Next day Aiken ‘went south to see Commandant General Lynch, and put to him that he could do more for the Republic by propaganda than by fighting men of the old Army, most of whom thought they were doing their best for the Republic’. He clearly believed that the pro-Treaty section even now would ‘never countenance the King in the Constitution’. He advised Lynch that ‘although he had the moral right to fight, it was bad tactics, since he could only fight for a few months or years, without any chance of a successful revolution.’ Aiken met Lynch in Limerick during the temporary truce, and was still there when it was broken on 11 July. His thoughtful arguments made no impression on Lynch, who took the view that ‘the other people had started the fight and it was up to them to take steps to stop it.’ ‘I failed in my mission and returned to my division.’
Things still seemed to be hanging in the balance. When he got back, he and his staff met Mulcahy to insist that the Provisional Government must ‘give the Anti-treaty parties civil and military a constitutional way of carrying on for the republic, such as withdrawing the oath for admission to the parliament’. If they did not, ‘we would give them no support moral or material.’ Aiken clearly accepted the validity of the parliament itself, and it seems unlikely that even if his conditions had been met he could have persuaded many other republicans to accept them. But they were not. When he next returned to his HQ at Dundalk he found ‘orders to attack the Executive forces in my area’. His reaction to this was predictable: he broke off relations with the Beggars Bush GHQ. The orders had come from the Chief of Staff, Eoin O’Duffy, and Aiken pointedly told him ‘that if the Minister for Defence attempted to govern, without the consent of the best people, he would be driven to use rotten men and means’. On 17 July his division issued a manifesto. ‘Realising that Civil War is suicidal to the Nation, and also that our hands are full at the present juncture protecting our own people against the ravages which are daily being committed against them in the North’, they had ‘agreed to unite … to hold intact our forces in face of the common enemy, to resist the second plantation of Ulster by England, and to maintain law and order’.192 His HQ was promptly seized by men of the 5th Northern Division and he was arrested.
The issue had been forced by O’Duffy, who now saw any negotiations as useless, if not indeed dangerous. In mid-August, he argued to Collins that any peace without a definite ‘Military decision’ would benefit only ‘the Bolsheviks’. The underlying proto-fascism of conservative nationalists came closer to the surface once the traditional enemy had decamped. ‘The Labour element and Red Flaggers are at the back of all moves towards “Peace”,’ O’Duffy warned. The left realized that ‘if the Government can break the back of this revolt, any attempts at revolt by labour in the future will be futile.’193 With Lynch instructing O’Malley later that month that there could be no negotiations except on the basis of recognition of the Republic, such will to compromise as still survived may be said to have finally disappeared.
WILLIAM COSGRAVE ENTERS HIS INHERITANCE
In August 1922 the shape, and the personality, of the Provisional Government changed twice in ten days, when first Arthur Griffith died on the 12th and then Collins was killed in action during a trip to Cork on the 22nd. Griffith’s cerebral haemorrhage, at the age of fifty-one, was probably brought on by stress, and a consuming anger against the republican irreconcilables. Collins’s death had an aspect of classical tragedy: when his convoy was fired on, there was nothing to stop the car he was travelling in from driving through to safety – nothing except perhaps his desire to demonstrate that he was truly a fighting man, not a pen-pusher. By the time he reached Beal na mBlath, most of the republican ambush party had left, and the rest had dismantled the blockage on the road. Emmet Dalton immediately told the driver to drive on, but Collins halted his convoy and went out on to the roadside with a rifle. He was playing soldiers. The precise source of the shot that hit the back of his head and shattered his skull has been a matter of dispute, but it was his own decision to put himself in its way.
