1
The Long War
In December 1956, weeks after Fidel Castro and his comrades landed on the Cuban coast, a much older revolutionary movement on another small island was getting ready to complete some unfinished business. During the early hours of 12 December, the Irish Republican Army launched a series of attacks on police and military targets throughout Northern Ireland, aiming to dislodge Britain’s last foothold on Irish soil after centuries of foreign rule.
Six years later, Castro had taken power in Havana, seen off the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was about to take delivery of Soviet nuclear missiles, thrusting his country to the forefront of global attention. But the IRA had not been able to attract the interest of its own people, let alone the outside world. A statement in February 1962, announcing the end of the movement’s latest campaign, looked forward hopefully to ‘a period of consolidation, expansion and preparation for the final and victorious phase of the struggle’.1 The New York Times derided ‘a few score of young toughs’ who had used ‘a grand and famous name’ to exalt their feeble efforts: ‘The Irish Republican Army belongs to history, and it belongs to better men in times that are gone.’2
The IRA had documented the progress of its failed uprising in a newspaper called the United Irishman, named after a group of eighteenth-century separatists whose most famous leader was Wolfe Tone, a Protestant lawyer from Dublin. Every year, Irish republicans made the pilgrimage to Tone’s graveside at Bodenstown to hear the movement set out its vision for an Ireland that had changed beyond recognition since his death. Products of a revolutionary age, the United Irishmen took inspiration from Tom Paine and the French Jacobins in their struggle for an Irish Republic. Armed with such Promethean ambitions, they set out to bridge the gap between descendants of Catholic natives and Protestant settlers, turning the page on the sectarian wars of the seventeenth century: ‘We have thought little about our ancestors – much of our posterity. Are we forever to walk like beasts of prey over fields which these ancestors stained with blood?’3
Remarkably, it looked as if they might succeed. The discrimination suffered by Presbyterians at the hands of an Anglican establishment helped the United Irishmen to carve out a popular base in Ulster, the heartland of Protestant settlement. Their middle-class, Protestant leadership struck up an alliance with the Defenders, a movement of artisans and small farmers with an eclectic ideology that was mostly supported by Catholics.4 Although the founders of the United Irishmen were archetypal bourgeois revolutionaries, and the initiative still lay with middle-class radicals like Tone, the society’s membership became increasingly plebeian after the British authorities drove it underground.5 In pursuit of mass support, United Irish leaders spiced up their political manifesto by promising to reduce the burden of taxes, tithes and rents.6 In 1797, one British general warned that his government’s position in the country rested on sand: ‘The loyalty of every Irishman who is unconnected with property is artificial.’7
The administration at Dublin Castle responded with savage repression, while the leaders of the movement held their fire in the hope of receiving French military aid. When a French expeditionary force did land on Irish shores in 1798, it was already too late to make a difference. Hamstrung by informers, the United Irishmen saw their plan for a national rebellion miscarry in almost every case, with the exception of Wexford, where a month-long struggle ended in a crushing defeat for the rebels. Captured by British forces, Wolfe Tone took his own life in prison to evade the hangman’s noose. He became an inconvenient figure for those who sought to identify Irishness with Catholicism: the ‘Irish-Ireland’ polemicist D. P. Moran later dismissed him as ‘a Frenchman born in Ireland of English parents’, and some Catholic ideologues tried to write Tone and his disciples out of the nation’s history altogether.8
The role played by Ulster Presbyterians in the revolt was just as troublesome for those who associated the Protestant faith with loyalty to Britain. There was no sequel to this episode: the loyalist Orange Order, founded in the 1790s, proved to be a far more enduring presence in the world of Protestant Ulster than the United Irishmen. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the barrier between Anglicans and ‘Dissenters’ melted away, leaving the movement for national independence to draw its support almost exclusively from the Catholic population. The memory of 1798 saddled that movement with a pledge to overcome sectarian boundaries that was more honoured in the breach than the observance. At a time when the Catholic Church increasingly sought to monopolize Irish identity, such well-intentioned failure still counted for something.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, William Pitt’s government pushed through an Act of Union between Ireland and Britain that came into effect in 1801. Pitt abandoned plans to combine the Act of Union with the repeal of legislation that discriminated against Catholics, and ‘Catholic emancipation’ became the rallying cry for a decidedly unrevolutionary politician, Daniel O’Connell, in the 1820s.
