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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
An accessible overview of Ireland's War of Independence, 1919-21. From the first shooting of RIC constables in Soloheadbeg, Co Tipperary, on 21 January 1919 to the truce in July 1921, the IRA carried out a huge range of attacks on all levels of British rule in Ireland. There are stories of humanity, such as the British soldiers who helped three IRA men escape from prison or the members of the British Army who mutinied in India after hearing about the reprisals being carried out by the Black and Tans in Ireland. The hundreds of thousands of people who celebrated the Centenary of the 1916 Rising with pride and joy are the same people who will appreciate the story of the Irish Republicans who battled against all odds in the next phase of the fight for Ireland between 1919 and 1921.
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Dedication
For my children, Fionn and Lily May.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Trish Darcy for affording me the time to write, and for her constant love and motivation. My two children missed out on a good few summer days when I should have been with them instead of researching, so thanks to Fionn and Lily May for their patience and support. The following people are deserving of special gratitude: Emer Ryan for her brilliant editorial skills and suggestions, which really shaped the book. For their forbearance, Michael O’Brien, Ivan O’Brien, Eoin O’Brien, Ide Ní Laoghaire, Susan Houlden and all at O’Brien Press, including Emma, Nicola, Kunak, Helen, Bex, Elena, Aoife, Brenda, Sarah, Fionnuala, Laura, Ruth and Ruth. Dr Conor McNamara was particularly helpful and offered many great suggestions and much encouragement, and gave me access to information that I would not otherwise have found. Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc was kind enough to read the draft and gave me guidance when I needed it most. Thanks to Liz Gillis for her speedy replies and expertise. Liam Cowley was particularly helpful, too. For encouragement and knowledge: Dr John Gibney, Dr Conor Kostick, Dr Ruan O’Donnell, Stew Reddin, Gerry Shannon, Niall Bracken, Paul O’Brien, Jim Langton, Ronnie Daly, Ruairí O’Donnell, and Cuan Ó Seireadáin. Donal Fallon and Las Fallon were both helpful and kind. Thanks to Joe Connell and Professor Mary McCay in the US. Special thanks to Glenn Dunne and Berni Metcalfe at the National Library of Ireland. Thanks to Captain Daniel Ayiotis, Hugh Beckett, Lisa Dolan, Noelle Grothier, Commandant Stephen MacEoin, Adrian Short, Linda Hickey, Sergeant Ned Kelly, Corporal Kevin Byrne, CQMS Tom Mitchell, Commandant Claire Mortimer and all at the Bureau of Military Archives. Also to all at Kilmainham Gaol, especially Aoife Torpey and Niall Bergin.
For all their constant encouragement, thanks to Mamo and Dado, Orla, Mark, Diarmuid, Eibhlis, Carmel, John, Pat, Kathleen, Barry, Maireaid, Eoin, Bernie, Aoife, Oisín, Ferdia, Roisín, Nora, Gerry, Rory, Colin, Fiona, Pedro, Denise, Liam, Ciara, Dave, Daithí, Gary, Davorka, Peter, Alex, Ci, Jack, Conor, Ruth, Rita O’Hare, Gerry Adams, Nikki Gavin, Cecelia and Boppo. Always great supporters of the 1916 Walking Tour: John Donoghue, James Donoghue, Anna, Alan, JF, Josh, Ken, Fran, Ciara, Joey, Shane, Matt and all the great people at the International Bar. Thanks to Fionntan and all the people of the Market in Belfast. To Ann, Mervyn and everyone in Glasnevin Cemetery and Museum. To Matthew at the National Botanic Gardens and all the Dublin Northside attractions. To all the lads in the GPO and at Fáilte Ireland on Suffolk Street, thanks for the constant support. Best to all the great women of Moore Street. Respect to all the men and women who fought and who fight for a better Ireland. Finally, Shane Mac Thomáis, Shane Kenna and Tom Stokes, gone but not forgotten.
