A grim process, brilliantly master-minded by Collins, of systematic terror against Irish police and detectives began on 24 June 1919. An Inspector of the RIC named Hunt was shot dead in the back in the main square of Thurles in broad daylight. There was a large crowd passing through the square at the time on its way back from a race meeting, but it made no attempt to help the dying man and the assailant disappeared into it with ease. He was never caught. Hunt had recently been assiduous in directing the law against the Volunteers and on the two previous Sundays had broken up Sinn Fein meetings, seizing from one of them a Republican flag.
However, the jury at the inquest did not accept the view that such activities warranted a death sentence. They found a verdict of wilful murder and passed a vote of condolence to the Inspector’s family.1 The Archbishop of Tuam denounced ‘this shocking crime’ as ‘a most grave violation of the law of God’ and said that the man who committed it would one day ‘also be called before the Judgement Seat of God, and will meet his victim face to face for his punishment through eternal life’.2
The very day of Hunt’s death – though before it was known – the archbishop had been one of the signatories of a statement issued by the entire Irish hierarchy from Maynooth. This had castigated the irritations of military rule and the denial of political rights to the Irish people.** ‘The existing method of Government cannot last,’ this statement had run. ‘… We have the evils of military rule exhibited at our doors. In this ancient civilizing nation, the people are not permitted to rule themselves through men of their own choice.’ The acts of violence which the hierarchy ‘deplored’ sprang, they said, ‘from this cause and this cause alone’.3
Now too in the archbishop’s condemnation of the deed at Thurles there was a note which for all his abhorrence made some justification of such things easier: ‘For all this,’ he said, ‘there is only one solution: let the military domination of Ireland cease at once. Let the people of Ireland choose for themselves the Government under which they are to live …’4
At this time in the middle of 1919 there was an unresolved ambivalence in the minds of the Irish people. On the one hand they were being roused by government policy into a national political front such as had only been equalled in Irish history by O’Connell’s movement for Repeal of the Union. Readers of the Nationalist Party paper, the Freeman’s Journal, read headlines like ‘Free Use of the Baton in Kilmallock’; ‘Women Suffer’; ‘Glen of Aherlow Aroused by Troops, Aeroplanes etc.’5 and reacted indistinguishably from those who had voted Sinn Fein rather than Nationalist at the election. The very appearance in the towns and villages of large numbers of soldiers with rifles and bayonets evoked associations of an ancient land war that went deeper than any political frustration. On the other hand the bloodshed caused by the actions of the Volunteers in provoking the government was disliked and deplored.
In the long run, in the light of history, there could be no doubt on whose side the Irish people would come down in a simple contest of brutality between the government and the Volunteers. In the absence of any realistic policy but repression from the government they were bound to come down, for all their early misgivings, on the side of the Volunteers. In this the policy of Collins and the other extremists in the Sinn Fein movement succeeded brilliantly. They won their battle against the moderates in Sinn Fein by making moderation irrelevant.
The Archbishop of Tuam had concluded his pronouncement on the killing of Inspector Hunt with the words: ‘We humbly implore God to grant us soon that liberty for which we and our fathers before us have prayed and longed. We ask Him at long last to grant us peace – peace from the blighting rule of the stranger, and peace from that baneful influence of deeds of violence.’
The only answer came from Dublin Castle. It immediately banned the entire Sinn Fein organization in Tipperary and even the Gaelic League itself. From Lloyd George and the government, euphoric over the Peace Treaty which they had just formally concluded at Versailles, there came no vestige of a new policy for Ireland.
Unionists were now more than ever desperately aware that some attitude other than either repression or the old proposal for the exclusion of six Ulster counties was required. A group headed by Sir Horace Plunkett formed in June 1919 an Irish Dominion League demanding Dominion Home Rule for all Ireland. The minority in Ireland, they declared, had no right to deny the fundamental right of the Irish people to see the unity of their country preserved.6 English Conservatives, like Garvin of the London Observer, commented that it was ‘no longer enough for the Ulster Covenanters to say “We won’t have it.” That pre-war formula is as dead as King William …. Mere “won’t have it” is what the vast majority of the United Kingdom won’t have.’7 He recommended an Ulster government sub-autonomous to Dublin.
