of the day, Churchill was talking of air action (a habit the Colonial Office had got into overseas) and even discussing how to disguise British aircraft in Free State colours.

  ‘IT’S GOOD TO FEEL MYSELF A SOLDIER AGAIN’

  The attack forced the Four Courts garrison to think about the rationale of their action, and showed that they had no positive idea of how the c
ampaign might proceed. Strong as the building was, its complicated interior made it hard for the 180 men of the garrison to stay in touch with each other. O’Malley rightly judged that they were ‘rats in a trap’. They seem to have spent much of their time trying to figure out a means of escape (O’Malley advocated digging a tunnel) and waiting for the arrival of relief forces. Their Rolls-Royce armoured car, wryly christened ‘The Mutineer’, could do no more than drive back and forth inside the compound, firing on the National troops working their way into the west wing building. Most of the Dublin Brigade were stuck (as O’Malley complained) on the wrong side of O’Connell Street. Todd Andrews had a low opinion of their military leaders – and, with the exception of O’Malley, of the leadership as a whole. After studying them at close quarters for several months, he concluded that ‘the man with a record was not necessarily, nor indeed usually, a man with the qualities required to deal with the predicament in which we in the Four Courts found ourselves.’145 The same went for the republican forces outside, which Andrews later joined. Oscar Traynor was against a repeat of 1916 and in favour of guerrilla warfare, but he went an odd way about it. When Andrews met up with the 4th Battalion in the Hammam Hotel, he found that they were about to barricade it in 1916 style. ‘I could not believe that we were going to indulge in such a foolishly futile military exercise. But so it turned out.’ They had no doubt that ‘militarily we were in a hopeless position,’ but simply had no idea what else to do. At least the company of ‘a squad, if that is the word, of pretty young Cumann na mBan girls to attend to our commissariat’ was agreeable.