Collins’s body was brought back from Cork to Dublin by boat, arriving just before first light. The procession ‘when it reached Stephen’s Green in the dark grey morning, the coffin on a gun-carriage, a piper in front and a small straggling crowd of two or three hundred people after it’, was intensely moving to those who saw it. When the government met that day, Ernest Blythe unsurprisingly ‘never … saw a more dejected looking group’. The War Council was recast, headed by Mulcahy, who remained defence minister, but also at last became commander-in-chief. Kevin O’Higgins, who had been serving on the military staff, stepped up to a bigger political role as home affairs minister. He proposed that Mulcahy should succeed Collins at the head of the government, though Blythe persuaded his colleagues that to put a second general in that position would send out the wrong signals. Only then was W. T. Cosgrave, who had chaired the Cabinet in Collins’s absence, formally confirmed as chairman. O’Higgins then surprised Mulcahy by suggesting that O’Duffy – Mulcahy’s ‘right arm’ – be made chief of police, to kickstart the stalled process of establishing the Civic Guard (soon to be officially named ‘Garda Síochána’). Public insecurity, he argued, had reached a critical point – ‘foundations are crumbling on the civil side, decrees cannot be executed, debts cannot be collected, credit is therefore at an end, all commercial enterprise is at a standstill.’ This was a bigger problem even than the military threat. If the situation was not ‘boldly faced’, the social crisis could ‘shatter all hopes of founding a democratically governed Irish State’.194
After Collins’s death there was a widespread fear of reprisals by National forces, and with good reason. The Squad veteran Vinnie Byrne, who said that for four or five days ‘I’d have shot any bloody Die-hard I came across,’ was not alone. Many people assumed that the loss would cripple the Provisional Government. They included de Valera, who assured McGarrity in September that its personnel was ‘very weak’; Cosgrave was ‘a ninny’. Liam Mellows likewise thought that the Free State ‘seems to be a bit groggy these days’, and Paidin O’Keeffe predicted that ‘the English will be back in a week.’ But though many ministers decided to take refuge in Government Buildings for security (echoing the retreat of British officials into the Castle in 1920), the ministry was not seriously shaken. De Valera’s judgment was wide of the mark, and Todd Andrews’s contemptuous snort that Cosgrave’s ‘ambition in life was to be accepted as respectable’ also missed the point. Cosgrave had a quality of quiet solidity that was most valuable in the crisis of 1922 – his very ordinariness may have been an advantage. (The joke that even his wife did not know what his second initial stood for was double-edged.) Events now pitched him into a unique position: with both Griffith and Collins gone, he took over the headship of both the Dáil ministry and the Provisional Government, moving to resolve the unstable, semi-fictional dual authority that had been preserved since January. As president of Dáil Éireann and chairman of the Provisional Government he was a remarkable – perhaps unique – constitutional hybrid. This hybridity would echo into the institutions of the Irish Free State: after the Republic had finally been formally wound up in December, Cosgrave became a British-style prime minister with the title of president – President of the Executive Council.
The remnant of the second Dáil would have a kind of half-life for years – indeed decades – to come, as the last repository of republican sovereignty. In August Liam Lynch, still looking for ways of pulling the republican movement back together, suggested that ‘if the second Dáil, which is the Government of the Republic, or any other elected assembly, carry on such Government, I see no difficulty as to the allegiance of the Army.’ Cosgrave explained that ‘the functions of the Second Dáil came to an end on June 30th. The meeting which was to have taken place on that date would have been purely formal … The Sovereign Assembly of Ireland is now the Parliament elected in June last.’195 But as that parliament did not assemble until September, the precise source from which Mulcahy and
other ministers derived the authority they were exercising could well be questioned. The failure to convoke the parliament led to damaging charges that the government was showing ‘as complete a disregard for democracy’ as the irregulars. It was acting ‘as if it had a clear and unchallenged mandate … but it has no mandate at all’.196
It is clear that the delay was entirely for military reasons. Mulcahy had warned Collins early in August that it was ‘too early to say whether we could establish ourselves’ in the south ‘in time to have Parliament meet on [the] 12th. I feel that we shall have to have another postponement …’ But he thought that ‘even the political effect of another postponement would be good.’ His reasoning was characteristically military: it would ‘prevent the Irregulars in the South feeling that as soon as we came definitely up against them, we hesitated to face them boldly, and turned aside from the job, and called Parliament’. He predicted that if parliament did not meet until 24 August, ‘our military position would be very favourable.’197 In fact, Collins was killed two days before that date, and the meeting was put back still further to September.