Having won the vote for propertied Catholics, O’Connell turned his attention to the Union itself, but retreated in the face of a government clampdown. The year after O’Connell’s death in 1847, during one of the most catastrophic famines in modern European history, a group of radical nationalists who called themselves Young Ireland tried to join Europe’s ‘springtime of nations’. However, the British authorities had no trouble suppressing their revolt.9 The Great Famine decimated the lower ranks of the Irish peasantry, and spawned a vast Irish-American diaspora that would provide future struggles for national independence with a vital source of moral and material support.
James Stephens, a veteran of France’s revolutionary underground, founded a new organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in 1858. Unlike the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders, the IRB established a lasting presence on the Irish political scene, surviving well into the twentieth century. Its supporters became popularly known as the Fenians. Backing for the movement came predominantly from the working and lower-middle classes, giving it a strong egalitarian flavour, although the movement’s radicalism was largely pre-socialist, pitting the people against the aristocracy, not the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.10 The Catholic Church responded to the Fenians with ferocious hostility, and they were the nearest thing to an anti-clerical force in a deeply religious society. However, in contrast to the French republicans who had inspired James Stephens, the IRB tried to avoid a head-on clash with the Church.11
The IRB’s Irish-American allies pressed hard for an uprising against British rule, and even mounted raids of their own into Britain’s Canadian possessions: the first time a military force calling itself the ‘Irish Republican Army’ went into action. In 1866 the American branch accused Stephens of foot-dragging and ousted him from the leadership. Yet after another failed insurrection the following year, the IRB’s Supreme Council decided to adopt a more cautious strategy.12 A revised constitution published in 1873 promised that the organization would ‘await the decision of the Irish nation, as expressed by a majority of the Irish people, as to the fit hour of inaugurating a war against England’, in the meantime offering its support to ‘every movement calculated to advance the cause of Irish independence’.13 For the rest of its history, the IRB had one foot in the world of conspiracy, and the other in the realm of open mass politics.
The IRB’s main rival in the latter sphere was the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), founded by Isaac Butt in 1874, but given real impetus by Butt’s successor Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landowner who deployed his aristocratic hauteur to good effect against Britain’s ruling class. It later became customary to refer to two different strains of Irish nationalism: the ‘constitutional’ and ‘physical-force’ parties. However, those labels obscured some basic facts about Irish political life. The reformist, parliamentary approach favoured by the IPP ran up against two main obstacles. Restrictions based on class and gender prevented the majority of Irish men and women from voting, even after franchise reform trebled the Irish electorate in 1885. Moreover, Irish MPs took their seats in an overwhelmingly British parliament, with no guarantee their voices would be heard. Parnell recognized as much by pursuing obstructionist tactics in the House of Commons, to the displeasure of Isaac Butt.
The IRB gave some tentative backing to Butt’s party, and one member of its Supreme Council, John O’Connor Power, won a seat at Westminster for the IPP.14 IRB activists also played a central part in the genesis of the Land League, a movement for agrarian reform founded in 1879.15 The League spearheaded a bitter struggle against ‘landlordism’ in the midst of a deep agricultural depression, demanding the right of tenants to buy their plots. The British prime minister William Gladstone prohibited the League in 1881 and had Parnell imprisoned. A series of land acts went some way towards addressing the grievances of rural Ireland, enabling many tenants to become small proprietors, although agrarian discontent remained a live issue well into the twentieth century, especially in the western counties.
After his release from jail, Parnell began pivoting towards a parliamentary alliance with Gladstone’s Liberal Party. He cemented that pact after the IPP’s electoral triumph in 1885, when it swept the boards outside Ulster. Meanwhile the IRB wilted under the onslaught of Britain’s political police.16
Parnell accepted a proposal for self-government within the United Kingdom that fell a long way short of what the IRB was prepared to accept. Even in this diluted version, Home Rule still faced resistance at Westminster. Gladstone’s first bill in 1886 was voted down in the House of Commons; a second bill seven years later passed the lower chamber but faced uncompromising opposition from the House of Lords. In the intervening period, revelations about Parnell’s private life had seen him ejected from the IPP’s leadership at the behest of Gladstone and the Catholic bishops. As a consequence, the Home Rulers split, and Parnell turned back to the Fenians for support – an alliance that his followers continued for some time after Parnell’s death on the campaign trail in 1891.17
As late as 1909, one-quarter of the IPP’s parliamentary group had a background in the IRB.18 But by the turn of the century, the Brotherhood itself was a greatly diminished force.19 The revolutionary tradition in Irish politics appeared to have been extinguished, while the IPP’s reunified caucus waited for the stars to align in its favour once again.
