‘Immorally, Unconstitutionally, Tyrannically’: Ireland and the Conscription Crisis of 1918

The Policeman

Whatever lesson his teachers intended to impart to T.J. McElligot at the training centre for the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Phoenix Park, Dublin, it probably was not the one the young constable walked away with. “I did not know I had a country until I joined the police force at the age of nineteen,” he later wrote:

…and six months in the Dublin depot made me a rebel. On leaving the depot in May, 1908…I stood outside the gate and swore to play a man’s part in bringing that institution to an end.

It took exactly ten years and a month for such an opportunity to arise: the Military Service Act had just gone through Westminster on the 16^th April 1918, meaning that the men of Ireland would soon be conscripted into doing their part for the British military machine in France and elsewhere – whether they wanted to or not. Stationed by then in Trim, Co. Meath, as a RIC sergeant, McElligot seized on the chance to act as an inside man for the protest movement that was rapidly “uniting the people of Ireland in a solid phalanx of resistance,” as he put it. By the time the Anti-Conscription Conference met in the Mansion House, Dublin, on the 18^th April, two days after the passing of the Act, McElligot had been able to surreptitiously provide them with confidential police documents detailing the ways Conscription was to be enforced by the British authorities.

Policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary

He hoped to go further than that:

I saw a great opportunity for defeating conscription by organising the police not to enforce it but to resist it, and that they should become the spearhead of the resistance movement.

Again, McElligot was able to use his position to good effect, contacting other RIC personnel with the plans he had in mind. When he submitted in writing his progress to the Anti-Conscription Conference, or the Mansion House Conference as it was also called, the Irish political heavyweights involved heartily thanked him for his efforts and urged him to continue.

He also reached out to the heads of the Irish Volunteers:

…and told them of the movement to resist conscription. I said it would be the greatest opportunity they could get of seizing arms in the police barracks, where they would be handed over by most men if conscription was to be enforced.

McElligot was envisioning nothing less than the mass defection of the RIC, an upheaval against Irish subservience by the very body tasked with upholding it. Given the stakes involved, and “at the time and under the circumstances,” McElligot later wrote, “I regard the conscription crisis as one of the most favourable opportunities for paralysing British rule in Ireland.”[1]

Trim RIC Barracks, where McElligot was stationed (Source: https://meathhistoryhub.ie/trim-1920-the-capture-of-the-barracks-and-the-burning-of-trim/)

The Volunteer

The rebelliously-minded sergeant was not the only one sizing up the potential of the enfolding situation. Valentine Jackson was working for the Rathdown Rural District Council, Co. Dublin, when an officer from the British Army – by the rank of Major, Jackson believed – stopped by, asking to see the man responsible for the city streets. Jackson led him to the desk of Rory O’Connor, the Engineer of Paving. After O’Connor assured his caller that anything said would be in confidence, the Major explained the reason for his visit, saying that:

…there would be extensive street fighting in Dublin if conscription were enforced and that they would mainly use tanks, some of them of a heavy type, in such fighting. He wanted O’Connor to give him a list of streets which would be unsafe for the heaviest tanks, on account of sewers and other undergrounds works.

Rory O’Connor

Playing the part of a dutiful civil servant perfectly, O’Connor asked for more information on the vehicles in question, such as their weights and load distribution, to better assess which streets would be riskiest for them. These details the Major did not know, though he promised to provide them later. The two men chatted for a while on the finer points of urban combat before the Major left, “very well pleased with the interview,” according to Jackson, who apparently had been hovering about to witness the exchange.

The Major apparently never asked himself why a pen-pusher would know so much about the logistics behind street fighting, particularly where Dublin was concerned. He might not have been so keen to confide in the obliging Irishman had he known that O’Connor had helped deliver messages to the various rebel strongpoints in the capital three years earlier, as part of the Easter Rising of 1916.

And now 1918 was looking to provide a flashpoint of its own. O’Connor called in on Jackson’s own office, located in the same building:

He wanted my opinion on a proposal that in the event of an attempt to enforce conscription the water supply should be cut off from all the city military establishments.

While sympathetic to O’Connor’s suggestion, Jackson did not think it practical, explaining that the British Army would surely be competent enough to restart water pipes in the event of them being blocked or cut. Besides, fire hydrants could be used with hose-lines to provide water if necessary.

A British tank on an Irish street, 1921 (Source: https://ansionnachfionn.com/2015/09/16/a-british-tank-on-an-irish-street/)

Despite this setback, O’Connor remained:

…anxious to consider the matter further so we spent the next few days driving around the city barracks during which he noted the size and exact position of the various branch pipes together with their valves and fittings.[2]

Michael Collins

For O’Connor just happened to be not only the Engineer of Paving for a local government body but also, in his spare time, the Director of Engineering for the GHQ of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers – memoranda on plans for the demolition of bridges, railways and engines throughout the country in the event of Conscription were signed off by him. Ernie O’Malley noticed these papers as he conversed with Michael Collins in the latter’s office on Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin, along with a large map of Ireland with red streaks radiating from the capital as plans of attack. Like O’Connor, Collins had cut his teeth during Easter Week; he also held rank in the Volunteers GHQ, as Director of Organisation, and it was in that capacity he appointed O’Malley to Co. Offaly to help lead the Volunteer companies and battalions there.

That O’Malley did to his utmost ability, parading the men through the towns and countryside while under the watchful eye of the RIC. Whenever a policeman asked his name, O’Malley would draw his revolver but it never became necessary for him to use it – at least, not yet. Elsewhere, in Athlone, an Irish sergeant-major who was part of the garrison offered O’Malley help with seizing the castle armoury, to the point of fighting his fellow soldiers if necessary.

Athlone Castle

“It looks like conscription,” Collins had told him approvingly. “That’ll make some slackers wake up.”[3]

The Activist

Liam de Róiste

Even a long-time member of Sinn Féin and hardened political activist was finding it hard to process the enormity of recent events. “The past week has been a remarkable one in the history of Ireland – one of the most remarkable probably in some ways,” Liam de Róiste jotted down in his diary on the 21^st April, five days after the passing of the Military Service Act. “What the effect of the decisions come to may ultimately be it is difficulty at the moment to determine.”

One thing for sure, however:

The whole nation is united, as never the nation was united before, against the imposition of compulsory service by the British Government. The right of the British Government to enforce it on Ireland is denied by all. It is accepted that the government is acting immorally, unconstitutionally, tyrannically and that, therefore, resistance to this imposition is a duty on all, is in accordance with justice, morality, religion, national right, dignity, freedom.[4]

Given the pressures on Britain on the war front, where Germany had just launched a major spring offensive, its decision to finally apply Irish Conscription may have been understandable, if desperate. Nonetheless, in doing so, it had “committed another of her many big blunders in her handling of Ireland, showing a crass lack of comprehension of the country’s outlook and reactions,” according to Kevin O’Shiel, another Sinn Féin proponent.[5]

Kevin O’Shiel

For the separatist party, this misstep on its enemy’s part could not have come at a better time. After a flurry of success the previous year, Sinn Féin had entered 1918 with a loss of no less than three by-elections. It was enough to make O’Shiel afraid that his cause was on the retreat, and that Sinn Féin’s time had come and gone – and now the British state had given it the perfect battlefield on which to fight. From then on, for O’Shiel and his fellow party workers, “our aim was to keep the public interest up to scratch and not let it flag or fade.”[6]

Which was unlikely to happen anytime soon. Public interest was enough for representatives from all of the major political groupings – at least where Nationalists were concerned – to meet on the 18^th April 1918, at the Mansion House, Dublin: John Dillon and Joe Devlin from the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Éamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith for Sinn Féin, along with three Labour men and two other, non-aligned Members of Parliament (MPs). After an anti-Conscription pledge was drawn up, in which the assembled leaders swore to resist the threat together, a deputation was immediately sent to where the Catholic bishops of Ireland had been gathering on unrelated matters in Maynooth. The Princes of the Church were more than happy to lend their ecclesiastical support to the political struggle, issuing a manifesto of their own later that night, declaring defiance against Conscription to be “consonant with the law of God.”

Daniel Cohalan, Bishop of Cork, surrounded by nuns from the Sisters of Charity (Source: Wiki)

Three days later, on the 21^st, meetings in almost every village and parish in Ireland were held for people to sign their names en masse to the Mansion House pledge:

Denying the right of the British Government to enforce compulsory service in this country, we pledge ourselves solemnly to one another to resist Conscription by the most effective means at our disposal.[7]

De Róiste learnt about this at Mass in St Finbarr’s Church, Cork, from no less an illustrious figure than the city bishop, the Most Rev. Dr Cohalan – a sign, de Róiste saw, of how closely the clerical and the secular would be working together on this. Also “I see the hand of Eamon de Valera in that pledge,” he later wrote, “and of Wm. O’Brien of the Labour Party in the words of ‘compulsory service,’ with the word ‘military’ omitted.” He was unwilling to give much credit to the IPP, dismissing any contribution from it “unless Parliamentarians accept Sinn Féin ideas” – as in absentionism from Westminster – “there are no others left, no others by which Conscription can be defeated.”[8]

The Politician

De Róiste was not the only one unwilling to put aside doctrinal differences even in the face of a common danger. When the idea of an anti-Conscription summit had initially been mooted at Dublin Corporation, the Labour attendees believed that this was an attempt to ‘get the jump’ on Sinn Féin, considering how everyone else in the room were IPP partisans. They would only agree to the motion if Sinn Féin was also involved – whether Sinn Féin would want to, however, was another matter.

“There appeared to be some considerable doubt as to whether they would or not,” wrote William O’Brien, one of the Labour men in question, “but finally they did. They feared they mightn’t favour the idea of working with the Irish [Parliamentary] Party.”[9]

Actually, many in Sinn Féin did not. When their central offices had received the invitation to the Mansion House from Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the innovator of the idea, “shrewd were the glances cast at it, and long the discussions of its worth,” described Darrell Figgis, a senior administrator in the party. De Valera and Griffith, to which the letter had been addressed, were in favour of accepting “but it took the united effort of these two men to carry the proposal with the Executive Committee,” the concern being that Sinn Féin’s sense of self as the Irish government-in-waiting would be diluted by standing next to its hated rival.

(left to right) Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera, the President and one of the two Vice-Presidents of Sinn Féin respectively at the time

De Valera tried resorting to the suggestion that he and Griffith attend the Mansion House “as individuals, binding Sinn Fein in no way by their action,” an early display of the Long Fellow’s gift for creative ambiguity. Not that this impressed Figgis – “the suggestion was like a mathematical formula for which no practical correlative can be found – looking very real on paper, but equating with nothing real on fact” – even as he was supportive of de Valera’s stance and cynical of the motives of the naysayers. “No doubt some of these considerations were moved by the desire for separate possession and power. Impure motives move obscurely in the sincerest of folk,” Figgis wrote in his memoirs, adding darkly: “Those impure motives moved more in some than in others.”[10]

John Dillon

John Dillon, meanwhile, had tried talking himself out of the invite after receiving his own as the IPP Chairman, believing that the ideal place to argue Ireland’s case remained in the debating-hall of Westminster – which would just happen to play into his party’s strengths, still possessing as it did the majority of Irish parliamentary seats. The suggestion from de Valera and Griffith to the Lord Mayor that the conference go ahead without anyone from the IPP was what probably pushed Dillon into accepting, lest his party be left out in the cold.

“As I had summoned the conference,” O’Neill later explained, “I was in the chair and it took all the ingenuity I possessed to make a favourable start.” Dillon, O’Neill observed in the Mansion House, was “solemn, and no doubt realised that the power of his party was diminishing, and that by attending the conference he was playing into the hands of Sinn Fein.”[11]

Of course, the IPP’s prestige had been waning for quite some time already; in attending, Dillon had had little choice when his prevarication failed. Plenty in Sinn Féin, likewise, felt pushed into acting against their best interests. Nonetheless, “wise or unwise, the wish of the people left no alternative,” as Figgis baldly put it. Even so, the enforced familiarity with each other in no way eased the contempt between the two factions, despite the occasional attempt at solidary. One such gesture was tried at Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon, when de Valera and Dillon shared a platform in early May, speaking out together against Conscription; a similar event followed in Derry, this one attended by Figgis and Joe Devlin, the Member of Parliament (MP) for West Belfast.

Éamon de Valera at an anti-Conscription rally, 1918 (Source: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000641459)

“Neither meeting was exactly a success,” wrote Figgis, “and they were not repeated.”[12]

The Inspector-General

It was a “union which necessity imposed on the other two parties and which is no doubt equally embarrassing to both,” wrote Sir John Byrne drolly in his monthly report to Dublin Castle. In any case, he predicted (correctly) that the makeshift alliance between Sinn Féin and the IPP would probably run aground come the upcoming by-election in East Cavan, since there could only be one seat won between the pair.

Sir Joseph Byrne (Source: https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/irish-police-chief-dismissed-from-post)

Which is not to say that the RIC Inspector-General was unconcerned or complacent about the responsibilities ahead of him; quite the contrary, in fact, as Byrne made clear:

Though prosperous and free from ordinary crime, the country early in the Month [of April] became ablaze with furious resentment on the passing of the Military Service Bill with power to apply Conscription to Ireland.

In case his employers did not fully grasp just how serious it was:

Houses were raided for arms, and explosives were stolen, and persons at public meetings spoke of shooting policemen, attacking their barracks, blowing up bridges and other acts of sabotage. For some moment some insurrectionary outbreak seemed inevitable.

Such was the danger that the more isolated RIC barracks in the south and west of the island were closed, with police in North Tipperary even confined inside at night lest they be attacked. “The County Inspector anticipates that the first attempt to enforce Conscription in the County will provoke open rebellion,” Byrne reported, “and in his opinion it will not be possible to enforce it” – a viewpoint seemingly shared elsewhere in Ireland.

What saved the day – for the time being – was “the intervention of the Roman Catholic Bishops” in their declaration:

…that England had no right to conscript the Irish people against their will and that resistance would be justifiable, but through their Clergy the people were urged to keep calm and await instructions from them and their political leaders as to united action to resist ‘this blood tax.’

While Home Rulers and Republicans were publicly working together against Conscription, it was the Catholic clergy who “now assumed command of the movement.” No better display of this dominance was the use of churches in the taking of the anti-Conscription pledge on the 21^st April, and for the collection of donations for a ‘National Defence Fund’ a week later, on the 28^th, the results being, according to police reports, unprecedented.

Signing the anti-Conscription pledge at a church gate, 1918 (Source: https://www.businesspost.ie/news-focus/the-spring-tide-of-irish-nationalism-how-ireland-was-lost-in-the-1918-conscription-crisis/

The influence of the clergy was not entirely benign from the point of view of the Inspector-General, however. “I will not I think be out of place here to call attention to the strong efforts which are being made to induce the younger members of the RIC to resign than take part in the enforcement of Conscription,” Byrne wrote. As upholders of British law in Ireland, the RIC had long been the target of abuse and suspicion, which the force had stoically weathered – until now: “It is a new experience for its members to be assailed through their conscience by members of their Church.”

The Clergyman

After all, the Constabulary recruited from the population, making the bulk of it Catholic and thus keenly vulnerable to this sort of pious blackmail:

The Clergy as a body have not openly engaged in this conspiracy to corrupt the Constabulary, but certain priests have addressed very strong appeals to them on spiritual grounds, telling them publicly in the Church that Constables who in any way assist Conscription will incur all the consequences of mortal sin, and that in the event of life being taken they will be mortally guilty of murder.

Byrne did not say how effective this subversion was, or would be if push came to shove, but the implications alone were troubling. “It is needless to point out that the preaching of such a mischievous doctrine to a religious body of men is pregnant with possibilities” [emphasis in text],” he added to drive the point home.[13]

John Henry Bernard, Archbishop of Dublin

It could be argued that, for all their undoubted influence, the Hierarchy and its priesthood had had little choice. “By the action they have taken,” observed another commentator, John Henry Bernard, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, “they have regained the confidence of all Roman Catholic Ireland.”

This renewed trust, combined with their unique role as spiritual counsellors, allowed individual men of the cloth to keep the peace in ways impossible for politicians or policemen. An example of this was in Cootehill, Co. Cavan, when eight men were arrested in their beds on the morning of the 16^th April 1918. Four were from Sinn Féin, the other half IPP supporters, and they had brawled a month earlier over a by-election between their respective factions in Waterford City. A crowd gathered at the RIC barracks where the suspects were being held, to be told by Father P. O’Connell not to interfere with the police in the course of their duty – words evidently heeded for nothing further was done until brass bands from both the local Sinn Féin and IPP clubs arrived to parade through the town.

The fact that the two bands did so together without another incident could only be attributed to the newfound spirit of cooperation against the Military Service Act, as emphasised by the banners in the crowd reading No Conscription and We Will Not Be Conscripted. When the eight detainees were ordered to be taken to Belfast by train, Father O’Connell “directed the enormous crowd that congregated to make way for the police” escorting the prisoners to the station, “which they did,” according to the newspaper coverage.

Anti-Conscription rally, 1918

Afterwards, at another demonstration later that day in the town square, the padre:

…delivered a rousing speech against Conscription, assuring his flock, whom he had shepherded safely through this potentially very explosive situation, that ‘they would be more than a match for the British Army’.

Perhaps no one other than an ordinary parish priest could juggle so effectively “the roles of anti-British agitator and preserver of law and order,” to quote one historian – and few other times than the Conscription Crisis would this combination have been so needed.[14]

The Relief

To some, however, all these efforts amounted to little more than empty posturing. “In sermons and from the altars the congregations were exhorted to resist conscription,” remembered Joe Good. However, “as I saw it, the clergy in Ireland were inspiring the people to a fanatical enthusiasm which they would not be able to lead or control.” Politically, leadership was defined by its absence – this was before Dáil Éireann’s creation (in January 1919), and Good clearly did not consider the Mansion House Conference or either of its component main parties, Sinn Féin and the IPP, to be adequate substitutes.

The best available were the Irish Volunteers, of which Good was one. Perhaps that is why he held a somewhat blinkered view of the situation, as if no one else in Ireland was pulling their weight, but he held that “the Volunteer GHQ had a moral responsibility for what would ensue if conscription was resisted by force of arms.” The problem was that that was easier said than done. Senior officers like O’Connor, Collins and O’Malley may have been drawing up grand strategies to their hearts’ content but Good could not recall any such plans, or any plans at all, trickling down to the ordinary rank-and-file.

Irish Volunteers

Between this and their lack of weapons, the Volunteers “could only have been slaughtered” if the British military was in earnest, which Good believed they were. He saw proof of this while cycling through the country on holiday, in the form of an unusual number of railway sleepers waiting in rail yards. As a veteran of Easter Week, Good had experienced their use in war before as impromptu barricades:

There is nothing I know of quite as good. I thought I saw the plan of the British, which appeared to be to isolate a town or village, where required, by the erection of these sleeper barricades during the night so that the village could be dealt with.[15]

Good may have been speculating, but Volunteers elsewhere in Ireland were given cause to fear the worse. In Co. Tyrone, Volunteer pickets standing guard at night beheld the peculiar display of British soldiers being dropped off by train along various stations, after which the detachments would march along the rails until catching up with the train that had stopped for them. “The Volunteers could not understand what the soldier tactics meant,” recalled one witness of this, “and the incident caused much excitement and alarm and made a lot of Volunteer officers go on the run to evade capture.”

Thankfully, “this threat only lasted for a few months and then fizzled out.”[16]

British soldiers with barbed-wire in front of a crowd in Ireland

Cooler heads had prevailed, both in Ireland and amongst the Powers-That-Be. “As time passed the wild consternation of the first few days gradually gave way to hope that the Government may realize the difficulties of the undertaking and not pursue it,” the RIC Inspector-General reported.

Conscription was not cancelled; at the same time, it was never implemented, almost as if London was weighing up its options, trying to figure out which was the least bad one. By October 1918, six months after the drama had begun, “the dread of Conscription subsided, and with it a good deal of the enthusiasm for Sinn Fein.” Partly this was due, in Byrne’s opinion, to “the firm attitude of Government and the support afforded to the RIC by troops stationed in disturbed districts,” but also because of the changing fortunes of the war. The German Army, once so mighty and seemingly unstoppable earlier in the year, had all but collapsed, and with it the need for Conscription.[17]

Ernie O’Malley

While many in Ireland (and London) must have sighed in relief, the Irish Volunteers found themselves losing much of the wind in their sails. O’Malley was in Donegal when he felt the shift in the atmosphere of the houses he visited, “an awkward silence or a sudden rush of speech… I would grope for words in return and an out-of-proportion sentence would become strain, and I would feel myself inarticulate.” It became a relief for him to take his leave.[18]

Recruits who had flocked to the safety in numbers now backed away, shrinking the Volunteers down to their prior strength. The big winner was perhaps more Sinn Féin than the Volunteers, in the opinion of John McCoy of Armagh, since the former was left well positioned to contest the subsequent General Election in November 1918. Many IPP supporters were to throw their lot in with Sinn Féin on account of its identification with the anti-Conscription campaign – although not all. “Opposed to us in this election were many of the people who had swarmed to us during the conscription crisis,” complained Michael Rock, the Commandant of the Fingal Volunteers.[19]

Truly, chewed bread is soon forgotten, as the old adage goes.

Of course, this was far from the end of the matter, for Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers with their joint mission of an independent Ireland, and for the authorities who continued to eye developments warily. Conscription had become old news already but it had, while its crisis lasted, given rise to what one long-time MP, Tim Healy, hailed as “the most remarkable movement that ever swept Ireland.”[20]

References

[1] McElligot, T.J. (BMH / WS 472), pp. 2-5, 17

[2] Jackson, Valentine (BMH / WS 409), pp. 30-1

[3] O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013), pp. 95-6, 98, 100-1

[4] ‘6 Feb – 17 May 1918’, Liam de Róiste Diaries Online, Cork City Council (Accessed on 08/02/2024), pp. 128-9

[5] O’Shiel, Kevin (BMH / WS 1770, Part 6), p. 10

[6] Ibid, p. 22

[7] Ibid, pp. 15-7

[8] De Róiste, pp. 127, 129-130

[9] O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Fourth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited, 1969), pp. 163-4

[10] Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927], pp. 192-4

[11] Morrissey, Thomas J. Laurence O’Neill (1864-1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917-1924) Patriot and Man of Peace (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2014), p. 109

[12] Figgis, pp. 193, 201

[13] Police reports from Dublin Castle records (National Library of Ireland – NLI), POS 8545

[14] Miller, David W. Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898-1921 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Limited, 1973), pp. 408-10

[15] Good, Joseph (BMH / WS 388), pp. 38-40

[16] Corr, Seán (BMH / WS 458), p. 5

[17] NLI, POS 8545 (for April) and P8547 (for October)

[18] O’Malley, p. 118

[19] McCoy, John (BMH / WS 492), p. 37 ; Rock, Michael (BMH / WS 1398), p. 5

[20] Healy, T.M. Letters and Leaders of My Day, Volume II (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, [1928]), p. 597

Bibliography

Bureau of Military History Statements

Corr, Seán, WS 458

Good, Joseph, WS 388

Jackson, Valentine, WS 409

McCoy, John, WS 492

McElligot, T.J., WS 472

O’Shiel, Kevin, WS 1770

Rock, Michael, WS 1398

Books

Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927)

Healy, T.M. Letters and Leaders of My Day (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, [1928])

Miller, David W. Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898-1921 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Limited, 1973)

Morrissey, Thomas J. Laurence O’Neill (1864-1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917-1924) Patriot and Man of Peace (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2014)

O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Forth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited, 1969)

O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013)

National Library of Ireland Collections

Police Report from Dublin Castle Records

Online Source

Liam de Róiste Diaries

‘One of the Most Interesting Chapters’: The Role of Co. Wexford in the Easter Rising of 1916

The Full Story?

When Seán Doyle donated some items concerning the Easter Rising to the National Museum, he did so, as he explained in a letter, because he felt that “the interesting part played by Wexford has been not hitherto adequately represented.” He was writing in 1934 and it seems that his efforts made little headway as, eighty-one years later, another Doyle thought it necessary to offer “a gentle rebuke” to those historians “who promote the view that the 1916 Rising was confined to Dublin” at the expense of Co. Wexford and the overlooked “significant event” of its own during that momentous week.[1]

Postcard celebrating three leaders of the Rising in Co. Wexford (Source: https://heritage.wicklowheritage.org/topics/wicklow_1916-_1923/wicklow-1916-commemoration-programme/wicklow_life_collections_1916/comdt_peter_paul_galligan/postcard_of_3_enniscorthy_volunteers)

‘Significant’ may be too strong a word. Nonetheless, while it is true that the county had nothing compared to the slaughter on Mount Street, the naval bombardment from the Liffey or the final holdout in the General Post Office (GPO), it does provide an alternative version of the Rising, or how Easter Week could have gone.

Certainly, at least one journalist, writing in the Irish Times at the end of April 1916, barely before the dust had settled and the embers cooled, believed that “when the full story of the rising at Enniscorthy comes to be written it will provide one of the most interesting chapters of the ill-fated rebellion of the Sinn Feiners.” While information was sketchy, it appeared that, at the start of Easter Week, the Irish Volunteers involved had not acted immediately, instead waiting for news of their compatriots in Dublin. When it was confirmed that the city was in rebel hands, the Wexford men swung into action, first seizing the business establishments of Enniscorthy, along with its railway station.

Scarawalsh Bridge, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford

Whether to blow up the town bridge was debated but declined. Instead:

They then attempted to blow up the bridge at Scarawalsh, which crosses the River Slaney on the main road between Wexford and Enniscorthy. Before doing so they behaved with cruelty to the old and respected blacksmith, named Carton, who, with his family, live in a house close to the bridge. Carton and his family were ordered to leave the house, and had to wander about homeless for two days and two nights.

The Cartons were not the only ones inconvenienced. Factory workers on the train out of Wexford had been held up at Enniscorthy Station and forced to walk back along the railway line. And a class war seemed to have been waged as well as a national one: “While the revolution lasted employers were held up by their own workpeople.” Such societal reversals was something that the Men of Property, in the aftermath, were taking rather personally:

The greatest indignation prevails amongst the business people of the town and district, and the hope is expressed on all sides that the rebels will be hunted out to a man…There is a general feeling that, if the spirit of revolution is not ruthlessly stamped out, the trade and business of Enniscorthy will be ruined.

For a failure the Rising had been, in Enniscorthy and elsewhere in the country, and it was the Volunteers who were now at the mercy of others. One hundred and thirty-three suspects had already been rounded up by the authorities in Co. Wexford alone, with more to come. That these prisoners were being sent abroad by steamer to an unknown destination showed how seriously the Powers-That-Be took this latest threat.[2]

Irish Volunteers being arrested outside the Athenaeum, Enniscorthy, on the 1st May 1916 (Source: https://www.ucc.ie/en/theirishrevolution/collections/the-story-of-1916/chapter-4-the-uprising-itself/the-rising-in-enniscorthy/)

By the time the Royal Commission met a month later, on the 27^th May 1916, at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, to investigate the recent rebellion, three hundred and seventy-five altogether had been arrested in Co. Wexford. Out of these, three hundred and nineteen were transported to Dublin for later deportation, with fifty-two discharged and a pair taken to hospital. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), meanwhile, had seized a total of:

• 45 rifles
• 66 shotguns
• 8 pistols
• 6 revolvers
• 1 bomb
• 21 ½ stone of blasting powder
• 667 rounds of sporting ammunition
• 4,067 rounds of rifle and revolver ammunition
• A quantity of gelignite and other explosives

“A regular arsenal,” exclaimed Lord Hardinge as Chairman.[3]

Laying the Plans

W.J. Brennan-Whitmore

As Lord Hardinge grasped, the Volunteers in Wexford had been in complete earnest. So was the rebel leadership, which had had big plans for them. Given its position on the south-west coast of Ireland, the county was to serve two important tasks in the course of the Rising. Firstly, as explained by W.J. Brennan-Whitmore, they were to keep the line of communications open between the Irish Volunteer GHQ in Dublin and their units all the way to Cork. The second was more complicated, concerning Waterford city, “the really black spot” in Brennan-Whitmore’s (and the GHQ’s) view and a potential Achilles’ heel for their insurrection.