But for Irishmen the only Conservative voice that seemed relevant was that of Carson, and with some reason considering how many of his staunch supporters were in the government.** And what Carson now said was: ‘We will have nothing to do with Dominion Home Rule, or any other Home Rule …. We avoid it as a thing unclean, we fling it back at them.’8
Carson knew well enough that the government would have to offer something eventually, but he was determined that the sacrosanct position he had built up for the exclusion of six counties of Ulster should not be tampered with. Bargaining from immense strength he actually called for a Repeal of the Home Rule Act and said that if there were an attempt to impose it he would summon his provisional government and call out the Ulster Volunteers.9
Talk like this made many moderates in Ireland feel that for all Sinn Fein’s apparent shortcomings there was still nothing to support but Sinn Fein. After all, the respectable illusion that the Irish Republic might still somehow be implemented by moral pressure and by the abstentionist policy of self-reliance was still formally maintained. Announcements of the Dail ‘Government’s’ establishment of Arbitration Courts for land disputes, of commissions of investigation into the country’s economic resources and above all the launching of an ambitious Republican Loan of which £250,000 was to be raised with de Valera’s help in the United States and another £250,000 in Ireland itself, had an impressive ring.
Collins himself, as Minister of Finance, was in charge of the loan. Many people thought at the time that the target was absurdly high for, having no idea of his extraordinary role behind the scenes, they were quite unaware of his exceptional administrative ability or organizing powers. Within a year he was able to announce the closing of the loan at a figure of more than £357,000 for Ireland itself.10
That pressure was sometimes used to help raise this money seems undeniable, for when lists of subscribers periodically fell into the hands of British Intelligence they even included the names of well-known Unionists.11 But even though the IRB and Volunteer network which was Collins’s principal concern made organization and collection easier, the technical business of successfully lodging the money in hiding-places and various bank accounts which would escape the scrutiny of persistent British attempts to locate it, at a time when Collins himself was continually on the run, was a masterly achievement. It seems all the more so given the extent and far-reaching impact of his other activities and responsibilities at the time.
The Volunteers were now coming more under the control of Collins and General Headquarters in Dublin, though it was in the nature of the situation that much flexibility had always to be left to individual initiative in the field. Through able organizers whom he himself appointed and sent out, like Ernie O’Malley, a young red-headed middle-class Catholic of literary tastes, or through dedicated young local commanders with whom he was in touch, like Liam Lynch from Cork, the energy and spirit of individual groups of Volunteers was slowly harnessed to a potential guerrilla force, with some counties, like Cork itself, active enough to provide as many as three brigades. In active areas like Cork such brigades contained at first about 3,500 Volunteers though their nominal strength at least was to grow greater.** The vast majority of these men, however, at all times through the next two years continued simultaneously to lead apparently normal everyday lives in the towns and countryside.
At this time, in the middle of 1919, their activities still had a desultory quality. ‘We are still so to speak in the trenches,’ the secret Volunteer paper An t Oglach had put it in May, ‘but our “trench raids” and active operations against the enemy are growing more and more frequent, and are usually attended with brilliant success.’ Though sometimes lethal, these operations also sometimes recalled the more ineffectual efforts of the Fenians. Thus in August a police hut in East Clare was besieged for over an hour by an unknown number of men with rifles and revolvers and successfully defended by six members of the RIC who had actually been in bed at the start of the attack.12 Two days before, however, another barracks in Clare had been captured and two of the constables shot dead. The Bishop of Galway described their deaths as wilful murder and the ordinary citizens who composed the coroner’s jury had no hesitation in confirming his judgement with a verdict to the same effect. There were sympathetic crowds at the constables’ funeral.13
But again the pattern that had established itself at Westport and Limerick and in Tipperary was repeated. The whole of Clare was immediately proclaimed a military district and by the end of August 1919 some seven thousand troops were on the move throughout the county day and night. There was a ten o’clock curfew with lights out half an hour later. Significantly, when shots were fired at night through the window of a man who had been working for a relative under police protection, and the man’s fifteen-year-old son was killed, the coroner’s jury, in a verdict that was treated with some scepticism, pinned the blame on the military.**
In Dublin Collins began systematically dealing out death to those Irishmen in the ‘G’ (detective) division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police whom his intelligence network told him were becoming well-informed about Volunteer activities.14 He organized small units of skilled young gunmen who, filled with the highest patriotic motives, became proficient at liquidating both their fellow-countrymen and agents sent from England in the public streets. On 31 July 1919 an unarmed Irish detective sergeant named Smyth, a man with seven children, was shot in the back just outside his home in Dublin by one such group. ‘You cowards,’ he cried, understandably failing to appreciate the risks his assailants themselves incurred, and he turned and faced them. They fired again and continued to fire until he was within fifteen yards of his house, hitting him five times in all.15 He was to die some weeks later.