The Home Rule Crisis
That moment looked to have finally arrived in 1910. The Liberal Party had returned to power four years earlier after a long period of Conservative hegemony that took Home Rule off the agenda at Westminster. A snap election deprived the Liberals of an overall majority and left them relying on Irish MPs to pass legislation that stripped the aristocratic upper chamber of its veto power. In return for this support, Herbert Asquith’s government reluctantly pledged to grant Ireland self-government.20
That happy consummation could not come soon enough for the Home Rulers and their leader John Redmond. The IPP’s near-monopoly of electoral representation had left the party flabby and complacent. Its MPs rarely had to face a serious challenge at the ballot box, and their average age had risen sharply since Parnell’s time.21 If the movement began to falter, there were new forces ready to challenge Redmond’s authority as national leader. The journalist Arthur Griffith, a former IRB man, led a rival party that called itself Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’).22 Griffith called for a ‘dual monarchy’ on the Austro-Hungarian model as a halfway house between Home Rule and full independence, to be achieved by the abstention of Irish MPs from Westminster. A rising tide of cultural nationalism, channelled through organizations like the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association, frequently spilled over onto the political field. The IRB also began to revive under the leadership of Young Turks like Denis McCullough, who in his own words ‘cleared out most of the older men (including my father) most of whom I considered of no further use to us’.23
Most alarmingly for the IPP, with its conservative, Catholic stamp, the promising turn of events at Westminster coincided with a dramatic surge in labour militancy as syndicalism took root on Irish soil. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) sought to mobilize unskilled workers who could only hope to better their condition through tactical militancy and the strength of numbers.24 The ITGWU leader Jim Larkin was a strong supporter of Irish independence who believed that the working class would be its only reliable champion.25 Larkin’s socialist ally James Connolly expressed the same viewpoint in works like Labour in Irish History, with such eloquence that many came to believe he had invented it from scratch.
The business tycoon William Martin Murphy saw ‘Larkinism’ as a mortal threat to the interests of property. He organized a lock-out of union members in 1913 that became a struggle of unparalleled bitterness and intensity. When police attacked strikers at a rally in Dublin, the ITGWU leaders formed a working-class militia, the Irish Citizens’ Army, to protect their members in future clashes.26 The lock-out ended in victory for the employers, leaving the Irish workers’ movement to lick its wounds and prepare for the next round.
Murphy’s appetite for the battle had been whetted by his belief that Ireland would soon have its own parliament. A strong supporter of Home Rule, he wanted his class to hold the initiative at the dawning of a new age. However, the IPP’s confidence that a smooth road to self-government lay ahead proved to be disastrously misplaced.
At Westminster, the Conservative Party wanted to use Ireland as a lever to return it to government, and its leader Andrew Bonar Law threw his full weight behind Unionist opposition to Home Rule.27 In Ireland itself, the Ulster Unionist Party began making preparations for war, pledging to establish a provisional government on the day Home Rule came into effect. With enthusiastic support from Bonar Law, the Unionist leaders Edward Carson and James Craig set up a private militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and armed it with weapons from Germany.28 There was a large element of shadow-boxing in these manoeuvres, however. With the Tories on their side and regular briefings from sympathetic generals, the Ulster Unionists knew there was little danger they would have to face the British Army. This was confirmed by the Curragh mutiny of March 1914, when British officers defied orders to ‘coerce Ulster’.29
The Tory–Unionist alliance wavered between opposing self-government for the entire country and demanding Ulster’s exclusion from the new dispensation. Carson, a southern Unionist, would have preferred to block Home Rule altogether, but his lieutenant Craig was ready to fall back on the north-eastern counties, the only real stronghold for Unionism in an age of mass politics. As partition began to seem inevitable, the definition of ‘Ulster’ itself became rather hazy: the term could refer to the full nine-county province, where there was a small unionist majority, or a more compact area of six counties. A slimmed-down, manageable territory had obvious attractions for Unionism, although two of the six counties still had more nationalists than unionists.