With its harbour, Waterford provided a natural entry point into Ireland, from which disembarking enemy reinforcements could quickly penetrate into the heartlands. Seizing the city outright did not seem feasible, considering the pro-Redmondite and anti-Republican sentiments there, so the next best counter-measure would be one of containment, with Volunteer guards positioned to the north of Waterford, and more on its western and eastern flanks.

Liam Mellows

Brennan-Whitmore was one of the two GHQ operatives sent to explain to the Wexford Volunteers their part in all this. Along with Liam Mellows, he met the officers at the house of one of them in the town of Enniscorthy, sometime before Easter Week. “None of those present were told of any specific date for a rising,” Brennan-Whitmore, “but all were cautioned of the very confidential nature of the discussions; nor was anything committed to writing for obvious reasons.”

As soon as orders were received from Dublin, the Wexford men would mobilise at Enniscorthy, so chosen for its central position in the county:

Here there was to be a redistribution of arms, necessitated by the fact that while some of the corps were reasonably well armed, considering the circumstances, others were very poorly armed. A commissariat was to be set up for the provisioning of the men in the field. As soon as this task was done the local police barracks was to be invested. Every effort was to be made to achieve a quick surrender and the arms and ammunition taken at once and distributed to the corps. Meanwhile small detachments were to be sent at once to take the police barracks in outlying localities.

Once all this was done, the rebels would divide into two brigades. One was to go to Rosslare, another coastal village, in order to deny a British landing there. Since GHQ was well aware of how short of munitions the Volunteers were in general, “they were not to attempt a fight to the finish, but to retire when no longer able to maintain their positions effectively and to continue to harass the enemy in his progress inland,” as Brennan-Whitmore put it.

Irish Volunteers

The second brigade was to attempt a similar role at Waterford, specifically at New Ross, north of the city, allowing them to guard against British advances via the River Barrow. Again, these men were not expected to make a last stand if things went wrong; in such an event, they would fall back to regroup at Enniscorthy and possibly try again, this time going through neighbouring Co. Wicklow and into Kildare in order to threaten the Curragh. But, whatever happened, “it was repeatedly emphasised that anything like a prolonged fight was to be avoided at all cost, and manoeuvre and harassing tactics mainly resorted to.”

It was all very ambitious and Brennan-Whitmore had his doubts as to how realistic any of it could be, considering the untrained state of the Volunteers and their paucity in weapons. As it turned out, the Wexford men never had a chance to put theory into practice, and almost lost out on having any role at all, thanks to circumstances beyond their control – the story of the Rising in a nutshell.[4]

‘An Air of Indecision’

When it finally occurred, Easter Week became less the execution of finely-honed strategies and more an exercise in improvisation.

J.J. O’Connell, in the uniform of the Free State army during the Irish Civil War

The first sign of trouble that Peter Paul Galligan saw was when Captain J.J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell appeared in Enniscorthy on the Good Friday of Holy Week, the 21^st April 1916. Galligan, as Vice-Commandant of the Enniscorthy Volunteer Battalion, was by then aware of the Rising planned in three days’ time, on Easter Sunday, a fact he had learnt from Seamus Doyle, the Battalion Adjutant. If Galligan had been surprised at this revelation, alarmed at its short notice or resentful at being informed by a colleague rather than from a superior, he gave no hint of it when it came to writing his reminiscences. A lecture the month before, in March, given by a visiting Patrick Pearse on Robert Emmet might have been a clue in itself: after all, what else was that ill-fated patriot known for besides rebellion?[5]

Patrick Pearse

Doyle himself was aware of the incipient insurrection through his contacts in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), though he did not know the date until Pearse told him via a code he had left with him after the Robert Emmet talk. On the morning of Holy Thursday, Doyle received a message from Pearse ostensibly asking about some books available ‘on the 23^rd July next. Remember 3 months earlier.’ By the dating of the 23^rd July, and the ‘3 months earlier’ remark, Pearse was informing the other man that the day of action was to be the 23^rd April, Easter Sunday.[6]

What was less clear was everything else. At a staff meeting attended by Galligan, Doyle and another officer, O’Connell, according to Galligan’s recollection:

…told us that he had been appointed by the Vol. Executive to take charge of Wicklow, Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny areas, but that he refused to take over the command and would take no part in the forthcoming rising and, further, that it would be our own responsibility whatever action we took.

If O’Connell gave a reason for this startling information, Galligan did not record it. He then left Enniscorthy and that was the end of his involvement as far as the Rising was concerned. Which is perhaps just as well; all he had accomplished in his short time was disarray:

As a result of O’Connell’s action we were left without instructions and could take no further action and on Easter Sunday there was an air of indecision prevailing amongst the officers owing to this lack of instruction.[7]

Seamus Doyle

Doyle was to tell the story a little differently, leaving out O’Connell for the most part, and instead it was a motorcyclist who arrived from Kilkenny “to state that as a result of the directive from GHQ that day they [the Volunteers] were not ‘rising’.” Doyle was sent by the other officers to Wexford town to discuss with their counterparts there, but “since they were also very confused about what to do,” that did not help matters.[8]

Coming to a Decision

Both Galligan and Doyle undertook journeys to Dublin to find out the facts for themselves. That they went separately and alone shows how ad hoc everything was becoming. Also indicative was that Doyle, when arriving at the Volunteer Headquarters on Dawson Street, did not bother asking Eoin MacNeill for clarification, despite the Chief of Staff being present. Instead he proceeded to the offices of the Irish Freedom newspaper in D’Olier Street to meet Seán Mac Diarmada, as one IRB initiate to another – Doyle clearly knew where the true power behind the revolution lay, or at least thought he did.

Seán Mac Diarmada

“He told me that MacNeill had consented to the Rising taking place on Easter Sunday,” in two days’ time. With this cleared up, “I travelled back to Enniscorthy that evening satisfied that everything was going well and sent this information around the other officers.”[9]

For his part, Galligan was told on the Sunday in Dublin by some acquaintances that the Rising was off for the foreseeable future. MacNeill’s countermanding order in the Irish Independent that same day confirmed it – or seemed to, as Galligan stayed in the area long enough to learn the next day that the big event was on after all.

Dublin was otherwise quiet and outwardly normal save for an overturned tramcar and a dead horse in O’Connell Street which Galligan passed on his way to the GPO. In the rebel base of operations, he reported to Pearse, along with Joe Plunkett and James Connolly. After some discussion amongst themselves, they assigned him back to his command in Enniscorthy. There, he and the rest of the Volunteers were:

…to hold the railway line to prevent [British] troops from coming through from Wexford as [Connolly] expected that they would be landed there. He said to reserve our ammunition and not to waste it on attacking barracks or such like. He instructed that I be supplied with a good bicycle.[10]

Peter Paul Galligan in a Volunteer uniform

Galligan cycled home on Easter Wednesday, the 26^th April, in time to give direction to an otherwise floundering battalion. The certainty of action that Doyle had brought back with him from his own trip evaporated with the publication of MacNeill’s countermanding order on the Sunday. Two contradictory messages from Pearse, the first cancelling the Rising, the next confirming it, only drove various Wexford officers to declare over the next three days their intent to do nothing. With Galligan’s return, however, came direct orders from Connolly and the rest of General Headquarters – and that finally settled the question.

“It was decided by all to start operations on Thursday morning,” Doyle recalled.[11]

Takeover

While reviewing the recent events, Mr Montague Shearman caught what looked like a discrepancy on the part of County Inspector Sharpe, one of the RIC officials testifying to the Royal Commission. The membership of the rebel movement in Wexford, Sharpe had stated, numbered at the time of the insurrection three hundred and twenty-five.

Shearman: You say there were about 325 in the county, and that 600 men turned out?

Sharpe: Yes, two hundred of them armed.

Shearman: That is about double the estimated number?

Sharpe: Oh, yes, but they terrorised the whole of the inhabitants into joining them.[12]

Numbers are notoriously hard for historical sources to agree upon, and personal intentions prone to contesting interpretations. Galligan put the strength of the Enniscorthy Battalion, when it was done mobilising on Thursday morning at 2 am, to about a hundred Volunteers, while Doyle had it at a hundred and fifty, at least in terms of who was armed and reliable. But both men, in their respective accounts, agreed that no one needed to be coerced; if anything, there was too much motivation and not too little.

“Large numbers were presenting themselves to join us and the feeding of these men was one of our biggest problems,” wrote Galligan, while Doyle remembered being “besieged by men wanting to join. They became a problem to feed and billet.”[13]

Irish Volunteers

Another point of contention in the sources is how the Volunteers solved the aforementioned problem. County Inspector Sharpe’s report for the month of April has it that the rebels, after entering Enniscorthy, “commandeered provisions, motor cars, arms, Ammunition, etc. indiscriminately paying for nothing.” Galligan did not deny the taking of supplies from the town shops but that, as a mitigating factor:

A receipt was given in all cases for articles commandeered. It was admitted in all cases afterwards that there was no undue commandeering and no one was victimised on account of his political leaning.[14]

Another rebel officer, James Cullen, wrote in his own reminiscences of how “during the Rising the houses of nearly all the loyalists were visited by parties of Volunteers,” so the ‘no victimisation’ might not be entirely accurate. It should also be noted that Carton the blacksmith who was allegedly – according to a contemporary Irish Times report – cruelly evicted from his house near the bridge, along with his family, is not mentioned in either Volunteer or police accounts, casting the validity of that less-than-edifying episode into question.[15]

The only other ripple in the water was the small RIC force in Enniscorthy, centred in the police barracks, and consisting of six constables, a sergeant and a District Inspector. Grossly outnumbered, the policemen chose discretion as the better part of valour and withdrew to the safety of their barracks.[16]

RIC barracks on Abbey Street, Enniscorthy – building on the left (Source: https://wexfordcivilwararchaeology.com/2021/04/10/wexfords-civil-war-a-gazetteer-of-the-damaged-r-i-c-barracks-and-civic-buildings/)

Showing Fight

For one of them, however, the experience of Easter Thursday must have been harrowing enough, as described by a Volunteer:

At seven o’clock, Constable Grace was seen in Court St. Volunteer Mick Cahill was on duty at Mitchell’s corner, saw him crossing the road and fired at him, and only Grace took shelter in Pat Begley’s door in the corner, he would have got him. Constable Grace then made a run for the barracks…He was fired on again from the top of Castle Hill. There were a couple of Volunteers in the Convent of Msrcy [sic] field and, when he was just going into the barracks, one of them shot him in the leg. He was later brought to the hospital.[17]

A different version was provided by Father Patrick Murphy, a priest sympathetic to the uprising, in which Grace was hit and wounded while in bed, lying close to a window, rather than outside and actively participating. Another Volunteer, Thomas Sinnott, suggested that such violence was incidental rather than intentional; his commanding officer having previously told his charges “the police were not to be shot or fired at unless they themselves showed fight. He said it was against the British, we were,” and that Constable Grace had only been shot after opening fire first.

RIC policemen (Source: https://irishconstabulary.com/ric-equipment-carried-in-the-early-1900s-t3043.html)

After holing up in their barracks, the remaining RIC garrison continued to be a thorn in the side of the rebels, who had to risk coming under fire when crossing the town bridge. Otherwise, the fighting in Enniscorthy was negligible, as Sinnott later explained in his interview before the Military Pensions Board:

Q: Was Thursday the only day in which there was any firing in this Period?

A: I think that would be right. There would be an occasional shot.

Q: There was no fighting or an attempt to fight?

A: No. The general opinion was, if it lasted, that the RIC would have to surrender. They were without food, tobacco, etc. – we left them the water supply though we could have cut it off.

Q: Your orders were not to attack but to defend? You were really making every effort to confine attack to the military, and regard the police as a police force, but if they attempted to use force –?

A: We would also use force.[18]

Force proved unnecessary since the RIC stayed in their stronghold until the end. No effort was made by the Volunteers to storm the building and perhaps they did not need to; for practical purposes, the Crown police force had ceased to be relevant in Enniscorthy – and, so it seemed, British governance in general.

The Republic of Enniscorthy

After the months of planning, almost undone by the agonising uncertainty in the eleventh hour, the takeover of Enniscorthy had proved startlingly straightforward: the Volunteers simply marched into the town and made it their own. “The Tricolour was hoisted on Headquarters with due ceremony, a Guard of Honour under Paul Galligan,” Doyle recalled. He, meanwhile, “issued a proclamation, proclaimed the Republic, and calling on the people to support it and defend” – whether he was consciously following the model set by Pearse outside the GPO on the Monday is unstated.

The Athenæum on Castle Street, Enniscorthy, headquarters of the Irish Volunteers during the Rising (Source: https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/building-of-the-month/the-athenaeum-castle-street-enniscorthy-td-enniscorthy-county-wexford/)

Using the Athenaeum clubhouse as their aforementioned headquarters, the officers present delegated duties, although who was doing precisely what depends on who one asks. In Doyle’s telling:

Bob Brennan took over the command. He was the senior Brigade officer. I was appointed Adjutant. Paul Galligan was appointed operations officer. Bob Brennan also acted as quartermaster. Pat Kegan looked after the armaments and Michael de Lacey looked after supplies. Phil Murphy tool charge of recruits and R.F. King was in charge of scouting operations.[19]

Galligan has Doyle as the overall O/C instead of Brennan, though he did describe the latter as “one of the driving forces during the period” [as in, the War of Independence afterwards]. Seán Etchingham was in charge of recruits, not Phil Murphy, and Michael de Lacey’s use lay in his typewriter, typing up the various orders that were to be issued. “All of our officers and most of the men were in uniform,” Galligan added. County Inspector Sharpe would later pooh-pooh the rebels as “all ne’er no wells” who had joined only having “failed in everything else” but it is clear the Enniscorthy Volunteers took their role as soldiers of the newly-found Republic very seriously; accordingly, law and order was upheld in the town by the placing of guards on the banks, along with the confiscation of keys to all pubs.[20]

“During the four days of Republican rule not a single person was under the influence of drink,” Father Murphy noted approvingly.[21]

Enniscorthy market square (today)

Which was all very well, but there was still the rest of the county, and the country, to consider. Efforts were made to rouse the Volunteer units elsewhere in Co. Wexford, resulting in a mixed bag, as Galligan outlined:

A mobilisation order to mobilise his company was sent to Sean Kennedy at New Ross. He failed to do this and a second order was sent to him. Kennedy’s father met the man who carried the orders and told him that if he did not leave the town he would shoot him. New Ross never officially mobilised, but as far as I can remember a number of men reported to Enniscorthy. Ferns mobilised and sent in a full quota of men, small, of course. Wexford [town] also sent in some men.[22]

Regarding Wexford town, however, Thomas Doyle (no relation to Seamus, it seems) had nothing but scorn. Two men had been sent there on bicycles earlier in the week, on Easter Wednesday. The RIC were ready and waiting to arrest the pair as soon as they arrived. Worse almost followed. “All the loyalists turned out, which was nearly everyone in Wexford, to lynch them. Only for the police, they would have stormed the barracks,” he wrote. “We really only got one man from the Wexford Battalion. That was Wexford town for you in Easter Week!”[23]

Still, the Volunteers had enough men out in arms to attempt the primary strategy assigned to them by GHQ: the sabotage and harassment of enemy reinforcements. ‘Attempt’ proved the operative word: a mission to blow up a bridge on the railway line below Wexford town was foiled when the Volunteers so assigned were surprised by the RIC, with the loss of two taken prisoner. Another failure was the search for a trainload of ammunition from Waterford that the Volunteers heard – through friendly railway workers – was due for Arklow; despite looking through all stations between Wexford and Arklow, nothing of the sort was found. The Volunteers found smaller tasks more manageable, such as felling trees to block certain roads, and removing the railway line at various points through their control of Enniscorthy station.[24]

British soldiers guarding a train in Ireland, 1920 (Source: https://www.rte.ie/history/munitions-strike/2020/0415/1130693-the-1920-munitions-strike-an-unusual-kind-of-strike/

The Rebels of Today

The Rising was to last in Co. Wexford for four days altogether, from the belated start on Easter Thursday to its end on Monday, the 1^st May 1916. A contemporary report attributed its ceasing and deceasing to a 15-pounder gun, dubbed ‘Enniscorthy Emily’, that the British military were apparently able to transport, via an armoured train, close enough to Enniscorthy to be in range of Vinegar Hill, site of the famed 1798 battle. There, the Volunteers had gathered “with the intention probably of emulating the deeds of their ancestors, but the rebels of to-day are of different stuff,” wrote the Irish Times:

A hurried council of war was held, but the deliberations were brought to an abrupt conclusion when a well planted shell which the gunner of ‘Enniscorthy Emily’ discharged at the hill. The shell, which, it is stated, was a blank one, landed plump amongst the rebels, and exploded with a prodigious and terrifying noise. When the rebels recovered somewhat from the terror-inspiring sound, they hoisted white flags all over the hill, as many as forty flags being counted, and about 200 of the ‘brave’ insurgents bolted for the hills. The others laid down their arms unconditionally, and the military have ever since been busily engaged in rounding up the stragglers.

Robert Brennan in later years

“So began and ended the ‘war’ in the Enniscorthy district,” the newspaper concluded with a sniff and a sneer.[25]

Needless to say, at least one croppy was not going to lie down and take this. When it was time to pen his own version of events, Robert Brennan made a point of singling out “the fantastic account of this affair published at the time in the Irish Times and, later, repeated in every book I have seen on the Enniscorthy Rising,” determined as he was to set the record straight:

It is stated that the British advanced from Wexford under cover of an armoured train which had been christened “Enniscorthy Emily”, that the rebels, outfought in the town, retreated to Vinegar Hill where they finally surrendered. The fact was that the British did not enter the town until twelve hours subsequent to our decision to give up and that we never even heard of “Enniscorthy Emily”[26]

The truth was more prosaic: the Volunteers disbanded after it had been made clear to them that their insurrection was already over, without a single shot needed by either side. Peace moves had been tried before by Father McHenry, the administrator of the Enniscorthy Catholic parish – first, to the besieged policemen in their barracks on the 28^th April (Day Two), and then a second try the day after, this time to Seamus Doyle. On both occasions, the would-be peacemaker failed: the RIC garrison refused Father McHenry’s call to surrender, and his argument that the rebel cause was a hopeless one “made no impression on me” as Doyle described.[27]

Vinegar Hill, Co. Wexford (Source: https://www.tuatha.ie/vinegar-hill/

Well Satisfied?

What did make an impression was the news on Saturday morning of British forces moving towards them from Arklow. Galligan took personal charge of an advance guard of Volunteers posted in Ferns, the strategy being to delay the enemy there long enough for the rest to be ready in Enniscorthy. The RIC had vacated their barracks in Fens, allowing the rebels to occupy it, and to barricade the roads leading in and out of the town unmolested.[28]

Seán Etchingham

What came next was not the British attack but something quite unexpected: two RIC officials, a District Inspector and a sergeant, who had come under a flag of truce, bringing with them from Dublin a copy of Pearse’s order to surrender. Doyle had heard about this before, from a delegation of businessmen who had, like Father McHenry, been trying to broker a truce. The Enniscorthy O/C had not believed it then and did not believe it now, at least, not entirely. After consulting with the British commander in Wexford, Colonel French, it was agreed for Doyle and another officer, Seán Etchingham, to travel to Dublin under safe pass.

Once in the capital, the pair were escorted to Arbour Hill Prison, where Pearse was in his cell, lying on a mattress with his greatcoat as a blanket. “He rose quickly when the door was opened and came forward to meet us and shook hands with us,” Doyle wrote of their encounter. “He appeared to be physically exhausted but spiritually exultant.” Nonetheless, Pearse confirmed the surrender order, writing it out in a piece of paper upon Doyle’s request. He did not even know Wexford had been ‘out’, such was the speed of events and the Volunteers’ own tardiness, but he did not seem too dispirited, giving Doyle “the impression he was well satisfied with what had happened.”

The Wexford officers brought the written order back with them to Enniscorthy, allowing the rest, when called together, to see it for themselves. “The order was received with mixed opinions but finally it was decided to obey the order,” Doyle remembered. “We called in all our outposts and sentries and I read the order to the garrison. This was about midnight [on Sunday].” By 4 pm on Monday, the 1^st May, Colonel French entered Enniscorthy with his soldiers and accepted the surrender. If Wexford had entered the Rising late, it at least could claim the distinction of being the last to leave.[29]

The leaders of the Wexford Rising (Front row: Séamus Rafter, Robert Brennan, Séamus Doyle, Seán Etchingham. Back row: Una Brennan, Michael de Lacy, Eileen Hegarty)

A month later, County Inspector Sharpe was pleased to report to his superiors that “the County is at present peaceable except Enn. [Enniscorthy] District and a small portion of the Gorey District which adjoins Enn.” Seditious sentiments seemed limited to “the relatives and associates of the rebels”; in the other areas, Sharpe estimated that three-quarters of the people were hostile to the recent upheaval. “There are rumours of another rising at Whitsuntide but there is no indications [sic] in the County that it will take place.”[30]

Máire Comerford

Even those committed to carrying on the struggle against British rule could not have disagreed with this self-confident appraisal. When Máire Comerford tried rousing a crowd in Main Street, Gorey, with what she had heard about North King Street in Dublin (where fifteen men had been shot or bayoneted to death by Crown forces) at least one listener was outraged – at Comerford for criticising British troops rather than at the massacre. The rest of her audience rapidly dispersed, the shock of such disloyal talk evidently too much for them. Come the same time the following year, in 1917, and Wexford did not even bother with a commemoration for the Rising. Comerford only learnt about the one in Dublin from reading about it in the newspapers – when the ceremony was already over.[31]

Still, it was too soon for the British state to be relaxing its guard quite yet. “Hide the arms,” Pearse had whispered to Doyle and Etchingham in his prison cell when the wardens were out of earshot. “They will be wanted later.” Some Wexford Volunteers chose to do just that, like Thomas Sinnott and the two rifles he buried before his arrest for his part in the Rising. “They were afterwards resurrected,” as he put it.[32]

See also:

Dysfunction Junction: The Rising That Wasn’t in Co. Kerry, April 1916

Still Waters Running Deep: The Tragedy at Ballykissane Pier, April 1916

Defeat From The Jaws of Victory: The Easter Rising in Co. Louth, 1916 (Part I)

Victory From The Jaws of Defeat: The Easter Rising in Co. Louth, 1916 (Part II)

References

[1] Gannon, Darragh. Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916 and the National Collection (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), p. 265 ; Doyle, Eamon, ‘Wexford 1916’, History Ireland, published in Issue 6 (November/December 2015) Letters, Volume 23

[2] Irish Times, 29/04/1916

[3] Ibid, 29/05/1916

[4] Brennan-Whitmore, W.J. Dublin Burning: The Easter Rising from Behind the Barricades (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2013), pp. 22-4

[5] Galligan, Peter Paul (BMH / WS 170), pp. 7-8

[6] Doyle, Seamus (BMH / WS 315), pp. 7-8

[7] Galligan, pp. 7-8

[8] Doyle, Seamus, pp. 8-9

[9] Ibid, pp. 9-10

[10] Galligan, p. 8

[11] Doyle, Seamus, pp. 10-2

[12] Irish Times, 29/05/1916

[13] Galligan, pp., 9-10 ; Doyle, Seamus, p. 12

[14] Police reports from Dublin Castle records (National Library of Ireland – NLI), POS 8540 ; Galligan, p. 10

[15] Cullen, James (BMH / WS 1343), p. 6 ; Irish Times, 29/04/1916 (Carton’s eviction)

[16] Irish Times, 29/05/1916 (makeup of police force)

[17] Doyle, Thomas (BMH / WS 1041), p. 22

[18] Murphy, Patrick (BMH / WS 1216), p. 4 ; Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘Sinnott, Thomas D.’ (WMSP34REF24701), pp. 24-5

[19] Doyle, Seamus, pp. 12-13

[20] Galligan, pp. 10, 12 ; Irish Times, 29/05/1916

[21] Murphy, p. 4

[22] Galligan, p. 11

[23] Doyle, Thomas, p. 20

[24] Galligan, pp. 10-1

[25] Irish Times, 29/04/1916

[26] Brennan, Robert (BMH / WS 779 – Part I), p. 147

[27] Irish Times, 29/05/1916 ; Doyle, Seamus, p. 13

[28] Galligan, p. 12

[29] Doyle, pp. 14-6

[30] NLI, POS 8541

[31] Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021), pp. 60, 64-5

[32] Doyle, p. 15 ; Sinnott, p. 26

Bibliography

Newspaper

Irish Times

Books

Brennan-Whitmore, W.J. Dublin Burning: The Easter Rising from Behind the Barricades (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2013)

Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021)

Gannon, Darragh. Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916 and the National Collection (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Brennan, Robert, WS 779

Cullen, James, WS 1343

Doyle, Seamus, WS 315

Doyle, Thomas, WS 1041

Galligan, Peter Paul, WS 170

Murphy, Patrick, WS 1216

Military Service Pensions Collection

Sinnott, Thomas D., WMSP34REF24701

Magazine

Doyle, Eamon, ‘Wexford 1916’, History Ireland, published in Issue 6 (November/December 2015) Letters, Volume 23

National Library of Ireland Collection

Police Report from Dublin Castle Records

At the Mercy of Events: The Opening Moves of the Anti-Treaty Side in the Irish Civil War, July – August 1922

‘Our National Policy’

The strategy of the anti-Treaty, or Republican, side at the start of the Civil War was defined largely by the absence of any. No less a senior figure than Ernie O’Malley, Acting Assistant Chief of Staff to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), had to write to his Chief of Staff, on the 21^st July 1922, to ask him to “give an outline of your Military and National Policy as we are in the dark here in regard to both?” When Liam Lynch replied, four days later, it was in a noticeably tart tone: “You ask for an outline of GHQ National policy. Is it necessary to state that our National policy is to maintain the established Republic?”

O’Malley could be forgiven for wondering how this was to be achieved. The day before, on the 20^th July, IRA forces had pulled out of Limerick, forfeiting the city to the forces of the Free State, or the National Army as the pro-Treaty IRA was now to be called. With the fall of the Four Courts and other Republican bases in Dublin at the start of the month, that made Limerick the second major centre lost to the enemy, with only Cork remaining in anti-Treaty hands. In O’Malley’s eyes, things were not looking good; for Lynch, in contrast, the war had only just begun.

