The Easter Rising of 1916 is often represented as a foundation event. It was not. Irish nationalism was much older than 1916. Rather, the rising was a transformative event, for it raised the stakes in nationalist Ireland’s demands. Previously, home rule within the United Kingdom had been the mainstream aspiration. Now, after the executions of the leaders and the threat of conscription towards the end of World War I plus the triumph of Sinn Féin and the annihilation of the old Irish party in the 1918 general election, the demand was for outright independence: for an Irish republic. The rising was the indispensable condition for this change.
The British had blamed Sinn Féin for the rising, although it had exactly nothing to do with it. The confusion arose because Sinn Féin had become a shorthand for every kind of advanced nationalism. After the rising, it was decided that if the cap seemed to fit, nationalists would wear it. The party was reconstituted under the leadership of Éamon deValera, for whom Arthur Griffith — founder of the original party twelve years earlier— stood aside. Its constitution stated that ‘Sinn Féin aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic’ before adding that ‘having achieved that status, the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of government’.
This piece of semantic ambiguity was a formula proposed by deValera, the first public evidence of his serpentine mind. The fact was that Sinn Féin was not uniformly republican, although it was certainly more ‘advanced’ than the Irish Party, and the possibility needed to be left open that when the Irish people were finally offered their choice, they might choose something other than the republic.
Sinn Féin swept all before it in the general election of December 1918. The Irish Party was wiped out. The new party, true to its pledge, refused to take its seats at Westminster and instead constituted itself as Dáil Éireann, the assembly of the Irish. It met for the first time on 21 January 1919. On the same day, two Catholic policemen were shot dead at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary. This is generally accepted as the first action in the War of Independence, a sporadic series of local ambush battles in certain counties (much depended on the bellicosity and initiative of local commanders) that sputtered in 1919, burst into flame in 1920 and was finally ended by the Truce of July 1921. There followed a drawn-out set of negotiations in London, culminating in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 which established the Irish Free State a year later. By then, the island had been partitioned (see chapter 40).
The Irish Republican Army (IRA), as the Volunteers were now styled, was an army nominally under the civilian control of the Dáil but in reality engaged in semi-autonomous local operations. The War of Independence was focused on Munster, and especially on the counties of Tipperary and Cork. It was, first and foremost, an assault on the front line of the British administration in Ireland: the police, in the form of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police. The RIC was the eyes and ears of the state in the countryside; the G Division of the DMP was the intelligence branch of the Dublin force.
At local level, IRA commanders had been harassing the RIC for some time before the Dáil formally passed a motion authorising a boycott of the force in April 1919. In this, they were bowing to reality: the motion came three months after Soloheadbeg, which had occurred without any civilian authority and was triggered by military impatience with political foot-dragging. Further IRA actions had followed in the meantime. Gradually, attacks on the RIC increased during 1919. In response, remote barracks were evacuated. Then, in 1920, the pressure was ramped up. The numbers of attacks increased dramatically, forcing the closure of more and more barracks and securing the capture of much-needed arms for the IRA.
This provoked a crisis in the British administration, for the very sinews of their rule were being compromised. At Easter 1920, over 300 RIC barracks and twenty tax offices were attacked and burned. The British response was to fill the gap with two paramilitary forces made up for the most part of demobbed troops from the Western Front, a police auxiliary force (the Auxiliaries) and a second group known then and ever after as the Black and Tans (because their temporary uniforms reminded people of the hunting pinks of the famous Co. Limerick hunt, the Scarteen Black & Tans).
As potent as all this mayhem in the countryside was Michael Collins’ campaign in Dublin. His ‘squad’ — hand-picked killers — assassinated members of the G division of the DMP and members of British Intelligence, most famously on the morning of Sunday 21 November 1920, when fourteen British agents were killed in their beds. In reprisal, the Black and Tans killed twelve spectators at a football match in Croke Park that afternoon.
In all this catalogue of ambush and reprisal, one of the first senior policemen to die had been RIC Detective Inspector Hunt, and the circumstances of his death tells us much about the disturbed state of nationalist Ireland in those years. On 23 June 1919, in the early days of the conflict, Hunt was shot dead in cold blood and in broad daylight here in the Market Square in Thurles. The IRA man who fired the fatal shot was called Jim Stapleton. Neither he nor any of the other attackers wore any disguise. No one testified against them, and it is too easy to put this down to intimidation — although this was always a factor with the IRA, both then and later. But one witness recalled, ‘The crowd jeered, and there were cries of “Up the Republic”. There was not the least sympathy for the unfortunate man. Public bodies did not pass a resolution. Scarcely a blind was drawn on the day of the funeral.’
This happened before the arrival of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans; before the murders by crown forces of the mayors of Cork and Limerick; before the death by hunger strike of another mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney; before Bloody Sunday. Nationalist Ireland had withdrawn its consent to be governed by the British, whose rule was no longer legitimate there. The quickening of nationalist ambition following 1916 had reached the point where the greatest possible degree of separation from the United Kingdom was now the demand. And people were prepared to look the other way when daylight murder was committed in support of that demand, not because they were heartless brutes but because their loyalty was finally withdrawn from the British connection — to the extent that it had ever been committed to it — and given to something at once older and newer.
D/I Hunt died practically at the door of the hotel where the GAA had been founded in 1884 and about a mile from where Tom Semple hurled for the Blues up in the Sportsfield (see chapter 41).