By the time it met, the legal system had been radically redirected. The operation of the Dáil courts had been troubling the government for some time. The court system had been reconstructed after the Truce, and courts then ‘reached the highest point of their effectiveness’; but, if this was true overall, the local variations were always striking, even within counties.198 In Sligo, for instance, the south appears to have responded adequately to the reorganization while the north failed dismally. There was no attempt to hold a district court until 2 December, and then it fell through when only one justice managed to turn up. Austin Stack lambasted the ‘fiasco’, lecturing the justices that ‘the courts in your district are in a most unsatisfactory condition.’ Stack’s direction of the courts has been sharply criticized – ‘self-important, bullying and pedantic’, he tried to impose ‘rigid and unreal demands’.199 But his relentless chivvying of local court officials must have had some effect, and when he quit his post after the Treaty vote, things were unlikely to improve. Mulcahy complained to Griffith early in February that the Home Affairs Department was no longer working. ‘We are losing terrible [sic] in prestige because the ordinary Petty Sessions are going on, and going on in court houses, while Republican courts are in the background.’ In a guarded tribute to the former Minister, he noted that people were complaining that ‘whereas they could get a reply almost by return from Stack, under the present condition they cannot get a reply even after a number of reminders.’ The effect of this disorganization ‘cannot but be bad for the Free State’.200
The decision to scrap the republican courts does not, though, seem to be explicable on practical grounds. The system was still working when the circuit judges were recalled in mid-circuit on 11 July. Two days later the Supreme Court was abolished, and shortly after that the government took the remarkable step of formally rescinding the 1920 decree that had established – or, as the announcement put it, ‘purported to establish’ – the republican court system. This was the only Dáil decree ever to be formally rescinded, and the fact that it was done not by parliament (which had not then met) but by the Minister makes the step still more remarkable.201 Here, if anywhere, the need to meet British requirements acted to squeeze the life out of the Irish revolution. The loss of the republican courts seems to have been felt by many: ‘I have often heard it regretted since that [they] were not made permanent.’202
The new parliament also represented a decisive break from the Republic. If there was any temptation to have it meet as Dáil Éireann – a verbal fudge that might have mollified some lukewarm supporters of the government – it was sternly resisted by Cosgrave. When it eventually assembled on 9 September it was described in firmly British terms as ‘the Parliament to which the Provisional Government is to be responsible’ under the provisions of the Treaty. Even so Cosgrave, acting as chair pending the election of a new speaker (Ceann Comhairle), casually referred to the assembly as ‘the Dáil’, as did everyone who spoke. Some deputies indeed spoke of it as the ‘third Dáil’. The title ‘Provisional Parliament of Southern Ireland’ does not seem to have been heard. The political freight carried by formal terminology was emphasized by the veteran deputy Laurence Ginnell, who insisted that he had been elected ‘not to attend any such Parliament’, but ‘as a member of Dáil Eireann’, and refused to sign the roll unless he was assured that it was Dáil Éireann. ‘Will anyone tell me with authority whether this is Dáil Eireann or a Partition Parliament?’ Was it ‘the Dáil for the whole of Ireland?’ Ginnell’s warning that ‘the public are watching’ did not, however, deter Cosgrave from moving his expulsion, and he was led out of the chamber by the Captain of the Guard (a relief to ministers who saw that he might have been ‘very much of a thorn in our flesh’ in the next critical months).203 The chairman made clear that the executive was also changing. When Gavan Duffy asked if ‘the present system of dual government would be unified’, Cosgrave made clear that the two governments would at last be merged. Even so, the Free State as such could not formally come into being until 6 December, a year after the signing of the Treaty.