“We are finished with compromise or negotiations unless based on recognition of [the] Republic,” as he told O’Malley.[1]

Liam Lynch

From the start of the Treaty controversy, the two men could not have been more different, with O’Malley’s choleric aggression pitted against Lynch’s phlegmatic moderation. O’Malley had urged resistance at once without even waiting for the Dáil to finish making its decision – Lynch insisted on a ‘wait and see’ approach. O’Malley had helped bring Limerick to the point of open conflict as soon as he could – Lynch diffused the crisis with a personal intervention to the city. O’Malley had wanted to reinforce their position in the Four Courts in case of attack; by then, relations between the two factions were looking hopeful and Lynch was content to trust in the better angels of the Free State.[2]

Their respective approaches to the war before them, when it finally broke out, were similarly at odds. “Our Military Policy must be Guerrilla tactics as in late war with common enemy [Britain],” he instructed O’Malley, “but owing to increased arms and efficiency of Officers and men, it can be waged more intensely.” Business as before, in other words: what had been good against Perfidious Albion would be good enough for the Free State.[3]

O’Malley, in contrast, was quite clearly chomping at the bit as he wrote back from Dublin a week later, on the 28^th July. Despite the loss of the Four Courts and other positions, the city’s IRA brigades had survived more or less intact but for how much longer, O’Malley could not say:

Enemy very active and in some cases whole coys [companies] have been picked up. This cannot be prevented, as the men must go to their daily work and there are not sufficient funds on hand to even maintain a strong column.

Ernie O’Malley

“We will carry on here as best we can,” O’Malley assured him, “but I am afraid we cannot bring the war home to them very effectively in Dublin.” Which is not to say a big gesture was impossible; in fact, O’Malley had a couple in mind even as he typed. “I was thinking of holding a block again for a day or two and then melting away,” he wrote. “I think the chances of melting away would be very few now but it would be better perhaps than having men and stuff picked up. Would you advise this action?”

Another bold initiative would be “to make a sweep and capture” of some of the leading figures in the Free State. Since holding them in Dublin would be difficult, given the constant enemy raids and patrols, O’Malley reached out to his Chief of Staff for help: “Could you arrange to look after them if we do not take them?”[4]

Old Tactics or New?

O’Malley had asked for advice. Five days later, on the 2^nd August, writing from his current headquarters in Fermoy, Co. Cork, Lynch gave it.  He hastened to throw cold water on the other man’s ambitions, stressing to his Acting Assistant Chief of Staff that the former’s main priority should be caution:

In view of the great activity of the enemy, you and other prominent officers here should take the greatest precautions. I would like to be able to rely on your safety to direct command. Keep people from seeing you – send deputies to interview those who must be seen, and direct things by dispatch.

As for O’Malley’s suggestion to temporarily seize a building block for a brief hold-out, “I would not favour this course, as it would only lead to the loss of more men, and material which we cannot afford to lose.” Similarly, while Lynch did not quite discourage the capture of high-ranking prisoners, he made it plain that O’Malley would be on his own for that one: any such POWs would have to be kept in Dublin as the situation elsewhere in the country, even in the South where the IRA’s strength was greatest, was too unsettled to be considered secure.

Instead, O’Malley was to focus his efforts on more low-key targets: sabotaging wires and telegraph poles in order to better isolate enemy posts from each other. As Lynch repeated: “I believe more effectual activities can be carried out on the lines of the old guerrilla tactics.”[5]

Train derailed in Co. Kilkenny during the Civil War (Source: https://kilkennylibrary.ie/eng/our_services/decade-of-centenaries-resources/civil-war-on-trains/

These prudent instincts seemed to receive a vindication only three days later in the crushing failure of the Dublin IRA to execute just the sort of daring stroke O’Malley had been hankering after. The ‘Bridges Job’ was intended to do nothing less than cut the Free State off at its knees by blowing up all canal and railway bridges around Dublin, effectively isolating the capital from the rest of Ireland, or at least severely impeding the ability of the enemy to reinforce or communicate with its army. Considering the number of operations the National Army was engaged in, not least its planned offensive in Munster, this wrench in its gears would have been crippling, possibly fatal.

The date of the ‘Bridges Job’ was set for the night of the 5^th-6^th August. Several hundred Dublin IRA men were mobilised accordingly throughout the city, some armed with handguns and grenades, others carrying the explosives and picks intended for use on their targets. Loose lips and intelligence leaks had meant that the Pro-Treatyites were forewarned, however; as the parties set forth on their mission, Free State soldiers pounced.

At Cabra Bridge, for example, an armoured car opened fire at point blank range, pinning down some of the IRA men in the field they had been moving through and scattering the rest. It was the same story elsewhere. “In nearly every case the Irregulars were found in the act of tearing up bridges. 104 were captured,” reported Charlie Dalton to his superiors in the National Army command. “Practically no damage was done in North County Dublin.” Likewise, in the south side, Free State troops drove out of the village of Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, surprising IRA bands along the way. “Some succeeded in escaping but they were nearly all captured,” remembered Laurence Nugent, one of those involved. “The Republican section of the 3^rd Battalion was almost wiped out.”

An armoured car of the Free State forces (Source: https://westcorkpeople.ie/culture/history/the-battle-of-the-armoured-cars/)

By this, Nugent meant captured. Other than a pair of wounded IRA fighters, bloodshed was minimum, as losing combatants in the Civil War generally preferred to surrender than battle it out to the death. But that did not lessen the scale of the disaster for the Dublin IRA, with the loss of men, some of whom were experienced officers, not to mention equipment, and never again would it take the sort of risks O’Malley wanted.[6]

Getting on with the War

Seán Moylan

The ‘Bridges Job’ was something of an anomaly since, from the start of the Civil War, the Anti-Treatyites had tended to withdraw to fight another day rather than chance an open confrontation. Which is not to say that this approach was unanimously accepted or without controversy. “There is no use in fooling with this question any longer,” Seán Moylan had told Liam Deasy impatiently on the 6^th July 1922, urging the Deputy Chief of Staff to dispatch reinforcements to Limerick, where IRA forces were squaring off against their pro-Treaty counterparts, under the joint command of Donnchadh O’Hannigan and Michael Brennan. “Send on the men and let us get on with the war.”[7]

Donnchadh O’Hannigan

As with O’Malley later, Moylan’s push for action would be overruled. In this case, the decision had been on whether to engage at all. “O’Hannigan and Brennan Divs. are adopting a neutral attitude,” Lynch announced to O’Malley on the 10^th July. “That is glorious, if they stand by their signatories.”[8]

After a series of talks in the city, both armies had agreed to a ‘live and let live’ attitude, each keeping to their respective positions and out of each other’s way. If the Union had won the American Civil War through its Anaconda Plan, using superior strength to gradually crush the Confederacy into submission, the IRA command counted on something similar to win the Irish one: isolating the scattered units of the enemy and neutralising those that could be coerced into passive ‘neutrality’ – before focusing on the holdouts. As most of the South and West were already in Republican hands, with Limerick looking to be rendered a non-threat, this appeared quite a credible stratagem. Con Moloney certainly believed so, as the IRA Adjutant General outlined to Oscar Traynor in a letter on the 9^th July.

“Generally speaking we are having the best of the matter, and things are settling down to real business,” Moloney wrote. “I expect we will control say from the Shannon to Carlow in a day or two.”

Thanks to the Limerick détente, the Anti-Treatyites now enjoyed:

…a very considerable military advantage as with a comparatively small number of troops held up at Limerick, we have been able to ensure that at least 3,000 of F.S. troops are also held up. Had we to fight in Limerick our forces that are in Limerick would not only be held there for at least 10 days, but we wouldn’t be in a position to re-enforce Wexford-New Ross area.

A similar approach was hoped for in the Midlands, held on behalf of the Free State by Seán Mac Eoin, the famed ‘Blacksmith of Ballinasloe’, with:

…about 10,000 men at Athlone. It is possible that we may be able to keep McKeown [alternative spelling] neutral. In any case he is now entirely on the defensive. We expect to capture a few small posts in his area within the next week. We will have to keep him busy in any event.

Holding the enemy in place, under their thumbs, was key. The two likeliest moves the Pro-Treatyites could try, as Moloney saw it, were:

1. Landing troops on the southern coast.
2. Advancing into the Third Southern Division’s area (encompassing Laois, Offaly and North Tipperary).

However, Moloney told Traynor, “I think if you can keep them busy in Dublin they won’t attempt any of these, certainly not the former,” and the lack of undamaged roads should deter efforts for the latter.[9]

IRA combatants take up position (Source: https://www.whytes.ie/art/1922-23-irish-civil-war-press-photographs-including-battle-scenes-and-bank-of-ireland-handover/135771/?SearchString=&LotNumSearch=&GuidePrice=&OrderBy=HL&ArtistID=&ArrangeBy=list&NumPerPage=30&offset=545)

‘Above the Dignity of a Skirmish’

There were reasonably solid grounds for taking the picture Moloney presented at face value. The Free State position in Limerick was a weak one as O’Hannigan was painfully aware. Most of his men were raw recruits, with no more than two hundred rifles between them. Had the Anti-Treatyites chosen to attack at the start rather than talk it out, the contest would have been a short one, O’Hannigan admitted, “because we couldn’t last.” And Athlone was not much better, seeming less like a secure fortress and more like a prison, its defenders hemmed in and helpless to protect the population beyond from IRA bands.[10]

Free State soldiers marching over the bridge at Athlone, March 1922 (Source: https://picryl.com/topics/athlone)

“People living in the outlying districts are in a state of terror only equalled by that experienced during the Black-and-Tan regime,” reported a local newspaper. One breakout effort apparently resulted only in failure. “Athlone attempted to march on one of our posts in 3^rd Southern area, but were forced to return again to base,” Moloney reported on the 13^th July. Little wonder then that “the Free State were [sic] very frightened of us” at the time, remembered Michael Kilroy, the commander of the Mayo IRA. Once Mayo was secured for the Republicans, Kilroy planned to march his troops next to Athlone and burn out the garrison from its barracks with fire-bombs made from petrol-cans. Mac Eoin, in contrast, could only fret over the poor performance of his men and wonder if it was down to their incompetence or something more insidious.[11]

“At this stage, some of our forces and some of our staff were not loyal,” he ruefully told historian Calton Younger, years later.[12]

Seán Mac Eoin

If the war was hanging in the balance, then it tilted dramatically – but not, it must be said, decisively – in favour of the Pro-Treatyites. The truce in Limerick broke down on the 11^th July and by the 20^th, a little over a week later, the IRA was pulling out of the city. And Mac Eoin proved neither neutral nor defensive when he finally scored a win at Collooney, Co. Sligo, capturing the town on the 15^th July after four hours of fighting. At this point, however, a Free State victory was still not inevitable, nor were the Anti-Treatyites out of the game. Collooney was something of an exception at that point, with the pace of the war being otherwise “stagnant” as the Irish Times complained: “Except in the West, where General McKeon has won a distinct and important victory at Collooney, there has been no engagement which ranks above the dignity of a skirmish.”

It should be noted that there was nothing inherently superior about the training or skill of the National Army. The Irish Times might have written enthusiastically about its new training regime on display at the Curragh and how “expert instructors in military engineering, military hygiene and medical services, tactics, training and musketry, ordnance supplies and general economic organisation, have been employed to lecture and advise the present officers and men.” But Limerick and Collooney had been won primarily, it seems, by artillery above all else. In Limerick, the Anti-Treatyites had been holding their own; some even sounded contemptuous when discussing their opponents.

Sandbag defences in Patrick Street, Limerick, during the fighting in July 1922

“We had plenty of good fighters. The Staters were not numerous,” Tom Kelleher said, while Moloney believed that, up to the eleventh hour, “the enemy moral was very low; things were going our own way.”

Others were not so sure. “The Staters there were far better organised and in greater numbers,” said Connie Neenan. But it was surely not a coincidence that the IRA did not abandon Limerick until a heavy gun blew in the front wall of one of its barracks in the contested city. The Anti-Treatyites evacuated that night. Similarly, Collooney might well have withstood, its Republican defenders putting up “a strong resistance,” aided by four snipers in a church-tower who “kept up the firing until the shells from an 18-pounder made the position untenable,” reported the Irish Times.[13]

‘A Serious Menace to the State’

On such occasions, the Anti-Treatyites had no answer. But if ‘wonder weapons’ alone could have won the Civil War, then it would not have lasted as long as it did. Even with Limerick lost and Mac Eoin on the offensive, the situation did not look hopeless to Lynch. As for his subordinates, none of them were then advocating anything short of complete commitment to the fight. Ireland, from East Limerick to Waterford, the so-called ‘Munster Republic’, was still in in their hands, making it yet possible to formulate a plan in the face of the inevitable enemy attacks, as described by historian John Borgonovo:

Lynch intended to absorb these blows, and suck more National Army troops into Munster. Operating behind the Free State forces, IRA flying columns (well supplied with automatic weapons and mines) could then sever the government supply lines. If the Republicans failed to hold their Munster line, they would simply resume guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare was what they did best, and Lynch believed the IRA would beat the Free State in a war of attrition, just as it had (in his mind) defeated the British army.[14]

This may have been a rather passive plan on Lynch’s part – true to form – but that did not make it a bad one in itself. Defending, after all, is famously easier than attacking. Lynch was counting on that military maxim to bleed the Pro-Treatyites white every step of the way out of Limerick.

“The enemy here will fail hopelessly in open country unless he advances in massed formation and that would be too costly,” he told O’Malley on the 25^th July. The recent costly push by the National Army into East Limerick seemed to bear this prediction out. “We captured 76 armed prisoners and where enemy show no fight we are convinced of our future success in open country.” Little had happened by the time of another letter of his, on the 7^th August, to dent his confidence: “Feel confident of victory. When will the enemy see the madness of their actions?”[15]

Free State soldiers at the ready (Source: https://oldphotosofcork.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/cork-in-the-civil-war/

Only two days later, on the 9^th August, it was a slightly more subdued Lynch who outlined to O’Malley the recent, most unwelcome turn of events. Someone in the National Army had evidently reached the same conclusion as Lynch in that pressing on into open country would risk too high a butcher’s bill, instead opting for an alternative route:

On the night of the 7^th [August] the enemy landed at Passage (about 8 miles from Cork City), but are still pinned there and have made scarcely any progress towards Cork City. On the same night they also landed in Youghal, Union Hall and Glandore, but they do not appear to have made any attempt to advance from these points so far. Bodies of our troops have been rushed to these places to delay and contest their advances.[16]

The IRA outpost at Passage had issued some warning shots at the Arvonia as the steamer cruised towards them in the dark early hours of the 8^th. When no one returned fire, the outpost men assumed it was in fact a friendly vessel. They were about to apologise at the gangway, as the Arvonia prepared for disembarkation, only to be overwhelmed by the National Army soldiers who had been biding their time on board. With their maritime entry point secure, and buoyed by their success, the Free Staters struck out that same day towards Cork City, reaching as far as Rochestown without meeting resistance.

That changed later in the evening as the men came under heavy fire, with eight of them killed. Undeterred, they pushed on and managed to reach the village of Douglas two days later. At this point, the Anti-Treatyites had largely withdrawn to nearby Cork City, where “from the display of force and the preparations made by the irregulars, it was believed that a determined effort would be made to hold the city,” according to the Irish Times.[17]

Every Man for Himself

The Anti-Treatyites, as it turned out, had a very different idea in mind. After all the drama and tension and build-up, the battle for Cork was to last no more than forty minutes, and even calling it as such would be a stretch.

Burnt-out remains of a building at Victoria (later Collins) Barracks, Cork, razed during the Anti-Treatyite retreat (Source: https://oldphotosofcork.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/cork-in-the-civil-war/)

Commandant-General Tom Ennis entered the city in his armoured car on the 10^th August, having first lobbed a couple of shrapnel shells to disperse some lingering Anti-Treatyites at the Douglas suburb. Shots were exchanged in some of the main streets in Cork but most of the violence was directed against certain buildings as the IRA hastened to leave as little of value behind. An attempt was made to blow up Parnell Bridge, with the explosion being heard for miles around, but the structure survived, allowing Ennis and his detachment, in what the Irish Times compared to a Roman triumph, an unimpeded passage through Cork – unimpeded that is, save for the enthusiastic greetings they received en route:

Every window had its occupant waving a cordial welcome. Men cheered loudly in the streets, and when crossing Parnell Bridge the troops had to march in single file before taking up temporary headquarters at the Corn market…During their progress through the city, the troops received many a hearty hand-shake, and women embraced some of them in their joy.

The Cornmarket would have to suffice, for the military barracks in the city had been left a smouldering ruin, the fires having been started on the 8^th August, almost as soon as news had come of the Passage landings, suggesting that evacuation had always been part of the Anti-Treatyites’ plan. Other barracks about the city had also been put to the torch, the hoses of the fire brigade having been spitefully sabotaged beforehand to prevent their rescue:

Dense clouds of smoke rose skywards as these buildings were being consumed, and the noise of frequent explosions gave the impression that there was heavy fighting, and it caused alarm.[18]

However frightening these sounds, there was little bite behind the bark, the men and youths who made up the IRA in Cork being more concerned with fleeing the city than fighting for it. One 18-year-old, the future writer Frank O’Connor, knew it was a lost cause when he saw a senior officer standing in the middle of a road amidst a crowd of other bewildered men, waving his arms and shouting: ‘Every man for himself!’[19]

Bedraggled soldiers during the Civil War

‘An Immense Effect’

It was Limerick all over again, except the Anti-Treatyites had barely bothered with even a token resistance. Retreat at least minimalised casualties and preserved the bulk of the IRA, which was now to abandon altogether its previous attempts at holding strongpoints and territory in favour of guerrilla tactics – which was what Lynch had wanted anyway. When, on the 18^th August, he announced himself to be “thoroughly satisfied with the situation now,” he was almost certainly sincere. Risking open confrontation had never sat well with the IRA Chief of Staff. “In Cork and elsewhere the organisation of Columns everywhere is complete,” he promised O’Malley, “and extensive operations will begin immediately.”[20]

Liam Deasy

The Assistant Chief of Staff was not so satisfied. As before, O’Malley was chaffing at the bit, frustrated by the enforced passivity. “We are not going to win this war on purely guerrilla tactics as we did on the last war,” he complained to Liam Deasy, O/C of the First Southern Division, on the 9^th September. Instead, “we must concentrate on taking posts, as the capturing of a post, no matter how small, has a far bigger effect on townspeople and on the enemy than minor ambushing tactics.” Even better would be if this could be done in Dublin; after all, there was not much point making the country ungovernable if the Pro-Treatyites continued to hold the capital.

“If we could by means of better armament bring the war home to the Staters in the Capital,” O’Malley ruminated to Deasy, “it would have an immense effect on the people here and on the people in surrounding Counties.”[21]

Maybe. But it was far too late for that. The Anti-Treatyites had had their chance and either lost them like in Limerick, squandered them as with Cork or blew them such as the ‘Bridges Job’. From now on, the Republican cause would live or die on the guerrilla tactics Lynch put so much faith in. Had the ‘Bridges Job’ succeeded, it may very well have aborted the National Army landings in Co. Cork and elsewhere on the south coast, especially considering how the Free State grand offensive was only a few days later. Moloney had already guessed the Pro-Treatyites would attempt such a maritime assault – he had also told Traynor to keep the pressure on in Dublin to prevent just that. Munster would have remained in anti-Treaty hands and the Civil War possibly taken a different turn.

Except it didn’t, Lynch might have retorted. Speculation at that point was useless. The Anti-Treatyites had left themselves at the mercy of events, and the only thing left to do was wait and see if whatever came next would be kind.

References

[1] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), pp. 62, 68

[2] O’Malley, Ernie. The Singing Flame (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012), pp. 62, 71, 81, 101

[3] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 68

[4] Ibid, p.75

[5] Ibid, p. 82

[6] Dorney, John. The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922-1924 (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Square, 2017), p. 114-9

[7] Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: A History of the Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), p. 149

[8] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 45

[9] Ibid, pp. 43-4

[10] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970), p. 372

[11] Westmeath Independent, 08/07/1922 ; O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 52 ; O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014), p. 66

[12] Younger, p. 363

[13] Irish Times, 17/07/1922 ; MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), pp. 230, 245 ; O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 70

[14] Borgonovo, John. The Battle for Cork: July-August 1922 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2011), p. 64

[15] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, pp. 68, 88

[16] Ibid, p. 91

[17] Irish Times, 15/08/1922

[18] Ibid

[19] O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 227

[20] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 105

[21] Ibid, p. 165

Bibliography

Books

Borgonovo, John. The Battle for Cork: July-August 1922 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2011)

Dorney, John. The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922-1924 (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Square, 2017)

Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004)

MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014)

O’Malley, Ernie. The Singing Flame (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970)

Newspapers

Irish Times

Westmeath Independent

‘Of a Grave and Serious Character’: James O’Neill as Commandant of the Irish Citizen Army and His Fall, 1921

Power Games

James O’Neill (Source: http://eastwallforall.ie/?p=3624)

James O’Neill and money mixed perhaps a little too well together; at least, that was the verdict of Frank Robbins. Despite a shared membership in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), which had seen both men ‘out’ during the Easter Week of 1916, Robbins did not spare his former colleague his pen when it came to writing his memoirs, years later. Replacing James Connolly as Commandant of the ICA was going to be a tough sell for anyone but, in Robbins’ view, O’Neill bore particular responsibility for the post-Rising lethargy that afflicted the once-proud organisation:

His failure was entirely due to his lack of desire or ability to pursue the Connolly philosophy. When questions of policy arose O’Neill’s attitude was to procrastinate rather than take the line which would have been laid down by Connolly or [Michael] Mallin, were either there to lead.

Frank Robbins

Robbins did his best to push the ‘Connolly philosophy’ during his time on the ICA Army Council in 1918, which for him meant closer contact with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the latter’s insurgency against British rule in Ireland. This prospect alarmed other members of the Army Council, who feared cooperation would result in the assimilation and subordination of the ICA to the larger body. Though Robbins privately conceded there were some reasonable grounds for this concern, he pushed on regardless and managed to obtain the official sanction of the Army Council.

Robbins accordingly arranged a get-together in Liberty Hall, Dublin, between Séumas Robinson, Archie Heron and Frank McCabe, representing the IRA, and the ICA in the form of himself, Michael Donnelly (the then Secretary to the Army Council) and Michael Kelly. This meeting of minds went well enough, in Robbins’ view, as did subsequent others, but, before a deal could be reached, another election was held for the Army Council, in which Robbins lost his seat. That effectively cut the outreach effort off at the knees.

Irish Citizen Army members, standing to attention

Too late did Robbins realise he had been undermined the whole time: “It was subtly suggested that…Michael Donnelly and a few others, including myself, were ‘sore-heads’” or troublesome malcontents.

A Cold Dish

As for the Iago behind these smears, Robbins knew who to blame, for they bore the hallmarks of his own Commandant. O’Neill’s “methods of controlling power were remarkably subtle,” aided by a smooth and persuasive manner:

He had an answer for every question raised and was a most convincing talker. A whispering campaign was a favourite device – you were a “very decent fellow” but “off balance in thought” – and so with a glib tongue he always went his way. When challenged at the many meetings held from time to time on matters affecting his authority he would deny that the allegations were correct and his denial would be buttressed by evidence purporting to come from “a high officer in the Volunteers [IRA] to whom he had spoken only a day or two before.[1]

Seán Russell

When it was O’Neill’s turn to fall from grace, Robbins made sure to record it in merciless detail. He had been speaking with Seán Russell, an old acquaintance from their shared days in prison and now a member of the IRA GHQ. Russell was thus in a position to correct Robbins on a couple of misconceptions: that (1) O’Neill was also on the IRA Headquarters Staff when, in fact, he was not, and (2) twelve rifles supposedly gifted to the South Tipperary IRA Brigade on behalf of the ICA had really been bought from O’Neill.

Taken aback by these discoveries – and, one suspects, sensing an opportunity for some payback – Robbins had Russell obtain for him a written statement from the IRA Quartermaster-General, Seán McMahon, confirming the sale of the twelve rifles. Armed with this proof of financial impropriety, Robbins arranged for a special session of the ICA Army Council, where O’Neill, his way of words evidently failing him, was stripped of his rank as Commandant.

“So my labour on this very distasteful subject ended,” Robbins wrote.

Michael Collins

But he could not resist a final kick at O’Neill’s prone reputation. A court-martial was set up to try O’Neill – demotion not being enough – during which he was also hit with charges of a criminal nature by the Dublin civil authorities and imprisoned, sometime after the Truce in July 1921. Plans from within the ICA to free their former Commandant were thwarted by Robbins, with the help of Michael Collins. When Collins wanted to go further and arrest everyone involved in the stymied rescue effort, Robbins intervened on their behalf, arguing that they had simply been acting out of misplaced loyalty to O’Neill. Collins acquiesced and Robbins left satisfied, having had his way on both accounts.

“Need I say that O’Neill was not rescued the next day,” he wrote – revenge truly is a dish best served cold.[2]

An Act with a Political Purpose?

Which is not to say that everything Robbins told should be taken at face value; his, after all, is just one voice among many from the era. Furthermore, he was “a controversial figure within the [Labour] movement,” according to his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, who “wrote many provocative articles for the press and was known for his obstinacy at meetings” – a man, it seems, who could nurse a grudge.[3]

Fortunately, then, we are not dependent on his word for the abrupt end of O’Neill’s time as ICA Commandant. Robbins was unspecific about the nature of the criminal charges against O’Neill but contemporary newspapers and internal IRA documents do shed more light on the matter. O’Neill’s arrest in mid-1921 and subsequent detainment presented an awkward situation and not just for the man himself, touching as it did unresolved issues between the ICA and the IRA.

ICA men taking shelter on the rooftops

Though Robbins was to depict O’Neill as having no interest in contributing to the wider revolutionary movement in Ireland – indeed, being quite resistant to the idea – that is not quite the full picture. O’Neill, according to Catherine Rooney, was behind some smuggling she did of gelignite from Glasgow to Dublin, via Belfast, in 1918. “Years afterwards, I heard that that was an arrangement between James O’Neill and Joe O’Reilly,” Rooney recounted of her time in Cumann na mBan. Since O’Reilly was a top aide to Collins, it is reasonable to believe that at least some of the gelignite went to the IRA.[4]

Furthermore, O’Neill and another ICA man, Michael McCormack, had on at least one occasion met Collins and Cathal Brugha in person, during which both parties agreed to assist each other, while keeping their respective armies separate and distinct. This is, at least, according to historian R.M. Fox, who had the advantages of access to ICA members and original records for his research. The image Fox provides is admittedly on the sanitised side, saying only that “O’Neill retained the position of Commandant from 1917 to 1921” without comment or expansion on how it ended, but he does present a counterbalance to Robbins’ unrelentingly hostile depiction of the ICA leader.[5]

R.M. Fox’s book on the Irish Citizen Army

The main thrust of Robbins’ account and allegations are, however, corroborated by contemporary correspondence – to an extent.

Sometime in mid-June 1921, the ICA Army Council received word about “a quantity of stuff from abroad” – quite likely gelignite again – that could be purchased. Request for funds from the IRA GHQ fell through due to poor communication, as did an appointment by O’Neill to meet the Minister of Finance to Dáil Éireann – Collins, it seems, did not turn up. With time a-wasting, “we had to raise the money immediately and on our own,” explained John Byrne, the Honorary Secretary of the Army Council, in a letter to Brugha, the Minister of Defence.  This was by done with a robbery at Bolands Mill on the Grand Canal Dock, Dublin, on the night of the 25^th June 1921.

No violence was performed in the course of this act, at least to hear Byrne tell it; indeed, it sounded like an almost civilised affair, with the cashier pointing out which box to take. When asked if the money was to be paid back, the participants assured the cashier that this would indeed be the case. Around £700 was netted, two hundred of which being put aside to pay for the ‘stuff’.

