The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  But he was determined to fight for control of the republican funds still resting in the USA. In a postscript he argued that ‘they’ could not ‘make good their title after their performance … when they would not declare that their Parliament was Dáil Éireann’. The line to take, he wrote shortly afterwards, was that ‘the new Dáil is not the legitimate successor to the old Dáil … The funds are the property of the Second Dáil which has not yet been constitutionally dissolved.’ Over the years McGarrity had often done little more than extend a sympathetic ear to his distinguished correspondent, but at this point he made a decisive intervention, urging on 27 September that ‘top man’ make a ‘determined stand’; the second Dáil should be recalled and an all-Ireland civil government ‘be boldly declared’. (‘You may have a government – that is not known – that is not enough.’) ‘The bolder the stroke, the more will rally to your banner.’207

  In fact the policy of establishing a government had already been discussed at some length by IRA leaders. A month earlier, Liam Mellows had urged that ‘a Provisional Republican Government should be set up at once.’ Writing to O’Malley from Mountjoy gaol on 29 August he argued that ‘an object – a target – must be presented for the enemy … to hit at – otherwise it becomes a fight (apparently) between individuals.’208 He also argued that ‘The Programme of Democratic Control (the social programme) … should be translated into something definite’: this was ‘essential if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence’. Mellows suggested taking the programme that had appeared in the Workers’ Republic on 22 July – a pretty full-blooded socialist document advocating nationalization of the banks and industry. ‘Under the REPUBLIC all Industry will be controlled by the State for the workers’ and farmers’ benefit …’ For Mellows, if Irish labour could be kept ‘for the Republic’, it would be ‘possibly the biggest factor on our side’.209 The idea of creating a republican administration was also supported by Maurice Twomey, who asked ‘where was the Republic’ and who was in charge of it. ‘You cannot very well have a Republic without a government.’ Other republicans were also reacting to the crystallization of the Free State by focusing on social programmes. P. J. Ruttledge, the only ‘politician’ on the IRA Executive, had persuaded it to adopt a Land Scheme for confiscating and redistributing ‘demesnes and ranches’. But, tellingly perhaps, O’Malley was unable to lay hands on a copy of Ruttledge’s scheme.

  Lynch still appeared unmoved by such thinking, though. ‘Views and Opinions of political people are not to be too seriously considered,’ he declared at the end of August. ‘Our aim and course are now clearly defined and cut and dried.’ Even though ‘many influences’ would be ‘constantly brought to bear to deflect us from them … these will be brushed aside’.210 Mellows was evidently one of these: ‘his ideals prevent him from seeing the same military outlook as others at times.’211 But the argument for a republican government was revived yet again when O’Malley’s adjutant, Tom Derrig, posed the question ‘can we get on without a shield of Civil Authority or civil departments at the very least?’ Derrig thought there were three possible courses. The one he preferred was to call the second Dáil, ‘dissolve it and form a Government from the Third Dáil which will swear allegiance to the Republic’: this would ‘strengthen us much more in the eyes of the people and will strengthen our position wonderfully’. Otherwise a number of civil departments (courts and local government, finance, land, food and propaganda) might be set up, or – failing all else – a five-man army council might be set up with one of its members in charge of civil administration. This last, however, was not warranted – was in fact ‘discard[ed]’ – by ‘our military position’, and would be utterly impossible unless Lynch’s HQ came to ‘a more central base’.212

  O’Malley put Derrig’s argument to Lynch on 24 September. ‘We consider it imperative that some sort of a Government whether a Provisional or Republican Government or a Military one should be inaugurated at once.’ Derrig spoke of the need for ‘some form of central control’ (probably not very attractive to Lynch) and the role of the government as a ‘shield’ (perhaps a little more). O’Malley suggested that it was ‘essential to fight the illegality of the Provisional Government’, and ‘time to turn our attention to a constructive policy’. The republicans needed both a legal committee, and a body to tackle ‘the food question, Transport, Land and Civil Administration’. He reported that Derrig was organizing a legal committee, and ‘working on the Democratic Programme’. Three weeks earlier he had in fact argued that ‘the need for a Democratic Republican Constitution is felt’, and that it would ‘get the workers’. But O’Malley’s pressing sense of the need to give some social content to the concept of the republic was not shared by his chief. (Lynch bluntly dismissed the labour manifesto as ‘gas’ and demanded that workers stop co-operating with the enemy.) He had, as Mellows’s biographer Desmond Greaves condescendingly put it, ‘been trained as a small-town shop assistant and such matters were foreign to him’.

