Another in the series of systematic assassinations of Crown agents by the Volunteers, which was to mark the next two years in Ireland, had taken place in Westport on the night of 31 March. At a few minutes to eleven, a former Inspector of the RIC called Milling, now a Resident Magistrate, had just gone into his drawing-room to put his clock on to the new summer-time before retiring, when four revolver shots were fired at him in the old White-boy or Land League style through the window, shattering the glass and hitting him in the abdomen. He died next morning, murmuring to a RIC man who had been summoned to his death-bed: ‘They have got me at last.’ Milling had become particularly unpopular in the previous year when he had sent Volunteers to prison for unlawful assembly and drilling and had been under police protection ever since. A week before he had helped send two men to prison for cattle-driving.1
The deed seems to have been the work of local men acting without sanction from the Dublin executive headquarters, though it could conceivably have been ordered by the IRB. Many local activists were at this time afraid that inactivity would lead to a decay in the Volunteer organization and one of them has written: ‘It was saved mainly because a minority of officers and men vigorously agitated the policy of action, argued its feasibility and more or less convinced or coerced General Headquarters into giving it a reluctant sanction.’2 One of those at General Headquarters who almost certainly required very little persuasion along these lines was Michael Collins. He had made his own attitude towards future action clear in a revealing scene at the end of March.
On de Valera’s return to Ireland, Collins, on his own and Harry Boland’s initiative, had issued public notices to the effect that the President would make an official entrance into Dublin ‘at the gates of the City’ where he was to be received by the Lord Mayor and escorted to the Mansion House. The last person to be so received had been the British monarch Queen Victoria, nineteen years before. Understandably the authorities banned the proposed ceremony. But Collins insisted that it should go ahead and de Valera prepared a fairly militant speech for the occasion.3 Many Sinn Fein supporters were apprehensive of bloodshed and a meeting was called of the Sinn Fein executive, in whose name Collins had announced the ceremony. He had even attached the signature of the Honorary Secretary to the notice without consulting him. After some protest had been made at this high-handedness Collins rose and, admitting full responsibility, announced that the decision had been taken nominally by Sinn Fein but in reality by ‘the proper body, the Irish Volunteers’. He said, according to one who was present, that
the sooner fighting was forced and a general state of disorder created through the country, the better it would be for the country. Ireland was likely to get more out of a state of general disorder than from a continuance of the situation as it then stood. The proper people to take decisions of that kind were ready to face the military, and were resolved to force the issue. And they were not to be deterred by weaklings and cowards.**
On this occasion he was over-ruled, but within the Volunteer organization itself he was not so easily hampered. Only a few weeks later he was to write to a Volunteer Brigade commander: ‘When you ask me for ammunition for guns which have never fired a shot in this fight, my answer is a simple one. Fire shots at some useful target or get to hell out of it.’4 The day before the shooting of Milling at Westport, a constable had been seriously wounded by a Volunteer with a revolver in Cork.
The Westport killing was received with horror and widespread indignation throughout Ireland. The jury at the inquest found that Milling had been ‘foully murdered’ and a public meeting held in Westport condemned the outrage unanimously as did the Westport Urban District Council. The Archbishop of Tuam described it as a dastardly crime and the perpetrator, if not insane, ‘a criminal of the first order’. The Irish Independent, which had supported Sinn Fein at the General Election, wrote in a leader entitled ‘Cowardly Crimes’ that the killing had been ‘indefensible’ and ‘morally wrong’ and that it could ‘only bring odium on the whole country and do irreparable harm to the national cause’.5
A week later a Constable O’Brien was shot dead in Limerick when a party of some twenty men rescued a Volunteer named Byrne in his pyjamas from a hospital where he was being treated under guard. In the mêlée, however, Byrne was himself shot by one of the police and died a few days later. In moving a resolution of sympathy with Byrne’s mother and simultaneously paying a tribute to Constable O’Brien of the RIC, a speaker at the Limerick Board of Guardians repudiated ‘English’ statements that Sinn Fein had had knowledge of ‘recent murders’. ‘They would not tolerate,’ he said, ‘the murder of any man. They were prepared to meet their enemies by open day and would not hide themselves or act as assassins.’6
Even at this point in time, after the General Election, after all the sense of betrayal over Home Rule, after all earlier Irish history, the British Government, by some form of settlement which would have acknowledged the nationalist principle of a united Ireland, could almost certainly have driven a wedge between the vast majority of moderate Sinn Fein opinion and the extremists within the movement who were determined to force a bloody revolution at all costs. But the political realities of the time make such speculation irrelevant. Not only were the British Government and the British Parliament dominated by men with strong ties of loyalty to the anti-national minority in North-East Ulster, but Britain had just emerged triumphant and apparently unweakened from the greatest test of her strength in history and was as yet in no psychological mood drastically to re-think Irish policy. The government therefore took the only action it thought necessary: repression. This made it easier for Volunteer extremists to convince their moderate Sinn Fein supporters that the fight for nationalist principles was indeed as brutal and violent as Fenians had always said it must be.