The site of Bolands Mill, Dublin

“We trust that this statement will prove to your satisfaction that this was an act with a political purpose,” wrote Byrne. O’Neill found himself arrested at his home two months later, on the 23^rd August, by ten or twelve plainclothes policemen from the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), who searched the premise and removed, as well as O’Neill, two bicycles left there by the IRA, a bicycle belonging to the ICA, and a British Army motorcycle that had been commandeered by the ICA. “The police were warned that they were seizing political stuff and breaking the truce” – in reference to the ceasefire in July 1921 between the Irish insurgency and the British authorities – but “the detective stated that this was merely a civil and not a political case”; in other words, under terms not covered by the Truce.

Worse, after O’Neill was taken to Bridewell Station, the sergeant in charge stated that:

…the police were working in “conjunction” with the IRA and that the Commandant [O’Neill] had not been connected with politics for several months or words to that effect.”

Which was something the rest of the ICA Army Council was refusing to let be. “We are determined not to stand idly by while the Commandant” – by then a resident of Mountjoy Prison – “suffers for what was an act of the whole Council,” Byrne warned Brugha.[6]

Acts of War or Profit?

During the course of the previous two and a half years, in the conflict to be known as the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish War or the Tan War, the IRA had been fighting tooth and nail against the British state in Ireland. The ICA had played its part in this – a supportive role, perhaps, but a part all the same; now it appeared that the IRA had aided the DMP in arresting the commanding officer of its ally. A similarly convoluted picture emerged at a meeting of the ICA Army Council in August 1921, where O’Neill’s predicament was the main topic of discussion.

In attendance were six members of the Council, with Countess Markievicz as the acting commander in O’Neill’s absence, as well as Gearóid O’Sullivan, representing the IRA GHQ as its Adjutant-General. “They all spoke together for some time and subsequently they told me they came to talk to me about the accusations against their Commandant Jim O’Neill,” wrote O’Sullivan in his typed report to the rest of GHQ.

Gearóid O’Sullivan

The Bolands robbery, the ICA leaders asserted, was:

• Done under their auspices.
• For the purpose of obtaining money to buy arms.
• An “an act of war”, making it perfectly legitimate.

As O’Neill should not thus have been arrested, the rest of the Army Council “wished to discuss his position as a prisoner in the hands of the enemy and to arrange for his release by peaceable or other means” – the latter, they presumably meant, by armed force. Furthermore, O’Sullivan relayed, “they asserted that they understood that there was a working arrangement between Jim O’Neill” and the IRA, as well repeating the earlier claim that the IRA had assisted in O’Neill’s arrest and were “now co-operating with the enemy police with a view to his conviction.”

It was a claim O’Sullivan did not confirm or deny to the Council, only asking for proof. Sergeant O’Shea responded by providing three such points: (1) the Station Sergeant at Bridewell Station had said as much to O’Neill’s wife when she was there, (2) Jerry Murray, a van-driver for Bolands who also belonged to the local IRA battalion, had his house surrounded and guarded by other IRA members, who instructed him to give evidence against O’Neill, (3) other witnesses had apparently also been told by IRA intelligence officers “to go ahead.”

O’Sullivan did not comment on any of this in his report – it is possible that he was unsure as to the full picture. Of more immediate interest to the Adjutant-General was the money stolen in the heist: £1,300 altogether had been taken from Bolands, yet only £700 was passed on to the ICA Army Council. “There is no information of the remaining £600,” he noted.

‘A Certain Amount of Consternation’

The ICA had gone into the meeting as the aggrieved party. Now O’Sullivan turned the tables, revealing to the Army Council, causing in the process “a certain amount of consternation,” that:

O’Neill had no official connection with us [the IRA GHQ], and when I produced a list of goods passed by O’Neill to our Q.M.G. [Quartermaster-General] and for which O’Neill received £112. The Council believed that these guns were being passed to the Army [that is, the IRA] on loan and had never heard of any sum of money having been received by O’Neill with the transaction.

It seems O’Neill had not been keeping his ICA colleagues entirely apprised in his dealings on their behalf (which supports the accusations Robbins was to make in his memoirs). Although not explicitly stated by O’Sullivan, his readers could have presumed that the money made by O’Neill on his sales to the IRA Quartermaster-General had – like the unaccounted-for £600 from the Bolands robbery – not been passed on to the rest of the ICA. As if that was not damaging enough to O’Neill’s standing, O’Sullivan next read out a list of a dozen or so other robberies linked to O’Neill and some associates of his.

Instead of liberating their Commandant, the Army Council members now had something a little different in mind: they still wanted O’Neill free but so they could deal with him themselves. O’Sullivan, however, was distinctly cool on the idea of entrusting the ICA with anything:

I think it is better that O’Neill should remain in prison and I think it is a good opportunity of clearing up this matter of the Citizen Army. At the moment I believe the whole Council should be placed under arrest in connection with the robbery of Bolands, but as this would entail the arrest of a Minister of Dail Eireann I should like to have special instructions.

Countess Markievicz

The person in question was Countess Markievicz, serving, among the many hats she wore in her revolutionary career, as the Minister of Labour. As arresting someone in such a public and political role would create consideration complications, O’Sullivan was wise to hold off, pending further instructions. He did add that Markievicz was the only one on the ICA Council not implicated in the theft of money, to buy arms or otherwise. She had, after all, been in prison at the time.[7]

‘Under the Cover of Political Warfare’

O’Neill would thus not be leaving his cell in Mountjoy anytime soon. There seems to have been little doubt among contemporaries as to his culpability. O’Sullivan did admit, in another report, that “we have no evidence against O’Neill,” but even this was used as evidence for the prosecution: “I am sure this fact only proves O’Neills [sic] cleverness.”[8]

The man himself stoutly held to his innocence, at least when before the court at the City Commission, Green Street, Dublin, on the 1^st November 1921. He knew no more about the theft at Bolands than any of the jurors before him, O’Neill told the assembled body; indeed, he was glad, he continued, of not being out on bail the previous week due to another bakery firm having been similarly robbed and he would not want to be a suspect in that one as well.

The Green Street Courthouse, Dublin

According to the court, £1,334 had been stolen from Bolands – which matches the sum O’Sullivan cited, and not the smaller amount the ICA Army Council initially believed had been taken on its behalf. Another contradiction is that of the rosy view of the robbery as a quick, quiet affair, as initially depicted by Byrne – employees at Bolands were reportedly put “in bodily fear and danger of their lives” at gunpoint. Overseeing the City Commission, Mr Justice Samuels summed up the allegation as “of a very grave and serious character,” and that “recently in Dublin robberies had taken place that had no authorisation from any power whatever, except an organised band of well-skilled thieves.”

Indecision by the jury caused the case to be postponed until later in the month, on the 18^th November, and the accused – described by newspapers as “a young man of powerful build” and “a respectable-looking young man” – was removed from the court. At his next trial, O’Neill once more pleaded ‘not guilty’ before conducting his own defence. The line – if there was one – between the political and the criminal was again addressed, this time by the prosecutor, Mr William Carrigan.

“These crimes,” he said, “had hitherto been carried on under the cover of political warfare, but the fact that these crimes had no political connection was shown from the circumstances that, since the cessation of strife in June last [due to the Truce], the number of these raids had increased in frequency.”[9]

The unsettled state of Dublin was illustrated in a report by the IRA GHQ, composed as part of its own investigation. Fourteen separate incidents were listed, carried out, it was believed, by members of the ICA. These included, along with Bolands, two bank heists on Camden Street, the holding-up of bread van drivers on Howth Road, an attempted robbery of the Dolphins Barn Post Office and two stick-ups of men from the Jewish community.

The ICA Army Council at least took responsibility for Bolands at its second meeting with O’Sullivan a month after the initial one, on the 5^th September 1921. That particular deed had been “an official thing”, sanctioned by the Council for the purposes of fundraising (the missing £600, however, remained unaccounted for). O’Sullivan was unimpressed. He believed that two of the Council members, Captain Kelly and Sergeant O’Shea, had done more than merely permit the crimes, being themselves “active members of the Robber Gang” along with O’Neill.

A Final Verdict?

“Something must be done with the ICA,” wrote the IRA Adjutant-General, disgust and frustration palpable in his report:

There is [sic] some honest fellows in it…I would suggest their being disbanded; of course we must secure their arms. They are a danger now and will always be such no matter what way the War [with Britain] goes.[10]

As it turned out, no such move was made against the Irish Citizen Army. Byrne, the then ICA Honorary Secretary, believed that it had been decided instead that “it was better to put the man away,” as in leaving O’Neill behind bars, out of sight and hopefully out of mind, rather than risk the potential clash. After all, O’Neill’s treatment was not unanimously accepted by the rest of the ICA, there being “at the time…disagreement over O’Neill’s case,” for which Byrne was among those blamed. Things were awkward enough, even years later, for Byrne to put off applying for a military pension as it would involve contacting former comrades on the Army Pensions Committee.[11]

In his own pension application, O’Neill was notably coy on the issue. When asked if his imprisonment had been due to his role in the revolution, all he said was: “Yes, certainly, but I was not arrested as a result of having participated.” By the time of his next trial, on the 10^th February 1922, O’Neill had already been acquitted of the Bolands’ robbery, only to be left with more charges of theft, these ones relating to the bicycles and the motorcycle found on his property. Pleading not guilty again, O’Neill played the ‘political card’: he had only been holding the items in question as per his orders from the IRA. This was flatly contradicted by the body in question, via its liaison officer, making it clear that the defendant was on his own.

“There was something very misleading about the case,” O’Neill remarked, to laughter in the chamber. He was one to talk. An attempt to evade the court had been made on his behalf when a letter signed ‘James Byrne’ was received, in which the author, describing himself as an ‘Adjutant’, repeated the defence that O’Neill’s actions had been sanctioned by the IRA. Not only did the IRA liaison officer refute this claim as well, he denied there was any such adjutant in the IRA by that name. The Judge commented only that the new Irish Powers-That-Be had washed their hands of the affair – and then passed a sentence of three years.

And so “a remarkable series of trials came to a close,” wrote the Irish Times, which paid tribute to the story’s protagonist in his display of “remarkable intelligence in the conduct of his own defence.”

That was not quite the end of the drama, however. O’Neill was rearrested later in 1922, on the eve of the Civil War, this time by the pro-Treaty faction of the IRA – “purely on my reputation,” O’Neill explained, as he was no longer involved in the ICA. Since he had just returned to Dublin from a visit to the countryside, he must have been freed before then, probably due to the amnesty of POWs and other political prisoners.

If so, then O’Neill was lucky, being considered “a discredited Republican at that time,” according to Oscar Traynor, a Dublin IRA commandant, who gave evidence regarding O’Neill’s pension bid. “He had to go before a court; he was in a little trouble,” Traynor said, which is something of an understatement. By the time of the revolutionary pension applications, in 1936, O’Neill appears to have been in charge of the ones for ICA members. Traynor expressed surprise as this, since “I thought he had been ostracised” – a tribute, perhaps, to the silver tongue of O’Neill’s that Robbins so resentfully recalled and the Irish Times fulsomely praised?

Oscar Traynor in 193 (Source: https://www.rte.ie/history/2020/0810/1158556-oscar-traynor-goalkeeper-rebel-who-became-minister-of-defence/)

Traynor did not hide his contempt for the ICA before the pension board, dismissing its members as having been hopelessly disorganised during the War of Independence. He did concede that O’Neill had been a senior officer in it, from whom the Dublin IRA purchased munitions such as gelignite, rifles and ammunition. Traynor did not go into the whole murky matter in quite as much detail as others would do, but he noted that, of the sales O’Neill made, the money “apparently…never reached the Citizen Army.”[12]

References

[1] Robbins, Frank. Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1977), pp. 202-4

[2] Ibid, pp. 215-6

[3] Murphy, Angela, ‘Robbins, Frank’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Accessed on 07/11/2023)

[4] Rooney, Catherine (BMH / WS 648), pp. 16, 28

[5] Fox, R.M. The History of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: James Duffy and Co. Ltd., 1943), p. 205 ; O’Riordan, Turlough ‘Fox, Richard Michael’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Accessed on 17/11/2023)

[6] Military Archives – Cathal Brugha Barracks, Michael Collins Papers, ‘Correspondence and statements connected to a robbery at Bolands Mill, 25 June 1921 which was carried out by the Irish Citizen Army’, IE_MA_CP_05_02_50, pp. 2-4

[7] Ibid, pp. 5-6

[8] Ibid, p. 16

[9] Irish Times, 02/11/1921 ; Evening Herald, 18/11/1921

[10] Military Archives, ‘Correspondence and statements…’, p. 16

[11] Military Pensions Service Collection, ‘Byrne, John’ (MSP34REF17897), pp. 38-9

[12] Irish Times, 10/02/1922 ; Irish Independent, 10/02/1922 ; Military Pensions Service Collection, ‘O’Neill, James’ (MSP34REF8368), pp. 33-4, 38-40

Bibliography

Books

Fox, R.M. The History of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: James Duffy and Co. Ltd., 1943)

Robbins, Frank. Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1977)

Dictionary of Irish Biography

Murphy, Angela, ‘Robbins, Frank’

O’Riordan, Turlough ‘Fox, Richard Michael’

Bureau of Military History Statement

Rooney, Catherine, WS 648

Military Archives – Cathal Brugha Barracks

Michael Collins Papers, ‘Correspondence and statements connected to a robbery at Bolands Mill, 25 June 1921 which was carried out by the Irish Citizen Army’, IE_MA_CP_05_02_50

Newspapers

Evening Herald

Irish Independent

Irish Times

Military Service Pensions Collection

Byrne, John, MSP34REF17897

O’Neill, James, MSP34REF8368

Parallel Policies: The Opening of the First Dáil Éireann and the Soloheadbeg Ambush, January 1919

Two Events, One Day

Curiously, the fact that two of the most important events in Ireland for the year 1919 – and arguably for this period in Irish history in general – happened on the same day is, if not quite unconnected, a coincidence. IRISH REPUBLICAN “PARLIAMENT” – FIRST MEETING IN DUBLIN – REMARKABLE GATHERING went one set of headlines in the Irish Times for the 22^nd January, covering the events of the day before. Elsewhere in the same edition of that newspaper were TWO POLICEMEN MURDERED – SHOT DEAD BY MASKED MEN – THE DEAD MEN’S RIFLES STOLEN – TIPPERARY TO BE PROCLAIMED A SPECIAL MILITARY AREA.

As the quote marks around the word ‘Parliament’ indicate, the Irish Times, long a mouthpiece for genteel opinion, did not take that seditious congress on the 21^st entirely seriously. This was despite the attendees all being Members of Parliament (MPs), elected only a month previously in the General Election of December 1918, albeit on a strictly abstentionist basis as per the policy of the Sinn Féin party – which was where the innovation lay. If the freshly-minted MPs were not to go to the Parliament of Westminster, then a parliament of their own, it seemed, they would go.

The assembled Sinn Féin delegates outside the Mansion House for the First Dáil Éireann, 21st January 1919 (source: https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/920-first-dail-eireann-1919/)

“There have been many remarkable assemblies in the spacious Round Room of the Dublin Mansion House from time to time,” the newspaper read, “but that which opened its proceedings yesterday afternoon at 3.30 o’clock possessed many characteristics which rendered it unique.”[1]

Máire Comerford

For others, however, this was more than a novelty but something profound and very, very serious. “No day that ever dawned in Ireland had been waited for, worked for, suffered for like the Tuesday in January 1919 when the First Dáil Éireann met,” wrote Máire Comerford. She had been one of the many Sinn Féin activists doing the waiting, working and suffering since the Rising of 1916, almost two years before. For her, this had all been about more than a single election, more than a transfer of power and responsibility from one party to another – “the responsibility to vindicate the men of Easter Week was on our shoulders” – and now, at last, vindication seemed to have come about.

“If Robert Emmet could be here with us,” Comerford overheard someone say in the crowd of onlookers that curled from the front of the Mansion House, all the way to Kildare Street. “Ah, he is not far away,” came the reply. No doubt the pair had the aforementioned martyr’s famous epitaph, about it not being written until my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, in mind.[2]

The Mansion House, Dublin

For this was exactly what the occupants in the Round Room that afternoon intended to make happen. “The fundamental principle of Sinn Féin was not to ask others, particularly the Conquerors, to concede us our freedom,” explained another party worker, Kevin O’Shiel, “but…to go forth boldly and proclaim it.”[3]

Count Plunkett

That they did. When it was time to begin, at 3:30 pm, the Sinn Féin MPs – or Teachtaí Dála (TDs) if one prefers – of An Dáil Éireann slowly filed in, up the centre of the hall. Of the sixty-nine elected in the General Election, only twenty-seven were present, the others being currently in jail, another sign that the times were far from normal or settled. At the head of the procession were Count Plunkett and Eoin MacNeill, and anyone familiar with Irish politics would have recognised this pair, the two most senior members of Sinn Féin still at liberty. But it was a relative unknown, Cathal Brugha, who served as Chairman for the proceedings – the Irish Times was not even sure of his name.

Cathal Brugha

“Mr Burgess is a young man of athletic build and strong features,” explained the newspaper in the briefest of summaries, “and he played a prominent part in the rebellion of 1916, when he was severely wounded” – which may not have seemed much of a political career so far in itself, but in the new Ireland, any connection with the Easter Rising of blessed memory was sufficient. Despite being a relative neophyte in public affairs, Brugha rose to the occasion, according to Piaras Béaslaí. In addition to being TD for Kerry East, Béaslaí had been among those helping behind the scenes, drafting the documents to be presented and, in this case, picking the right man for the role.[4]

“It was my suggestion that Cathal Brugha should preside,” Béaslaí wrote in his memoirs, “and it proved a very happy decision” as he “presided over the assembly with solemn dignity.”[5]

Proclaiming Freedom

All the attending representatives were from Sinn Féin, making this more of a Sinn Féin event than an Irish parliament per se. Other winning candidates in the General Election had been invited but the remaining MPs of the all-but-defunct Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) were absent, as were the Ulster Unionist. Not that anyone had expected anything from the latter group; indeed, the only ripples of laughter in the otherwise sober proceedings were when Edward Carson’s name was read out in the roll-call.

The First Dáil Éireann in session inside the Round Room of the Mansion House

Still, as Sinn Féin had won the lion’s share of electoral seats, the party gathering in the Mansion House that day could be considered a national one by default. This uniformity in the room helped the inauguration of Dáil Éireann to go smoothly enough, despite its shortfall in members present. Four motions were proposed in the course of the event and all passed without debate or fuss:

1. The Provisional Constitution.
2. Declaration of Independence.
3. Appointment of delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference.
4. The Democratic Programme.[6]

As each reveals something about the context of the time, and the goals of the new assembly, it is worthwhile exploring them in some depth.

The Provisional Constitution:

This first was largely a work of necessity – “based on practical common sense,” as Béaslaí put it – establishing as it did an Executive or Ministry of five, headed by the President – someone has to be in charge, after all, even in a free nation.

Piaras Béaslaí

The roles of the various Ministers matched the needs at hand: a Minister of Home Affairs for administration, a Minister of Finance for money matters, and a Minister of Defence to take responsibility of the Irish Volunteers. That armed body had been marching in lockstep with Sinn Féin since the Easter Rising, throwing its energies into the latter’s election campaigns, and so it was assumed the Volunteers “would, in accordance with the principles of their constitution, accept the authority of a Parliament freely elected by the people of Ireland” (it remained to be seen if things would go quite as easily as all that). Last and most definitely least, in Béaslaí’s eyes, was the fifth position in the Executive: the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which “was, of course, only an ornamental , and intended chiefly as a gesture indicating our claim to international status.”

And that was that for now. This new ruling board was a concise one as “it would have been absurd, out of the small number of members at liberty, to appoint a larger Executive,” though this would only be the start, as its size grew in time to accommodate its responsibilities.[7]

Declaration of Independence:

Considering the purpose of the Dáil and that of Sinn Féin in general, it was hardly unexpected that something of this nature would be made, and so the reading of it was “praiseworthily brief,” according to a grateful O’Shiel:

The essence of that document…was that having recalled that the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, it went on to say that ‘Now therefore we, the elected Representatives of the ancient Irish people in National Parliament, do, in the name of the Irish nation, ratify the establishment of the Irish Republic and pledge ourselves and our people to make this declaration effective by every means at our command.’[8]

Perhaps because the ‘Declaration of Independence’ was self-consciously following in the footsteps of 1916’s ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’, it has been destined to stay in its shadow – during the Decade of Centenaries, it was copies of the latter, not the former, that were delivered to every school in the Republic in 2016. Or possibly this is due to the ‘Declaration’ lacking the literary quality of the 1916 Proclamation, which enjoyed the input of no less than three talented writers: Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and James Connolly, as noted by Daniel Mulhall, then Ambassador to the United States.

“The Declaration is best seen perhaps as a reiteration of the 1916 Proclamation,” Mulhall writes:

The difference between the two documents is the context in which they were issued. When it occurred, the Easter Rising expressed the will of a relatively small minority of Irish nationalists, whereas in January 1919 the members of the First Dáil had the wind in their sails in the wake of that decisive election result a month before. The quest for some form of independence now had the undoubted support of a majority of the Irish electorate.[9]

As the 1916 Proclamation had been an avowedly Republican declaration, what else could the new state be? ‘The Irish Republic’ was to be its name in English, with Saorstát Éireann for the Irish version. The IPP had exhausted itself for the futile sake of Home Rule only six years before; now, anything short of complete separation from Britain was unacceptable. All the same, even some at the forefront of the struggle would wonder if the new parliament had not been a little hasty.

Upon reading the news in Durham Gaol, Darrell Figgis fretted that the Dáil was putting the cart before the horse, for to declare a Republic before the Versailles Peace Conference would drastically lessen the chances of the Irish delegates being received for fear of Britain taking offence. And P.S. O’Hegarty later traced the seeds of the Civil War, the disaster-to-come, to his colleagues aiming too high to soon. “Up the Republic! was a fine slogan. The Republic itself was a fine objective,” he wrote in 1952, a sadder and maybe wiser man. “But it was plainly unattainable and it became a ‘strait-jacket’ not alone for de Valera but for everybody else.”[10]

But that was for the future to worry about. Whatever may be said for the prudence or literary qualities of the ‘Declaration’, it announced its message well enough: Irish independence was here to stay.

Printed edition of ‘The Declaration of Irish Independence’ (Source: https://www.whytes.ie/art/1919-21-january-the-declaration-of-irish-independence-and-irelands-address-to-the-free-nations-of-the-world-historic-documents/130187/?SearchString=&LotNumSearch=&GuidePrice=&OrderBy=HL&ArtistID=&ArrangeBy=list&NumPerPage=30&offset=310)

Helping Those Who Help Themselves

Appointment of delegates to the Peace Conference

That the Peace Conference, due to meet in Versailles, Paris, would provide the stage for Ireland to be embraced by the sovereign states present as one of their own had long been a cornerstone of Sinn Féin policy. Indeed, Seán T. O’Kelly, one of the organisers of the Dáil’s inauguration, remembered the haste and anxiety to get things done before the Peace Conference, which may explain why the date for January, so soon after the General Election, was chosen.[11]

Sinn Féin postcard, circa. 1918, imagining Ireland being welcomed by ‘Uncle Sam’ as an equal at the Peace Conference (rather fancifully as it turned out)

President Éamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith and Count Plunkett were appointed as the three delegates, a fact surely complicated by how the first two were currently in prison. But these were heady times for the Republican activists, flushed with electoral victory, to whom no problem seemed insurmountable. “It was impossible for youth, my age group then, to see how our request could be refused in the atmosphere of the time,” recalled Comerford, “when we believed that tyranny had been roundly defeated by great and generous powers like the USA, fighting for small nations.”[12]

Pádraic Ó Máille

Not that those present in the Mansion House that day were staking all their hopes on the greatness and generosity of said powers. Pádraic Ó Máille, TD for Galway Connemara, who had been the one to propose the trio, quoted as he did so the old proverb, “God helps those who help themselves.” If the Peace Conference failed to do justice to Ireland, Ó Máille added, the people of Ireland would insist themselves on justice being done.[13]

Democratic Programme

In contrast to the comforting familiarity of the ‘Declaration of Independence’, the ‘Democratic Programme’ was entering new territory – a little too much so for some. Its declaration that national sovereignty extended “to all its material possessions, the National’s soil and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation,” with private property to be “subordinated to the public right and welfare,” makes the ‘Programme’, in Ambassador Mulhall’s words, “a strikingly radical document, echoing the kind of socio-economic concerns that had motivated 1916 leader James Connolly.”

Seán T. O’Kelly

Regardless of such merits, none of the Sinn Féin sub-committee members tasked with drafting the various documents for the First Dáil Éireann seemed to have been very excited about this particular one. Seán T. O’Kelly was to claim authorship for its final draft but only after the rest of the sub-committee had failed to come up with anything at their Harcourt Street meeting on the 20^th January, the night before the Dáil was due to open. Harry Boland had come in with a loose assortment of handwritten notes which he said were from Thomas Johnson and William O’Brien, two leading figures in the Irish Labour Party.

“Boland read out these notes,” O’Kelly recalled, “and this started a long and sometimes heated discussion. There were ideas and statements which some of the committee would not accept.” O’Kelly ended up taking the bundle of sheets home, where he managed to finish the final draft by 4 in the morning, aided by no one else but his wife:

I used as much as I could of the notes given to Harry Boland by his two friends [Johnson and O’Brien]. I also used other notes and suggestions handed to me by the committee. The draft as put to the Dáil and adopted was my composition, whether it be considered good or bad.[14]

Kevin O’Shiel

The result was the “very radical and highly dubious ‘Democratic Programme’,” as O’Shiel described with a sniff, “that, in the course of time was discreetly dropped and forgotten about.” Other contemporaries likewise hastened to disown it and its implications. “It is doubtful whether a majority of the members would have voted for it, without amendment, had there been any immediate prospect of putting it into force,” Béaslaí told his readers. “If any charge of insincerity could be made against this first Dáil it would be on this score.”[15]

The Other Thing That Happened That Day

The First Dáil took no more than two hours before adjourning at 5:30 pm. For a relatively concise affair, much had been achieved: Ireland now had a parliament of its own – albeit a self-proclaimed one – along with a government in the form of the Executive and even the start of a foreign policy. Notably, nowhere in the speeches or resolutions passed was the possibility of war mentioned even though, according to some, that was the state Ireland already was in – or should be. Ó Máille had spoken of the Irish people taking it upon themselves that justice be done; in another part of the country, earlier that same morning, others had taken matters into their own hands in quite a different way.

Scene of the Soloheadbeg Ambush, Co. Tipperary (Source: https://www.rte.ie/history/soloheadbeg/2020/0330/1127348-the-soloheadbeg-ambush-sudden-bloody-and-unexpected/)

Constables McDonnell and O’Connell had been escorting a cartload of gelignite from Tipperary town to Soloheadbeg quarry, three miles away, while accompanied by two others: Patrick Flynn, an employee of the Tipperary County Council, and the cart driver, James Godfrey. A little after midday, between 12:30 and 13:00, the otherwise uneventful journey was interrupted by a band of masked assailants who jumped over the roadside fence, shouting at the policemen to put their hands up.

“Almost at the same moment,” Flynn relayed afterwards:

I heard a report, and the two constables fell on the road. One of the men got into the cart, and drove away in the direction of the quarry with the gelignite. The others took the policemen’s rifles and ammunition from them, and went away in a different direction. I came back to Tipperary to report the matter to the police barracks.