Supporters of Home Rule observed these developments with fury, contrasting the indulgence bestowed on the UVF with their own rich experience of British coercion. John Redmond’s inability to respond to the crisis sapped his authority, and the IRB saw a chance to intervene. Its members took the lead in establishing the Irish Volunteers as a counterweight to the UVF. Although the Volunteers formally pledged to support the IPP leader, who made sure to place his own men on their executive, the implicit challenge to Redmond’s cautious parliamentary tactics was unmistakable.30
The outbreak of a European war in August 1914 postponed a head-on clash. Asquith’s government put Home Rule on ice until the conflict was over, while the UVF enlisted in the British Army; Redmond urged the Irish Volunteers to do the same. The majority heeded his call, leaving behind a militant rump under strong IRB influence. As the war dragged on, becoming deeply unpopular, Redmond’s standing among the nationalist population declined sharply.31
During this period, a close-knit group of IRB leaders began making plans for an uprising against British rule. They kept their scheme secret, not only from the general public, but even from the nominal head of the Irish Volunteers, Eóin MacNeill. Fearing that the socialist leader James Connolly would mount a separate insurrection of his own, the conspirators brought him into their confidence. Jim Larkin’s departure for the US had left Connolly in charge of both the ITGWU and the Irish Citizens’ Army. The collapse of European socialism into support for the war effort horrified Connolly, and he was desperate to strike a blow of some kind against the slaughter in the trenches.32 In the past, Connolly had argued that the working class should lead the struggle for national independence; now he decided to join an uprising with a more ambiguous social content, leaving future generations of left-wing activists to puzzle over his legacy.33
The Easter Rising of 1916 lost any real chance of success when Eóin MacNeill discovered that the conspirators had tricked him and sent out instructions for the Volunteers to stand down. Knowing they would be prosecuted anyway, even if they abandoned their plan, the leaders of the rebellion decided to go ahead, in hope rather than expectation of victory, with a fraction of the manpower they had been counting on, and none of the anticipated German support. Outside Dublin, there was little action of note.34 The capital itself saw intense street fighting that far surpassed the impact of 1848 or 1867. After six days Patrick Pearse, the rebel commander, surrendered to avoid further loss of life. Pearse became the first of sixteen men to be executed under martial law, including a badly injured James Connolly.
The steady trickle of executions helped convert a general feeling of bewilderment at the Rising into popular admiration for its leaders. Sinn Féin played no direct part in the rebellion, but Arthur Griffith’s party became a channel for the new mood, winning a series of by-elections and choosing Éamon de Valera, one of the most senior rebels to have escaped the firing squad, as its leader.35 De Valera, whose US birth and part-Spanish parentage gave him a dash of exoticism, went on to dominate Irish politics for the next half-century, combining the appearance of rigidity with a readiness to dance around awkward principles when the situation demanded it.
An attempt by the new Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, to impose conscription on Ireland completed the work that the Rising had begun. The anti-conscription movement, supported by Sinn Féin, the IPP and the Catholic bishops, climaxed with a general strike in April 1918 that shut down the country outside Ulster.36
Eight months later, the United Kingdom held the first general election since 1910, with the taste of victory over Germany still fresh. Franchise reform had nearly trebled the size of the Irish electorate, and Sinn Féin took full advantage to mobilize support. De Valera’s party promised to boycott the parliament in Westminster and secure international recognition for an Irish Republic.
It won 73 of 105 seats, wiping the IPP off the electoral map. The Unionists held their own in Ulster, the only bulwark against Sinn Féin’s hegemony, winning 23 of the region’s 37 seats.37 On 21 January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs gathered in Dublin’s Mansion House to inaugurate a new assembly, Dáil Éireann, and declare Irish independence. After a century of disappointment, the dream of Tone and Stephens looked to have become a reality.
A Nation Once Again?
On the same day, a group of Irish Volunteers began the War of Independence with an attack on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Tipperary. By now, the reorganized Volunteers were generally known as the Irish Republican Army. The maxim of their new campaign might have been drawn from words attributed to John MacBride, one of those executed in 1916: ‘If it ever happens again, take my advice and don’t get inside four walls.’38
Guerrilla tactics had been used before in struggles against foreign occupiers, most famously in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, but never in such an effective and systematic manner to achieve a political goal. The British government denounced the IRA as cowardly murderers because its Volunteers refused to meet highly trained, professional troops in open combat. The bitterness of the attacks underlined how difficult it was for a powerful state to crush a much weaker enemy that chose not to play by the rules. Anti-colonial militants in the rest of Britain’s empire took careful note.