The local sense of outrage at the Soloheadbeg killings in County Tipperary in January had been to some extent blunted by the subsequent imposition of military restrictions. The same thing now happened in Westport and in Limerick, which were both immediately proclaimed military districts. Whereas the funeral of Constable O’Brien had been sympathetically attended by some Sinn Fein supporters, that of the Volunteer Byrne took place down streets menacingly lined by British troops with fixed bayonets and armoured cars, and a military aircraft even flew overhead.7 By the next day in addition to Tipperary, Westport and Limerick (both City and County), much of County Cork including the city, County Roscommon and County Kerry were under military rule. In Limerick, where the military restrictions on fairs, markets and social functions and the need of permits for movement caused much resentment, a particularly serious situation developed and a General Strike was called for a few days. On one occasion a thousand citizens who had left the town without permits to watch a football match were prevented from legally returning at night by the military. Most, however, had filtered back by their own devices the following morning, thus re-arousing all the traditional scorn for authority as well as resentment. Sympathetic farmers sent eggs, butter, milk and bread into the beleaguered city from the surrounding countryside.8
Such crude displays of British military strength disconcerted many otherwise moderate nationalists who had a more acute sense of Irish history than the British Government. The Irish Independent which, while pro-Sinn Fein, deplored the shootings, stressed that military measures were no way to deal with them.9 Henry Harrison, the former Nationalist MP who had been an ardent supporter of Parnell’s and had served with distinction and gallantry in the 16th Irish Division in France, wrote a significant letter to The Times on 23 April. Constitutionalism, he wrote – by which he meant the Home Rule movement – had achieved its success only to be robbed of its fruits by unconstitutional action on the part of the two great English political parties acting as accomplices. There would soon, he said, be nothing but counsels of despair. When he came to lay aside his uniform, his duty to Ireland would override all other loyalties, and if the betrayal of constitutionalism were finally consummated he would betake himself to ‘such courses (if any) as may seem most expedient for helping Ireland’s cause, whether or not the law allows or the Constitution warrants’.10
Robert Lynd, the correspondent of the Daily News, reported that ‘even the soldiers who fought for the allies as they return home are becoming converted by the thousand into Sinn Feiners’.11 One such was a young man of twenty-one from West Cork named Tom Barry, who had been in the British Army in Mesopotamia and who was soon to apply to join the Volunteers, or, as they were beginning to be called in the countryside, the Irish Republican Army. He had had no nationalist ideas at all before the war. Within two years he was to become one of the most skilled guerrilla commanders in Ireland.12
A feeling of separateness from Britain, which, up to now, the Fenians and Sinn Fein had had to argue and which Harrison and most Nationalists had always denied, was being created and visibly consolidated by the British Government with its refusal to offer Ireland anything but military force.
It was at this sensitive moment that the American Commission for Irish Freedom arrived in Ireland to see de Valera. They were to prove of considerably more value to the Irish republican cause in Ireland than they had been in Paris. For the week-long journeying of its three delegates about the country in the company of the Irish leaders, with many unabashed speeches calling for an Irish Republic on platforms where the tricolour waved with the Stars and Stripes, did much to convey the impression that the power of America was behind the cause, and to rally popular opinion when there was in fact little else with which to rally it. The Commission even managed to provoke a few incidents with the British authorities which rallied opinion still further.