A doctor was brought to the scene but in vain: by then, both Constables McDonnell – 50 years old, a widower with several children – and O’Connell – 30, unmarried – were dead, the first two fatalities in what would become known as the Irish War of Independence, the Tan War or the Anglo-Irish War. Despite armed with rifles at the time, neither McDonnell nor O’Connell had had a chance to defend themselves as, according to Flynn, “the whole thing occurred in a minute or two.”[16]

Dan Breen

Not so, argued some of the participants, years later. “The police did try to fight,” insisted Séumas Robinson, O/C of the Third (South) Tipperary Brigade, underlining the word in his text. In this version, he and another man had been grabbing the cart-reins when the two constables raised their rifles in their direction, fingers on the triggers, prompting the rest of the Irish Volunteers to open fire with the fatal shots. Another participant, the soon-to-be-famous Dan Breen, was to tell much the same, that the policemen had left their killers no choice: “We would have preferred to avoid bloodshed; but they were inflexible…It was a matter of our lives or theirs” – a statement somewhat at odds with another of his, that his only regret was that more ‘peelers’ were not present that day to meet the same fate as that would have made a stronger impression.[17]

Either way, the exact circumstances behind Soloheadbeg are perhaps less important than the fact it happened at all and why.

Neither Robinson nor Breen cared much for the other. To Robinson, the other man was a hot-headed liability, while Breen depicted his O/C in his memoirs as a clueless rube selected for his role to be a convenient figurehead. But the two were in agreement on one thing: that the Soloheadbeg ambush happened not because of the election of Sinn Féin and the forming of the Dáil but despite of it all.[18]

Turning a Blind Eye

“The public did not clearly realise the difference between the political body, Sinn Féin, and the military organisation, the Irish Volunteers,” Breen explained. The growths of the two bodies, despite their different natures, had been mirroring each other, at times overlapping – as Sinn Féin clubs were formed in various parishes, the local Volunteers would enrol as well, with the club president, as likely as not, doubling as an officer in the Volunteers. Which became, as far as Breen was concerned, a serious hindrance: “The Volunteers were in great danger of becoming merely a politic adjunct of the Sinn Féin organisation.” Simply waiting around in between bouts of time spent in jail on one charge or another was not going to accomplish anything, at least not in the way Breen wanted.[19]

Irish Volunteers

Robinson also observed with dismay the stupefying effect politics was having on the military aspect of the struggle. The upcoming establishment of the Dáil in Dublin only threatened to make things worse:

We all heartily desired the formation of a Republican government, but what I feared was that the Government, once formed, being our moral superiors, a state of stalemate would be inevitable unless war was begun before the Dáil could take over responsibility. Who could, for example, expect a government situated as the Dáil would be ever to make a formal declaration of war?

If a war was not to be formally declared, then the trick would be for someone like Robinson to make one happen anyway.

Séumas Robinson

News in late December 1918 of the gelignite due for transportation to Soloheadbeg thus provided him and the rest of the South Tipperary Brigade with the perfect opportunity. As he prepared for the ambush in the preceding weeks, Robinson refrained from reading newspapers or any official dispatches from the Volunteer Headquarters in Dublin, lest he learn of the Dáil’s announcement and thus lose any chance at plausible deniability, a strategic ignorance he compared to Horatio Nelson’s famous holding of the telescope to his blind eye. That the gelignite set forth on the same day as the Dáil’s opening was to Robinson mere chance, not to mention a narrow dodge – “just in time,” as he put it.

Though both Robinson and Breen were to omit the other’s responsibility in the decision to rob the gelignite and, if necessary, kill the police escort, the fundamentals in each man’s account were the same: the ambush was envisioned as the start of something bigger, and the political movement that Dáil Éireann represented seen not so much of a complement as a competitor to their efforts.[20]

“The military mind is the same in every country,” Arthur Griffith ruefully remarked when P.S. O’Hegarty told him of a planned operation by the Volunteers that was, in the latter’s opinion (and evidently the former’s as well), “fiendish and devilish and inadvisable from any point of view.” Breen, on the other hand, came to resent how “neither then [Soloheadbeg] nor at any later stage did Dáil Éireann accept responsibility for the war against the British,” leaving him and his comrades to risk their lives and liberty on the streets and fields of Ireland with scarcely an acknowledgement. Two different viewpoints, two sides in the same cause, and they could not have been further apart.[21]

Memorial to the Soloheadbeg Ambush (Source: https://cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/EQUQ5JUK46DMMM6JWVUOKLSXV4.jpg)

References

[1] Irish Times, 22/12/1919

[2] Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021), pp. 94, 98

[3] O’Shiel, Kevin (BMH / WS 1770, Part 6), p. 92

[4] Irish Times, 22/12/1919

[5] Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, Volume I (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008), pp. 165-6

[6] Irish Times, 22/12/1919

[7] Béaslaí, p. 166

[8] O’Shiel, p. 94

[9] Mulhall, Daniel, ‘Blog by Ambassador Mulhall on the First Dáil, 21^st January 1919’, Department of Foreign Affairs (Accessed on 15^th August 2023)

[10] Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927]), pp. 231, 235-6 ; O’Hegarty, P.S. A History of Ireland under the Union: 1801-1922 (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1952), pp. 729-30

[11] Irish Press, 26/07/1961

[12] Comerford, p. 101

[13] Irish Times, 22/12/1919

[14] Irish Press, 27/07/1961

[15] O’Shiel, p. 94 ; Béaslaí, p. 167

[16] Irish Times, 22/12/1919

[17] Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), pp. 29, 72 ; Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), pp. 32, 34

[18] Robinson, p. 28 ; Breen, pp. 21-2

[19] Breen, pp. 29, 31

[20] Robinson, pp. 70-2

[21] O’Hegarty, P. S. The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010), p. 32 ; Breen, p. 94

Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Press

Irish Times

Books

Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008)

Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021)

Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927)

O’Hegarty, P.S. A History of Ireland under the Union: 1801-1922 (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1952)

O’Hegarty, P.S. The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010)

Bureau of Military History Statements

O’Shiel, Kevin, WS 1770

Robinson, Séumas, WS 1721

Online Article

Mulhall, Daniel, ‘Blog by Ambassador Mulhall on the First Dáil, 21^st January 1919’, Department of Foreign Affairs

Election Insurrection: The Death of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Ascendancy of Sinn Féin in the General Election of 1918 in Ireland

War and Peace?

While not exactly unwelcome, the Armistice on the 11^th November 1918, that finally put an end to four years of war, complicated an already tense situation in Ireland. “The defeat of the German Army which they believed to be impossible was an embarrassing surprise” for Sinn Féin, wrote Sir Joseph Byrne, the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in his monthly report to Dublin Castle. Such feelings could go beyond mere awkwardness. According to Ernest Blythe, then a political prisoner in Dundalk Jail, so convinced were many of his fellow Sinn Féiners of a German win that the news to the contrary plunged them into a state of gloom.[1]

Armistice Day, November 1918 (Source:

All of which was less to do with a desire for a German win and more for a British loss. But what really rubbed Sinn Féin activists like Liam de Róiste and Kevin O’Shiel the wrong way was having to watch some of their fellow countrymen revel in the victory. “Soldiers and their ‘women’ paraded [through] some of our [Cork] city streets last night, jeering, shouting, ‘singing’,” wrote the former in his diary on the 12^th. Still, after a few scuffles and a baton-charge by the RIC, “things passed more quietly than might have been expected, with the flush of victory strong in the blood of the pro-English.” O’Shiel was similarly aggrieved at the sights and sounds of the “rejoicing pro-British crowds” and “Rathmines Jingoes” as they marched through Dublin, waving Union Jacks and singing wartime songs such as It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.[2]

Thomas Kelly

Unlike Cork, things in Dublin did not pass quite so quietly. By coincidence, Sinn Féin was having a big event of its own that evening, at the Mansion House, presided over by Alderman Thomas Kelly. The agenda was originally intended to be the start of the party’s campaign for the forthcoming general election, Kelly told the packed hall, but, given the news of the day, something more was now to be announced: the declaration of Ireland’s independence as a separate and distinct nation.

So full was the venue that some of the attendees had to stand outside in the street, where they passed the time by singing The Soldier’s Song and other rebel tunes in vogue. This caught the notice of travellers on the passing trams, who either waved Union Jacks and Stars-and-Stripes in provocation or shouted ‘Up the Rebels’ and ‘Up de Valera’ in support. After two hours of this, the crowd, numbering in the hundreds, decided to take a more proactive approach and marched in processional order, still singing, away from the Mansion House, over O’Connell Bridge and into Sackville (now O’Connell) Street.

“The crowd through which they passed was thoroughly good-humoured,” reported the Irish Times, “and no collision occurred.” The only flickers of trouble was when a British officer grabbed the tricoloured flag at the head of the procession, leading to a fracas on the corner of Grafton Street and, later, when the marchers attempted to return by Westmoreland Street, only to be blocked by police. Instead of pressing ahead, the Sinn Féiners dispersed. Similarly civilised was when the meeting at the Mansion House drew to a close and those inside departed, “singing and cheering, along the same route, but no untoward incident occurred.”[3]

The Mansion House, Dublin

The Order of the Day

Given the tempers of the time, this ‘live and let live’ attitude could not last long. On the following evening, as the celebrations continued in Dublin, incidents of a more serious nature were reported in different parts of the city centre, as Sinn Féiners clashed with British soldiers, prompting on one such occasion a police charge in Grafton Street (among the injuries of the day was a constable struck on the head with a bottle). But it was the day after that, on the 13^th November, that the city practically became a warzone.[4]

Members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) during the course of their duties (Source: https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/the-dublin-metropolitan-police-the-colonial-legacies-of-irish-policing)

“The streets of Dublin were almost in their normal state yesterday,” reported the Irish Times on the 14^th, “but after nightfall crowds assembled in the principal thoroughfares, though not on a scale approaching the dimensions of the gatherings of the two previous nights.”[5]

Smaller, perhaps, but no less volatile. By the end of the night, no less than four places in particular had borne the brunt of the crowd’s wrath:

• The Mansion House, Dawson Street.
• Sinn Féin headquarters, 6 Harcourt Street.
• Liberty Hall, Beresford place, headquarters of the Transport Workers’ Union.
• Emmet Hall, Inchicore, meeting place of the Irish Transport Union.

That each were associated in some way, either with Sinn Féin in particular or, in the case of the last two, the current rise in radicalism, makes it hard to believe that their targeting was by chance or a coincidence. “I was sitting in my study about 7:45 [pm],” Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, told the press later about the assault on the Mansion House:

Looking out, I noticed a __ __ __, numbering two or three hundred, waving sticks and Union Jacks, and making use of language certainly not very polite towards me.

Rough speech was soon to be the least of the Lord Mayor’s concerns:

Some came to the door and made use of hatchets, with the object of forcing it in. They broke the windows with stones and used sticks to break the lamps outside. Things looked very dangerous, when a bluejacket got on the steps and exhorted the crowd to move off.

Laurence O’Neill, Lord Mayor of Dublin

After one final indignity, an attempt to set fire to the door of the Mansion House that mercifully fizzled out, the mob did indeed move off, singing, according to O’Neill, God Save the King as they did so.

Emmet Hall in Inchicore had it the easiest that night, ‘only’ enduring stones thrown at it by soldiers who otherwise did not approach the building, and even then the fusillade lasted for no more than six minutes. Over at Liberty Hall, clerks and union officials huddled inside as a crowd consisting of “noisy young soldiers, accompanied by sailors, members of the WAAC [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps], and several males and female civilians” smashed the lower windows and the glass panes in the door with sticks and trench tools. When the sounds of several gunshots were heard, seemingly from the roof of the building, the assailants decided they had had their fun and hastily scattered.

As for the Sinn Féin offices on Harcourt Street, they “presented a strange appearance” the following morning, almost every window being broken and an iron railing left lying by the front entrance. But visiting journalists found the party officials, far from being downcast or defeated, in a jubilant mood over how they had heroically held their own:

At about 7:40, practically the same hour as the raid on the Mansion House, a crowd of soldiers and civilians…proceeded to attack the headquarters of the Sinn Fein Organisation. There were about 30 Sinn Feiners inside the premises…The defenders with sticks and bare knuckles beat back the attackers, and although the latter reached the steps of the house, they never succeeded in gaining an entrance.[6]

Harry Boland

“This was primitive warfare at its best,” recalled Simon Donnelly with some gusto. Stones through the window had alerted him and the other Irish Volunteers stationed inside to the onset of the anticipated attack. At a given signal, other Volunteers, waiting on standby outside, rushed into the fray and soon “skull-cracking was the order of the day” on the street. One combatant in particular made an impression on Donnelly: Harry Boland, “a man of fine physique” who “did trogan [sic – Trojan] work, as everytime he hit an enemy went down.” Soon the battle of Harcourt Street was done and won, and “the mob eventually retired, sadder but wiser people.”[7]

Perhaps de Róiste summed it up best. “True, peace is in being,” he wrote in his diary. “But an armistice is only a temporary cessation of hostilities” – at least, where Ireland was concerned.[8]

Intemperate Language

Amidst this turmoil was the General Election to be conducted the following month, in December. The only certainty, it seemed, was that Sinn Féin would win and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) was on its way out. When reviewing the month of November for Dublin Castle, Sir Joseph Byrne gave the IPP only a single paragraph. It was all the former party of Parnell and Redmond, and the standard-bearer for Irish national aspiration for decades, warranted, it seemed.

MPs from the IPP assembled at the House of Commons, July 1914 (Source: https://www.rte.ie/eile/election-1918/2018/1211/1016473-election-1918-what-you-need-to-know-about-how-ireland-voted/)

“For some time past it has been obvious that the Irish Parliamentary Party had outlived her popularity, even with the R.C. [Roman Catholic] clergy,” the RIC Inspector-General noted:

The chief complaint now urged against them is that they failed to obtain from Government satisfactory guarantees with regards to Home Rule. Their organization has been similarly apathetic with regard to the new register of voters. Thirty-two members of the Party did not seek re-election, allowing twenty-five Sinn Feiners to be elected on nomination day unopposed, and it is not improbable that many more Nationalist seats will be lost.

Sir Joseph Byrne (from the ‘Irish Independent’, 20th December 1919)

Against such a backdrop, it is unsurprising that Sinn Féin would merit far more attention in Byrne’s report. In contrast to the flaccid defeatism of the IPP, “the Sinn Fein party was most active and nominated candidates for 102 of the total 105 constituencies.” Despite this, public meetings for the party remained small and “none of them could be described as enthusiastic,” which the Inspector-General attributed to the mass arrest of its leadership, including its president Éamon de Valera, who were now sitting behind prison bars for their supposed role in the so-called ‘German Plot’ earlier in the year, in May 1918.

Not that the absence of its head had tamed the Sinn Féin body, whose speakers at meetings “made the usual demand for separation from England and complete independence,” but “making allowance for the heated atmosphere of an election contest the language used, though disloyal and bitterly anti-English, was, on the whole, not worse than might be anticipated.” Still, what was being said was ‘disloyal’ enough, particularly for the party’s clerical supporters, who “were more intemperate in their language than the lay men.”

An example of the kind of speech being typically used at Sinn Féin rallies, and from two men of the cloth no less, was at Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, on the 24^th November 1918. There, the Rev. Father Hayes read out the oath of allegiance taken by Members of Parliament (MPs), and then asked how any man could take that oath and be faithful to Ireland. Any and all past concessions had not been earned by sending men to Westminster, quite the contrary in fact: Catholic emancipation was won by British fear of Irish rebellion, Church of Ireland disestablishment by the sacrifice of Fenians, and land acts by farmers barricading their houses.

Sinn Féin poster, 1918

Next to speak was the Rev. Father Wall. The policy of Sinn Féin, he told his audience, was that of Ireland as a nation:

In the course of his speech he said that they had more than one string to their bow. They did not depend entirely on the [post-war] Peace Conference. Sinn Féin would establish a constituent assembly which would use moral force, and perhaps other force, in furtherance of the cause of their country, and that later they would if necessary use physical force. He added that they intended to send envoys to the United States and other countries to stir up enmity against England.

Not everyone in Sinn Féin was quite so committed, at least according to one police informant who had spent time in the Dublin offices on Harcourt Street. “Most of the extremists do not expect a republic and would be satisfied with colonial home rule,” this anonymous source told their handlers – that is, if it was Sinn Féin who could claim responsibility.

Otherwise, what the spy reported chimed in with what Father Wall said at Kilfinane: that Sinn Féin (1) was willing to set up for Ireland a parliament of its own, “a constitutional assembly to replace British rule”, (2) was looking overseas for support, particularly at the Peace Conference, “to lay out the Sinn Fein cause before the nations”, (3) had a willingness to employ violence for its ends due to “an extreme section which in time of excitement might plunge the country into serious trouble.”

Sinn Féin postcard, circa. 1918, imagining Ireland being welcomed by ‘Uncle Sam’ as an equal at the Peace Conference (rather fancifully as it turned out)

‘This Branch of Sinn Féin’

Sinn Féin was indeed a broad church or, as Father Wall had put it, a string with many bows. Making up its prospective candidates for the election were a mix of doctors, solicitors, farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, students and even a humble labourer, their only requirement being “rebel antecedents” as none had ever sat in Parliament before, a far cry from the decades of service many of the MPs in the IPP could point to.

Less easy for the RIC to evaluate were the Irish Volunteers as, since the recent ban on political gatherings without a permit and a general clampdown on the part of the authorities, “the Irish Volunteers have become practically a Secret Society.” Information on that paramilitary body was thus hard to come by, save from documents found on suspects or in their homes during searches; even the source of their newspaper, An tÓglach (spelt ‘An Toglach’ in Byrne’s report) was largely unknown.

Irish Volunteers

Still, the RIC had observed enough about the Volunteers to know that they and Sinn Féin were very much joined at the hip. An example of this alliance was how the number of companies nearly corresponds to the number of Sinn Fein clubs reported by the police.” Elsewhere in his summary, the Inspector-General referred to the Volunteers as “this branch of Sinn Fein” as if they were one and the same, which was not, strictly speaking, true, but also not entirely inaccurate at the same time.

A more pressing question for Dublin Castle about the Volunteers was their capacity for another uprising. For this, Byrne presented a mixed picture. At first glance, the Volunteers did not appear to be a great threat, being insufficiently armed and equipped for conflict with soldiers, and fear of the troops restrains them from rebellion.”

In the long run, however:

Unless a counter movement of the responsible citizens should arise, of which at present there is no indication, [the Volunteers] are sufficiently organized with the weapons at their disposal, and supported in every direction by numbers of turbulent young men who if not actually in thier [sic] ranks are in close sympathy with them, to be unmanageable and to make government impossible in the event of the Military Force in the country being reduced.

Sinn Féin likewise looked immune to the apprehension of ‘responsible citizens’ and other respectable types, being “too strong to be affected by adverse opinions or warnings from any quarter” come polling day. And if the Irish Volunteers could indeed make Ireland ungovernable for Britain, then their political partner was already “keeping the whole country in a state of unrest by its republican pretensions.”[9]

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 3rd August 1918. The caption reads: “Mr Lloyd George seems to be as funky now about facing a General Election as his cast-off pals, Mr John Dillon and ‘Wee Joe’ Develin. They all fear the heap labelled ‘Rubbish shot here.’”

Plenty of Punch

Which is not to say Sinn Féin was having everything its own way, nor that the IPP had completely given up the will to live. The former, to quote O’Shiel:

…fought the General Election of 1918 under very great handicaps. Most of its leaders and, indeed, its candidates, were imprisoned or interned, most of its newspapers and journals were suppressed and what was permitted of them so severely censored that they were of little propaganda value.[10]

Sinn Féin was forced accordingly to rely on whoever it had on hand for help. P.S. O’Hegarty walked in on Harry Boland in their Harcourt Street offices reading through a list of names and picking who was to stand and who would not, a slightly disconcerting sight which O’Hegarty found to be “an illuminating insight into democracy” (‘skull-cracking’ being only one of Boland’s many duties). Compounding the difficulties was the arrest of Robert Brennan on the 20^th November 1918 at the Sinn Féin headquarters, the fourth such raid on the premises in the past six months. Given the thirty armed policemen and half a dozen detectives in attendance, the authorities were clearly taking no chances and Brennan was driven away in a military motor van, along with six hundred confiscated copies of the party manifesto.[11]

British soldiers outside the Sinn Féin headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin (Source: https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/cradle-of-the-irish-republic-a-journey-through-6-harcourt-street

That made him the third Director of Elections for Sinn Féin to be so removed (his predecessors, Seán Milroy and Dan MacCarthy, having both been deported earlier that year). Luckily, Brennan had had the foresight to leave for party workers like Máire Comerford:

…very precise instructions as to our duties before and during the campaign. These were observed in scrupulous detail. With patience and devotion we copied every name on the [electoral] register into three different notebooks for each townland in every constituency. The attitude of voters, after each of the three canvasses, was recorded and sent to the constituency director. Absolutely no effort was spared to win the contest.

After all, more than an election hung in the balance as far as Comerford was concerned: “The responsibility to vindicate the men of Easter Week was on our shoulders.[12]

Máire Comerford (centre) with other women from Cumann na mBan

Even if the Irish Party could not match that sort of crusading zeal, it was to display a dogged, never-say-never determination of its own. Many had been writing it off as early as 1917, when the first of its by-election defeats began, yet still the IPP struggled on, making its would-be successor fight for every inch of political ground, sometimes in more than a figurative sense. “The Redmondites in the city had plenty of punch, and I mean punch, in that election,” Frank Edwards said wryly of Waterford. He was referring to the by-election earlier in 1918, one of the few wins the IPP could claim and which, for a time, looked set to reverse the tide back in its favour.[13]

That hope soon dissipated, yet, even so, Dillon refused to give up, being, in the words of one biographer, “a man fully committed to what he knew to be a mortal combat, and watching every move and sign of the enemy to snatch what advantage he might from a desperate situation.” If victory was no longer plausible, then a rear-guard action would have to do. “It is quite conceivable that in six months,” the IPP Chairman told T.P. O’Connor in June 1918, “Ireland may have sobered down so much that we shall emerge from [the general] election with say 40 seats.” But this was before the results of the East Cavan by-election were in; when they were, and it was known that Sinn Féin had triumphed by over a thousand votes, forty seats suddenly seemed less than attainable.[14]

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’ on the 29th June 1918. The caption reads: “With his fiction about a German ‘Plot,’ the Pasteboard Cromwell, Mr. Lloyd George, gasses poor, doddering John Dillon, while his Cavan Defeated lies at his feet. ‘Pasteboard’ fancies once more that the way is again clear for Irish Conscription.”

Disappearing to Reappear?

Dr Patrick O’Donnell

Some long-time allies were wanting the Irish Party to quit altogether: John Horgan in Cork City proposed in October that its MPs withdraw from Parliament to better present a united front with Sinn Féin together at the Peace Conference, while Dr Patrick O’Donnell, the Bishop of Raphoe, similarly urged the IPP to stand down its candidates for the general election that month, to “disappear to reappear”, as His Eminence put it. Dillon firmly declined both suggestions, taking the time to explain to each man in detail his reasons why.

John Dillon

Abandoning Westminster would hand the Irish pulpit entirely to the Unionists, he told Horgan, an act which “is to me an absolutely insane one.” As for the Peace Conference, “there is not the slightest chance of representatives of Ireland being allowed to enter such” an event and, even if they were, the Irish envoys would receive a reception “of a very painful, and to them, surprising character,” thanks to Sinn Féin’s unsubtle favouritism towards Germany – the wrong horse, it turned out, to have backed.

Regarding Dr O’Donnell, Dillon had given his advice “the most careful consideration,” he assured the Bishop. But:

You speak of ‘disappearing to reappear’ – could a political leader guilty of such conduct ever reappear, or show his face, in public life? Could he reasonably expect the people to trust him or place any reliance on what he said?

Clearly not, in Dillon’s opinion:

If there is one thing more than another which the Irish people cannot tolerate in a political leader it is cowardice, and failure to stand and fight for the principles which he says he believes in. And in this I must say I heartily agree with the people.[15]

With that said, there was nothing left for the IPP Chairman to do but gird his loins in defence of the East Mayo seat he had held for thirty years. Not all his colleagues were joining him: as noted in the RIC report for November, some constituencies were being left wide open for Sinn Féin to claim as their previous MPs stood down in the face of almost certain electoral annihilation.

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 14th December 1918. The caption reads: “Mr John Dillon recognises in East Mayo that even Dublin Castle and all its limbs cannot save him from defeat.”

In South Meath, for example, David Sheehy seems to have decided that three general elections were enough for one career and that a younger candidate should to try his luck. Lorcan Sherlock was asked by telegram to stand instead for the IPP, despite his current duties as City Sheriff in Dublin, a place he had far more connection with as a former lord mayor than he did with Meath; besides, Sherlock had not been notified in advance and so unsurprisingly turned the invite down. It was not much of an offer anyway. So desperate by then were the IPP supporters in South Meath for someone that they resorted to asking Dillon to provide a name.

The one they eventually got, Thomas Peter O’Donoghue, also lacked a background in the constituency, being a Kerryman, and while he proved an active enough campaigner in the short amount of time left, the contrast with the Sinn Féin campaign, which selected its candidate, Eamon Duggan, early on and began canvassing at once, could not have been starker.[16]

Conor Cruise O’Brien

In the years to come, Monsignor M. Curran, secretary to the Archbishop of Dublin and a keen political observer, would read the obituaries of former Irish Party stalwarts and remark along the lines of ‘I thought that man was dead long ago.’ David Sheehy exemplified that decline into shabby obscurity, living with a daughter who, as his wits wandered in his old age, “was inclined to bully him,” remembered his grandson, Conor Cruise O’Brien (who was to walk a political path of his own). “Was she unconsciously punishing him for having lost his parliamentary seat in 1918, and for our dynasty’s decline?”[17]

‘Not as Rebels, but as Insurrectionists’

Those still standing worked hard at giving as good as they got. In South Roscommon, John Patrick Hayden dismissed his rival, the ubiquitous Harry Boland, as “only a tramp tailor”, the Sinn Féin policy of an Irish Republic as “impossible to realise, unless it could be enforced by an army and navy equal to that of Great Britain,” and the other main Sinn Féin platform, that of abstentionism, in a tone of incredulity: “How were social reforms to be won? How were Irish interests to be safeguarded?”

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 23rd November 1918. The caption reads: “Mr John Dillon, MP, will begin his canvas in East Mayo next week, arrayed in his Election suit for the occasion – an empty porter cask.”

As Hayden was the proprietor of a local newspaper, he could at least expect a certain amount of good coverage. One poem submitted to the Roscommon Messenger just happened to chime with Hayden’s stated sentiments – assuming, that is, Hayden was not its author:

I would ask you, Mr Boland, will you stay

From attending to our business in the Commons o’er the way?

Where our taxes will be trebled by Lloyd George and Bonar Law,

Who, for all your bogus risings, do not give a single straw.

“Friend,” he says. “the House of Commons is no fitting place for me,

I’m too advanced a rebel for that quarter, don’t you see;

But to South Roscommon’s business I’ll attend without a stint,

When we form our new Republic and our Irish Parliament.

Boland, for his part, generally avoided that type of personal attack, preferring – for the most part, anyway – to argue in favour of his cause rather than against the opposition’s. “We are not looking for prolonged power,” he told a Sinn Féin rally in Roscommon town on the 24^th November 1918. “We believe in new times, new men and new ideas.” He did not so much counter Hayden’s accusation of abstentionism leaving Ireland open to taxation as dismiss its importance altogether: “I do not like to discuss these questions from a material point of view. I, for one, would rather see Ireland with a crust in her mouth standing erect, proud and free, than fat and sleek and prosperous, a beggar and a slave” – which, judging from the resulting cheers, shows Boland had read his audience well.