The IRA began by targeting members of the RIC, an armed police force recruited overwhelmingly from the Irish Catholic population. Many rural police stations shut down altogether, leaving much of the countryside outside government control. Fear of assassination and communal pressure combined to produce mass resignations, obliging the authorities in London to rely on outside recruits to fill the gap. Reprisals against civilians by these auxiliary troops deprived British rule of such moral authority as it still possessed.39 In November 1920, Lloyd George boasted to a society banquet in London that his government had ‘murder by the throat’. By the end of the month, the IRA had killed fourteen men it identified as British intelligence officers on a single morning in Dublin, while its 3rd Cork Brigade wiped out an eighteen-strong company of auxiliaries in an ambush at Kilmichael.40 British troops responded to the assassinations in Dublin by opening fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match, killing twelve. Soon afterwards, the government declared martial law in the south-west.
For the most part, the IRA fought its war in Dublin and Munster, with rural chieftains such as Seán Moylan, Liam Lynch and Michael Brennan operating at some remove from the national leadership. The relationship between the Volunteers and the IRB was never fully clarified: on paper, the Brotherhood had no input into IRA decision-making, but the last president of its Supreme Council, Michael Collins, was also one of the IRA’s most charismatic and influential commanders.
Sinn Féin politicians like Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera did their best to maintain that the IRA took orders from the Dáil and its cabinet. In practice, the military wing of the movement paid little attention to its nominal superiors, and Sinn Féin’s main contribution to the struggle lay elsewhere, in a system of ‘republican courts’ that by-passed the British legal system.41 Organized labour also played a significant part in this campaign of civil resistance: there was a short-lived Soviet in Limerick to protest against martial law, railway workers blocked the transport of British soldiers, and a general strike in April 1920 forced the authorities to release hundreds of republican prisoners.42
Facing a choice between negotiation and wholesale repression, Lloyd George put out feelers to the Sinn Féin leadership, leading to a truce in July 1921.43 A delegation headed by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins went to London to discuss the terms of an Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Lloyd George had already moved to secure the Unionist position in Ulster by partitioning the island. The IRA was less active in the province than in other parts of the country. In Belfast, it had to play the role of communal defence force, facing off against loyalist militias as the city descended into a maelstrom of sectarian violence. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act created two Home Rule parliaments for a twenty-six-county ‘Southern Ireland’ and a six-county ‘Northern Ireland’. Opposition from Sinn Féin made the first of those parliaments a dead letter, while the second took on a life of its own. The Unionist leader James Craig now saw regional self-government as a vital safeguard against the threat of British perfidy.44
The US president Woodrow Wilson had popularized the concept of ‘self-determination’ in Europe after the war, but there was no consensus between Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists about how and where that right should be exercised. The settlement imposed by the Government of Ireland Act resolved this dispute by giving the Unionist Party everything that it asked for. With backing from their Conservative allies, who were also Lloyd George’s coalition partners, the Unionist leadership had decided that a six-county area was the largest chunk of territory they could safely manage. If there were any more nationalists inside the boundaries of Northern Ireland, its stability could not be guaranteed.45
There was no county or large town in the South where unionists were in the majority, yet two of Northern Ireland’s six counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, had a nationalist preponderance. Alternative ways of subdividing the island to establish local preferences – by Westminster constituencies, for example, or county and city boroughs – would all have assigned a smaller area to Craig’s party.46 In private, Lloyd George acknowledged that the case for his government’s preferred model of partition was weak, and he sought to keep it off the agenda for talks: ‘Men will die for throne and Empire. I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Fermanagh.’47
The Treaty negotiations concentrated on two issues: the political status of an independent Ireland, and its relationship, if any, with the area that remained under British rule. The British negotiating team offered Dominion status that would put the new Free State on a par with Britain’s white colonies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This was considerably more than John Redmond had expected to receive a decade earlier, but under those terms the government in Dublin would still be subordinate to the British Crown.
