The political and military manoeuvrings in Dublin had taken much of the spotlight off IRA activities in Northern Ireland. For months Collins had been surreptitiously co-operating with the Northern Command, which was instigating a military offensive in the six counties. Commanders of all five IRA northern divisions met in Clones on 21 April 1922 and decided to stage a major uprising in the north, beginning in early May. The aim was to embarrass and destabilise the Belfast government to compel it to be more accommodating with Dublin, while at the same time aiding the search for IRA unity in the twenty-six counties by enlisting the support of the northern IRA and neutralising the partition issue. But the planning of this Northern Offensive, which was variously styled as a ‘Northern Rebellion’ or the ‘May Rising’, went seriously awry.
Chief of Staff Eoin O’Duffy promised that GHQ would provide the needed arms, but when the 3rd Northern Division covering much of Counties Antrim and Down was unable to get the arms it was expecting, the operation was delayed. As the 2nd Northern Division, which covered Counties Derry and Tyrone, pleaded that it could not postpone its plans on such short notice, GHQ at Beggars Bush authorised it to go ahead.
Collins was implicated in these operations, which were financed by the Provisional Government, but he insisted that all . the activities had to be in the name of the IRA. He had never made any secret of the fact that he saw the Treaty as a stepping-stone to the desired goal. His ultimate aim was still an Irish Republic. His involvement in the military and political talks leading to the election pact with de Valera not only helped to obscure his machinations in relation to the north, but also lent credibility to his efforts to avoid civil war in the twenty-six counties. Assisting beleaguered northern nationalists was an issue on which he could find substantive agreement within the IRB and leading members of the IRA Executive, such as Rory O’Connor and Liam Lynch.
Liam Lynch blamed the Beggars Bush garrison for the postponement, because all the promised weapons were not delivered, but the British were already wise to the exchange. General Macready, the commander-in-chief of British forces in Ireland, reported that an intercepted message from Lynch to Rory O’Connor indicated that a ‘considerable quantity of arms and ammunition (30 Thompson Machine guns with 8,000 rounds (.45), 75 rifles and 10,000 rounds .303 ammunition)’ were to be dispatched ‘at the request of the Provisional Government from North County Cork area for use in the north of Ireland’. Macready thought it was significant to note not only that ‘the Provisional Government were responsible for ordering the dispatch of arms to the north or at any rate northern border’, but also that it could afford to spare so many arms.. 1..
‘Under present circumstances burning and destruction of property is the only way in which we can hit Belfast men,’ Minister for Defence Richard Mulcahy had told members of the north-east advisory committee on 11 April 1922. But he had some reservations. ‘I don’t think you will get away from the fact that if . property is destroyed in Belfast now if there is any settlement that we will probably have to pay for it … And it is simply taking money out of the pockets of the Irish people generally rather than out of the pockets of Belfast Capitalists.’. 2..
As the weapons being sent by Beggars Bush to the No. 2 Battalion of the 3rd Northern Division would not arrive in Belfast until just two days before operations were due to begin, the local commandant went to Beggars Bush and personally got GHQ’s approval for a postponement.
O’Duffy instructed Seamus Woods of the 3rd Northern Division not to move until after a meeting of the northern divisional commandants. ‘This meeting was held at GHQ on 5 May and it was decided that each Division complete its plans and await instructions from GHQ,’ Woods noted.. 3.. It was left to the chief of staff to determine the date, to be in the near future, on or after which every division would strike.
The 2nd Northern Division had planned to launch its offensive in early May and got permission to go ahead on its own. On 2 May its forces launched simultaneous attacks on police barracks at Bellaghy, Draperstown and Coalisland. Special Constable John Harvey was shot dead at Bellaghy and three colleagues were wounded, while two were wounded at Draperstown. Various bridges and railway lines were damaged, and the IRA engaged in an orgy of arson. A weaving mill was set ablaze in Limavady and a flax mill at Ballykelly. The IRA also attacked and set fire to the home of Special Constable William J. McClung at Annaghmore, near Coalisland. When colleagues tried to go to his rescue they were ambushed and Constable Robert J. Cardwell was shot dead.
. The IRA ambushed and fatally wounded Special Constable William McKnight about six miles from Cookstown. In another ambush that night a Special Constabulary sergeant and two constables – Sergeant Frizelle and Constables Hunter and Heggarty – were killed at Ballyronan, County Derry. The IRA also attacked the Special Constabulary post at Elagh, three miles north of the city of Derry, where one sergeant was wounded. In addition, they fired on the home of Major R. L. Moore, about three miles south of the city, breaking all the windows. He was not only commandant of the local Special Constabulary, but also grand master of the Orange Order in the city of Derry.