During the Rising, he and his comrades had gone out “not as rebels, but as Insurrectionists, for we spoke for a Nation”; he contrasted them with those Irishmen who had fought in the Great War “now lying in unhallowed graves in France and Flanders and every other battle front.” Boland could not resist another dig, this time at the IPP’s expense: “The Party complained that the people had deserted them. Well, no; the Party had deserted Ireland and the people had remained true.”

As with many Irish elections of this period, the exchanges could go beyond the verbal. IPP partisans tore down republican tricolours at one booth in Castlerea on polling day, the 14^th December, and stamped on them until driven off by Irish Volunteers; more Volunteers, armed with hurleys and ashplants, surrounded the polling booths in Roscommon town and had to be dispersed by the returning officer. Despite the RIC Inspector-General’s description of them as a ‘secret society’, the Volunteers remained a visible presence throughout the country, to the point of escorting the ballot boxes being taken to the Roscommon courthouse for counting in blatant defiance of the RIC constables on duty.

Boland later emerged from that same courthouse to be carried shoulder-high to his party’s headquarters in town, where speeches, bands, a torchlight procession and house illuminations marked his electoral triumph – a mighty 10,685 votes to Hayden’s pittance of 4,233. It was but one victory among many.[18]

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 2nd November 1918. The caption reads: “The small Sinn Fein pulley having set the big wheel of the General Election in motion, Mr John Dillon’s Four Hundred Pounders are all dropping out of their seats…The Pasteboard Cromwell, Mr Lloyd George, weeps for his faithful henchmen.”

Landslide

Dillon had been bracing himself for the worst; even so, “the landslide is a good deal greater than I had expected from my reports, and I confess some of the results have surprised me very much,” he wrote to T.P. O’Connor in December after the votes had been tallied.

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 21st December 1918. The caption reads: “Mr John Dillon, the Supreme Boss and War Lord of the late Irish Parliamentary Party, was downed at the polls in East Mayo on Saturday last. He is now anxiously seeking the shortest route to Holland, to join another War Lord in affliction [a reference to the exiled Kaiser], while his ex-Four Hundred Pounders rejoice at his departure, as they imagine that this may open another road for them at the old loaves and fishes.”

East Mayo had been a landslide of its own: 8,843 votes for Sinn Féin against Dillon’s 4,451 – fittingly, the new MP there was Éamon de Valera, a coup de grâce delivered by one party leader to the other. The winner had not even needed to be present, imprisoned as he was in Lincoln Jail. Out of 105 seats in Ireland, Sinn Féin now held 73, Unionists 26 (primarily in Ulster), leaving the once-mighty Irish Parliamentary Party with a paltry 5. Dillon had not yet entirely given up hope for a comeback, though he conceded to O’Connor “in any case after such a crushing defeat it would be no easy task.”[19]

Father Michael O’Flanagan

Actually, it was an impossibility and everyone but Dillon knew it. “We finished Redmond and everything he stood for, and whatever the future may hold for Ireland, Republicanism will always hold sway here,” wrote Nora Connolly, daughter of the 1916 martyr. She was writing sometime after, but one does not have to look very far for contemporary reports on the finality of the result. “The defeat of the Nationalist Party is crushing and final,” intoned the Irish Times, as little as that most conservative of newspapers must have liked it. “Sinn Féin has swept the board, but we do not know – does itself know? – what it intends to do with its victory.”[20]

Good questions: no less a prominent figure in the newly ascendant power than Father Michael O’Flanagan, one of its two vice-presidents, was heard to say that, since the people had voted Sinn Féin, “what we have to do now is to explain to them what Sinn Féin is.”[21]

In other words: what next?

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 28th December 1918. The caption reads: “When Mr Lloyd George reads the long list of Sinn Fein victories he yells in amazement, ‘What will [US President Woodrow] Wilson say?’”

References

[1] Police reports from Dublin Castle records (National Library of Ireland – NLI), POS 8547 ; Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), p. 98

[2] ‘25 October – 17 November 1918’, Liam de Róiste Diaries Online, Cork City Council (Accessed on 15/05/2023), p. 71 ; O’Shiel, Kevin (BMH / WS 1770, Part 6), p. 41

[3] Irish Times, 12/11/1918

[4] Ibid, 13/11/1918

[5] Ibid, 14/11/1918

[6] Evening Herald, 14/11/1918

[7] Donnelly, Simon (BMH / WS 481), p. 11

[8] De Róiste, p. 71

[9] NLI, POS 8547

[10] O’Shiel, p. 45

[11] O’Hegarty, P. S. The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010), p. 53 ; Evening Herald, 20/11/1018

[12] Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021), p. 94

[13] MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), p. 2

[14] Lyons, F.S.L. John Dillon: A Biography (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1968), pp. 440-1

[15] Ibid, pp. 446-8, 450

[16] Bruton, John. ‘The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics’, An Irish Quarterly Review (Spring 2019, Volume 108, No. 429), pp. 94-5

[17] Curran, M. (BMH / WS 687, Section 1), p. 345 ; O’Brien, Conor Cruise. States of Ireland (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974), p. 104

[18] Fitzpatrick, David. Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 110-2

[19] Lyons, pp. 453-4

[20] MacEoin, p. 209 ; Irish Times, 30/12/1918

[21] O’Hegarty, p. 21

Bibliography

Newspapers

Evening Herald

Irish Times

Roscommon Herald (cartoons)

Books

Comerford, Máire (ed. by Dully, Hilary) On Dangerous Ground: A Memoir of the Irish Revolution (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2021)

Fitzpatrick, David. Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003)

Lyons, F.S.L. John Dillon: A Biography (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1968)

MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

O’Brien, Conor Cruise. States of Ireland (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974)

O’Hegarty, P.S. The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Curran, M., WS 687

Donnelly, Simon, WS 481

O’Shiel, Kevin, WS 1770

National Library of Ireland Collections

Police Report from Dublin Castle Records

Online Source

Liam de Róiste Diaries

Article

Bruton, John. ‘The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics’, An Irish Quarterly Review (Spring 2019, Volume 108, No. 429)

Book Review: People Under Siege: The Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond, by Aaron Edwards (2023)

Can Ulster Unionism be reformed? And, if so, into what? These are the central questions posed in Aaron Edwards’ book: at one point, he draws a distinction between ‘Ulster British’ (inclusive, tolerant, good) and ‘Ulster Loyalist’ (not so much), and elsewhere with ‘civic Unionism’ against ‘cultural Loyalism’ (likewise respectively). When confronted with the choice between these two worldviews, however, it is rarely the angels of Unionism’s better nature that wins out, as the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) found when it tried to harness the strength of one in the service of the other.

It might not have been the most obvious party of peacemakers, formed as it was by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) while they were serving prison sentences for various terrorist offences. Yet enforced confinement does hold certain advantages; for one, the time to think and take stock of circumstances.

“In the compounds we had these regular seminars,” explained Billy Mitchell, the UVF Director of Operations:

There would have been differences of opinion. There were people still locked in what we would call a ‘DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] mindset’. Others were more progressive in their thinking. And, so, there was this melting pot of ideas and thoughts.

Out of this stew came:

…a consensus that we had to redefine unionism. One, we had to understand what unionism was all about. A lot of volunteers were responding to republican violence…So, none of us went into Long Kesh with an ideology. It was in Long Kesh that we hammered it out.

Billy Mitchell

The creed so forged was, as Edwards describes, a “liberal, left-leaning and working-class alternative to mainstream unionism.” This made it a perfect fit for the PUP, looking as it was to challenge shibboleths in their community. While others railed against the Good Friday Agreement as a betrayal, Mitchell, as the PUP’s senior strategist, saw it representing a “transition, of invitation and of opportunity,” and the chance at “a new era of hope and opportunity.” Unfortunately, the tide of Unionist public opinion was not flowing in his favour, as shown when Billy Hutchinson, his PUP colleague and fellow ex-prisoner, lost his seat in the Northern Irish Assembly in 2003 and later his council seat as well.

Things took another turn for the hard-line with the Flag Protests, when Belfast City Council voted in December 2012 to limit the flying of the Union Jack over its buildings to designated days. Enraged at what they saw as a devious Fenian plot, protestors descended on Belfast City Hall to disrupt the vote, some even succeeding at breaking through the security barriers and into the building before police could intervene. Present at these demonstrations was Hutchison, ruminating to reporters at an impromptu press conference about the ‘de-Britification’ that he said was taking place.

Flag Protestors outside Belfast City Hall

Yet, a decade earlier, the PUP had sounded positively agnostic on the whole question if the statements of Mitchell were anything to go by. He dismissed “Sinn Féin’s preoccupation with flags and emblems” as having “more to do with wanting to remove any visible sign of their failure to break the link with Britain than it has to do with republican ideals.” Even if successful, such cultural coups were “nothing for nationalists to be jubilant about or for unionists to be despondent about.” Fine words, perhaps, but, by 2012, there was plenty of despondency to go about as far as many of the latter were concerned. “The protests are not about the flag, they never were just about the flag,” wrote one editor of a Shankhill-based newspaper. “There is a deep-rooted disillusionment within PUL [Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist] working-class communities that they have been left behind by those in power at Stormont.”

Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston (Source: https://belfastcity.public-i.tv/core/portal/speaker_profile/24486

It was a vacuum the PUP moved to fill, and successfully so – at first – winning over 12,000 first preference votes in the 2014 local government elections, with four councillors elected in Belfast and Coleraine, and an influx of new members, albeit many being more in tune with ‘The Sash’ than ‘The Internationale’, in Edwards’ pithy phase. In doing so, the party envisioned as the working-class alternative to mainstream Unionism seemed to have lost its way, in the view of members like Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston.

“More and more people came to join the party,” she recalls:

They were very much disillusioned with the DUP and a lot of it was protest. Some came from the TUV [Traditional Unionist Voice]. And they didn’t join the party because of its policies, because of its vision for it. They joined it because of its reaction to certain events and thought it would give them strength in numbers.

Billy Hutchinson (Source: https://minutes3.belfastcity.gov.uk/mgUserInfo.aspx?UID=42)

Numbers soon became what the PUP lacked, securing only 5,955 first preference votes two years after its bounce, in the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly elections and failing to grow its electoral profile. The DUP and TUV, in contrast, saw the return of their natural voters, while the ‘squeezed middle’ demographic passed over the PUP in favour of the Green Party and the People Before Profit Alliance (PBPA). In attempting to weave divergent strands together – ‘civic Unionism’ with ‘cultural Loyalism’ – the PUP had been left merely with frayed edges.

It’s a contrast – and contradiction – that Edwards is well placed to navigate for his readers. The book begins and end with him on the Glorious Twelfth, in 2001 and 2021 respectively, taking in the sight of that most contentious of events: an Orange parade. On neither occasion did things run smoothly. In 2001, on Whitewell Road, North Belfast, a line of police Land Rovers blocked the way, while a Nationalist crowd on the other side hurled bricks, bottles and even golf balls at the thirty Orangemen making an attempt at a parade.

Twenty years later, in 2021, it was the lockdown thanks to the Coronavirus that stymied the big event, though the Eleventh Night bonfires Edwards beheld in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, made up for the lack of spectacle. These bonfires, Edwards notes, had become much larger and grander than the ones to be found two decades ago, the acrid stink of burnt pallets and melted tyres enough to make him gag while just passing by. “A perfect metaphor for the wrecking of working-class areas,” he muses, while before, in 2001, what had moved him was the plight of the parade participants, thwarted by police and assailed with missiles.

Despite the book’s title, and the frequent depictions by the media of Unionists having a siege mentality, Nationalists, Republicans and what-have-you rarely feature here; the big struggle, instead, being Unionism’s against itself. For all the modern veneration of icons like Edward Carson and James Craig (whose stern, moustached visage adorns the wall mural of an otherwise plain-looking house in one photo), the Northern Irish state, from its inception in the early 1920s, was never entirely confident of the support of the people it had supposedly been created for.

Wall mural of James Craig, founding father of Northern Ireland

Aspiring politicians standing on a platform of Independent Unionist such as Tommy Henderson or Labour like Harry Midgley threatened to chip away at the hegemony of the Unionist Party. Class was (and, it seems, remains to this day) a major fault line: Henderson worked as a housepainter, while his opponent for the parliamentary seat of North Belfast in 1923, Thomas McConnell, was the managing director of a cattle and horse-trading business. McConnell won, but with a reduced majority. Midgley likewise cut into the establishment man’s majority for West Belfast during the same general election – worse, he had done so by taking almost as many Protestant votes (10,000) as Catholic ones (12,000). Little wonder, then, that Carson sounded close to panic at the next Westminster election a year later, in 1924, when he warned crowds in North Belfast that they were “facing Ulster’s most crucial hour,” with any split on the Unionist vote likely to open the door to a Sinn Féin victory.

Tommy Henderson

Despite such challenges and close shaves, Northern Ireland would remain as it was, made in the sectarian, conservative and heavy-handed image its founding fathers had intended. Nonetheless, hope for a difference remained. Henderson’s next run at a constituency seat, a decade later in 1933, was much more successful, thanks to an artfully choreographed performance which had him arriving on the Shankhill Road on the back of a flat-bed lorry, before speaking from an illuminated pedestal. Notably, his choice of talking points were bread-and-butter ones, easily relatable to his listeners, and it earned Henderson a seat in the Northern Ireland House of Commons.

It is in such grassroots figures, Edwards suggests, that the hope of Unionism – ‘civic Unionism’ over ‘cultural Loyalism’ – lies. This reviewer confesses himself sceptical, despite the book’s best efforts. As of now, the DUP remains the party of choice for the Unionist voter, and even a maverick like Henderson took care to play his own Orange card, emphasising how “his Unionism and his Protestantism were as good” as anyone’s – a lesson anyone seeking to breach the siege mentality of Unionism had best remember.

Publisher’s Website: Irish Academic Press

See also:

Book Review: My Life in Loyalism, by Billy Hutchinson (with Gareth Mulvenna) (2020)

Book Review: UVF: Behind the Mask, by Aaron Edwards (2017)

On a Knife’s Edge: The Last By-Election between Sinn Féin and the Irish Parliamentary Party at East Cavan, June 1918

A contination of: When the Challenger Becomes the Challenged: Sinn Féin vs the Irish Parliamentary Party in the East Tyrone By-Election of April 1918

On the Retreat?

Kevin O’Shiel

By mid-1918, the struggle for hegemony within Irish Nationalism had reached a stalemate of sorts. Sinn Féin had looked unstoppable the year before, winning all of the four by-elections, only to be halted in its tracks when the Irish Parliamentary Party [IPP] pulled off a trio of wins in South Armagh, Waterford City and East Tyrone. Regarding the last in April 1918, “this is the third seat gained by the Nationalists [the IPP], which is in favour of an understanding with England,” read the Tyrone Courier, quoting from the French Echo de Paris. “These successes seem to indicate that the popularity of the Sinn Fein party is on the wane.”[1]

Was it? While Sinn Féin officially deplored any such defeatist suggestions, some amongst its ranks, such as Kevin O’Shiel, were inwardly fretting at what the recent flurry of losses could mean for the future of:

…the new evangel and it began to be thought that there might be something after all in what the Nationalist and English press were telling their readers, that the tide was definitely turning against the new movement and the new men with an ever increasing momentum, that the danger of rule by the “wild men” and the “gunmen” was passing away; the people were returning to political sanity, the hectic emotional fever, engendered by the post-Easter Rising executions, having spent itself.[2]

And all this over an election Sinn Féin should never have risked in the first place, in James McGuill’s opinion. At South Armagh, back in February 1918, he had overseen the party’s array of campaign cars as Director of Transport. Despite his efforts, Sinn Féin suffered its first setback, and since East Tyrone did not seem any more promising a prospect, McGuill intended to remain in Dundalk until a personal request from Michael Collins changed his mind. Arriving in Dungannon, McGuill found the situation to be even worse than he feared. Instead of motorcars, Sinn Féin often had to make do with ponies and traps for travelling around the constituency or as platforms from which to address the crowds; waiting, at one particularly awkward point, for the IPP speakers to be finished with the sole wagonette in town before theirs could use it.

Scotch Street, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone (source: National Library of Ireland, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/49524799151

McGuill was able to compensate somewhat with the theft of a few IPP-owned vehicles, and then tricking some Irish Party supporters into donating petrol for them. Such electoral lowballing was not enough to ward off the result McGuill had feared from the start, the implications of which he, like O’Shiel, found troubling:

This defeat in East Tyrone was rather serious from the Sinn Féin point of view coming so soon after the defeat in South Armagh. It was felt by some that the British would interpret those defeats as a weakening of the hold that Sinn Féin had on Irish public opinion.

Michael Collins

Compounding the pressure was how the British Government was finally starting to take notice of the growing threat in its Irish backyard. Collins’ arrest for a seditious speech on St Patrick’s Day in Derry was enough for the Irish Volunteers GHQ to make an exception to its usual prohibition against recognising Crown courts and allow him to accept the offer of bail and twelve months of good behaviour rather than serve a prison term. With the threat of conscription for Ireland looming on the horizon, Collins was considered too critical a figure, and at too critical a time, to be lost to a jail cell.

“The British Authorities did not then appreciate the importance of the man they so lightly let out of their hands!” McGuill wrote, amused at this narrow dodge.

McGuill himself was a busy man, meeting fellow officers in the Dundalk Volunteers to discuss plans for an opening move against the enemy establishment. As Adjutant, McGuill had taken notes on the police and British military barracks in the area. These were forwarded for approval to Dublin but the reply from GHQ expressed more interest in a raid being carried out on Ballyedmond Castle, Co. Down. This was considered doable by the Dundalk officers at a meeting on the 16^th May 1918; after it ended, just before midnight, McGuill was on his way home to bed when another man caught up with him to warn that the other officers had just been arrested by British soldiers.

So alerted, McGuill was able to avoid the troops sent for him. Over a hundred others from across the country, however, could not, detained as they were and then deported to English prisons for their alleged conspiring with Germany, the so-called ‘German Plot’.[3]

‘A Restless and Unsatisfactory Condition’

Sir Joseph Byrne (from the ‘Irish Independent’, 20nd December

It was, as far as Sir Joseph Byrne, the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), was concerned, a measure long overdue, with results that were instantly appreciable. “The Sinn Feiners see that they were mistaken in their belief that the Government was afraid of them, and already an improvement is noticeable in their demeanour,” Byrne wrote to Dublin Castle in his monthly report for May 1918. “The revolutionists have become far less aggressive and defiant and the speeches at Sinn Fein meetings more cautious in their language than heretofore.”

However, Byrne did not delude himself into thinking that the change was anything deeper than surface-level:

They are still bitterly disloyal, and hostile to any form of British rule, and the new leaders when they are identified will have to be closely watched.

Meanwhile, “moderate Nationalists are reported to be pleased though afraid to say so openly.”

Moderation was currently a rare thing to find in Ireland: “Although outwardly peaceful from the point of view of prosperity and freedom from ordinary crime, the provinces remained during the Month of May in a restless and unsatisfactory condition.” This was despite there being much to commend: profits for farmers and tradesmen were good, as were wages, which was perhaps why industrial strikes had been few. Even tenant and landlord relations – that age-old apple of discord in Ireland – seemed amicable. Instead, “the restless condition of the country at present is due to political rather than agrarian causes, and is attributable mainly to fear of Conscription” which had finally come to pass, via the Military Service Act, to Ireland in April:

The general consternation…has been somewhat allayed by the Lord Lieutenant’s appeal for voluntary recruits, which many regard as an indication that the measure will not be proceeded with, and there was a large falling off in the number of anti-conscription meetings.

Nonetheless, “there is…no reason to assume any abatement of the spirit of opposition,” Byrne warned. As proof, Sinn Féin, despite the setback of the ‘German Plot’ arrests, appeared more vigorous than ever, gaining 43 more clubs by the end of May, to a total of 1,293 in Ireland. Its female auxiliary group, Cumann na mBan, had meanwhile jumped from 35 clubs to 80. As for the other group of interest:

The Irish Volunteer Force is managed so secretly that it is difficult to ascertain authentic particulars as to the details of the organization, but it may be assumed that most of the members of Sinn Fein Clubs of military age belong to it.

Irish Volunteers

Whatever its internal workings, publicly the Volunteers were on a downturn to judge from their number of drills and training sessions: 340 recorded in May, compared to the 507 the month before. The Inspector-General attributed this to the harsher, less lenient measures of the Government, with soldiers cooperating with the RIC in the dispersal of illegal gatherings and the arrests of offenders. “It is expected that the matter will shortly be well in hand,” Byrne wrote. Another encouraging sign was the increase in recruits for the Army and Navy: 1,079 during the four weeks before the 15^th May, 364 more than the four weeks preceding.

The message Byrne delivered to his superiors was thus a mixed one. Militarily, Ireland did not seem to be in any danger; given the deficiency in arms owned by the Irish Volunteers, an uprising, like the one that occurred two years before in Dublin, was unlikely. Politically, on the other hand, was quite a different picture, the country now fixed in a tumultuous state, and it was all thanks to Conscription.[4]

The Conscription Crisis

John Redmond

From the start, the Power-That-Be in Britain had been warned.

“I must tell you that the enforcement of conscription in Ireland is an impossibility,” John Redmond wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, in November 1915. In the event of such a move, “the Irish [Parliamentary] Party will be forced to oppose it as vigorously as possible at every stage.” Asquith’s successor was told the same thing, though David Lloyd George hinted at an offer of Home Rule in return for Conscription in December 1916. Not even the dangling of his life’s goal before him was enough to shift the IPP Chairman – “I told him we could never agree to conscription as a condition of Home Rule and that under any circumstances conscription was impossible in Ireland,” Redmond recorded in the minutes of their meeting – and instead it was the new Prime Minister who stepped aside, turning instead to a different topic.[5]

T.P. O’Connor

T.P. O’Connor found Lloyd George in a less emollient mood a month later as they dined together in London. Conscription once again found itself in the conversation and, when the Irish Member of Parliament (MP) repeated Redmond’s line of it being an impossibility, the other man pointed out that the English people, who were already sending their sons to the war, would be less than sympathetic to Ireland’s refusal. O’Connor argued that conscription would mean a hundred deaths in its enforcement alone, to be met with the retort that England would not care if the deaths amounted to ten thousand. And this was from a Prime Minster otherwise sympathetic to the Irish situation.[6]

Nonetheless, Ireland remained un-conscripted; nonetheless, the possibility alone was corrosive to the IPP’s support. The by-election of South Longford in May 1917, four months after O’Connor’s uncomfortable exchange with Lloyd George, was not the first Sinn Féin victory of the year but it confirmed just how far the tide of public opinion had turned against the party that had, for a generation, been the voice of national aspiration.

If in politics you are only as good as your current crisis, then this was one the IPP found itself unable to get away from. “The conscription menace is emphasised in every verse of doggerel, and fathers are warned that if the Sinn Fein candidate is not returned, every young man will be taken for the Army,” reported the Irish Times. “This threat seems to be having its desired effect” – as was proven to be the case on polling day. “Today a new chapter is opened with South Longford gone over to Sinn Féin,” went the same newspaper on the 11^th May. “How many seats could Mr Redmond count with entire confidence upon retaining similar attacks?”[7]

Sinn Féin activists during the South Longford by-election of May 1917

By the end of 1917, with all four of that year’s by-elections lost, the answer appeared to be ‘not many – at best.’ For all of Redmond’s defiance to British Prime Ministers on the subject, the fact was that, on this most crucial of topics, the Irish people evidently trusted the newcomer party more than the established one. His previous plea to the Chief Secretary of Ireland in December 1915, that “conscription gives a certain reality to the [revolutionary] movement [emphasis in text]” and that “were it to be killed dead, the movement would die down,” had gone unheeded.[8]

Whether it could have been as simple as that is debatable. After all, the Irish Times had listed other reasons behind Sinn Féin’s success, in South Longford and elsewhere: Home Rule’s delay, the unwelcome possibility of Partition and the sheer energy Sinn Féin displayed were all combining to “make very difficult the position of the Nationalist Party [IPP] in the next few weeks” and further. But there was no denying that, come April 1918, all other considerations had been eclipsed by that of Conscription – enough to bring bitter enemies to the same table, literally, at the Mansion House, Dublin, on the 18^th.[9]

The Mansion House, Dublin

‘A Veritable Miracle’

There, representatives of the two major parties met for the first time: John Dillon and Joe Devlin from the IPP, Éamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith for Sinn Féin, along with three Labour men and two other Nationalist MPs. After an anti-Conscription pledge was drawn up, in which the assembled men and their respective factions swore to “resist Conscription by the most effective means at our disposal”, a deputation was immediately sent to where the Catholic bishops of Ireland had been gathering on unrelated matters in Maynooth. The Princes of the Church were more than happy to lend their ecclesiastical support to the political cause, issuing a manifesto of their own later that night, declaring resistance against Conscription to be “consonant with the law of God.” Three days later, on the 21^st, meetings in almost every village and parish in Ireland were held for people to sign their names en masse to the Mansion House pledge.

The country had never been more in lockstep. If every cloud has a silver lining, then Conscription’s, or the fear of it, was how it performed “a veritable miracle in Nationalist Ireland,” so O’Shiel described with rhetorical flourish, “pulling together at one stroke all its discordant elements and binding them in one strong, and what proved, irrestible [sic] union against the grave threat.” Darrell Figgis, another Sinn Féin activist, struck a similarly heady note in his own reminiscences – “I am sure there never has been such concord in Ireland. Enemies forgot their enmities and hastened to be first in friendship” – while Tim Healy, MP and one of the Mansion House Conference attendees, rejoiced in a letter to his brother about how “there was nothing in [Daniel] O’Connell’s time to compare with Irish unanimity against Conscription.”[10]

For all these high-minded words, the lines between the parties involved could be papered over at most, but never erased. When the idea of an anti-Conscription summit had initially been mooted at Dublin Corporation, the Labour attendees believed that this was an attempt to ‘get the jump’ on Sinn Féin, considering how everyone else in the room were IPP partisans, and would only agree to the motion if Sinn Féin was also involved. Whether Sinn Féin would want to, however, was another question.

William O’Brien

“There appeared to be some considerable doubt as to whether they would or not,” wrote William O’Brien, one of the Labour men in question, “but finally they did. They feared they mightn’t favour the idea of working with the Irish Party.”[11]

Actually, many in Sinn Féin did not. When the Sinn Féin offices received the invitation to the Mansion House from Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the innovator of the idea, “shrewd were the glances cast at it, and long the discussions of its worth,” described Figgis (as one of Sinn Féin’s senior administrators, he would have been in a position to know). De Valera and Griffith, to which the letter had been addressed, were in favour of accepting “but it took the united effort of these two men to carry the proposal with the Executive Committee,” the concern being that Sinn Féin’s sense of self as the Irish government-in-waiting would be diluted by standing next to its hated rival.