  De Valera took the issue up again with Lynch, telling him on 12 October that in order to provide a rallying point and centre of direction, to preserve the continuity of the Republic and to establish a claim on the republican funds, a government must be restored. Characteristically he also warned McGarrity on the same day that there would be ‘grave difficulties’, since no body but the Army Executive could ‘now get the allegiance of the men who are fighting’, and their views on possible peace were ‘unlikely to be the same’ as his. Lynch had the same idea; though he had decided not to summon the Executive again ‘unless a decision is necessary on some vital point of policy’, he had told O’Malley that he felt ‘sure the decision of the Executive would be to fight to a finish, and accept no more compromises’.

  When the Executive discussed the issue over two days on 16–17 October, it might otherwise have been ready to go further than merely calling on ‘the former President of Dáil Éireann to form a government which will preserve the continuity of the Republic’. When the second Dáil reconvened in secret on 25 October and reaffirmed that de Valera was its president, the Cabinet he formed had an air of unreality. The ministries headed by Austin Stack (Finance), O’Kelly (Local Government) and Barton (Economic Affairs) simply did not exist, while the Defence Minister, Liam Mellows, was incarcerated in Mountjoy gaol.

  ‘VERY DRASTIC MEASURES’

  The death of Collins, and that of his close friend Harry Boland, might be seen as sad accidents. Towards the end of the year, however, there were signs that a vicious spiral might overwhelm the restraints that had so far kept the civil war within bounds – avoiding what Collins had called ‘unnecessary destruction and loss of life’. The first executions under the Army Emergency Powers Resolution, of four republican IRA men on 17 November, were followed by the execution on the 24th of Erskine Childers on what many saw as a trumped-up charge. (He had a miniature pistol, a gift from Michael Collins, but his real offence was to be seen as the éminence grise of the republican irreconcilables.) Gavan Duffy denounced this execution directly as a political murder. Scrupulous precautions, he insisted, should have been taken against doing an injustice under the new regulations; instead ‘unnecessary secrecy’ seemed ‘to pervade the dealings of the authorities with these strange tribunals’. Three days later an IRA warning was issued to the Speaker of the ‘Provisional Parliament of Southern Ireland’: ‘every member of your body who voted for this resolution by which you pretend to make legal the murder of soldiers, is equally guilty … unless your army recognises the rules of warfare … we shall adopt very drastic measures to protect our forces.’

  The government reacted to this warning by issuing the so-called ‘Orders of Frightfulness’ on 30 November. These identified fourteen named categories of people who were to be shot on sight. Barely a week later the leading pro-Treaty TD and former IRA leader Seán Hales was assassinated on Ormond Quay in Dublin. Mulcahy immediately proposed that the imprisoned Four Courts leaders be executed, and th
e Cabinet agreed. The legality of this action was highly questionable, to say the least. Mulcahy’s subsequent announcement of the executions described them as both a ‘solemn warning’ and a ‘reprisal’. It was later said that O’Higgins was dismayed by the addition of the word reprisal, but Ernest Blythe (who accepted that it was a bad choice which drew stern criticism from the Church) was clear that the whole Cabinet had approved the statement. They did not question Mulcahy’s selection of names, assuming that it was caculated to strike the heaviest psychological blow possible. The summary executions were not intended to be even pseudo-legal: Blythe bluntly described them as simple counter-terrorism. He argued that if the four men had been brought before drumhead courts martial the effect would have been worse: people would have said that the verdicts were a foregone conclusion in any case, and the government was trying to avoid direct responsibility. The killings had a powerful effect, confirming, ironically, the assertions of hawkish British ministers about the value of strong action in impressing the Irish people with the government’s resolve.213 O’Higgins read parliament a lesson in elementary political theory: all government was ultimately based on force, and ‘must meet force with greater force if it is to survive’. Salus populi suprema est lex. This was incontrovertible, if remarkably frank: the question of course was what kind of threat to public safety Childers had represented.