Contents
Introduction
This book is an overview of the period in Ireland known as the War of Independence, 1919–21. It is not a complete encyclopaedia of every battle or every person who fought or died in that conflict, but concentrates mainly on the actions that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) undertook in the guerrilla campaign against British rule in Ireland. There are some accounts within that are disturbing but there are also stories of humanity, such as that of the British soldiers who helped three IRA men escape from prison, or the members of the British Army who mutinied in India when they heard about the reprisals being carried out by the Black and Tans in Ireland.
As a nation, we are, I believe, indebted to the men and women who fought for Irish freedom. We should never forget the powerful strength of the Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who endured a hunger strike to the death, or the composure of medical student Kevin Barry who was only eighteen years of age when he was hanged. These individuals cared nothing for material wealth or possessions and exchanged their lives for the emancipation of their fellow Irishmen and Irishwomen. They fought for an Irish Republic and were Republicans. They established the first Dáil, an Irish parliament, at a time when many of the elected representatives were in British jails. They endured beatings, shootings and torture. Their families suffered in equal measure, living in fear of British raids that saw their homes destroyed and business premises burned down.
The story of the War of Independence does not have a happy ending. The Government of Ireland Act, 1920, also known as the Fourth Home Rule Bill, had established two separate Home Rule institutions on the island of Ireland, namely Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland. According to the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which brought the War of Independence to an end, Ireland was divided into two separate states, the twenty-six counties of a newly formed Irish Free State to the south, which was set up as a dominion of the British Commonwealth, and the six Ulster counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Derry and Tyrone to the north. Nationalists of what came to be known as the Six Counties were left to fend for themselves in an Orange-dominated province ruled from Stormont, a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant State.
THE IRISH FREE STATE
The Irish Free State had a difficult start. The revolutionary Dáil Government and Provisional Government were replaced by an Executive Council, and a Governor-General was appointed as a representative of the King. The legislature, called the Oireachtas, comprised a lower house, Dáil Eireann, and an upper house, Seanad Éireann. Members were required to take an oath of allegiance, which declared fidelity to the British King, and this was anathema to opponents of the Treaty. A devastating civil war followed, between the newly established National Army, representing those who supported the Treaty, and the anti-Treaty IRA, who refused to recognise the new Free State and wished to continue the fight for the Republic.
Following the civil war, which was won by the National Army, the anti-Treaty political party, Sinn Féin, refused to take its seats in the Dáil. Pro-Treaty members formed Cumann na nGaedheal, a forerunner of today’s Fine Gael party, and they ruled until 1932. In 1926, Éamon de Valera resigned from Sinn Féin and founded Fianna Fáil, which entered the Dáil following the 1927 general election and went on to become the governing party after the general election of 1932.
In 1931, the Statute of Westminster saw Britain relinquishing its authority to legislate for its dominions, including the Irish Free State. In 1937, under a Fianna Fáil government, the citizens of the Irish Free State voted in a referendum for an entirely new Constitution of Ireland, which saw the state taking the name ‘Éire’ (Ireland), and a new office of President replacing that of the Governor-General. The state was officially declared a republic in 1949. The 1937 constitution claimed jurisdiction over all of Ireland, while recognising in Articles 2 and 3 that legislation would not apply in the Six Counties (Northern Ireland). These articles were reworded following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 to remove the claim of jurisdiction over the whole island of Ireland, replacing it with the words: ‘a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island’.
Throughout the early twentieth century, the twenty-six-county state was dominated by an ultra-Catholic insular élite who paid homage to the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic, but avoided actuating ideals enshrined in that document, such as guaranteeing ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’ and ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally’.
A hundred years on, the people of the island of Ireland seem to be more appreciative of the past and some are striving to make Ireland ‘a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land’, as imagined by socialist and republican leader James Connolly in 1897. The hundreds of thousands of people who celebrated the centenary of the 1916 Rising with pride and joy are the same people who will appreciate the story of the Irish Republicans who battled against all odds in the next phase of the fight for Irish freedom, between 1919 and 1921.