Arthur Griffith privately agreed to accept a Boundary Commission on the status of Northern Ireland, rather than local plebiscites. He argued that the commission’s findings were bound to ‘give us most of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and part of Armagh, Down, etc.’ Michael Collins took a similar view, believing that a truncated Northern Ireland would soon come under the authority of an all-Ireland parliament.48
Lloyd George hustled Griffith into accepting the draft Treaty by revealing his Boundary Commission pledge, and threats of immediate war created the right atmosphere for the rest of the delegation to sign.49 Sinn Féin and the IRA both split over the terms of the document: the Dáil voted in favour by a slender margin, but the majority of IRA brigades were opposed.50 A steady drift towards conflict began, during which the British government applied intense pressure on Griffith and Collins to take action against their republican adversaries.51
On 28 June, the new pro-Treaty army began shelling IRA units that had occupied Dublin’s Four Courts, inaugurating the Irish Civil War. For many years after, conventional opinion in Britain credited Lloyd George with bringing peace to Ireland. His real achievement was to have brought peace to Westminster, for which a war between Irishmen was an acceptable price to pay.
Historians have often explained the split between pro- and anti-Treaty camps in psychological terms, as a division between realists and idealists, practical men and ‘die-hards’.52 It was certainly not a straightforward clash between opposing political blocs like the civil wars in Russia, Spain or Greece. The leading figures in the two camps had a shared nationalist outlook. Insofar as ideology played a role in the split, it was a question of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tendencies within the movement, which could sometimes be difficult to parse. Many observers expected Éamon de Valera to be more accommodating than Michael Collins when the negotiations began, but de Valera became the political figurehead of the ‘die-hard’ cause, while Collins used his position as IRB chief to promote the Treaty.53
The Civil War also resists any easy categorization as a class conflict.54 However, the Treaty did receive overwhelming approval from the elites of Catholic Ireland, and there was more than a simple desire for peace behind their attitude. The War of Independence coincided with a tremendous wave of land and labour agitation that swept through the country. Membership of the ITGWU increased from 5,000 in 1916 to 120,000 four years later.55 The Irish Labour Party, founded before the war by Larkin and Connolly, took on real substance for the first time. After Labour stood aside in the 1918 election to give Sinn Féin a clear run, the Dáil voted to accept a blueprint for social reform drafted by the Labour politician Thomas Johnson. Politicians who later deplored the ‘communistic flavour’ of Johnson’s Democratic Programme praised it effusively at the time.56 For the Church, the press and the business class, it was vital to establish a new authority capable of holding the line against social upheaval. The precise terms of its relationship with Britain were a secondary concern.
Such factors did not produce the Civil War, but they helped determine its brutality. One minister in the new Provisional Government, the arch-conservative Kevin O’Higgins, famously described it as being composed of ‘eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole’.57 A display of force would help those foundations to set. His fellow Treaty-ite Eoin O’Duffy urged Michael Collins to ignore talk of peace from ‘the Labour element and Red Flaggers’. For O’Duffy, a glittering prize now lay within reach: ‘If the Government can break the back of this revolt, any attempts at revolt by labour in the future will be futile.’58
In August 1922, Collins died in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces in Cork, where he was directing the war effort. Collins had been more conciliatory towards the republican ‘die-hards’ than most of his fellow ministers, and his death removed the last inhibitions on the Provisional Government leaders. There were seventy-seven official executions of republican prisoners, three times more than the British carried out during the earlier phase of conflict, along with an unknown number of extra-judicial killings.59
Facing a government that, unlike the administration at Dublin Castle, could not be stigmatized as an alien presence on Irish soil, the anti-Treaty forces soon lost the military initiative. On the eve of the Civil War, James Connolly’s son Roddy went to Moscow in search of assistance for Ireland’s fledgling communist movement. The Bolshevik leader Mikhail Borodin told him that the Treaty’s opponents would soon be crushed: ‘It is really laughable to fight the Free State on a sentimental plea. They want a Republic. What the hell do they want a Republic for?’60
The IRA’s chief of staff Liam Lynch brushed aside a proposal from his imprisoned comrade Liam Mellows for a social programme that could mobilize support among workers and small farmers.61 Mellows was dispatched to the firing squad soon afterwards. Lynch soldiered on, making no attempt to build a political movement that could explain why a struggle against the Treaty was necessary. After Lynch’s death at the hands of government troops in April 1923, with the military situation clearly hopeless, his successor Frank Aiken gave the order to dump arms.62
‘Our Question Isn’t Finished’
The debate in the Dáil over the Treaty had concentrated on the status of the Free State, not the question of partition.63 Many nationalists believed that the Boundary Commission would resolve the issue, but that confidence proved to be badly misplaced. The terms of reference for the commission required it to ‘determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’, without specifying what those conditions might be. In practice, the matter would be settled by considerations of power, not justice, and Northern Ireland’s nationalist minority was sorely lacking in such clout. When the Boundary Commission completed its work in 1925, it recommended some minor territorial exchanges that would have left James Craig’s mini-state substantially intact. Embarrassed by the outcome, the Irish leader William Cosgrave readily agreed to the report’s suppression.64
There was no ideal solution to the problem of Ireland’s conflicting identities, and the partition settlement made no attempt to provide one. On formal democratic grounds, the outcome was clearly illogical, as John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary have pointed out: ‘A 30 per cent minority in the island (in the 1918 voting returns) was able to prevent one area from seceding, but this area in turn contained a 30 per cent minority (in the same voting returns) in favour of the secession of the whole island.’65 However, the case for partition had never rested on such premises.