(left to right) Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera, the President and one of the two Vice-Presidents of Sinn Féin respectively

De Valera even tried resorting to the suggestion that he and Griffith attend the Mansion House “as individuals, binding Sinn Fein in no way by their action,” an early display of the Long Fellow’s gift for creative ambiguity. Not that this impressed Figgis – “the suggestion was like a mathematical formula for which no practical correlative can be found – looking very real on paper, but equating with nothing real on fact” – even as he was supportive of de Valera’s stance, and cynical of the motives of the naysayers: “No doubt some of these considerations were moved by the desire for separate possession and power. Impure motives move obscurely in the sincerest of folk…Those impure motives moved more in some than in others” (as this text was published in 1927, its author may have had the bitterness over the Civil War more in mind).[12]

John Dillon, meanwhile, had tried talking himself out of the invite after receiving his own, believing that the ideal place to argue Ireland’s case remained in the debating-hall of Westminster – which would just happen to play into his party’s strengths, still possessing as it did the majority of Irish parliamentary seats. The suggestion from de Valera and Griffith to the Lord Mayor that the conference go ahead without Dillon was what probably pushed the IPP Chairman – Dillon had replaced the late John Redmond, who had died the previous month, in March – into accepting, lest his party be left out in the cold.

Laurence O’Neill, Lord Mayor of Dublin

“As I had summoned the conference,” O’Neill later explained, “I was in the chair and it took all the ingenuity I possessed to make a favourable start.” The national unanimity O’Shiel, Figgis and Healy took for granted had, in fact, been far from inevitable. Dillon, O’Neill observed in the Mansion House, was “solemn, and no doubt realised that the power of his party was diminishing, and that by attending the conference he was playing into the hands of Sinn Fein.”[13]

Of course, the IPP’s prestige had been declining for quite some time already; in attending, Dillon had had little choice when his prevarication failed. Plenty in Sinn Féin, likewise, felt pushed into acting against their party’s best interests. Nonetheless, “wise or unwise, the wish of the people left no alternative,” as Figgis baldly put it.[14]

Anti-Conscription rally

A Hollow Alliance

The RIC Inspector-General probably had his finger best on the political pulse. While the current furore over Conscription was enough to drive the two hitherto hostile factions, if not quite into each other’s arms, then at least to each other’s side, “the hollowness of the alliance is apparent in the refusal of either side to withdraw from the Election contest in East Cavan,” Byrne reported to Dublin Castle.[15]

Samuel Young

For, almost unnoticed beneath the clamour, the MP for the aforementioned area, Samuel Young, had died on the 18^th April, the same day as the Mansion House Conference. Having reached the venerable age of ninety-six years, Young had been the Methuselah, not just of the Irish Party but of the House of Commons as its oldest MP, a career defined more by its longevity than anything in particular – much like Young himself.

“Although he cannot be described as a great man,” the Freeman’s Journal admitted, “his life was a remarkable one,” the course of which had beheld:

…Five sovereigns on the British throne; he saw Belfast [his city of birth] grow from an thirty thousand people into a city of three hundred thousand; he saw the origin and growth of half a dozen movements in Ireland; he saw the happening of gigantic events in Europe and America; he saw the passing of legislation that transformed the face of this country and turned the Irish people from serfs into free men.

Young’s own contribution to history had been slight: a few public utterances in Westminster, two of the most notable being in regard to Home Rule, which, at least, was fitting enough, given his “deep convictions that Ireland under Home Rule would become a great, happy and contented country, and a strength to the Empire of which she forms a part…Ireland wants more of his kind” – so concluded the Freeman’s Journal in a heartfelt obituary.[16]

Whether Ireland felt the same was another matter, and what it wanted was about to be put to the test. Given the length of his public service, it would be seem somewhat perverse, if not outright cruel, that Young’s death would be regulated to practically a footnote in the other newspapers; nothing in his life, like the Thane of Cawdor, became him like the leaving of it. After twenty-six years of the same representative (Young having been continuously elected since 1892), East Cavan was due to decide on a new one, a contest which, for many, could not have come at a worst time: Nationalist Ireland looked set to tear itself apart all over again.

Archbishop William Walsh

No less an illustrious figure than the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr William Wash, confessed himself alarmed in a letter to O’Neill, on the 24^th April, at what he was reading in the papers about the prospect of yet another divisive by-election between the IPP and Sinn Féin. “If there is not perfect agreement on this point we are in for a hopeless situation,” warned His Eminence. “Can nothing be done? If nothing can be done to secure real unanimity, thousands who were heart and soul with the movement will have no option but to drop out.”[17]

It was a danger Edward Brady, the Justice of the Peace from Clones and the Chairman of the Urban District Council, also felt keenly in a letter of his own, published in the media on the 27^th April:

I earnestly appeal to the good sense and patriotism of the electors to see that in view of the present grave menace which overhangs our country, East Clare shall not endanger the national unity which now, thank God, exists. If a candidate acceptable to all Nationalists is not available better leave the vacancy untilled until the present danger is past.[18]

Some hope of that. On the same day that Brady’s plaintive plea was printed, the Nationality announced to the country that “Mr Arthur Griffith was unanimously selected at a Convention of Sinn Féin and the clergy of East Cavan on Sunday as candidate for the representation of that constituency” – as the newspaper in question was edited by none other than the candidate himself, this might as well have been an official press release from Sinn Féin. Unity or no unity, the gauntlet had just been thrown.[19]

Fait Accompli

Peadar Clancy

Given its aggressive attitude towards elections from the start, it was not surprising that Sinn Féin would refuse to be leashed when another such opportunity presented itself. “As the vacancies occur the same thing will happen everywhere throughout the country,” declared Peadar Clancy in a letter to his brother after the victory in South-Longford in May 1917, “until we have wiped out the Redmondites who had betrayed Ireland.” If to Clancy the democratic process was a weapon, then, for Griffith, it was simply good strategy. “There is no sort of propaganda and no way of educating the public to be compared with a contested election,” he told Eoin MacNeill when the latter was querying their expensive costs.[20]

Nonetheless, on this occasion, Griffith had every intention of staying out of this latest contest; that is, if we go by Figgis’ recounting of events. Backroom machinations were thus necessary to push the Sinn Féin founder, and currently one of its two vice-presidents, into the arena, even if it was against his will. Figgis, as the official in charge of the party administration, knew that the Sinn Féin branch in East Cavan had plumped for Griffith. Procedure was then for the name of the candidate to be placed before the Central Executive for approval.

But Figgis was also aware of the talks to put forward a neutral choice for East Cavan, which, he decided, would not do at all. Before boarding a train to Cashel, Co. Tipperary, Figgis sent a telegram to the party headquarters in Dublin, telling them to announce Griffith as Sinn Féin’s man for East Cavan. They were to do so in two days’ time, on Monday – notably, the Central Executive was due to meet the next day, on the Sunday, which Figgis was skipping in favour of Cashel – and a fact Figgis neglected to mention in his telegram, instead presenting Griffith’s selection as if it was already official policy.

Darrell Figgis

This lie of omission worked like a charm. By the time Figgis returned from Co. Tipperary on the Monday, the news was already in the press. Neither Griffith nor de Valera were thrilled with this development when Figgis met them in the party offices later that day, with Griffith going so far as to suggest that a statement be issued, pulling back from his nomination by clarifying that the Central Executive had not yet had the chance to consider it.

To this, Figgis, in a masterpiece of obfuscation:

…answered that this could be done, but it had to be remembered that the next day [Tuesday – 23^rd April] was the day of the National Strike against Conscription – when no papers would be published and when the entire nation would stand idle…No announcement could therefore be made before Wednesday. By that time the news would be belated, and the candidature of Arthur Griffith would have been confirmed by the relentless action of forty-eight hours.

“I suppose we will have to go through with it now,” Griffith replied after mulling over this latest twist, “and perhaps it is just as well” – at least, that was the general gist of what he said, as far as Figgis remembered.[21]

It’s a good story; perhaps a little too good – a biographer noted Figgis’ “tendency to exaggerate his own role” in his memoirs. In truth, Sinn Féin had everything to win by plunging ahead and little to gain by playacting at cooperation. Still, even afterwards, some gestures were attempted: at Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon, de Valera and John Dillon shared a platform in early May, speaking together against Conscription, followed by a similar event in Derry, this one attended by Figgis and Joe Devlin, the MP for West Belfast.

“Neither meeting was exactly a success,” wrote Figgis, “and they were not repeated.”[22]

Anti-Conscription demonstration, 1918

Fundamental Differences

Of other types of meetings, there were aplenty; too many in Liam de Róiste’s view. “In Cavan the situation in some respects was comical,” the Cork-based Sinn Féin official wrote at the time in his diary, “there were what we may term Sinn Féin meetings, Party meetings, combined meetings, ‘neutral’ meetings, election meetings, anti-conscription meetings.” Similarly absurd was the IPP’s pretensions: “They shout unity, unity, unity, with no real understanding of what unity means except we know unity to them means following in every particular the leadings of Dillon, Devlin and a few others.”

Because, besides Conscription, what common ground could the two parties share?

Take Cavan as example. Griffith stands for the Sovereign Independence of Ireland, for the right of the Irish Nation to control its own destinies in every [underlined in text] sphere, for the repudiation of England’s right to rule, denial of the English Parliament by not going there, the presentation of Ireland’s claim to independence before the Peace Conference.

In contrast:

His opponent evidently stands for Home Rule of some kind, which denies the other things, for bargaining with the English Government, for friendship between Ireland and England in English terms, for gaining to Westminster, and denial of the presentation of Ireland’s claim at the Peace Conference. In Griffith the claim of Ireland is a nation’s claim: to his opponent “the Irish question” is one of domestic politics within the United Kingdom.

As such, “there can be no unity on such fundamental differences. It could be achieved only by one side or the other abandoning their fundamental principles” – which clearly was not going to happen.[23]

T.M. Healy

For the other side, not just its principles was at stake but its very existence. “If the Sinn Feiners win Cavan, they will carry everything,” wrote T.M. Healy to his brother in early May. Though long estranged from the IPP, Healy still prided himself on keeping his ear to the ground, predicting that, while “in Cavan both candidates expect to win…I think the odds are on the Sinn Feiner” – after all, “nearly all the priests are on Griffith’s side.” The only honourable course left for his former colleagues would be to do nothing: “Dillon’s Party had a great chance of reviving their influence by standing aside in the Cavan election and letting Griffith be returned unopposed.”[24]

The IPP clearly shared the same doubts about its chances of winning; however, simply conceding the field to its threatened replacement was a surrender too far. No sooner had the Irish Party selected its own candidate, John F. O’Hanlon, at the Bailieborough Town Hall in late April, then the man of the hour tried negotiating his own retreat: if Griffith was to withdraw and allow the Lord Mayor of Dublin, renowned as an honest broker, to run instead, then he too would remove himself. The all-too-brief unity of before could be restored. O’Hanlon gave Sinn Féin three day to accept this, otherwise he would, without another moment’s delay, be treading on the tail of Griffith’s coat.[25]

O’Hanlon’s emollient gesture and defiant words could barely mask his party’s sense of vulnerability. Whether Sinn Féin gave his offer a second’s thought is unlikely; O’Neill, in any case, had decided to stay above the fray lest he risk his reputation as a peacemaker and a ‘friend to all’. “Many of the Party people are calling for a ‘neutral’ man – as if there is any man a neutral in Irish politics,” de Róiste noted scornfully.[26]

Dragging It Out

From the start, the difference in behaviour between the two sides was marked. “Up to the time of writing [1^st May] the Nationalist Party nominee (Mr O’Hanlon) has not yet started his campaign,” wrote the Irish Times correspondent in Cootehill. Save Sinn Féin, which was campaigning hard, “there is really nothing to lead one to believe that a keenly-contested election is about to be fought in East Cavan.” It took almost two weeks before the same newspaper could report that “it is now nearly certain that a contest will take place in East Cavan,” with a number of flags fluttering from houses – tricolours for Sinn Féin, the gold harp against green for the IPP – as if to signify that the contest was now finally on.

“Canvassing is being carried on by both parties, each of which expresses itself confident of success,” read the Irish Times on the 11^th May. “Everything is quiet for so far, and it is hoped that this state of affairs will continue.” Earlier, it had noted how “from the demeanour of the electors one can only gather that all would be grateful if a contest could be averted.”[27]

Figgis experienced this voter fatigue first-hand, attributing it to “a horror in Ireland of political divisions” dating back to the Parnell Split. ‘Factionist’ was the most common insult and accusation thrown Sinn Féin’s way at the start of its East Cavan campaign, and while its activists were unlikely to care, the electorate did, at least on this occasion, to judge from what Figgis was seeing:

In places where a few weeks before an election meeting would have brought forth a great hosting and resolute enthusiasm, now but a few came, and these few were silent and perturbed. They would have come in throngs to an anti-conscription meeting, but to a political meeting they would not.

Simply put: “The people did not want to hear of rival policies.”[28]

Another complication was the delay of the writ by the Irish Parliamentary Party, presumably in the “hope that some chance would avert from them a blow that could not help but be…of fatal consequence.” It was not until the 7^th June, weeks after Young’s death and the announcement of his two potential successors, that the Irish Times could announce the issuing of the writ, which “has had the effect of reviving interest in the East Cavan election” – as if the event was otherwise in danger of being forgotten.[29]

“This made the election an extremely long drawn-out and protracted one,” Kevin O’Shiel wrote with a sigh.[30]

‘The German Plot’

Procrastinating did the IPP no favours in the end, in O’Shiel’s opinion; to the contrary, it left the field of battle wide open for Sinn Féin workers like him to work the constituency, “giving us plenty of time to found new clubs, perfect our machinery and spread the new gospel by personal contact, meetings and the circulation of leaflets and pamphlets.” O’Shiel’s role was that of election supervisor for Ballyjamesduff, and there he remained for the better part of six weeks, performing work, as his title would indicate, “of a general supervisory character, co-ordinating and directing the work of the voluntary helpers in the area.”[31]

In contrast to Figgis’ memories of finding gloomy crowds and apathetic voters, O’Shiel’s own were such that, even years later, when putting them to paper, he seemed unsure as to whether future generations would quite believe him:

It is hard now to given an impression in words of those monster demonstrations that were such a feature of Sinn Féin in those early days of its career. They were enormous. It looked as though the entire population of neighbouring counties, men, women and children, had poured into the town for the day…The enthusiasm and fervour were intense, the very atmosphere appeared to be charged with exhilaration and high emotion. I have never experienced anything like it since, nor never shall.[32]

But it was never just about an election, nor merely a contest to see who would sit in a particular parliamentary seat. The bigger picture intruded in on the night of the 17^th May, when O’Shiel was woken in his lodgings at Ballyjamesduff. Told that the hotel was surrounded by British soldiers and Crown policemen, O’Shiel hurriedly dressed and went downstairs to where the local RIC sergeant was parleying with the proprietor in the hall.

John O’Mahoney

O’Shiel was safe. The Sinn Féiner the authorities wanted, one of many accused of complicity in the ‘German Plot’, was John O’Mahoney. The Dubliner (and future TD) was stirred from his bed in turn and appraised of the situation, which he took in good humour, the whole business being conducted in a civilised manner by everyone. Over in Dublin, the Sinn Féin headquarters had already been warned of the incoming sweep and were debating the proper course of action. Should they escape? Or resist? A third option was finally agreed on: they would accept their arrests, with an eye on the rest of the country, which was bound to be startled into indignation on Sinn Féin’s behalf.

“Moreover, the effect of such arrests on the East Cavan election would be to raise the issue there beyond all doubt,” wrote Figgis. With that settled, the Sinn Féin leaders were left to await their arrests in their own way. Figgis decided to return home, and even had time to have his wife pack his bag and prepare a meal. He was settling down to eat when the sound of footsteps on the stairs outside alerted him to the police detectives who had, as forewarned, come to take him away for his latest spell in an English prison.[33]

Sinn Féin election leaflet for East Cavan, comparing the imprisoned Arthur Griffith (in prison garb) with John Dillon pledging his loyalty to a British official (source: https://www.adams.ie/Arthur-Griffith-and-the-East-Cavan-Elections-A-very-good-collection-of-leaflets-issued-in-support-of-Arthur-Griffith-s-candidature-for-the-East-Cavan-parliamentary-seat-1918-including-Griffith-is-Our?view=lot_detail

Playing the Long Game?

Sinn Féin could not have planned the whole thing better itself. “How foolish and myopic they were!” recalled O’Shiel. “Far from doing us harm, the arrests increased the ardour of our workers and brought us many more converts” – not to mention sympathy for the absent candidate, as Griffith had been among those detained.[34]

John Dillon

John Dillon was all too aware of the advantage the British Government had just handed his rival. “Between their conscription policy and this coup they have put Sinn Fein on top in Ireland for the moment,” he wrote to C.P. Scott on the 21^st May, four days after the mass arrests. Which is not to say the IPP Chairman was giving up the struggle but it did make his efforts at resuscitating his party’s ailing fortunes all the harder.

“To sum up my view of the situation in Ireland,” Dillon wrote in another letter, this one to T.P. O’Connor, on the 17^th June, as East Cavan finally neared its climax:

We must look forward to six months at least of military rule and severe coercion. Whether it will be possible for us under such a regime, and with the extended franchise, to hold such a number of seats as would make it possible to carry on the party is doubtful. But it is quite conceivable that in six months, if the government do not commit some fresh atrocity, Ireland may have sobered down so much that we shall emerge from [the general] election with say 40 seats.

David Lloyd George

“That would do very well,” he concluded with a curious mix of fatalism and optimism. Notably, Dillon was not envisioning an Ireland dominated by Sinn Féin – a failure of imagination that says much about why the Home Rule cause came up short – instead, the villain of his narrative was the British Government, specifically its Prime Minister, who Dillon saw as “playing a very deep game, a game which necessitates the encouragement of S.F. up to a point sufficient to kill the parliamentary party.” Compared to the “immense skill and superb audacity” of Lloyd George, Sinn Féin was little more than a pawn, “being utterly devoid of political sagacity, and overwhelmed with poetic fervour and wild, unregulated enthusiasm.” As such, it was playing “right into the hands of L.G. [Lloyd George]” as part of the Prime Minister’s quest to provoke a confrontation in Ireland and justify the application of armed force.

Dillon kept this sort of conspiracy theory to himself and his correspondence circle. Publicly, instead, he kept the focus on the policy differences between his party and the other, returning to three general themes in his speeches to hammer at the opposition:

• The Sinn Féin policy of an independent, sovereign republic could only lead to a war with Britain that would be inevitably and bloodily lost.
• Such a policy, combined as it would be with a total abstention from Westminster, would be “a policy of lunatics.”
• Also, not only would this policy mean the end of the unity achieved at the Mansion House Conference, it was alienating opinion in America just when Ireland needed it to secure its rights at the post-war Peace Conference.

All the same, Dillon knew his struggle remained an uphill one, with one factor after another conspiring to stop the IPP from going anywhere. If not for Conscription fears and now the ‘German Plot’ arrests, “we had S.F. absolutely beaten,” he told O’Connor.[35]

A Close Contest?

In that, the IPP Chairman and O’Shiel the Sinn Féin activist were in agreement, if on little else:

For the first two weeks there was great doubt as to the result of the election. In my view, had the election occurred within that period, Griffith might well have been beaten. And, most certainly, had there been no threat of Conscription and no arrests, he would have been beaten.[36]

Piaras Béaslaí

Cavan was, after all, a Northern county, and O’Shiel knew from his Tyrone background how conservative and hard to uproot from past loyalties such areas could be: South Armagh and East Tyrone were proof of that. “The majority of the Ulster Catholics were still untouched by the national movement, which had taken such a grip on the rest of Ireland,” commented another Sinn Féin official, Piaras Béaslaí, on that point in time.[37]

That there were 57 Sinn Féin clubs in Cavan, with 3,573 members, was a sign that the party was making inroads, but against that – as estimated by the RIC report for May 1918 – were the clubs and membership numbers of the United Irish League (42 and 5,962 respectively) and the Ancient Order of Hibernians (45 and 3,254), two grassroots organisations long affiliated with the IPP. Even when accounting for a probable shared membership between the pair, there were still grounds for thinking that (1) the Irish Party could win, as it had three times already that year, (2) either way, the result would be a close one.[38]

“It is believed that the election will be closely contested, and that the majority will be small,” read the Irish Times on the 7^th June:

Both sides express themselves confident of success. The Sinn Féin supporters assert that their man will win by an overwhelming majority, and, on the other hand, the Nationalists say that Mr. O’Hanlon will head the poll with a majority of from 500 to 600.[39]

By the 21^st, the day after polling, “the general opinion…was that Mr Griffith had won by a couple of hundred votes.”[40]

Ireland’s Answer

Liam de Róiste

Such reports were enough to soothe Liam de Róiste’s nerves a little, though he remained “somewhat impatient and a little nervous” as he recorded in his diary. So much hinged on East Cavan: if Sinn Féin won, the British state would be sent reeling; if not, then the cell doors on the imprisoned men were staying shut, probably for a very long time.[41]

Not that would be the end of things, if a gratifying exchange de Róiste had heard about was anything to go by. A priest at the same convent school in Kinsale, Co. Cork, de Róiste taught at was testing his pupils’ knowledge of Irish history. All had heard of the Battle of Clontarf, one of the few occasions Ireland could claim to have won. Similarly, everyone in the class knew who Éamon de Valera was when the padre asked about him.

They were not so certain when he followed up with which battle de Valera fought, but one small girl proved equal to the task:

Éamon de Valera, in the uniform of the Irish Volunteers

Girl: The Battle of Dublin, Father.

Priest: When was it fought?

Girl: Easter 1916, Father.

Priest: And who won?

Girl: It isn’t over yet, Father.

Priest: What! Is de Valera fighting yet?

Girl: Yes, Father.

Priest: Where is he fighting?

Girl: In jail, Father![42]

De Róiste was taking tea after his classes at the convent school when, at 6.40 pm, news of East Cavan reached him. Instead of the slim majority some had been predicting for Sinn Féin, Griffith, as it turned out, had won by 1,214 votes, his 3,785 to O’Hanlon’s 2,581. Yet another IPP stronghold had been stormed and in the supposedly impregnable North to boot. “That is better by a great deal than expected, better than the most optimistic estimate,” de Róiste wrote triumphantly. “There is Ireland’s answer to Lloyd George and his Plot. There is Ireland’s answer to ‘the Party’.”[43]

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’, 15th June 11918. The caption read: “Mr. John Dillon, M.P., has endeavoured by his speeches to fill the ‘Slop’ Pail of Lloyd George to overflowing with his Fables and Fictious [sic] about the Sinn Fein leaders who have ousted him from popular favour. The dying U.I.L. [United Irish League, the IPP’s grassroots organisation] is endeavouring at the last moment to add a dirty bird from Cavan to the contents.”

“Arthur Griffith, Sinn Fein leader and deportee, was elected M.P. for East Cavan by a majority of 1,200 votes over the Nationalist [IPP] candidate,” went the RIC summary for the month. Despite the magnitude of the result, and its long-term implications, the Inspector General was primarily concerned about the immediate aftermath, mentioning that there were “some disturbances here and there, but on the whole it caused less excitement than previous Sinn Fein victories.” Likewise, the County Inspector report offered little comment, save that “all excitement has since died down.”[44]

But, of course, the excitement was only just beginning.

Cartoon from the ‘Roscommon Herald’ on the 29th June 1918. The caption reads: “With his fiction about a German ‘Plot,’ the Pasteboard Cromwell, Mr. Lloyd George, gasses poor, doddering John Dillon, while his Cavan Defeated lies at his feet. ‘Pasteboard’ fancies once more that the way is again clear for Irish Conscription.”

References

[1] Tyrone Courier, 12/04/1918

[2] O’Shiel, Kevin (BMH / WS 1770, Part 6), p. 9

[3] McGuill, James (BMH / WS 353), p. 46-9, 52-3

[4] Police reports from Dublin Castle records (National Library of Ireland – NLI), POS 8546

[5] Meleady, Dermot (ed.) John Redmond: Selected Letters and Memoranda, 1880-1918 (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2018), pp. 211, 269

[6] Ibid, p. 270

[7] Irish Times, 08/05/1917, 11/05/1917

[8] Meleady, p. 212

[9] Irish Times, 11/05/1917

[10] O’Shiel, pp. 14-6 ; Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927]), p. 195 ; Healy, T.M. Letters and Leaders of My Day, Volume II (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, [1928]), p. 596

[11] O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Fourth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited 1969), pp. 163-4

[12] Figgis, pp. 192-4

[13] Morrissey, Thomas J. Laurence O’Neill (1864-1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917-1924) Patriot and Man of Peace (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2014), p. 109

[14] Figgis, p. 193

[15] NLI, POS 8546

[16] Freeman’s Journal, 19/04/1918

[17] NLI, Laurence O’Neill Papers, MS 35,294/3/3

[18] Anglo-Celt, 27/04/1918

[19] Nationality, 27/04/1918

[20] McCarthy, Dan. Ireland’s Banner County: Clare from the Fall of Parnell to the Great War, 1890-1918 (Ennis: Saipan Press, 2002, p. 146 ; MacNeill, Eoin (ed. by Hughes, Brian) Eoin MacNeill: Memoir of a Revolutionary Scholar (2016: Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin), p. 94

[21] Figgis, pp. 202-5

[22] Ibid, p. 201 ; William, Murphy. ‘Figgis, Darrell’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Accessed on 14/03/2023)

[23] ‘6 Feb – 17 May 1918’, Liam de Róiste Diaries Online, Cork City Council (Accessed on 01/08/2022), pp. 149, 152-3 [PDF pages]

[24] Healy, pp. 596-7

[25] Irish Times, 27/04/1918

[26] Morrissey, pp. 114-5 ; de Róiste, p. 150

[27] Irish Times, 01/05/1918, 11/05/1918

[28] Figgis, pp. 205-6

[29] Ibid, p. 206 ; Irish Times, 07/06/1918

[30] O’Shiel, p. 29

[31] Ibid, pp. 29-30

[32] Ibid, p. 32

[33] Ibid, pp. 35-6 ; Figgis, pp. 210-3

[34] O’Shiel, p. 37

[35] Lyons, F.S.L. John Dillon: A Biography (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1968), pp. 439-41

[36] O’Shiel, p. 37

[37] Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, Volume I (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008), p. 117

[38] NLI, POS 8546

[39] Irish Times, 07/06/1918

[40] Ibid, 21/06/1918

[41] ‘17 May – 13 July 1918’, Liam de Róiste Diaries Online, Cork City Council (Accessed on 01/08/2022), p. 44

[42] Ibid, p. 40

[43] Ibid, p. 45 ; election results in Irish Times, 22/06/1918

[44] NLI, POS 8546

Bibliography

Newspapers

Anglo-Celt

Freeman’s Journal

Irish Times

Nationality

Roscommon Herald (cartoons)

Tyrone Courier

Books

Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008)

Figgis, Darrell. Recollections of the Irish War (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927)

Healy, T.M. Letters and Leaders of My Day, Volume II (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, [1928])

Lyons, F.S.L. John Dillon: A Biography (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1968)

MacNeill, Eoin (ed. by Hughes, Brian) Eoin MacNeill: Memoir of a Revolutionary Scholar (2016: Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin)

McCarthy, Dan. Ireland’s Banner County: Clare from the Fall of Parnell to the Great War, 1890-1918 (Ennis, Co. Clare: Saipan Press, 2002)

Meleady, Dermot (ed.) John Redmond: Selected Letters and Memoranda, 1880-1918 (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2018)

Morrissey, Thomas J. Laurence O’Neill (1864-1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917-1924) Patriot and Man of Peace (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2014)

O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Forth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited, 1969)

Bureau of Military History Statements

McGuill, James, WS 353

O’Shiel, Kevin, WS 1770

National Library of Ireland Collections

Laurence O’Neill Papers

Police Report from Dublin Castle Records

Online Sources

Dictionary of Irish Biography

Liam de Róiste Diaries

Making War Out of Peace: Limerick as a Battleground in the Civil War, July 1922 (Part II)

A continuation of: Making Peace Out of War: The Limerick Stand-Off and the Escalation of Treaty Tensions, March 1922 (Part 1)

A Man for the World

Few personalities impacted the Civil War as much as Liam Lynch’s, to the point that it could be argued that the victory of the Free State and the defeat of the Republican cause was built on it. Contemporaries seemed to recognise this, hence the number of opinions ventured on the question of who Lynch was and what motivated him.