On the afternoon of 12 May they attended in the Dublin Mansion House a private meeting of Dail Eirann which they addressed. Collins and Robert Barton – the latter had escaped from Mountjoy gaol some weeks before – were among the Dail representatives present, and though they withdrew up a long ladder into an adjoining building at the end of the proceedings, a large force of police and soldiers came raiding for them shortly afterwards.13 To some extent at least the authorities were by now aware of Collins’s importance. When, later that evening, guests began to arrive for an official public reception by the Lord Mayor for the American Commission, they found the building surrounded by troops in full field equipment with steel helmets and fixed bayonets and an armoured car pointing its machine-gun at the crowds. The delegates themselves, accompanied by de Valera and the Archbishop of Cashel and the Bishop of Killaloe, were actually prevented from entering for a time while the vain search continued. The reception was eventually allowed to take place, but as the London Star commented: ‘A more maladroit exhibition could not well be conceived … What a story they have got for American platforms …’
They had another from Westport, County Galway, where the military with fixed bayonets and an armoured car held the Commission up for one and a half hours outside the town and refused to allow them to enter. MacNeill, who was with them, was manhandled out of the way and moved off at the point of the bayonet. At the meetings which the Commission were allowed to hold in their progress through Galway, Mullingar, Athlone and other towns, Volunteers regulated the enthusiastic crowds.14
‘Three weeks ago,’ wrote the Irish Times when they left, ‘none save fools and fanatics believed in the possibility of an Irish Republic. Today a large number of Irish Nationalists hope, and a still larger number fear, that in the near future an Irish Republic may come to birth from the grotesque union of British folly and American sentiment….’15
When the delegates called on Dr Walsh, the Archbishop of Dublin, to say farewell, he was able to say to them that they had had an experience of ‘the kind of government under which we are living in Ireland’.16
In vain did the government’s supporters as well as its opponents look to it for a policy. There was silence. ‘Some solution must be found,’ The Times had cried on 16 April, ‘for the condition of Ireland is poisoning the broader currents of our Imperial and external policies.’ And on 2 May the paper had sounded an eleventh-hour note of desperation in its plea that ‘If there ever was a moment when it was vital that the Government should understand the situation in Ireland it is now. Most people agree that something should be done and done quickly.’
On May 22 came the first political pronouncement the government had made on the Irish question since the General Election. It came from Carson’s old Galloper, Lord Birkenhead, now Lord Chancellor, hardly an auspicious source. He said that when the Peace Treaty was finally signed the government would consider what to do about the Home Rule Act. Meantime, he continued, the only proper policy for Ireland was any degree of force that might be necessary to maintain order there. For, he contended, with what was an absurd exaggeration, even if an exaggeration of a certain truth, the great majority of the Irish people were in a state of open rebellion.
The slow rebellion that the extremist Republicans were developing under the name of Sinn Fein was indeed gradually getting under way. And yet for all the rally of national sentiment in face of British activities, when, on 13 May 1919, two more RIC constables were shot dead in a daring rescue of a Volunteer prisoner from a train at Knocklong station, County Tipperary, many moderates felt dismayed, and the strongest condemnation was forthcoming from the Church at once. The parish priest of a locality in which the two constables had served declared that murder was murder, however much people might attempt to cloak it with a political motive. And Dr Harty, the Archbishop of Cashel who had been confronted with British bayonets outside the Mansion House in Dublin a few days before, denounced what he called ‘the deplorable occurrence’ at Knocklong as ‘a crime against the law of God and a crime against Ireland’. He asked the young men of the country ‘not to stain the fair name of their native land by deeds of bloodshed’. It was, he said, no use to appeal to the fact that the British Government had been committing outrages in Ireland: two wrongs did not make a right.17 The inquest jury conveyed an ambivalence suggestive of the resentment which British military measures were creating. While expressing sympathy for the relatives of the dead policemen it added a rider that ‘the Government should cease arresting respectable persons, thereby causing bitter exasperation among the people’.18
As far as the respectability of the arrested person in this instance was concerned, he was Sean Hogan, a Volunteer who had been present at the Soloheadbeg killings. He had been rescued by his former comrades in that venture, Dan Breen, Seumas Robinson and Sean Treacy with help from other local Volunteers. Breen later wrote that he had to fire at once on this occasion because otherwise the constables would have shot their prisoner as they had done in the Limerick hospital. Though Breen was himself severely wounded he again successfully disappeared with the others into the countryside, getting help from local people and being passed along the Volunteer network.19 He and his comrades had again carried out the exploit on their own initiative.
The true attitude of the Dail representatives to these displays of Volunteer initiative cannot easily be discerned. Many Dail members, of course, being themselves Volunteers or even IRB men, had no scruples about such action for in their eyes all police and military could legitimately be treated as enemies. We have Beaslai’s word that no voice was raised against such action in the Dail in 1919, and yet not all the representatives there can have felt at ease, particularly in view of the persistent condemnation of the Church. Eoin MacNeill clearly had to resort to self-deception in order to accept it. When asked about the shooting of policemen in an interview with the Glasgow Herald at the end of May he replied: ‘As to the shooting of policemen, in all cases, as far as I know, these acts were committed in resistance to policemen engaged on purely repressive activities.’20
It is hard to see how the two local constables guarding a load of gelignite on its way to blasting operations at Soloheadbeg in January could have been regarded as engaged on repressive activities, or the two policemen caught at Knocklong guarding, in the normal course of duty, one of the Soloheadbeg killers. The raids for arms were easier to justify. MacNeill had been in favour of a defensive role for the Volunteers since before 1916. If they did not get arms now where they could, he told the Glasgow Herald, they would be ‘overridden’.