Under this second Provisional Government regime, counter-insurgency policy became distinctly tougher. Mulcahy was somewhat ‘less sentimental about old comrades’ than Collins had been. Cosgrave and O’Higgins were prepared to brand republican fighters as unlawful combatants, in effect criminals. They were unworried by the prospect of using martial law, despite its grim political echoes – and even though Mulcahy had long since judged that the threat across most of the country had been reduced to the level of a police action. Early in September the government discussed the possibility of proclaiming martial law in Cork, but decided to leave any decision to the chairman in parliament. The general confusion over martial-law powers in English law – whether they derived from Crown prerogative or common law – that had vexed the British Cabinet, remained unresolved, and the government eventually opted for statutory emergency powers. On 15 September, Mulcahy outlined the powers required by the army to restore order, and the government law officer was instructed to draw up the necessary provisions.
The result, the Army Emergency Powers Resolution, was introduced on 27 September and adopted next day. It took the form of ‘a number of recitals followed by a ratification clause’,204 establishing military courts or committees with powers to impose death penalties on non-army personnel and indefinite detention without trial. Firearms possession was to be controlled by the (National) Army Council. The Council was authorized to create further orders (which would have to be laid before the Dáil), to create offences triable by military courts. Answering Labour criticism of the legislation as a virtual military dictatorship, Cosgrave noted that, although he had always been against the death penalty, he could now see ‘no other way … in which ordered conditions can be restored in this country, or any security obtained for our troops’ – or indeed ‘to give our troops any confidence in us as a Government’.
Even after nearly four months of fighting, the National Army’s military effectiveness was still limited. As in the fight against Britain, the intelligence system remained unexpectedly fragile. Eastern Command, ‘with the exception of the 2nd Eastern division, does not show that proper grasp of intelligence work which is absolutely necessary to defeat the present tactics of the Irregulars. We should be in a position to anticipate and frustrate all Enemy activities,’ but the reverse was occurring in many places. In the south, the troops gave away information ‘and of course the Enemy are often able to frustrate our plans.’ In Limerick, the intelligence service might or might not exist – 2nd Southern Division said, ‘we do not know … beyond the absolute lack of any form of communication with this Department.’ These were potentially serious problems, but in the end they could be neutralized by the establishment of governmental legitimacy. The most important thing was that the war should be ‘made a second-rate news item … minimising disturbances and em
phasising the normalisation of things’.205
REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT
As president of a republic that was effectively disestablished, Eamon de Valera was in a kind of political limbo from the time the IRA Executive set itself up as an independent source of republican authority. Shepherded through the countryside from irregular unit to irregular unit, the awkward symbol of a lost state, he was more alert than his military hosts to the weakness of the republican position. The Dáil meeting of 9 September seemed to push him over the narrow line into outright defeatism, if he had not indeed crossed it already. According to Lynch, when de Valera had left GHQ on 15 August he had been ‘most pessimistic and regarded our position as hopeless. He even at that time contemplated taking public action which would ruin us.’ Before the Dáil met, Lynch urged that de Valera be told that the military situation had changed, and ‘we are so certain of success that we ask that no action be taken by him or Republican Party which would weaken us and may even rob us of victory.’ Either de Valera did not receive this reappraisal or he did not believe it. The long and agonized appraisal of the situation he sent to Joe McGarrity the day after the Dáil meeting pithily demonstrated the fundamental impossibility of the situation. Republicans had now to choose ‘between a heartbreaking surrender of what they have repeatedly proved was dearer to them than life and the repudiation of what they recognise to be the basis of all order in government and the keystone of democracy – majority rule’. There could be ‘no glory and no enthusiasm’ in the struggle, and, worse, ‘no way out of it’. He was already looking forward to a ‘revival of the Sinn Féin idea in a new form’ if ‘the present physical resistance fails’. He himself was ‘almost wishing I were deposed, for the present position places upon me the responsibility for carrying out a programme which was not mine’.206
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 58