  Out in the countryside the government forces clearly recognized counter-terrorism as an effective policy. In January 1923 the army’s emergency powers were enlarged, to impose the death penalty for a swathe of offences including carrying messages for irregulars, assisting in escapes, using military or police uniforms, and desertion from the National Army. The increase in the level of executions from late December onwards was striking. Whereas the British authorities had executed twenty-four Volunteers up to the Truce, the Free State executed at least seventy-seven (a total enshrined in Dorothy Macardle’s republican bible), and probably four more, for political offences. Though the Labour party succeeded in getting the government to talk about the idea of suspending executions to make a settlement possible, it failed to convince it. Meeting with the Labour leadership on 23 February, Mulcahy rejected the argument that executions stiffened republican resolve, and maintained that their effect was to erode irregular morale. The rate of executions actually increased after February.214 Unknown numbers were shot extra-judicially by police and National troops; the bodies of at least twenty-five republicans were alleged to have been dumped in Dublin streets. In Kerry in particular, a cycle of tit-for-tat killings began in late August 1922 when two republican IRA men were shot after surrendering. It reached a gruesome climax in March 1923 after five National troops searching a supposed republican dugout at Knocknagoshel were blown to pieces by a booby trap. The incident turned out to be a set-up. The local National Army commander ordered his troops to use republican hostages as minesweepers, and can hardly have been surprised when they went on to outdo their opponents by strapping prisoners to a mine of their own.

  On 7 March, nine republicans were brought from Ballymullen barracks to Ballyseedy Cross, bound hand and foot and roped together in a circle around a mine buried beneath a log and a pile of stones. When the mine was detonated, eight were killed; one, amazingly, was blown clear and escaped with only slight injuries. The men who rescued him heard a series of further explosions, and believed that grenades were thrown in among the victims.215 Smaller versions of this massacre were re-enacted within hours near Killarney, where five were killed, and Caherciveen, where four died. Only five of the thirty-two republican IRA men who died in Kerry in March were killed in combat. The massacres were widely believed to be the work of the Dublin Guards, but responsibility was never pinned on any senior officers – or indeed men. According to one National Army officer, the submissions made to the military court of inquiry at Tralee on 7 April which exonerated the troops were, ‘to my personal knowledge, totally untrue’.216

  ‘THE REPUBLIC CAN NO LONGER BE DEFENDED’

  In January 1923 Liam Deasy was arrested, and would no doubt have been executed like so many other irregulars. But he had already decided that it was pointlessly destructive to keep up the fight. Risking the charge that he was acting to save his own skin, he signed a statement accepting ‘immediate and unconditional surrender of all arms and men as required by General Mulcahy’ and calling on sixteen named republican leaders to give ‘a similar undertaking and acceptance’. The statement was drafted by his captors, but it accorded with his own conclusions, as he explained in a personal letter sent to the named leaders. When the government published the appeal on 9 February, it announced a temporary suspension of executions until the republican leaders replied, and offered an amnesty to all irregulars who surrendered with their weapons before the 18th. No reply came.

  This was far from the first effort to compose the split within the army. Throughout the fighting, as Ernest Blythe lamented, ‘individual Commanders in various areas, instead of pursuing the war with full vigour … were inclined to try to make contact with their opposite numbers and enter upon discussions.’ This tendency extended, with a few exceptions, ‘right through the top ranks of the Army’ – including Mulcahy, who at one point left a Cabinet meeting which had decided to prohibit all negotiations, ‘got into his car at the door of Government Buildings and drove to a rendezvous with Mr de Valera’. According to Blythe’s account, when the Cabinet discovered this, it was unanimous that Mulcahy should hand in his resignation, though ‘in view of the state of affairs generally, and … the way in which the Government was cut off from the Army, none of us felt that we could make that demand.’ But Blythe ‘never had full confidence in him afterwards’.217 No peace talks were ever formally entertained by the government. The civilian Free Staters seem to have made up their minds, probably well before Collins died, that they would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender, expressed in the demand for the surrender of arms.

