The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Traynor also occupied the luxurious Gresham Hotel, along with the Granville and the rest of the block between Earl Street and Parnell Street. De Valera arrived there to rejoin his old battalion as a rank-and-file Volunteer. The other most senior republican leaders, Stack and Brugha, together with Countess Markievicz, also gathered at ‘the block’ to confer with Traynor (who was ‘in sole and complete charge of military operations’, as Andrews pointedly noted). None of them had any specific military or political position. Just before leaving his Suffolk Street office de Valera had issued a press statement characterizing ‘the men who are now being attacked by the forces of the Provisional Government’ as ‘those who refuse to obey the order to yield’ to ‘England’s threat of war’. He declared that ‘the Republic’ was the ‘embodiment’ of Ireland’s independence. Liam Lynch, over the river at the Clarence Hotel, issued a more direct appeal to his ‘fellow citizens … to rally to the support of the Republic’.146 Co-signed by fifteen senior republicans (including Mellows, O’Connor, McKelvey, O’Malley, Seamus Robinson and Seán Moylan), this showed that the split-within-the-split was over.

  For two days the senior officers in the Four Courts debated the idea of surrender, finally rejecting it as a betrayal of the Republic. O’Malley and Paddy O’Brien, the garrison commander, planned a sortie, but in the mid-morning of 30 June the munitions store (in the Public Record Office wing) was hit by a shell and exploded, stunning the garrison and hurling a stupendous cloud of shredded irreplaceable archival records into the air. Oscar Traynor sent a message arguing that he could not relieve the Courts, and as the senior officer outside he was entitled to order the garrison to surrender. ‘If the Republic is to be saved your surrender is a necessity.’ His reasoning (influenced, Moss Twomey told Lynch, by Brugha) was that ‘the Free State people can reduce any position with artillery and capture the Garrisons and Equipment and thus destroy the morale of our Forces.’ But if the Four Courts surrendered, the rest could evacuate their positions ‘voluntarily without loss of prestige on the plea that they were occupied only to relieve the pressure on the Four Courts Garrison’.147 The garrison, exhausted by pointless tunnelling as much as by shellfire, had become equally defeatist: their morale was ‘broken by their crowding together in cellars where they could do nothing but listen to the fire … and hear the explosions’. O’Malley reluctantly accepted that surrender was inevitable, and led out the 130 survivors at 3.30 that afternoon.

  ‘The block’ was left as the last republican stronghold. It had a few days’ grace as the National troops worked their way up O’Connell Street with great caution, getting within range only on 4 July. Armoured cars drove up, peppering the hotels, whose garrisons broke through the internal walls exactly like Connolly’s garrisons in 1916. Artillery shelled the Gresham and the Hammam. By 5 July the buildings were on fire, and de Valera left with Stack and Traynor, assuming that the others would follow. (Markievicz had already left.) When they did not, Traynor ordered the survivors to retreat or surrender, but instead Brugha ran out into Thomas’s Lane, at the back of ‘the block’, where he was mortally wounded. That evening de Valera anxiously wrote to him, ‘I had no idea in view of the plan agreed on that you would attempt to hold the Hotels as long as you did … You were scarcely justified … in taking the risk you ran.’ He added a rare personal note: ‘we were all more than vexed with you – But all’s well that ends well.’ By the time his letter arrived, Brugha was dead. Sadly, perhaps, for the Republic, its most unflinching defender was happier with gun in hand, facing death, than he had been facing political disagreement in the council chamber. Sixty-five Executive and Provisional Government troops also died in the Dublin fighting, as did an unknown number of ‘civilians’ – possibly well over 250.

  De Valera felt that at least ‘the opening of the campaign otherwise not to be dreamt of by us gave a definite beginning.’ His press statement spoke starkly of ‘this war’. But the republicans, though physically better armed than the government’s forces, were not psychologically armed for war. O’Malley had not even been able to persuade the Four Courts garrison to occupy the surrounding houses in preparation for the inevitable assault, since they felt that firing on the approaching government forces would create a war situation. He bitterly lamented ‘the futile way in which we fought, the air of induced martyrdom in the Courts, and the mysterious occupation of O’Connell Street’.148 There was no plan of campaign. Traynor believed in guerrilla fighting but found himself sandbagging and loopholing hotels. He had little alternative, perhaps – without work to occupy them, he may well have feared that his men might drift away. But keeping them there made any idea of ‘relieving’ the Four Courts less rather than more feasible. Traynor hoped that the relief would come from the countryside (just as Pearse had in 1916). For a few days, the possibility of a ‘march on Dublin’ did exist, but in a sad anticipation of future republican strategy it petered out in a confused muster in Blessington, a village of ‘almost one long street below the hills’, 15 miles south of the capital.