A few days after the attack the Corporation of Dublin carried a motion condemning recent outrages and the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, who had done much to fight for better gaol treatment for Sinn Fein prisoners, strongly associated himself with the Bishop of Galway’s use of the term ‘murder’. ‘There was,’ he said, ‘no justification for murder and outrage.’16 It was a generally representative view at the time. The Westmeath County Council ten days later passed a resolution condemning ‘in the strongest terms our language can afford the murders and outrages that are occurring in various parts of the country’. These were, it said, engineered by the dangerous parts of society. One of the speakers said that ‘a storm of indignation should go forth from the elected representatives of the people. The instigators of those crimes are no acquisition to any political party or organization.’17
It did not yet seem to occur to the bulk of Sinn Fein supporters that it was precisely the elected representatives of the people – or an all-important element in them – who were applying the policy of ‘murder and outrage’ without popular sanction. On the very day of the Westmeath resolution, one such representative, who was still referred to in the newspapers as Mr M. Collins MP, gave a remarkable demonstration of his own extraordinary sangfroid as a revolutionary. For while Detective Sergeant Smyth lay dying in hospital Collins appeared at a Sinn Fein Congress at the Mansion House on 21 August, and, speaking as Minister of Finance, in a lucid detailed speech which was publicly reported, described the purpose and methods of collection of the Republican Loan. On it, he said, the whole constructive policy of Dail Eireann depended. The money was to go to a Consular Service, to Irish fisheries, afforestation, the encouragement of industry, and the establishment of a national civil service and arbitration courts.
‘Even if nothing comes of this moment’, he said, ‘– which is impossible – the loan will be redeemed by the next Irish Government even as today we are redeeming the Fenian bonds.’18
Earlier in the summer when a search had been made for him at the Mansion House, Collins had escaped up a rope ladder, and this time he presumably took careful precautions when entering and leaving the building. Two days later he was writing to his sisters: ‘For the moment … things are settled enough, but I am looking forward to the winter for significant happenings.’19 On 12 September he had Detective Constable Daniel Hoey shot dead in the street outside police headquarters in the middle of Dublin. It had been a spectacular day, for only a few hours before the government had finally given an answer to the urgent question of what it was going to do about Ireland. It had suppressed and declared illegal Dail Eireann.
Hoey had taken part in the raid on the Mansion House that had followed the decision, but Collins had escaped through a skylight. A few hours later the detective’s body slumped on to the pavement, hit by revolver bullets. He was unarmed and all that was found in his pocket was money and some religious emblems, for he was a devout Catholic.20 His was the third death of a member of the Crown forces that week and the sixth in less than six weeks.
One of the other casualties had been a soldier killed in Fermoy, County Cork, in a daring assault on a party of troops marching to church on Sunday, 7 September. This raid had been formally authorized by Collins and the Volunteer GHQ in Dublin, although on condition that there should be no casualties.21 It was brilliantly executed by Liam Lynch, revealing guerilla professionalism of which he was one of the earliest Volunteer exponents. The eighteen men of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in the church party were swiftly overpowered and thirteen of their rifles loaded into waiting motor-cars which were immediately driven off. Military vehicles which took off in pursuit found roads blocked by fallen trees which had been sawn through during the night and held back by ropes until the escaping raiders were safely past. Only one detail of the operation had gone awry, for in the scuffle one of the soldiers had been shot dead and three others seriously wounded.