THE IRA
The Irish Republican Army is better known by the acronym IRA. The term IRA was first used when the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood invaded Canada on three successive occasions in the 1860s, fighting under a banner with the letters IRA written on it. The Fenians in the United States also wore a tunic with brass buttons that had IRA engraved on them. In the 1880s during a bombing campaign in Britain, the Fenians regularly left a ‘calling card’ in bombs, a piece of metal with the message IRA emblazoned upon it.
On 24 April 1916, at the start of the Easter Rising, when the Proclamation was read by Patrick Pearse outside the General Post Office, the Irish Volunteers (Óglaigh na hÉireann), the Irish Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan (Women’s Council) and the Fianna Éireann (Warriors of Ireland) all stood under the banner of the Army of the Irish Republic. For the twentieth century, this is the birth of the IRA.
After the Rising, members of the Irish Volunteers who were imprisoned often signed IRA after their names in autograph books passed amongst their fellow internees. However, when referring to themselves, members might also use the term ‘Volunteers’. So sometimes when talking about a certain battle they might say either ‘The Volunteers waited on the road’ or ‘The IRA waited on the road.’
STRUCTURE
At the beginning of the War of Independence in 1919, the IRA was made up of local Irish Volunteer companies based around parishes, which were collected into battalions over larger areas, and these in turn came under the control of county brigades. In May 1921, the IRA was restructured and the Volunteers in Ireland were divided into sixteen divisions. There were three southern divisions, called First Southern, Second Southern and Third Southern. There were four western divisions, five northern divisions, three eastern divisions and a midlands division.
Each division was split into brigades. For instance, the East Limerick Brigade was in the Second Southern Division. In Ireland there were sixty-seven brigades in July 1921. Brigades were subdivided into battalions, often named after the area they covered. For example, the Fourth (Kilmallock) Battalion, East Limerick Brigade was in the Second Southern Division.
Battalions were further made up of companies, often named after the parish area from which they drew members. There might be ten companies in a battalion, each company named after a letter of the alphabet and the local parish. For example, A Company, Dungloe, First Battalion, First Northern Division.
Companies usually had a captain and a first lieutenant and a second lieutenant. The company captain was called the Officer Commanding or O/C. For instance, Denis Mulchinock was O/C Banteer Company, Fourth Battalion, Cork IV Brigade, First Southern Division.
On 11 July 1921, the IRA had a nominal strength of 115,000. There was a Scottish Brigade with 2,500 IRA members. Liverpool had 398 IRA members and London a much smaller membership of eighty-three, followed by Manchester with fifty-one. There were also twenty-four IRA Volunteers in the United States at the time.
Although nearly 70,000 service medals were issued to IRA veterans in 1942, only 15,000 of them had a ‘comrac’ bar. Comhrac (modern spelling) is an Irish word for ‘fight’ or ‘struggle’ and these medals were intended for those members of the IRA who had engaged the British in a battle.
The IRA was very well structured along the lines of an established army, but at times General Head-Quarters (GHQ), which was in Dublin, found it difficult to control the organisation; it was, after all, an underground army, and it was usually up to local IRA officers to decide upon their individual engagements. However, as a guerrilla army, the IRA was very effective and efficient considering it took on one of the strongest empires in the world at the time.
Administrators in Dublin Castle
Ireland was administered by the following people in Dublin Castle:
Timeline of the War of Independence
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
Chapter One
Proclaiming a Republic
Ireland has a noble history of revolutionaries who, over two centuries, attempted to overthrow British rule. However, as this chapter will show, it is also a history of failed uprisings. Beginning with the United Irishmen of Wolfe Tone in 1798 and then Robert Emmet’s rising in 1803, the chapter will go on to discuss how pacifist Daniel O’Connell’s success in achieving rights for Catholics came to be overshadowed by the decimation of the nation during the Great Hunger of the 1840s. The 1848 rising of William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland movement was followed in the next generation by the abortive Fenian rising of 1867; and the Irish Home Rule Movement, which sought to bring the Irish Parliament back from London to Dublin, was hugely popular from the 1870s but it, in turn, was surpassed by the Irish Republican Brotherhood who went on to stage an uprising in 1916. The success of that Rising is measured not by who won or lost but by the fact that it led directly to the War of Independence of 1919–21.