For British politicians, an unshakable conviction that ‘Ulster must not be coerced’ sat alongside a will to coerce the rest of Ireland into recognizing the Crown’s authority – not to mention those parts of Ulster that wanted to join the new Irish state. Irish nationalists, painfully aware of this double standard, often used it as an excuse for not thinking about the challenge Northern Ireland posed to their worldview. Future historians had no trouble pointing out the blind spots in that outlook: its reliance on geography, not history, to constitute the ‘Irish people’, and its tacit exclusion of most Ulster Protestants from the imagined community of Irish nationalism.66 The force of such criticisms should not obscure the one-sided character of partition, or the vital role of British power in making that imbalance possible.
William Cosgrave and his colleagues averted their gaze from Ulster and concentrated on building up the Free State. Their ruling party called itself Cumann na nGaedheal (‘Band of the Gaels’). Cosgrave’s ally Kevin O’Higgins dismissed the social aspirations of the revolutionary period as ‘poetry’, and there was a distinctly prosaic quality to Cumann na nGaedheal’s rhetoric, although its very bluntness could lend it a certain aura: it would be a long time before anyone would forget Patrick McGilligan’s warning that ‘people may have to die in this country and die of starvation’ if his government was going to balance the books.67 Arthur Griffith’s plan for a protectionist regime to build up Ireland’s manufacturing base was largely forgotten.68
Sinn Féin refused to take its seats in the Free State parliament, and the task of opposing Cosgrave initially fell to the Irish Labour Party. But the party’s leader Thomas Johnson was anxious, as he explained, to ‘reassure timid people who shiver when they think of Labour in power’.69 Johnson’s cautious approach posed no real challenge to Cumann na nGaedheal. The Labour leader once acknowledged that his party might win popularity by ‘disturbing and disintegrating the existing social order’, while insisting that no politician ‘with a sense of responsibility’ would dream of following that course.70
Éamon de Valera had a much keener eye for the main political chance. Frustrated with the sterility of Sinn Féin’s opposition to the Free State, he broke away in 1926 to establish a new movement, Fianna Fáil (‘Soldiers of Destiny’). Most of Sinn Féin’s Dáil representatives followed his lead, promising to take their seats if Cosgrave’s government abolished the oath of allegiance to the British Crown. After the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins by IRA members in 1927, Cosgrave brought in a law obliging all Teachtaí Dála (TDs) to take their seats on pain of forfeiture. Dismissing the oath as an ‘empty political formula’, de Valera led his supporters across the threshold.71
Five years later, Fianna Fáil took power in Dublin, inaugurating eight decades of electoral hegemony, during which the party never found itself on the opposition benches for more than one consecutive term. Contrary to legend, de Valera never uttered the words ‘Labour must wait’ during the War of Independence, and his party took care to incorporate social themes in its programme.72 Those who saw Fianna Fáil as a baffling, sui generis phenomenon usually expected independent Ireland to have a party system that corresponded to the West European norm. In fact, the mould of southern Irish politics was perfectly normal for a post-colonial state with an underdeveloped economy. The Irish party system was different because Ireland was different. Fianna Fáil wanted to remove all traces of British sovereignty over the Free State, but it also vowed to promote economic development by returning to Griffith’s protectionist vision. For workers and small farmers, it offered social reforms that, however modest in scope, still made for a welcome contrast with the grim austerity of Cumann na nGaedheal.73
It all made for a highly effective formula, especially when it started to deliver the goods. By the end of the 1930s, de Valera had scrapped the oath of allegiance and reduced the British governor-general to helpless impotence. A new constitution adopted in 1937 laid formal claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland and made the state a republic in all but name. De Valera also won back control of the ‘Treaty ports’ from Britain in 1938, enabling his government to remain neutral when war broke out the following year – the ultimate assertion of Irish sovereignty.74
Employment rose in protected industries, and a public-housing programme brought some relief to the working class.75 The success of Fianna Fáil wrong-footed Labour and the erstwhile ‘Free Staters’, who rebranded themselves in 1933 as Fine Gael (‘Tribe of the Gaels’). When the opposition parties finally came together to form a coalition government in 1948, ejecting Fianna Fáil from office for the first time in sixteen years, they completed de Valera’s project by declaring a republic and taking the Irish state out of the Commonwealth.