The jury at the subsequent inquest unanimously expressed horror and condemnation for ‘this appalling outrage in the midst of a peaceable and civil community, between whom the most friendly feelings have always existed’, but they did not find a verdict of murder because the raid’s intention had clearly been to get the rifles and the killing had been unpremeditated.22
For this oversight, in spite of their additional expression of sympathy with the dead man’s relatives, they were made to pay a heavy price. That night undisciplined troops broke out of barracks and did considerable damage in the town, smashing shop windows and particularly attacking the house of the foreman of the jury.23 Just as Lynch’s raid had indicated the sophisticated guerrilla technique which the Volunteers were eventually to develop in the countryside on a considerable scale, so this reprisal by the military foreshadowed a new pattern of violence that was to impress itself on Ireland with such profound long-term effects in the following year.
The official reaction to Lynch’s Fermoy raid was predictable. Both Sinn Fein and the Volunteer organization were banned in the Cork district. Equally predictably, this decision had the opposite effect to that intended, for it emphasized an identification of the two elements in the new national movement at a time when a division could have been exploited. Thus, de Valera, commenting from New York a few days later, was able to say of the suppression of Sinn Fein in Cork that ‘the English are … seeking to goad the people into open rebellion in the field’.24 What was really happening was that the Volunteers were goading the government into goading the people into rebellion – a process in which, much aided by the government itself, they were eventually to be successful.
For the time being, however, though Volunteer successes were enjoyed and applauded when they were achieved without bloodshed, those that caused casualties were still regarded by the Irish people with considerable reservation, if not dismay. Most of the victims after all were fellow Irishmen. A few days before the Fermoy raid a RIC Sergeant named Brady had been shot dead while on patrol duty in Tipperary. He left eight children and a widow, a simple Catholic Irishwoman who broke down pitifully at the funeral service, sobbing violently and calling out over and over again: ‘Murdered by the roadside! Murdered by the roadside!’25
The following Sunday the local priest, with this and the recent systematic killings of Irish policemen in Dublin and elsewhere in mind, cried in an impassioned outburst:
‘Who has authorized a small band of unknown, ignorant persons to meet in secret and decide that the life of a fellow human being may be taken lawfully …. The Irish people will not approve of bloodshed, and the freedom of martyred Ireland will not be achieved by midnight assassination.’26
A month later, on 19 October 1919, another Catholic Irishman of the RIC, Constable Downing, was shot in the stomach and killed in a Dublin street at 2 a.m. He was shot on Collins’s orders and with the sanction of the ‘Minister of Defence’, Cathal Brugha, who, when Sinn Fein had been seeking democratic support, had declared that Ireland’s freedom would never be won by assassination.** Three weeks later Brugha and Collins had a detective officer named Wharton shot in the back at night on the corner of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, though his severe wounds did not prove fatal. Wharton had been prominent in a number of prosecutions of the Volunteers. On 1 December, again on the orders of Brugha and Collins, another detective of the political ‘G’ Division named Barton, an Irishman from County Kerry, was shot in the back and killed. The coroner’s jury found a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ and added: ‘We consider his death a loss to the citizens of Dublin and we condemn these outrages.’ The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Larry O’Neill, a good nationalist, again publicly associated himself with the verdict, expressing his ‘abhorrence of this terrible crime’ and describing the dead detective as ‘an asset to the city of Dublin’.27
When, dismayed by this slaughter of their best detectives, Dublin Castle sent for a particularly intelligent Inspector from Belfast named Redmond, Collins had him shot and killed in Dublin on 21 January 1920. Meanwhile, in his other capacity as a senior ‘Minister’ of the Dail, he had been issuing prospectuses for the Republican Loan, one of which ran: ‘You can restore Ireland’s Health, Her Beauty and Her Wealth: Subscribe today To the Irish National Loan.’28
In the countryside, too, the campaign against ‘the enemy’ continued bloodily. Another RIC constable had been killed when opening the door of a barracks to a Volunteer raiding party in County Meath at the end of October, an act which brought down the curse of God upon the perpetrator from the Bishop of Meath in Mullingar Cathedral.29 The ‘barracks’ at Ballivor, County Meath, where this constable was shot, like very many of the six hundred or so ‘barracks’ in Ireland, was simply an ordinary two-storey house in the village street. It is understandable how such deeds, since sanctified into deeds of heroism, struck very many Irishmen at the time quite otherwise. This was long before any Irishman had been killed in a reprisal, and no Black and Tan had yet set foot in Ireland. When in December yet another RIC constable was shot dead by Volunteers in County Cork, in implementation of the doctrine long received from headquarters in An t Oglach, the Cork Corporation denounced the killing unanimously as a ‘cowardly and disgraceful murder’.