THE UNITED IRISHMEN
Born in 1763 into a Dublin Protestant family, Theobald Wolfe Tone studied at Trinity College Dublin and in London, and was called to the bar in 1789. However, he had little interest in practising as a lawyer and instead turned his attention to politics, founding the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. Influenced by events in the United States and France, the United Irishmen had a vision of Ireland as an independent nation of equality, where religious beliefs were irrelevant. In 1798, the United Irishmen staged a mass uprising against British rule in Ireland. The rebellion, which lasted from May until October, was ultimately crushed by the British, with the loss of 30,000 lives. Tone, who had sought French assistance in overthrowing the British, sailed into Lough Swilly with 3,000 men. However, the French fleet was captured on 12 October, Tone was taken prisoner, tried by court martial and sentenced to death. He died in prison on the morning of his execution, apparently having cut his own throat. Some fragments of the rebel armies survived for a number of years and waged a sort of guerrilla warfare in several counties.
A perception in Britain that the rebellion had been provoked by the misrule of the Protestant Ascendancy and a fear of collusion between Irish revolutionaries and the French led to the passing of the Acts of Union of 1800, which removed the Irish Parliament from Dublin. Irish MPs were now to sit as a minority amongst the British representatives in the Westminster Parliament. On 1 January 1801, the Union flag, as we know it today, was hoisted above Dublin Castle for the first time and a new entity was created, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Robert Emmet, another Dublin Protestant, became one of the leaders of the United Irishmen while a student at Trinity College. Having left Trinity rather than face an inquisition into radical students, he joined his brother Thomas in France, in 1802, where he discussed Irish independence with Napoléon and Talleyrand. Determined to organise an uprising, Emmet returned to his native Dublin and, on 23 July 1803, he decided to act. Emmet’s rising was confused and ineffective and lasted no more than two hours. However, his subsequent capture, after which he was hanged and then beheaded, ensured that he was immortalised as an Irish martyr. Emmet gave a speech from the dock after sentence of death was passed, the last lines of which challenged future Irish revolutionaries: ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’
Robert Emmet, who led a rising in 1803 and was hanged and beheaded.
DANIEL O’CONNELL
Penal Laws were a series of laws imposed in an attempt to force Catholics and Protestant dissenters, such as Presbyterians, to accept the authority of the Anglican church, which in Ireland was established as the Church of Ireland. From 1607, Catholics were barred from holding public office or serving in the army. They had to pay fines for non-attendance at Anglican services and their churches were transferred to the Church of Ireland. In 1652, Catholics were barred from membership of the Irish Parliament, and Catholic landholders had their lands confiscated. The Protestant Ascendancy ruling class passed further laws to restrict the religious, political and economic activities of Catholics and dissenters, but while many of these were repealed in the eighteenth century, the ban on Catholics sitting in parliament continued after the Act of Union, 1800, and Catholics were seriously under-represented in politics, law and the civil service.
Born in Kerry in 1775, Daniel O’Connell was educated in France where he developed a lifelong abhorrence of violence for political ends. Having returned to Ireland, where he built up a large practice as a barrister, he was confirmed in his pacifism by the violence of the 1798 rebellion and its aftermath. In 1823, O’Connell founded the Catholic Association, whose objective was to secure Catholic rights by constitutional means. With the support of the clergy, he turned it into a mass movement, campaigning and holding rallies around the country throughout the 1820s. In 1828, O’Connell was elected to the British Parliament, but could not take his seat as he was a Catholic. The following year, the Roman Catholic Relief Act was passed; O’Connell was victorious in a by-election in Clare and ‘the Liberator’ was able to take his seat at Westminster. It is interesting to note that although generally referred to as ‘Catholic emancipation’, the Catholic Relief Act actually raised by five times, to £10 per annum, the property qualification required to vote; this meant that many of the ‘40 shilling freeholders’, those whose rent was 40 shillings or £2 per annum, lost the right the vote.