Six Special Constabulary constables were killed in the first two days of the offensive. But the 2nd Northern Division was very much on its own. Although both the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of the old IRA were supposedly co-operating, the adjacent 1st Northern Division in County Donegal was embroiled in a vicious internal conflict. On 4 May forces from the Executive IRA raided a bank in Buncrana and got away with £800, but not before engaging with troops of the Provisional Government. A gunfight ensued and several people were wounded, including two innocent bystanders – nine-year-old Essie Fletcher and eighteen-year-old Mary Ellen Kavanagh, who both died of their wounds. Some hours later the Executive IRA ambushed the Provisional Government troops a short distance away near Newtowncunningham. Four of those attacked were fatally shot and two others seriously wounded. The 1st Northern Division of the IRA was so bitterly divided that it was no help to the 2nd Northern Division, which came under intense pressure in the following days as the loyalists retaliated with ferocity by killing . innocent Catholics in what were clearly sectarian reprisals.
On 6 May six suspected members of the Special Constabulary took two men, Catholic teachers John M. Carolan and his nephew Michael Kilmartin, from a friend’s house, about five miles from Dungiven. Although shot six times and dumped into a flax dam, Kilmartin managed to escape and make it to hospital, where he died hours later. The same day John McCracken, a publican from Dringate near Cookstown, was killed in his bar. The following week there was an outrage that was hauntingly similar to the McMahon massacre in Belfast. Men wearing police caps raided the McKeown home at Magherafelt and shot three sons in the house in front of their elderly parents. James McKeown was shot dead instantly, while his brother Francis survived with sixteen bullet wounds and Thomas survived four shots. As in the case of the McMahons, the McKeowns had no involvement in Sinn Féin; their crime was that they were Roman Catholics.
The intense pressure on the isolated 2nd Northern Division meant that by the time the 3rd Northern Division began its offensive later in month, the IRA in Derry and Tyrone had already virtually collapsed. When the north-east advisory committee met in Belfast on 15 May, a few days before the 3rd Northern’s offensive, it advised that the Provisional Government should notify the British government that Craig had failed to carry out the terms of the March agreement. ‘We further recommend that the army chief be asked to consider the advisability of carrying out a policy of destruction inside the six county area, removed from the border with a view to making government by Belfast parliament more expensive and difficult,’ the committee advised. It recommended the destruction of roads, bridges, railways and . property generally. These operations were ‘to be carried out as soon as government think it most expedient’.. 4..
In view of General Macready’s report that the Provisional Government was engaged in supplying weapons to the IRA, Churchill balked on 16 May at a request from Collins for 10,000 extra rifles. The colonial secretary was not prepared to supply further arms until he was satisfied that the Provisional Government would use them against the Executive forces. For a man who tended to see such matters in stark simplistic terms, however, he was apparently not fully convinced of the Big Fellow’s duplicity. Churchill reminded his cabinet colleagues, for instance, that ‘the lives of members of the Provisional Government were in danger. They were faced with every kind of difficulty and he was anxious not to put upon them more than they could bear.’. 5..
The 3rd Northern Division of the IRA began its delayed offensive on Thursday night, 17 May 1922, with a raid on the RIC barracks on Musgrave Street, Belfast. The aim was to seize weapons and military vehicles parked in the yard of the barracks. With inside help, the raiders managed to enter the police station dressed as police, but then things went badly wrong and the whole station was roused by the fatal shooting of Constable John Collins, who happened to be a Catholic. The raiders had to flee largely empty-handed and they captured none of the vehicles that they had planned to seize. The following day the division’s brigades engaged in attacks on commercial property in Belfast as well as RIC barracks, stately homes and railways stations in different parts of Antrim and Down. The 4th Northern Division was also supposed to have taken to the offensive on 19 May, but for some unexplained reason it did not go into action.
. Buildings destroyed in the IRA’s arson attacks on the night of 17 May included Shane’s Castle, the home of Lord O’Neill, the father of the speaker of the Stormont parliament; Oldcourt Mansion, Strangford; Crebilly Castle, along with the stationmaster’s office, telegraph office and a railway bridge in Ballymena; and Glenmona House, the summer home of the diehard Westminster MP Ronald McNeill in Cushendun, where the Northern Bank was raided and £2,000 taken. The raiders then burned the bank to the ground. Reid’s motor garage in Carnlough was raided and the owner’s car was driven into the street and set on fire, while the garage and an adjoining stable with a valuable horse inside were torched. As this was going on some of the men raided the local post office, and a number of private houses in the Carnlough area were torched. There were also attacks on the police station at Martinstown and the nearby Rathkenny creamery, which was torched. A Special Constabulary patrol helped to put out the flames but was then ambushed by the IRA and Special Constable James O’Neill was killed. Trees were felled to block the road near Ballykinlar, and a military officer and his wife drove into one of them. She was killed and he was seriously injured. The Irish Times reported that there were no casualties in an attack on the police station at Castlewellan, but The Freeman’s Journal reported that three raiders were killed, seven wounded and ten taken prisoner, and seven constables were reportedly wounded. There were also attacks that night on police stations at Cushendall, Cushendun, Ballycastle Barracks and the post offices at Cushendall, Carnlough, Ardglass and Ballymena. Several stations of the Midland Railway system were extensively damaged.