That many Irishmen needed to be persuaded by the Volunteers to think differently about such things was as clear to the Volunteers now as it had been to them in the more rarefied atmosphere of 1916. Notices to ‘Shun All Policemen as Spies and Traitors’, signed ‘A Soldier of the IRA (Irish Republican Army)’ were appearing and were not to be taken lightly.30 In Toomevara, County Tipperary, that autumn a notice naming for boycott a family ‘which had done injury to three soldiers of the Irish Republic’, and instructing that ‘they must not be greeted or sat next to in Church’, threatened punishment for non-compliance.31 What punishment in the name of the Irish Republic meant in this sense was illustrated in Clare when an Irishman who had been in the British Army was appointed schoolmaster at Knockjames. Notices were sent round to the parents of the local children reading: ‘Keep your son from Knockjames, otherwise you will have reason to regret it. By Order of the Irish Republican Army.’ The attendance was thus successfully reduced from forty-five children to sixteen, but one of the fathers who defied it received three hundred shot-gun pellets in both thighs, the groin and the lungs, in a manner that recalled the punishment of those who had always defied secret societies in Ireland.32 The Judge who tried the case in which the victim applied for compensation voiced the common illusion of most Irishmen of the time. He said he was glad to believe that the perpetrators of such deeds got no sympathy whatsoever from ‘any politician in this country. I would despair of my country,’ he continued, ‘if I thought the men elected to representative positions would or could for one moment sanction such outrages.’33
Elected representatives of the Irish people were sanctioning more lethal outrages than that against equally innocent people, but when in December Cardinal Logue, the Catholic Primate of All Ireland, was moved to speak out formally against the long sequence of killings in Dublin and elsewhere he, too, found it difficult to face the real truth:
Holy Ireland, the land of St Patrick, shall never be regenerated by deeds of blood or raised up by the hand of the midnight assassin …. It is hard to believe that the intelligent and reasonable members of any Christian political party could sanction or sympathize with crime …. Among the body of the people those crimes inspire horror, contempt and reprobation. Their sympathies are with the unfortunate and innocent victims, not with the cowardly assassins.34
Even as the Cardinal was writing this address the men to whom he indirectly referred – Collins, Mulcahy and Brugha among others – had perfected plans on which they had long been working for a most daring assassination of no less a person than the Viceroy, Lord French, himself. His car was attacked at Ashtown, County Dublin, in broad daylight on 19 December 1919. The attack failed because those who lay in ambush for him, including Dan Breen, directed most of their fire against the wrong car in a small convoy of two and Collins was furious at the mistake.35 The Archbishop of Dublin described the attack on French as ‘an appalling attempt at murder’.36
The popular Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, concurred in the condemnation. Two days later a group of Collins’s men armed with revolvers went to the editorial building where, after the editor had been informed of their disapproval of his comment and had been told that he would be shot if he stirred, the entire printing machinery of the paper was dismantled and destroyed.37
Patriotic motives must again be emphasized for Collins and others whom the Church, most responsible Irishmen and many ordinary Irishmen and women then regarded as murderers, though unaware of their identities. The Volunteer leaders and their followers were acting in the pure Fenian tradition, setting out to redeem Ireland’s past sufferings and redress her present wrongs by extreme methods because in their eyes these alone seemed appropriate to the extremity of the sufferings and the wrongs. There can be no doubt that their actions were immoral by the standards of the Church at the time, and were often by any standards vile. There can be no doubt that, like all revolutionaries, they had cynically exploited democratic processes to give the Irish people what they judged good for them rather than what the Irish people wanted. But for them these charges were irrelevant. For them the end alone would justify the means.