O’Connell, who was now seen as the ‘uncrowned king of Ireland’, gave up his practice at the bar to devote his time wholly to politics and to campaigning in the 1830s and 1840s for repeal of the Acts of Union, which he believed could be achieved by peaceful means. British political leaders quickly closed ranks against him, bringing in a coercion act to prevent mass gatherings, but a change in government gave the repeal movement the space to gather momentum. Supported by the Young Irelanders, the Repeal Association organised ‘monster meetings’ throughout the country, with an estimated three-quarters of a million in attendance at one meeting at the Hill of Tara. However, the Liberal government had become alarmed by the growth of the movement and, in 1843, banned a meeting scheduled to be held in Clontarf in Dublin. O’Connell was arrested, charged with conspiracy and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of £2,000. Although he continued his repeal activities following his early release from prison, it was clear that his tactics had failed, and the Young Irelanders withdrew from the Repeal Association. Knowing that he had been unsuccessful in his goal, O’Connell left Ireland in 1847 and died in Genoa later that year.
THE GREAT HUNGER
In August 1845, the potato blight, phytophthora infestans, was reported in the London Chronicle as having affected the crops in Ireland. The potato was the staple diet of the majority of the poor tenant farmers and the poverty-stricken landless in Ireland. Instead of Westminster Parliament enacting emergency legislation to ban the export of produce from Ireland and import supplies of food, a purposeful policy of laissez-faire was pursued. Those who could not afford food would have to rely on the sparse charity available from the state and private sources. The Irish Famine is an anachronistic misnomer as food was exported in abundance from Ireland under the armed guard of the British Army. During what is now referred to as the Great Hunger, compassion, not food, was in short supply. The Irish people were degraded by the Great Hunger and they would not easily forget that no Anglo-Irish landlord and no man of the cloth went hungry, while children perished for the want of food.
William Smith O’Brien from Dromoland, County Clare, had served as a Conservative MP in the 1820s and 1830s. However, his views changed and by 1844 he was a convinced Repealer. He became a leading member of the Young Irelanders and, with others who had split from Daniel O’Connell, founded the Irish Confederation in 1847, urging the formation of a National Guard and an armed rising. With most of the other leaders arrested, O’Brien and the Confederates still at liberty made an attempt at an uprising in July 1848 but it was illprepared and the Great Hunger had left the countryside weakened. The rising was a failure and many of the leaders of the movement were banished to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).
Considered by many to have been a form of genocide, the Great Hunger from 1845 to 1852 led to the death by starvation of over one million people, and a further one million emigrated around the world, settling in England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, Canada and the United States.
THE FENIANS
Thousands of Irish people continued to emigrate throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and the population of the country essentially halved within one generation. A significant number of Irish male immigrants in the US were sworn into a secret society formed in 1858, the Fenian Brotherhood. Its sister organisation in Ireland, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), staged an uprising in 1867 in the same year as the American wing of the Fenians invaded Canada. Neither event was a success, adding to the growing list of failed uprisings against British rule.
Physical force nationalism enjoyed a revival in the 1880s during the Land War when Anglo-Irish landlords were targeted by ‘agrarian outrages’ and the Royal Irish Constabulary earned the opprobrium of the Irish when the police acted as enforcers during evictions. Irish-Americans, under the auspices of Clan na Gael (the Irish Family), the new name for the Fenian Brotherhood since 1867, brought terror to the people of England by engaging in a bombing campaign in the 1880s. One young man arrested for his bombing activities was Thomas J. Clarke.