. Next day loyalist gunmen retaliated. Two men entered the lumberyard of J. P. Corry in Belfast and enquired about the religion of various workers. On receiving responses from all the men, they shot and mortally wounded John Connolly, who identified himself as a Roman Catholic. Two teenage cattle drovers – Patrick McAuley, eighteen, and Thomas McGuigan, seventeen – were killed at the Midland Railway cattle pens while loading cattle into wagons for Stranraer. They were among fourteen people murdered in Belfast that day. Although the story of the Dáil’s acceptance of the election pact featured prominently on the front page of the Sunday Independent, even more space was devoted to the dreadful news of a serious eruption of trouble in Northern Ireland.
Six more people were killed on Monday 22 May, including the first political assassination. The IRA killed William J. Twaddell, a unionist member of the Stormont parliament. He was shot dead in the street in broad daylight. President Arthur Griffith roundly denounced Twaddell’s assassination. ‘His murder strikes at the foundations of representative government,’ he said. ‘The honour of the Irish nation is concerned in this matter.’. 6..
On Tuesday the northern government invoked the Special Powers Act to introduce internment without trial. The police rounded up and interned 350 suspected republicans, including many from the divisions, as the northern authorities had the captured documents from St Mary’s Hall which gave the names of nearly all of the brigade officers in Belfast. Only twelve Protestants were interned, even though loyalists had been responsible for most of the killings.
If Collins had hoped that the offensive would put the focus firmly on Northern Ireland, he must have been disappointed, . because his plans were again upstaged by outrageous incidents within his own jurisdiction. Three former RIC men and a former British soldier were shot dead in the twenty-six counties over the weekend of 20–21 May. Timothy O’Leary, a former RIC constable, was killed on Saturday 20 May on his way to visit his mother in Kilbrittan, near Bandon in County Cork. A former RIC sergeant, J. Walshe, was killed in the presence of his wife at their home in Newport, County Tipperary, while former Head Constable Joseph Ballantine, fifty, who was about to move with his family to Portadown in Northern Ireland, was killed in front of his wife at their home in Raphoe, County Donegal. The following night Patrick Galligan, an ex-soldier, was shot dead in Newport.
The IRA in the north was initially content with the progress of the offensive of the 3rd Northern Division. ‘Each Brigade made a good start and the men were in great spirits, anxious to go ahead, but in a few days the enemy forces began to pour into our areas as no other Division was making a move,’ James J. McCoy, the adjutant of the 3rd Northern Division noted. ‘Things became so bad in No. 3 (East Down) Brigade where lorry loads of Specials were coming in from Newry (4th Divisional area).’. 7.. Although the initial plan was for the offensive to be staged throughout six counties, it began one division at a time, with the result that the northern authorities were able to rush reinforcements from the different areas to suppress the different divisions one at a time. McCoy called on O’Duffy on 24 May to order the 4th Northern Division into action. The chief of staff said he would do so immediately, but nothing happened. ‘A week later, as nothing was happening in other areas, we found it necessary to disband the columns, and leave the men in groups of three or more to . move about as best they could, in the hope of re-mobilising them when operations became general,’ McCoy noted. ‘Under such conditions it was natural to expect that the men would become demoralised.’ In the following weeks, he wrote ‘the demoralisation has practically completed its work’. He continued his report:
The enemy soon felt the operations were not general and concentrating in great numbers in our area, they realised that it was not difficult to cope with the situation. They now believe that they have beaten the IRA, completely in Antrim and Down …
There is a feeling among the civil population that we are not recognised by GHQ and that our orders came from the Executive. Most of the priests are under this impression also and some of them in fact have said from the pulpit that they will not give absolution to anyone who is a member of secret Military Organisation … They have refused to hear Fianna boys’ confessions.
The people who supported us feel they have been abandoned by Dáil Éireann, for our position to-day is more unbearable than it was in June 1921. Then the fight was a national one and our suffering was in common with all Ireland. Today the people feel that all their suffering has been in vain and cannot see any hope for the future.
The people who did not support us are only too glad of the opportunity of assisting the enemy, and practically all over the Division the Police Barracks are stormed with letters giving all available information against the IRA and their supporters. We have captured some letters and in most cases suggestions are made to the Police as to how they could best cope with the situation. In some cases they regret they did not give this information two years ago.. 8..