While de Valera’s attitude to Collins’s campaign of violence was further obscured by his long absence in America, the attitude of Arthur Griffith at this time, a man who believed in moral force and had disapproved of the 1916 rebellion, and whose moderating political influence on the movement Collins had feared two years before, must also remain something of a mystery. Griffith was now Acting President or Prime Minister of the underground ‘Government’ in de Valera’s absence. We know that on at least one occasion, in 1919 when warned of an act of violence by Volunteers planned in Cork, Griffith intervened successfully with Collins to prevent it.38 He must have known clearly enough who was having policemen shot down in the Dublin streets, or other Irishmen fatally ambushed on country roads or in their villages. It must still be guesswork to what extent he questioned the need for these things, or was worried by the condemnations of the Church and of secular organs of pro-Sinn Fein opinion. Perhaps, in spite of these, he justified such deeds by straightforward revolutionary logic. His own preoccupation was to establish a genuinely Sinn Fein or self-reliant Irish administration, with an independent national economy and judicial system. He was no pacifist. He had after all begun his nationalist career as a Fenian and had even remained a member of the IRB until 1906. His conversion to moral force had been more from consideration of the impracticability of physical force than from any moral conviction. He had the essential political gift of pragmatic adaptability. As 1919 proceeded it became clear that, with the activity of Collins and the country Volunteers, what had seemed foolishly impractical and therefore irrelevant before 1914, or even in 1916, might no longer be so. Since the total separation of Ireland from England in one form or another was his paramount concern, he may not have found it so difficult to adjust reservations about means to the consistency with which his one end could be kept in view.
That Griffith and others in the leadership felt some unease at the prevailing situation, however, and considered that it needed some form of regularization was indicated by the decision in August 1919 that the Volunteers should take an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic and Dail Eireann. Reciprocally, members of the Dail, who surprisingly had not yet made a formal undertaking of this sort, also took the oath. From then onwards, though the Volunteers still remained in fact under the control of their own organization and were directed, in so far as they were directed from the centre at all, by Collins rather than any cabinet decision, it was at least easier to say legalistically that the Volunteers were now the official army of the Irish Republic. Moderate men could regard what was being done as ‘responsible’. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, of course, which Collins also directed, remained responsible to no one but itself.
Collins was opposed to the Volunteers taking the Dail oath, maintaining that the ordinary Volunteer oath to the Republic was sufficient. He eventually agreed to the formality on the understanding that a separate Volunteer executive should remain in being as an advisory body to the Ministry of Defence.39 But he seems to have been in no hurry to see the decision implemented in the Volunteer units up and down the country. Some of these treated the oath to the Dail, as he must have guessed they would, with extreme suspicion. Collins’s organizer, O’Malley, who found himself swearing in brigade officers to Dail allegiance as late as the middle of 1920, could not take the whole thing too seriously when one of them pointed out that the headquarters staff had had no authority from the Volunteers themselves to hand over control of them to the Dail. ‘The Dail might go wrong and accept less than a Republic,’ this Brigade Commander objected. ‘… I suppose the Headquarters staff might go wrong also?’ They both just laughed.40
There seems to have been nothing exceptional about O’Malley administering the Dail oath to the IRA so long after the formal decision had been arrived at. It was not until nearly a year after that decision, on 16 July 1920, that Collins officially notified brigade commandants that the oath was to be taken, and it was a week later that the oath itself and the order to administer it was issued as a general instruction from GHQ in Dublin.41
The truth is not only that Collins, with his special position of control over the inner mechanism of the Volunteers, could be virtually a law unto himself whatever he might undertake formally for the comfort of political elements in the movement, but also that the Volunteers or IRA were by no means very tightly even under his or GHQ’s control.