  Gerald Boland, commandant of the 7th Battalion of the 2nd Dublin Brigade, complained that his brigadier, Andy McDonnell, ‘took every man he had from Bray to Arklow and left the road [to Dublin] wide open. He brought the whole mob out to Blessington in Furey’s Charabancs and not even one loaf of bread’. On 1 July Ernie O’Malley, Seán Lemass and others who had escaped from detention in Jameson’s Distillery arrived (‘to pester me’ as Boland grumpily put it). O’Malley took over, with Lemass as his director of operations and Boland’s brother Harry as quartermaster general. His instinct was, once again, to fortify the place – barricades were erected around it, and ‘engineers were sent out on the roads … to dig up the metalled surface and lay mines to prevent the approach of armoured cars.’149 He issued orders for the ‘destruction of communications, the establishment of our own communications, and the perfecting of an efficient Intelligence system’, adding encouragingly (in traditional GHQ style) that ‘unarmed men can be as useful as … armed men.’150

  None of this had any effect. When Oscar Traynor arrived at Blessington in the middle of the night on 6 July he found ‘everybody asleep’ and ‘things rather mixed up’. He endorsed Gerald Boland’s condemnation of Andy McDonnell’s action in ‘retreat[ing] from the whole eastern portion of his area, leaving it in the hands of the enemy’. Apparently ignoring O’Malley, he ordered the Blessington position to be abandoned. McDonnell was to ‘split his Brigade into columns’ and return to his old area. Traynor’s idea was ‘not to hold towns’, but ‘to hit and go away’. The force at Blessington, unfortunately, simply melted away, leaving behind trashed houses, robbed banks and ‘a terrible spirit of defeat’. Most of the men ‘stayed at home and were arrested for they had no leadership either from B[attalion]n or from the B[riga]de’.151

  No republican leaders emerged with much credit from the Blessington fiasco, or the Dublin fighting. Few seem to have realized it, though. O’Malley agonized over ‘surrender[ing] my own command’ with ‘no excuse that I could see’. ‘I felt a sense of disgrace about it … nor could I find peace of mind about it.’ But his comrades did not feel this way. ‘Nobody said what should be said about such a personal failure’; most of them ‘were not dissatisfied with the events of the past week’.152 For them, simply fighting, however incompetently, seemed to be enough. The sense of relief in Paddy O’Brien’s words to O’Malley when the Provisional Government’s ultimatum was delivered to the Fours Courts garrison – ‘It’s come at last’ – had been unmistakable. Liam Mellows made the point explicitly: ‘it’s good to feel myself a soldier again after all those futile negotiations.’153 For Rory O’Connor, O’Malley wrote, ‘the fight … had been a symbol of resistance. He had built a dream in his mind and the dream was there.’ O’Malley thought O’Connor was insulated against the idea of failure – ‘he evidently did not sense defeat,’ or share O’Malley’s idea that it might be more useful to escape from custody afterwards so as to keep up the fight. But in a long
reflective letter written in Kilmainham gaol at the end of November 1923, O’Malley also acknowledged that ‘fighting was so easy compared with that awful, soul-numbing, uphill fight against one’s people’s ignorance and prejudice’ (a process that might be taken as a definition of political action). ‘I had always been looking for fight as it was the best expression of my convictions.’154

  ‘WE LET THE REPUBLIC GO BY DEFAULT’

  Nobody has ever questioned Liam Lynch’s selfless dedication to his cause, but his capacity to direct the republican campaign has come in for plenty of criticism. Not only did he have no policy, he seemed to reject the very notion of having one. He was ‘a very good person, but he did not have a revolutionary mind’, Peadar O’Donnell said. ‘He could not descend from the high ground of the Republic to the level of politics.’ Early in September 1922 he asserted unequivocally that there was ‘no alternative policy to present one of fighting’. ‘At present it is a waste of time to be thinking too much about policy.’ If they could just ‘strike our hardest for some time … this would make the question of policy easier to settle’. This plainly reflected the general dislike of ‘politics’ that had burgeoned among the republican leadership after the Treaty, as well as Lynch’s personal suspicion that the ‘Republican Party’ had not ‘its mind made up to total separation from England’ as the army had. But it was problematic in more than one way. To fight without policy was to confirm the public image of militarism so carelessly endorsed by Rory O’Connor, a gift to Free State propaganda. The wishful thought that military action would cut through political complication has been the delusion of many soldiers. Lynch’s belief in the efficacy of ‘striking our hardest’ rested on a misunderstanding of the real basis for republican success in 1920–21, which had not depended on mere striking power. If it were to make any sense, it required that the striking should really be ‘hard’. Even by early September, however, it had become all too clear that it was not.