But if such public utterances on the awkward subject were rare from the Dail ‘Government’ we do know what the attitude of the Sinn Fein executive was at this time. Collins castigated it in a letter on 17 May – five days after he had attended the Dail addressed by the American Commission. ‘The position is intolerable,’ he wrote, ‘– the policy now seems to be to squeeze out anyone who is tainted with strong fighting ideas or, should I say I suppose, ideas of the utility of fighting.’ And the next day he wrote again: ‘We have too many of the bargaining type already. I am not so sure that our movement or part of it at any rate is fully alive to the developing situation. It seems to me that official S. F. is inclined to be ever less militant and ever more political and theoretical …. It is rather pitiful and at times somewhat disheartening. At the moment I’m awfully fed up, yet ’tis in vain etc.’21
The last words were an evocation of the joking doggerel with which Wolfe Tone had often completed entries in his diary: ‘Yet ’tis in vain for soldiers to complain!’ Collins indeed embodied much of the dash and charm of Tone’s fearless spirit, combining with these qualities considerably greater military effectiveness. From his own point of view he was soon to set the situation to rights.
Working from offices in Dublin, some secret, some not (one of the former in the first school started by Patrick Pearse, St Ita’s) Collins not only supervised the organization of Volunteer brigades throughout the country, but built up a formidable active élite in the capital itself, ably assisted by the Volunteer Chief of Staff, Richard Mulcahy, together with a Chief Intelligence Officer, Liam Tobin, and what later came to be known as ‘the Squad’ of expert gunmen. At the same time Collins appeared openly at sessions of the Dail between January and September 1919, functioning in his other role of Minister of Finance, and relying on information from his increasingly subtle intelligence system to give him warning of raids on the Mansion House. During a Dail session in April, when his face appeared respectably in the newspapers,22 he actually spent part of one of the nights inspecting British secret reports and documents inside the headquarters of the Dublin detective force, whither he had been conducted by a detective of the political section, working as a double agent in Collins’s service. This man, Edward Broy, together with other double agents, James Kavanagh, Patrick Macnamara and David Neligan, Irishmen who had decided that loyalty to Ireland could no longer be identified with loyalty to the Crown they served, were to provide the heart of an intelligence system which was totally to reverse the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pattern by which the informers were on the government side. Collins was even at a later date to enrol the services of an English officer working for British Military Intelligence in Dublin Castle.23
A less easily determined force complementing Collins’s underground revolutionary apparatus was what his British opponents called the Sinn Fein ‘terror’ in Ireland. The label ‘Sinn Fein’ in this context is confusing, but at a distance of fifty years the term ‘terror’ can be stripped of its pejorative content. Intimidation is an instrument of which the most high-minded nationalist revolutionaries have always made use as a means of ensuring that the often inert mass of the population should at least not hinder those operations conducted, according to the revolutionaries, on its own behalf. It was inevitably to figure prominently in these years in Ireland where it had historical roots going back to the agrarian secret societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had manifested itself most recently in the days of the Land League. Threatening letters, the infliction of cruel wounds, firing through windows of houses or at the person had intermittently been a feature of Irish rural life for agrarian purposes for two centuries. They became easily applied by individuals to new political objectives which also had to be pursued in secret.
So much history of what came to be known as the Irish War of Independence has been in terms of hagiography that the extent to which the intimidation of ordinary people – as opposed to the attacks on policemen, soldiers and officials – played a useful part is often omitted. The relative ease with which men like Breen or the killer of the magistrate Milling and Constable O’Brien of Limerick were able to remain undetected is evidence not only of reluctance to cooperate with the law for patriotic reasons but also of more self-interested motives. The fear of what might happen to a man who contravened the law of secret societies was a folk-tradition which rural Irishmen were inclined to respect, and of which they were not infrequently reminded. A transgressor had his ears cut off with a pair of shears as late as January 1920 and a girl had the calf of her left leg shot off by two masked men the following month.24 And though these punishments – probably for simple agrarian offences – would have been disapproved of by most Volunteers they created a climate from which they benefited. The Volunteers themselves usually preferred more direct methods, shooting the culprit cleanly and tying a label marked ‘Spy – killed by IRA’ to the corpse. Dozens of Irishmen were to die such deaths at the hands of their fellow-countrymen before the ‘war of independence’ was over.