Officers from active areas such as Cork would visit Dublin for conferences with Collins at GHQ from time to time and good officers like Liam Lynch would do their best to make the link a real one. It was in their interests to do so for GHQ was a central source of arms, ammunition and information. But the military situation did not permit easy contact and made it a necessity to delegate much initiative to local areas. No senior GHQ officers from Dublin visited Cork, the most heavily engaged county of all, after August 1919.42 As to the political sanction that was supposed to lie behind GHQ, Liam Lynch himself had once written revealingly that: ‘The Army has to hew the way for politics to follow.’43
The execution of civilian ‘spies’ and informers which was to become a feature of IRA activity in the following year was theoretically only to be carried out with sanction from Collins’s GHQ. But as a leading guerrilla commander of the next year has pointed out, this was seldom sought although a certain local nicety was observed in ascertaining that the victim was the correct one.44 IRA commandants would often reply to GHQ directives that local conditions made them inadvisable or impossible to carry out. Even lower down the chain of command a spirited local independence was to be the keynote of much IRA activity. One Volunteer, on being told by a superior that the legitimacy of his raids on the post office mails was in doubt and that there would have to be an IRA inquiry, refused to attend it. When told he would be forcibly taken to it, he replied that he would shoot to kill if an escort was sent. He therefore asked his own battalion commander either explicitly to sanction or call off the next mail raid.45
Such a state of affairs, an extension into politics of the whole Irish historical tradition of local secret societies, was to have significant political repercussions. The notion that the IRA was in anything but propagandist theory ‘the constitutional army of Dail Eireann’ was a myth.** For it, in the end, Ireland and Collins himself were to pay dearly.
At the latter end of 1919 the public attitude to the sporadic killings which, with the anti-police boycott, was still the chief activity of the Volunteers, continued ambivalent. On the one hand, there was a mounting dislike of the bloodshed on the part of the mass of moderate Nationalists who had voted Sinn Fein. On the other hand, there was also a mounting loathing of the military rule to which Volunteer activity gave rise, and this inevitably, given the whole background of Irish history, was directed not against the Volunteers who were the cause of these measures, but against the government which ordered them. The petty discomforts and insults of the military presence, to be read or heard about, if not experienced personally, acted as a continual goad to a sensitively conditioned Irish pride. Moreover, the enormity of the political insult which Ireland was experiencing in receiving, after the General Election and all the turmoil of the past few years, let alone the rest of Irish history, no further political acknowledgement of her national feelings at all, was something which festered daily in Irish minds. Not only had many of her democratic representatives been arrested but the suppression at last of Dail Eireann itself in August 1919 had made the political impasse seem more hopeless than ever. Stories from Mountjoy gaol, where in October the Lord Mayor found thirty-nine Sinn Fein prisoners in handcuffs in solitary confinement, after refractory attempts to assert their political status, simply inflamed the national sense of political frustration, though most people probably shared the Lord Mayor’s condemnation of Volunteer killings equally with his indignation at the prisoners’ treatment.