  Throughout the autumn of 1922 there were calls for peace from a series of public and private organizations. Several corporations and councils, harbour commissioners, boards of guardians, the Farmers’ Union, the Gaelic League, the Irish Women’s International League and others urged at least a temporary ceasefire. A new organization called Clann na hÉireann was founded in Navan in October, with the support of leading clergy and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, to promote all-Ireland activities as a platform for ‘peace with honour’. In November a People’s Peace League emerged, backed by the veteran Fenian P. S. O’Hegarty, and proposed that the two sides should meet together at a peace conference. The government’s line on such ideas was effectively summed up in Cosgrave’s response to a call from a grouping of Wexford Sinn Feiners, Farmers and Transport Workers for an armistice in December. Peace could be established only ‘on a sound basis, namely subject to the authority of representative government … The time for mercy is being rapidly consumed, and if advantage be not taken of it very shortly, those who are making war on the people will find too late that there is a limit to patience.’218

  On the face of things, the most plausible peace effort came from the Neutral IRA, a group put together by the Cork Volunteer leaders Florrie O’Donoghue and Seán O’Hegarty at the end of 1922. It claimed a membership of 20,000 ‘men who had pre-Truce IRA service, and who had not taken an active part on either side in the civil war’. This was a very large number, even if its organization was, as O’Donoghue admitted, necessarily ‘loose’. With a majority of republican sympathizers, it was a single-issue group, aimed at ending the war. It ‘sprang up spontaneously in every area in response to an appeal for this purpose’. It was able to mount an impressive convention in Dublin on 4 February 1923, with over 150 delegates. They called for the disbandment of both pro- and anti-Treaty forces, and their replacement by a new army recruited from pre-Truce Volunteers (themselves, presumably). The Neutral IRA sent both leaderships an appeal to negotiate a truce in mid-February.219 The republican view of these activities was pithily expressed by
Tom Maguire’s contemptuous remark that O’Donoghue ‘went from this bishop to that bishop trying to bring the sides together’. Cosgrave was no more receptive. He was recorded as saying, ‘if we have to exterminate ten thousand Republicans, the three millions of our people is bigger than this ten thousand.’220 This was unusually crude language (and grammar), but it essentially reiterated the line that he and O’Higgins had always taken: ‘if the country was going to live’, the government was not just entitled but obliged to act without flinching.

  When the Waterford brigadier Dinny Lacey was killed on 18 February, there were rumours that he had been involved in moves to end the fighting. The IRA Adjutant General wrote angrily to Lacey’s divisional commander, ‘the propaganda which our own people are furnishing the F.S. “Government” every day is reducing GHQ to a miserable position.’ The impression was that ‘Officers all over the country are deliberately disobeying orders of GHQ and making individual peace overtures to the enemy.’ This encouraged the enemy in ‘his “Executions and Surrender” policy’. GHQ – that is, Lynch – insisted that ‘a temporary cessation of strife will lead us nowhere,’ and added darkly that ‘discipline must be maintained at all costs.’ ‘By remaining firm & united we can secure Independence.’221

  By this time, most of Lynch’s subordinates had reached the conclusion that there was no point in fighting on. All but two of the eighteen commanders who attended a 1st Southern Division Council at Coolea on 26 February gave their opinion that victory was impossible.222 Lynch himself never accepted this. He had recently declared that the republican forces were ‘in a stronger military position than at any period’ in their history. The war would ‘go on until the independence of our country is recognised by our enemies’, and ‘victory is within our grasp if we stand unitedly and firmly.’ This was not just public morale-boosting. Conversing with Sean Dowling at this point, ‘not alone was he planning for mountain cannon to arrive, but he was also formulating the sort of uniform we would wear when we won.’223 Even the disillusioned de Valera believed, or at least told Joe McGarrity, that ‘one big effort from our friends everywhere would finally smash the Free State.’ The arguments were extensively rehearsed at a four-day meeting of the Executive between 23 and 26 March, the first to which de Valera was invited – an indirect recognition that the military command had run out of road. In the end, a motion ‘that further armed resistance and operations against F.S. Government will not further the cause of independence of the country’ was defeated by a single vote. It was still ‘impossible to reconcile the divergent views held by members of the Executive’. They decided to adjourn for a fortnight and reconvene on 10 April.