Though physical violence against non-conforming individuals was not threatened in the name of the Volunteers or IRA on any scale until the second half of 1919, and did not assume significant proportions until the years 1920–21, some fear of intimidation at least played a part from the start. ‘There is more terrorism,’ wrote the Unionist Daily Telegraph at the end of May 1919, ‘than in the worst days of the Land League. People are compelled to fall into line with the Sinn Feiners or they could neither trade nor buy the necessities of life.’25 The paper may well have been exaggerating, but that a boycott was in force could not be disputed.
The boycott – that mildest but in some ways most effective of all agrarian weapons – had been decreed by no less a man than de Valera himself, when, in addressing the Dail in April, he described the RIC as ‘spies in our midst’ and went on, somewhat in the tradition of Charles Stewart Parnell:
… these men must not be tolerated socially as if they were clean healthy members of our organized life. They must be shown and made to feel how base are the functions they perform, and how vile is the position they occupy. To shun them, to refuse to talk to them, or have any social intercourse with them or to treat them as equals, will give them vividly to understand how utterly the people of Ireland loathe both themselves and their calling …26
This was no incitement to violence in itself, but de Valera knew enough of rural Ireland, as Parnell had done, to know that there would be men in the countryside who saw to it that such a boycott was enforced. Later in the year a poster was to be found, placed close to where two policemen had been shot dead in County Clare, proclaiming: ‘Shun all policemen and spies! Three cheers for the IRA!’ and in the next two years apart from numerous executions of ‘spies’ there were to be many cases of women who had their heads shaved or were otherwise maltreated for consorting with Irish police or British soldiers.27 Even though such action may often have been taken by local individuals independently of Collins and Headquarters, the atmosphere these actions produced certainly made conditions for more significant operations easier. From several counties in the south and west of Ireland the RIC were to report by the end of 1919 that degrees of Sinn Fein terrorism accounted for total lack of cooperation between the population and the police. ‘… Even persons upon whom outrages have been committed,’ said the report from County Galway, ‘are not disposed to give the police any information which might lead to the discovery of the perpetrators of the outrages, fearing that by so doing further outrages would be committed on themselves or their property …’28
But the most potent force of all operating in favour of Collins and the other militants was undoubtedly the British Government itself. The embittered Home Rulers and other moderates who had largely voted Sinn Fein into power had been offered nothing in response to their challenging demand for a radical new policy. The government had tacitly admitted they had none to give and, responding to the activity of the extremists, sent steel-helmeted troops and armoured cars, adding to the political injury the insulting presence of an unwanted military authority in the streets. Gradually, reluctantly, the moderates were brought to acknowledge the fact that in an extreme situation there was little place for moderation.
But the process in the middle of 1919 was only just beginning and Collins, confronted by the caution of the political forces of Sinn Fein, was sometimes in despair. His bitterness against the Sinn Fein executive in the middle of May had been partly caused by an inadvertent public revelation on its part that its secretary, Harry Boland, had left the country.29 For, having refused to accept the deputy whom Boland left behind, they had insisted on electing a less belligerent figure in his place. Up to that point Collins had managed to keep Boland’s departure a secret for five weeks. Boland had in fact left Ireland to prepare the way physically and politically for de Valera’s clandestine departure for the United States. And early in June de Valera was successfully spirited out of the country by Collins and arrived in New York on 11 June. Collins may by now have been partly relieved to see him go.
De Valera’s own view at this moment of the best methods by which to pursue the goal of the Republic was, as often when an issue was delicate, obscure. On the one hand he was still technically President of the Volunteers, as well as the President of the Dail: and he was ready enough publicly to proclaim that the men of the tiny minority of 1916 had been ‘justified in regarding themselves as genuine representatives of the nation’.30 His official position with the Volunteers could be said to have been effectively taken over by the Minister of Defence, Cathal Brugha, but he knew well enough the sort of extremism for which both Brugha and Collins stood. On the other hand, his very insistence on going to America at all made it clear that he was thinking primarily in terms of a political rather than a guerrilla solution. He was in fact to remain in America for eighteen months, from June 1919 until December 1920. During this time the situation in Ireland changed dramatically and irrevocably.