The IRA watched these developments from the sidelines. By the late 1920s, it was already a shadow of its former self, with barely 5,000 activists: a third of the membership it possessed when the Civil War ended.76 A faction that included such figures as Peadar O’Donnell, Frank Ryan and George Gilmore argued for the IRA to reinvent itself as a movement of the dispossessed. They drew heavily upon Connolly’s writings and the prison notes of Liam Mellows to develop a socialist-republican platform in the hope of winning mass support. At their urging, the IRA launched a new party, Saor Éire (‘Free Ireland’), to take the place of a largely moribund Sinn Féin.77 But the republican leadership soon retreated when the Catholic hierarchy denounced their ‘communistic’ and ‘anti-Christian’ endeavour. In 1931, Cosgrave’s government banned the IRA and its nascent political front.78
In 1934, O’Donnell and his comrades broke away from the IRA to form an organization of their own. The manifesto of the Republican Congress declared its belief that an all-Ireland republic could never be achieved ‘except through a struggle which uproots capitalism along the way’.79 An early split hobbled the Congress, which faded from the scene within a few years. Many of its activists departed to fight for another Republic in Spain. Their attempt to fuse republican ideology with socialism remained a historical oddity until it was rediscovered by a new generation of activists in the 1960s.
Meanwhile, the rump IRA carried on in ever-decreasing circles. Fianna Fáil lifted the ban on the movement after coming to power, but drove it underground once again in 1936, this time for good. By the end of the decade, the IRA had lost its most capable leaders and was about to enter the leanest period of its history. Bereft of all political direction, oblivious to what was happening in the wider world, the remaining stalwarts even tried to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Mercifully they lacked the resources to make such a partnership meaningful, and the question of forming an ‘Irish Republic’ on the Wehrmacht’s coat-tails never arose.80
Fearing that the IRA would compromise Ireland’s neutrality, de Valera cracked down hard on his former allies, who appeared to have shot their bolt. The coalition government of 1948–51 included a new organization, Clann na Poblachta (‘Clan of the Republic’), that sought to capitalize on disillusionment with Fianna Fáil. Its leader Seán MacBride was a former IRA chief of staff, who steered through the declaration of a republic as the coalition’s foreign minister. Denounced by his old comrades as another renegade in the line of Collins and de Valera, MacBride had stripped the IRA of its vestigial raison d’être.
However, there was still one issue upon which republican purists could bring their energies to bear. MacBride’s government launched a diplomatic offensive against partition in the late 1940s, to be greeted with crushing indifference by a world that had bigger fish to fry.81 That failure inspired some to contemplate stronger methods. A younger generation of activists took over the IRA leadership and even managed to breathe some life into Sinn Féin’s waxwork figurine. One of those militants, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, later recalled his feelings as he watched Britain’s empire begin to crumble after the war: ‘We were the indomitable Irish that started all this off, when they controlled a quarter of the world. And now our question isn’t finished and all these people have passed us by.’82 After several years of preparation, Ó Brádaigh and his comrades set out in December 1956 to ‘finish the job’.
Operation Harvest, as the IRA called it, fizzled out long before its formal conclusion. In 1957, there were 341 incidents associated with the campaign; two years later, there were just twenty-seven.83 The internment of IRA suspects on both sides of the border struck a heavy blow against the republican movement, but its greatest problem was the lack of popular support. A statement drafted by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh to mark the end of the so-called Border Campaign deplored ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.84 It wasn’t just the British colonies in Africa and Asia that had passed republicans by. In the eyes of most Irish people, the IRA was a movement that time forgot.