  Peadar O’Donnell lamented that ‘we were very poorly off politically’ in 1922. ‘We let the Republic go by default.’155 A degree of rigidity was perhaps built into republican thinking. O’Malley acknowledged ‘a certain hardness in our idealism’, which ‘made us aloof from ordinary living, as if we were above it’. Men and women of principle were more apt to ignore than to cultivate ordinary people. ‘There was insistence on principle, which often stood coldly out where immediate feeling was needed.’156 Even to discuss policy was to raise the possibility of different priorities. Impelled by conviction rather than analysis, Republican strategic direction was never precisely organized.

  The republicans began the war, as has often been pointed out, with some apparent military advantages. Even if the army Executive did not represent 80 per cent of the old IRA, as O’Donoghue implied, it certainly controlled a clear majority – most estimates put it at over two-thirds. So the anti-Treaty forces were distinctly more seasoned than the government’s, and – even with only the 7,000 or so rifles they possessed – probably at least as well armed, at the outset. They lacked artillery, but so had the old IRA; they had plenty of experience in conducting the kind of campaign that would render such matériel irrelevant. They had a substantial munitions production capacity in Cork, with Patrick McHugh in charge. (He sent 2,000 grenades to the Four Courts.) McHugh even succeeded in producing the trench mortars that had failed in 1921.

  But republican commanders did little to exploit their resources. Most of them were extremely cautious about the kind of operations they might launch. To McHugh, arriving in Cork from Dublin in June, ‘it appeared they had no idea that there might be a fight.’ Once fighting had started, little changed. Republicans’ reluctance to fire on their errant comrades has been widely attested. Not all of them shared it, of course: Walter Mitchell made clear what he thought of the orders his unit received a few weeks into the war to fire over the heads of the Staters: ‘They never fired over me.’157 But the point was that such orders were issued. Oscar Traynor’s reasoning went for many others: ‘The O/C Dublin’, Twomey told Lynch in early July,

  does not consider it wise to resort at the moment to Ambushes in the streets, as it would alienate public sympathy which has much improved in our favour, would antagonise the rank and file of the Free State Forces who he believes are half-hearted and very much susceptible to propaganda influences, and also he favours the continuation of the situation which compels the Free State to make war on us.158

  All these points made perfectly good sense, but they amounted to a wholly passive defensive policy. It was based on the assumption that time was on the republicans’ side: an attractive one, naturally, but one which, if it turned out to be mistaken, would prove fatal.

  Initially, the attack on the Four Courts at least had the effect of reuniting the anti-Treaty forces, and Lynch resumed his authority as chief of staff on 29 June. At the same time, though, he moved out of Dublin and established his HQ at Mallow. This was a perhaps more than tacit recognition of the geopolitics of the struggle, and the effective abandonment of Dublin. Lynch’s strategic command was unchallenged, but he did not choose to work out a policy with his peers. Traynor naturally believed Dublin to be vital, and so did O’Malley, who saw clearly enough that ‘it is not so much use making the South unbearable for them if they have the Capital.’ But he addressed this view to Liam Deasy, not Lynch. Traynor bridled at Lynch’s idea of ‘keeping [the] route to [the] South open’ – with what precise purpose he did not say – and asked whether it was more important than ‘the holding of Dublin’ itself. But he does not seem to have got an answer. O’Malley himself, instead of returning to 2nd Southern Division, was appointed deputy chief of staff by Lynch. But when Lynch went back to Munster he was left in Dublin, and given command of the whole eastern and northern theatre (the two Dublin brigades, 1st Eastern and all northern divisions) – an area he had no experience of, and which had little or no organizational coherence. This was simply a waste of talent. Twomey maintained that GHQ, or some of it, should be in Dublin, and Lynch may have thought that O’Malley fulfilled this requirement. O’Malley himself repeatedly urged Lynch to establish GHQ in the capital, but Lynch said that while he would ‘like to’, it was more effective ‘here, where we are more in touch with the actual situation and developments’ (a telling enough phrase).