The release of the Mountjoy prisoners later in the month after a successful hunger strike seemed like a national political victory in the absence of any other, particularly since only two days before, the government had prevented the annual convention of Sinn Fein from meeting with a display of armoured cars and lorry-loads of steel-helmeted troops in the Dublin streets. When, on 25 November 1919, the government suppressed Sinn Fein itself as a political organization throughout the country, Arthur Griffith was able to say with some substance to an interviewer: ‘The English Government in Ireland has now proclaimed the Irish nation, as it formerly proclaimed the Catholic Church, an illegal assembly.’ The old Nationalist Party newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, described the action as ‘Nation-Baiting’.46
The confused popular attitude to the actions of the Volunteers was, however, well illustrated in a debate in the Clare County Council in December 1919. Tipperary North-East County Council had already passed a resolution placing on record horror at the outrages, saying they were acts of ‘irresponsible persons with whom no responsible person could have the slightest sympathy’. It called on all public bodies ‘to bring the perpetrators of such crimes to justice’. The Clare County Council met to decide whether or not to adopt this resolution itself. All the members were nationalists, either supporters of the old party or of Sinn Fein. One Nationalist Party supporter who wanted the resolution adopted said there was no man in the room who wanted to see an Irish Republic more than he did – ‘If I saw an Irish Republic in the morning’, he said, ‘– our own steamers leaving the Liffey, and being saluted by other Nationalities, I would die happy!’ But outrages, he insisted, acted against Ireland’s best interests. His chief Sinn Fein opponent who suggested that the resolution should simply be marked ‘Read’ argued that, if the government would grant Ireland self-determination, ‘I have no doubt in saying it, in six months’ time there will be no such thing as … shooting at persons, or no such thing as outrages of any kind’. He spoke of the government as dealing out ‘persecution and legalistic outrage’ instead of justice and freedom. The Chairman summed-up by saying that nobody liked violence and the honest people of Clare did not like it, but the actual wording of the resolution played into the hands of Ireland’s enemies. It was decided by a 9–5 vote simply to mark the resolution ‘Read’.47
Just over a week later the government, speaking through no less a person than the Prime Minister, offered Ireland for the first time since the General Election something other than ‘persecution and legalistic outrage’ or simple enforcement of the status quo. Lloyd George had already announced at the beginning of the month that he hoped soon to make ‘a real contribution towards settling this most baffling of all problems’48 Now, speaking on 22 December 1919 in the House of Commons, he outlined proposals for a new Home Rule Bill which he intended to introduce the following year.
It is possible now to see that in the context of the time this was at least an attempt to think up something new. What seems astonishing, if it is to be viewed at all as a genuine attempt to meet the wishes of the people of Ireland rather than simply an attempt to safeguard the wishes of the Protestants of North-East Ulster, is that its authors should not have realized that it would be the similarity of the proposal to what had already been rejected which would make the impact on popular opinion, rather than the new aspects.
In the first place, what was unchanged was the proposal to separate or partition North-East Ulster from the rest of Ireland. Instead, however, of excluding this area from Home Rule, it was to be given its own Home Rule legislature, subordinate to Westminster. Another innovation, important in the light of later events, was that the exact area of North-East Ulster to be partitioned from the rest of Ireland was to be determined by taking the six counties as a basis only and ironing out where practicable Catholic and Protestant communities one side or other of the border, thus producing ‘an area as homogeneous as it is possible to achieve under these circumstances’.**49 But it was the fact of partition that made the impression. This was particularly in the light of the bill’s second major defect for nationalists, for the actual measure of Home Rule to be given both Parliaments of Ireland was virtually the same as in the 1912–14 period, as if nothing had happened in the interval to enlarge the concept of Irish national aspirations.
Some attempt to respect the concept of a united Ireland was met in a proposed Council of Ireland with twenty members from each Parliament which was to have the power, without reference to Westminster, to unite the two Parliaments. But all the minor virtues of the proposed bill were totally eclipsed by what seemed to all parties its major defects. The majority of the Irish people – whom after all it was intended to placate – did not want it because they regarded it doubly as an offence to their national feelings. The southern Irish Unionists did not want it, partly on patriotic principles, and partly because it isolated them from the rest of the Protestant community of Ireland and reduced their representation to insignificance. The Protestants of North-East Ulster did not want it, because they wished to remain bound by the closest ties with Westminster. Given the geographic compactness of their strength they could still refuse to acknowledge, unlike southern Unionists, that the majority of the Irish people had any right to determine their own future.** The Irish Times summed up Lloyd George’s proposal as follows:
Its principle is hateful alike to Unionist and Nationalist. They know that national ideals and the ancestral spirit of a common patriotism cannot persist in a divided country. They know that the fantastic homogeneity which the Government proposes for the Ulster Unionists would be an excrescence on the map of Ireland, and would be ruinous to the trade and industry of the Northern Protestants …. We yearn for peace, but in Mr Lloyd George’s proposal we see not peace but a sword.50
This last forecast at least was soon proved accurate. Before the next year was out Ireland had become engulfed in horrors unsurpassed since the Rebellion of 1798.