  The republican high command was shaped in part by accident. Several senior leaders who had surrendered in the Four Courts, notably Joe McKelvey, Liam Mellows and Rory O’Connor, were in prison from that point until their deaths, while O’Malley (with Paddy O’Brien’s adjutant Seán Lemass) had escaped. Tom Barry had been arrested trying to enter the building, though he escaped in August. Lynch himself was arrested during the Dublin fighting, along with Liam Deasy, only to be released on Mulcahy’s instructions. He was again pulled up in Kilkenny on his way to Cork, and again let go. This coincidence suggested to some that he had given some parole, which the government alleged, and he and Deasy denied. If he had, it would have been out of character. Back in Dublin, on 27 July Oscar Traynor was arrested by a National Army patrol at Baggot Street Bridge. Austin Stack was pitchforked into the job of IRA quartermaster general at the beginning of August after Harry Boland was killed (shot while allegedly resisting arrest in the Grand Hotel, Skerries, though why he was there, in an area of exiguous republican activity, nobody seemed to know). Republican faith aside, Stack’s qualifications for this key post were no more evident than they had been for his earlier posting as deputy chief of staff, and, as before, he seems to have put in a patchy performance.159

  On the map, the republican position looked strong: almost all the main southern centres were in their hands. In 1st Southern Division area, only two posts were held by pro-Treaty forces, and they were immediately taken. Republican forces outnumbered and outgunned the government’s. They were certainly adequate for a sudden coup. But when the chance of using this strength to dispute the government’s control of Dublin was lost, the balance shifted. Lynch established a defensive line
from Limerick to Waterford, but positional defence was ultimately impossible for forces that had few machine guns and no artillery. The republican leadership saw the Limerick compromise (as Con Moloney said) as giving them ‘a considerable military advantage as with a comparatively small number of troops held up at Limerick, we have been able to ensure that at least 3,000 of F.S. troops are also held up’. If they had had to fight in Limerick the forces there ‘would not only be held there for at least 10 days, but we wouldn’t be in a position to re-enforce Wexford–New Ross area. How could we hope to attack Thurles?’ That supposed a large-scale offensive movement towards Dublin, but this never materialized. Instead as National troops concentrated on Limerick, the unsuitability of the republican forces for urban fighting became clear. Hostilities began late on 11 July and remained inconclusive for six days, with key posts in the city centre changing hands more than once. But when O’Duffy arrived on the 27th with reinforcements and an 18-pounder gun, the four key republican positions in the city were swiftly abandoned and left in flames. The battle for Limerick had the air of conventional warfare, but this was belied by the mercifully light casualty rate. Though there were eight days of fairly intense gunfire between the initial National assault on the Ordnance Barracks and the final republican retreat, no more than eight National troops were killed.

  The traffic from that point on was almost all one way. Although Liam Deasy’s tenacious defence of the Kilmallock front brought the National advance to a standstill, and showed that republican forces could fight positional battles in the countryside, it was undermined by the fall of the main southern towns over the next three weeks. Waterford was taken by National troops under John T. Prout on 23 July – a single field gun again playing an apparently decisive role. Three republican columns assembled by Dinny Lacey in Carrick-on-Suir advanced on Kilkenny through Mullinavant but retreated again when Lacey thought he had lost surprise. In the west, the first coastal landing, of troops embarked at Dublin on 22 July, took Westport on the 24th. Seán MacEoin’s deputy, Tony Lawlor, had already advanced through Castlerea, Ballinrobe, Ballyhaunis, Claremorris and Ballaghadereen without meeting resistance, and Castlebar was also captured in late July. At the end of the month, Seán MacEoin told Mulcahy that ‘all the reports about fights, and thousands of men, has [sic] faded considerably into thin air.’160 Tralee was taken by a force under Paddy Daly landing from the sea at Fenit on 31 July. Dublin troops were crucial here, as they were in the decisive landing at Passage West on 11 August which opened the way for the capture of Cork. Lynch’s own HQ at Fermoy (where it had arrived after moving from Mallow via Limerick and Clonmel) was abandoned. From then on they reverted to the time-honoured recourse of the weak, guerrilla warfare. This was now called ‘forming into columns’ in IRA terminology, a revealing usage which indicated that from the deep local structures on which the Volunteer campaign of 1919–21 had rested, only the columns survived.