Liam Lynch

To Dan Breen, his fellow Anti-Treatyite “was an absolute dreamer and an idealist. He wasn’t a man for the world. A monastery was his place.” When Dublin fell to the National Army of the Free State, with the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) failing to muster any sort of counterattack on the capital, Breen was convinced that the war was as good as lost, and told his Chief of Staff so. But Lynch, to Breen’s frustration, refused to pay heed, which Breen blamed on the other man’s “very strong Catholic upbringing and he was stuck with it. He didn’t understand compromise.”[1]

Which was not quite fair; Lynch had spent a good deal of time in the months leading up the Civil War trying to accomplish just that – a compromise – even if it put him at odds with the rest of the IRA Executive. Lynch might have been their Chief of Staff but that did not in itself instil respect in ‘hardliners’ who dismissed Lynch, Liam Deasy and other ‘moderate’ members as “well intentioned but failing in our stand to maintain the Republic.” To Deasy, such accusations stung, especially since “we felt that our policy was consistent and meaningful.”[2]

Michael Brennan

Even a foe like Michael Brennan, a general in the National Army, could recognise Lynch’s positive qualities: “Very attractive, of unquestionable courage, the kind of man who gets others to follow him.” Having said that, Brennan, like Breen, also thought Lynch as someone not quite cut out for the rough and tumble of the real world, “an innocent sort of man.” He did not, however, equate innocence with harmlessness, nor assume that Lynch’s attempts at negotiations with Brennan in Limerick, in July 1922, were anything other than self-serving. In doing so, Lynch only sought “a free hand to overrun the country and wreck the Treaty, in spite of the people.” For all the worthy talk, Brennan did not believe the enemy Chief of Staff “had the slightest intention of ending this ‘fratricidal strife’ except on the basis of imposing his views on his opponents.”[3]

And Lynch would succeeded in doing so had he won in Limerick, for the city, in Brennan’s professional opinion, was key. “The whole Civil War really turned on Limerick,” he told historian Calton Younger, years later. “The Shannon was the barricade and whoever held Limerick held the south and the west.”[4]

In that, if little else, he and Lynch were in full agreement. “If Limerick is won it will take us a long way to upholding of [the] Republic,” he wrote to a subordinate on the 15^th July 1922, as the long-stalled fighting finally broke out there.[5]

Limerick City

National Peace and Unity?

How Lynch intended to win the city was to vary with the circumstances. When he entered it at the start of July 1922, coming from Cashel with troops from his Cork IRA brigades, he had assumed – with the optimism that, as Deasy put, “ruled his life to the end” – he would not have to ‘win’ Limerick at all. That the place was not entirely his for the taking, with pro-Treaty forces still in possession of certain areas, was a surprise to him. Nonetheless, he set about occupying sites of his own, first the New Barracks, followed by the Strands Barracks, Castle Barracks and the Ordnance Barracks.

Liam Deasy

By the time Deasy joined him, Lynch was – true to form – confident that the opposition, in the form of the East Clare and East Limerick Brigades under Generals Brennan and Donnchadh O’Hannigan respectively, would be driven out in good time. Deasy could not see how this could be done and returned to his headquarters in Mallow, Co. Cork, with a heavy heart, hoping that some other way could be found to bloodlessly resolve things.[6]

Considering how anti-Treaty outposts in Dublin had been pounded with artillery only days before, that hope could not have seemed a very likely one. And so, it must have been with some surprise when Anti and Pro-Treatyites alike read the agreement Lynch and O’Hannigan had put their names to on the 4^th July 1922:

1. O’Hannigan will not at any time attack Executive [anti-Treaty IRA] forces, and the Executive forces likewise will not attack those of the former.
2. Executive forces will not occupy any of the East Limerick Brigade’s territory.
3. Both sides will only occupy their normal number of posts in Limerick City.
4. That there is to be no movement of armed troops in Limerick City or East City except by liaison arrangement.
5. O’Hannigan will withdraw any of his troops moved into Limerick City.

These terms were to come into effect by midnight. Though no time-limit was given, the aspiration that not only would these be lasting but would make a difference beyond Limerick, was clearly stated:

We agree to these conditions in the practical certainty that National peace and unity will eventuate from our efforts and we guarantee to use every means in our power to get this peace.[7]

Seán Moylan

‘Peace’ was the last thing on the minds of some. “There is no use in fooling with this question any longer,” Seán Moylan told Deasy impatiently on the 6^th July, two days later, urging him to dispatch reinforcements to Limerick from the Kerry and Cork brigades. “Send on the men and let us get on with the war.” Though less direct in his approach, Seán Hyde was of a similar mind, warning Deasy that “if we don’t taken them on today, we’ll have to take them on tomorrow.”[8]

Had it had been Ernie O’Malley in charge, as before in March 1922, when a very similar situation unfolded in the same city, Moylan and Hyde would not have needed to ask. But Lynch was from a very different mould than the hot-headed O’Malley and, besides, he was not burdened with a divided command this time. O’Malley was preoccupied in Dublin, Séumas Robinson with Tipperary, while two others who had contrived to frustrate Lynch’s peace-making plans at every turn, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Tom Barry, were cooling their heels behind bars. For once, Lynch had control of the anti-Treaty IRA all to himself, and he was going to do things his way.

Officers of the First Southern Division outside the Mansion House, Dublin, in early 1922 (Liam Lynch fourth from the left, Liam Deasy to his right)

Poker Face

Which could not have suited Brennan and O’Hannigan more.

Even beforehand, during the first showdown in Limerick in March 1922, the Pro-Treatyites had been stymied by the poor quality of their troops and the limited resources at their disposal; indeed, it is debatable as to whether the decision to withdraw from the city rather than fight it out with the Anti-Treatyites had been motivated more by pragmatism than pacifism. Four months later and Brennan’s situation had changed not by much. Raw recruits made up the bulk of his army, with no more than two hundred rifles between them.

Brennan could at least take advantage of his counterpart’s negligence. Lynch had overlooked the Athlunkard Bridge, allowing Brennan to secure it instead. After setting up headquarters in Cruises Hotel, Brennan established a line of posts that covered the route to the bridge. Most of the Pro-Treatyites stationed at these were unarmed, forcing them to make a display of what few arms they did have, even using lead pipes to fool hostile onlookers into thinking they had Lewis machine-guns.

As if this was not enough, Brennan managed to pull off an especially elaborate hoax. He began transporting more of his men from Ennis, Co. Clare, fifty at a time all armed with rifles. They would step off the train at Long Pavement, just across the river from Limerick, and be marched over the Athlunkard Bridge into the city. The rifles would be taken off the men and driven back by lorry to Long Pavement, where they were handed to the next batch of fifty arrivals. Brennan managed to pull this ruse several times over a couple of days.

Athlunkard Bridge, Limerick

Meanwhile, Brennan was impatiently waiting for the supplies of armaments from Dublin that he desperately needed. Looming large in his mind was the fear, as he later recalled, “that Lynch would attack me before they turned up, because we couldn’t last.” Since Anti-Treatyites had the numbers and the weapons in their favour, it was essential to use the talks with Lynch to keep his army from overrunning theirs.

“We met,” said Brennan, “and we met, altogether about a dozen times. We used to meet in the presbytery of the Augustinian church, and we argued and argued.”

Prevaricating was about the only card he could play. Except for Clare, South Galway and certain parts of Limerick, most of the South and the West were in the hands of the Anti-Treatyites. If they were to take Limerick too, then there would be nothing stopping Lynch from concentrating his forces on Dublin, where the fighting hung in the balance. At best, this would mean prolonged fighting in the capital, to be followed by the need to conquer Munster and Connaught from scratch. At worst, it would be the defeat and death of the Free State.[9]

‘A Very Grave Danger of Disaster’

Given how tenuous their position was, in Limerick and elsewhere, it was hardly surprising that morale amongst the Pro-Treatyites was “extremely low”, as Diarmuid MacManus found. “All ideas centred on (a) How best an attack from the enemy could be postponed or avoided by compromise and agreement, and (b) How long we could…hold out when besieged,” he wrote in his report to GHQ on the 7^th July. That the initiative and the odds lay with the Anti-Treatyites seemed to be a given.[10]

IRA men

MacManus was a new arrival to Limerick and, for Brennan and O’Hannigan, a not entirely welcome one, despite being on the same side. For one, he had been sent from Dublin on behalf of Eoin O’Duffy, their Chief of Staff, who was alarmed at what he was hearing about the rapprochement between his two generals and Lynch. Brennan and O’Hannigan, he feared, were going soft. “O’Duffy, as he was inclined to do, had jumped to conclusions,” MacManus told Younger, years later. “I imagined that he had far more information than he did, because I found when I got down there that things were not as dangerous as he had led me to believe.”[11]

Donnchadh O’Hannigan

In fact, MacManus at the time was as concerned as his Chief of Staff that something in Limerick was awry. “Lynch seems to have established an influence over him by soft words,” he said of Brennan in his report to Dublin. O’Hannigan, on the other hand, “is not fooled, and is the brightest spot in the situation.” Either way, MacManus shared the other officers’ fears for their vulnerability in the city. “Unless Rifles and armoured cars can arrive within 24 hours of now 10 a.m. 6/7/22,” he warned GHQ, “we will be in very grave danger of disaster.”[12]

By the end of the twenty-four hours, the requested guns and military vehicles had yet to materialise, the Free State having enough difficulty as it was keeping itself together. Neither had disaster occurred, though not from any help on MacManus’ part. The first thing he had done when arriving in Limerick, on the 5^th July, was cancel the arrangement with the Anti-Treatyites. Neither Brennan nor O’Hannigan had the authority to enter into anything of the sort, he informed Lynch. There would be no more meetings between the two sides.

With that said, MacManus left Limerick for another assignment in Clare, leading Brennan and O’Hannigan to pick up the pieces. For Brennan, it was a shock to learn that his superiors in Dublin had been as bamboozled as the Anti-Treatyites in Limerick, to the point that the former “assumed that I was getting out, that I wasn’t going to support the Treaty any longer.”[13]

Free State soldiers

Either way, it did not alter the situation at hand in Limerick or lesson its danger. Knowing their combined forces were still in no state to be slugging it out, both Free State generals agreed between them on a slightly different strategy, with a new piece of paper to sign. “It was a much less specific document than the first had been,” as described by Younger. “Indeed, it was a rather odd document altogether.” Likewise, another historian, Gerald Shannon, has called it “vague and muddled in detail.”

The Second Agreement

Nonetheless, it did not lack for a certain ambition. If the first agreement was little more than a drawing of a line between the two sides in Limerick, then this one called for a conference of the divisional commandant, to be attended by:

Anti-Treaty –

• First Southern (Liam Lynch)
• Second Southern (Séumas Robinson).
• First Western (the parts under Frank Barrett).

Pro-Treaty –

• Fourth Southern (Donnchadh O’Hannigan)
• First Western (the parts under Michael Brennan).
• First Midlands Command (Seán Mac Eoin).

Seán Mac Eoin

This conclave was to be held as soon as Mac Eoin, then based in Athlone, was available. He was another Free Stater the anti-Treaty command hoped to keep neutral and neutralised, so bringing him together with Brennan and O’Hannigan must have seemed like a chance to secure two birds with one stone. What was hoped specifically to be achieved was not stated in the document, signed by both factions on the 7^th July, only that, in the event of the failure to reach a consensus, Brennan and O’Hannigan were to hand in their resignations, implying that the liability lay on them. The Anti-Treatyites, in other words, would be going in as the stronger party.

With that in mind, the details, or lack of, matter less than what it all represented: the negotiated submission of the Pro-Treatyites involved. No wonder Lynch appeared distinctly relaxed when talking again with Brennan and O’Hannigan (MacManus prohibition against further such pow-wows not being heeded). When Brennan asked what would happen if Mac Eoin refused or failed to come (after all, no one had thought to consult Mac Eoin on the matter beforehand), an unruffled Lynch replied that they would worry only if it came to it.[14]

Stephen O’Mara

Another measure of Lynch’s self-assurance was his letter of reply to Stephen O’Mara, the long-suffering Lord Mayor of Limerick, on the 8^th July, the day after the second agreement. With civil authority at a standstill in his city, the Lord Mayor was wise enough to know who to turn to for assistance – and who held the power. Any commandeered supplies of no military value were to be returned, Lynch promised O’Mara, and while “as you weel [sic] know I cannot guarantee immediate payment for all stores retained but will see that a receipt is given for every article commandeered by us.” O’Mara’s proposal for a few IRA pickets to assist with policing would be considered; in the meantime, “I would recommend closing of Publichouses at 7 p.m. each evening and until further notice, in this I will actively co-operate.”

Clearly, Lynch was not expecting trouble anytime soon, particularly:

Now that Free State forces are evacuating Posts and removing Barricades, I have issued orders and our Posts will be evacuated by the time you receive this note. Evacuation would have been carried out up to time – 9 p.m. last evening [7^th July] – were it not for other side holding up same.[15]

The note of petulance did not mar what was otherwise – to Lynch – a very promising start to the end of the war – and on his terms, no less. During their negotiations, he displayed nothing but the utmost self-confidence mixed with paternalistic concern. “His whole case was that we hadn’t the remotest chance of winning now and, as nothing could be gained by further bloodshed, could we not agree to stop it,” Brennan remembered.[16]

‘The Best of the Matter’

Oscar Traynor

It was not just their Chief of Staff: many others in the anti-Treaty IRA command were likewise flush with premature victory. “Generally speaking we are having the best of the matter, and things are settling down to real business,” Con Moloney, the Adjutant General, relayed to Oscar Traynor on the 9^th July. “I expect we will control say from the Shannon to Carlow in a day or two.”

Key to this winning strategy was the Limerick détente, giving them as it did:

…a very considerable military advantage as with a comparatively small number of troops held up at Limerick, we have been able to ensure that at least 3,000 of F.S troops are also held up. Had we to fight in Limerick our forces that are in Limerick would not only be held there for at least 10 days, but we wouldn’t be in a position to re-enforce Wexford-New Ross area.[17]

Ernie O’Malley

Two days later, the battle of Limerick began, sweeping such upbeat predictions aside. Lynch never saw it coming. “O’Hannigan and Brennan Divs. are adopting a neutral attitude,” Lynch wrote to O’Malley in Dublin, the day before, on the 10^th July. “That is glorious, if they stand by their signatories.” If proved to be the operative word.[18]

Of course, to hear Brennan tell it afterwards, neither he nor O’Hannigan had any such intention. As soon as a convoy laden with long-awaited munitions arrived from Dublin on the morning of the 11^th June, Brennan sent Lynch a polite note that the truce was off, and that was that. While he had never thought of Lynch as particularly brilliant, even Brennan was surprised at how easily the enemy Chief of Staff had been foxed.[19]

Years later, upon bitter reflection, some of Lynch’s subordinates would be even more contemptuous. “Liam Lynch and his bloody Truce ruined us in the Civil War,” said Frank Bumstead, while Mick Sullivan deplored the overall “’incompetence” and lack of a “military man between the whole lot of us.” More evenly, but just as damning, Seán MacSwiney pointed to “the honesty of purpose of our leaders and their belief in the honesty of purpose of the enemy” for the failure in Limerick. “Time was needed by the enemy,” MacSwiney wrote dolefully. “To gain time they gave pledge which they broke when it suited their purpose.”[20]

All accurate observations, but ones made far too late.

At the time, there was still no cause for despair or recrimination. The report on the situation, dated to the 11^th July, and titled ‘Breaking of the Second Agreement’, coolly summed up the events of the day:

1.  At 3:30 pm, reports came in that the Free Staters were re-erecting barricades and occupying again posts they previously vacated.
2. Two armoured cars and one steel-plated lorry was seen at the William Street Barracks, the main base of the enemy.
3. Republican troops were ordered accordingly to occupy points of vantage not already claimed by the Pro-Treatyites.
4. 5:30 – the anti-Treaty-held Ordnance Barracks came under fire from the direction of the William Street Barracks. This was the start of the fighting.
5. 6:35 – information came that a pro-Treaty troop train had left Ennis for Limerick.
6. 7:45 – a Free State sentry was fatally shot while attempt to disarm an anti-Treaty soldier in Roches Street.
7. Firing is continuing in various parts of the city.[21]

Armoured vehicle with Free State soldiers

“The second agreement reached at Limerick has been broken by the enemy,” Moloney informed O’Malley on the 13^th July. “This [is] rather unfortunate at the moment as it has the effect of hold up operations against Kilkenny and Wexford-Enniscorthy Area.” Still, not to worry, was the message: “Fighting is going on in Limerick City at present and we have been able to maintain our lines of communication.”[22]

No Man’s Land

The city’s inhabitants were unlikely to be feeling quite as calm and collected. Tony McMahon remembered from his boyhood how “the area around St Joseph Street, Edward Street, Bowman Street and Wolfe Tone Street was a veritable no man’s land.” Caught between an anti-Treaty-held New Barracks and a Free State sniper atop a church tower, “the people were unable to get out to buy food and provisions,” necessitating the Anti-Treatyites to set up an emergency food depot in St Joseph Street.

“The bulk of the foodstuffs, flour, sugar, bacon and tea, were brought to the depot each morning by the troops,” according to McMahon. “There was enough for everyone and there were no complaints.”[23]

Free State soldiers in Limerick, July 1922

Lynch had by then withdrawn from Limerick, leaving affairs there in the hands of his subordinates. A report to him by Seán Hyde, Assistant Director of Intelligence, on the 13^th July, alluded to these efforts, as well as expressing the fear that famine was a looming inevitability regardless:

The city in another day or two will be in a starving condition as the bread supply is completely cut away. We, however, are doing our best to supply the civil population without running the risk of letting the food supply fall into the hands of the enemy.

As for the military situation, Hyde wrote with a sanguinity Lynch would have been proud of:

Firing today is not so severe as it was yesterday. The Republicans continue to advance and hem in the enemy. The [IRA-held] Strands Barracks is pretty hard pressed but is sticking it splendidly…On the arrival of further reinforcements and ammunition we will guarantee good results.[24]

Seán Hyde

By the following day, the 14^th, the conflict had escalated enough for Hyde to inform Lynch that “the situation in Limerick at the moment is such that fierce fighting along the whole front will be the order in the near future.” He had already suggested to Deasy, O/C of the First Southern Division, that he move some troops from his Cork and Tipperary units to clear the Free State out of Limerick, both the city and county, in their entirety, a feat Hyde did not believe would take more than a day or two. After all, “with regard to the manouvering of the enemy troops, they seem to lack leadership….If we could get them on the run at all, it would be an impossibility to rally them.”

Almost as an aside, he added: “From a reliable source we have information that the enemy has artillery in town. I cannot understand why it is not being used.”[25]

The pressure was clearly starting to get to the Assistant Director of Intelligence when he wrote the following day, on the 15^th July, from the New Barracks. Hyde began by apologising for not sending the previous report even sooner as:

Really there has been a terrible rush on here since the fight started. The barrack staff have all gone out on operations, with the result that the two of us who are left here, are so muddled with calls from anywhere and everywhere that we can scarcely concentrate on anything in particular for a minute.[26]

Otherwise, little had changed – or would do so two days later in his next report, on the 17^th. Both armies still held their own positions, with little progress made either way, despite how “our men continue advancing steadily, digging their way forward, but refraining from firing till the whole line is in a position to burst.” Hyde seemed satisfied with this ‘slow but steady’ approach for the moment; it was the city’s population that more concerned him: “The food question for the civil population here is becoming a very serious question.” Hyde proposed that provisions be brought in, possibly from Cork, and possibly by train.[27]

Civilians in Limerick during the conflict (source: https://www.whytes.ie/art/1922-23-limerick-civil-war-press-photographs/135768/?SearchString=&LotNumSearch=&GuidePrice=&OrderBy=LH&ArtistID=&ArrangeBy=list&NumPerPage=30&offset=209

There is no indication in the replies to him that the food issue was ever considered, let alone acted on, by the rest of the IRA command. Indeed, even his request for reinforcements came up against a wall of blithe unconcern. “I consider there are already sufficient armed men in Limerick City,” the Chief of Staff replied on the 18^th. It was classic Lynch: he had been underestimating the other side and overestimating his own from the start.[28]

The Blame Game

Two days later, it was all over. The artillery Hyde had heard about finally make its presence felt as well as known when, on the morning of the 20^th, the Free Staters aimed such a gun at the Strand Barracks and blew in the front gate as well as a hole through the wall large enough for a horse and carriage to enter. The twenty-three men inside had surrendered by 8 pm. That was enough for the remaining Anti-Treatyites: a string of cars drove out of the city around midnight, under the cover of darkness, signalling at last the surrender of Limerick to the Free State.

18-pounder, of the type used in the Civil War, on display at the National Museum of Ireland (source: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Collection/Soliders-Chiefs-online-gallery/Artefact/18-pounder-field-gun/546ac9d2-7612-4b51-9871-2c182d86175f)

Nonetheless, this was a retreat, not a rout: a rear-guard kept up covering volleys of machine gun and rifle-fire up to the last hour. Half an hour after midnight, two or three explosions ripped through the gate of the New Barracks, courtesy of a detonated mine. So strong was the blast that debris were hurled into the nearby streets, tearing the roofs off houses. As if that was not enough, two hours later, huge columns of smoke were seen billowing out from two separate locations, the New and Ordnance Barracks, and then the Castle Barracks, the flames beneath lighting up the night sky. In what would become their modus operandi, the Anti-Treatyites had set their three evacuated strongholds ablaze in order to deny the victors those gains.[29]

Remains of the Strands Barracks

Had flight been necessary, or defeat inevitable? To Deasy, Lynch’s order to fall back had been entirely sensible: “He must have realised the futility of opposing artillery in street fighting.” Interestingly, Con Moloney, when writing to O’Malley five days later, on the 25^th July, did not mention the enemy ordnance at all, instead attributing the loss to an imbalance of numbers: “The enemy moral was very low; things were going our own way, until enemy re-enforcements simply powered in.”[30]

Tom Kelleher

While this might have been an attempt to put a brave face on an unhappy situation, another IRA combatant believed that failure could have been avoided altogether. “In Limerick we had plenty of good fighters. The Staters were not numerous,” Tom Kelleher told historian Uinseann MacEoin, in a contradiction of Moloney’s statement. “Yet attacks were not pressed when they could have been.” The failings at the top was what lost Limerick, not the men in the streets, in Kelleher’s view. Even years later, the controversy remained a live one amongst the Anti-Treatyites. “[Kelleher] blames Deasy and Lynch – I am not sure,” said Connie Neenan. “The Staters there were far better organised and in greater numbers.”

For Neenan, abandoning Limerick could not be faulted as a decision, not when the Pro-Treatyites “enfiladed fire at us from the buildings and from across the river. We were in a tight situation. In the end we had no chance against them.” The indignity instead lay with how the withdrawal had been conducted, with the men forced to fend for themselves, bereft of support and even food. By the time Neenan left, being among the last to go as part of the rear-guard, he was so hungry that he had stooped to stealing a loaf of bread. “You would think that we had never heard of Napoleon’s dictum – an army marches on its stomach,” he grumbled. When Neenan reached the town of Buttevant in North Cork that morning, “we felt hopelessly disillusioned and disheartened.”[31]

Neenan was not alone, for Limerick left a sour taste in many a mouth, even the winners’. Having held the line for so long, Brennan was shocked when Eoin O’Duffy arrived and, instead of the expected praise, openly questioned the loyalties of the former’s officers – in front of them, no less, leaving the men who had won Limerick for the Free State close to mutiny.[32]

Eoin O’Duffy

They at least had a victory to conciliate their bruised pride. The Anti-Treatyites, on the other hand, were left with only a defeat and the sinking feeling that more were to come. The knock-on effect of the city’s loss was soon felt. East Limerick had looked ready to be conquered, Moloney told O’Malley, but “owing to the evacuation of Limerick by our Forces, the enemy in E[ast] Limerick area got a new lease of life.” Likewise, the IRA in the west of Ireland “will be pretty hard hit now that the enemy are free in Limerick.”[33]

And this was to be just the start. Lynch’s grand plan for victory was rapidly unravelling, and his dreams of a bloodless one mercilessly eviscerated by reality.

References

[1] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970), p. 378

[2] Deasy, Liam, Brother Against Brother (Cork: Mercier Press, 1998), p. 40

[3] Younger, pp. 374-5

[4] Ibid, p. 370

[5] University College Dublin (UCD) Archives, Moss Twomey Papers, P69/28(108)

[6] Deasy, pp. 54, 58-9, 64-5

[7] UCD, Twomey Papers, P69/28(242)

[8] Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: A History of the Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), p. 149

[9] Younger, pp. 370-2

[10] Hopkinson, p. 147

[11] Younger, p. 373

[12] Hopkinson, p. 147

[13] Younger, pp. 373-5

[14] Ibid, p. 374 ; Shannon, Gerald. Liam Lynch: To Declare a Republic (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2023), p. 200

[15] UCD, Twomey Papers, P69/28(172)

[16] Ibid, p. 373

[17] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), p. 43

[18] O’Malley, p. 45

[19] Younger, pp. 374-5

[20] Hopkinson, p. 149

[21] UCD, Twomey Papers, P69/28(157)

[22] O’Malley, p. 52

[23] Óg Ó Ruairc, Pádraig. The Battle for Limerick City (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Mercier Press, 2010), p. 86

[24] UCD, Twomey Papers, P69/28(141)

[25] Ibid (129-30)

[26] Ibid (107)

[27] Ibid (104)

[28] Ibid (93)

[29] Limerick Chronicle, 25/07/1922

[30] Deasy, p. 65 ; O’Malley, p. 70

[31] MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), pp. 230, 245

[32] Younger, pp. 382-3

[33] O’Malley, pp. 70-1

Bibliography

Books

Deasy, Liam. Brother Against Brother (Cork: Mercier Press, 1998)

Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004)

MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

Óg Ó Ruairc, Pádraig. The Battle for Limerick City (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Mercier Press, 2010)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007)

Shannon, Gerald. Liam Lynch: To Declare a Republic (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2023)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970)

University College Dublin Archives

Moss Twomey Papers

Newspaper

Limerick Chronicle

Making Peace Out of War: The Limerick Stand-Off and the Escalation of Treaty Tensions, March 1922 (Part I)

Manning the Barricade

Michael Brennan

Twice in five months, in 1922, Limerick was the fulcrum on which the rest of Ireland balanced, hovering between one possible outcome and the other; in both cases, between war and peace. The first time, in March, it tilted one way; come July, the other. Michael Brennan had no doubts as to the city’s importance. “The whole Civil War really turned on Limerick,” the former Free State army general said years later. “The Shannon was the barricade and whoever held Limerick held the south and the west” – and he should know, considering that he had been one of the military leaders charged with defending it on behalf of the Provisional Government at the outbreak of that fratricidal conflict.[1]

His anti-Treaty counterpart, Liam Lynch, had come to a similar conclusion. “If Limerick is won it will take us a long way to upholding of Republic,” he wrote to a subordinate in July 1922.[2]

Limerick city

Even before that breaking point, relations between the two factions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been strained enough for Ernie O’Malley to take two revolvers with him, hidden under his coat, to a peace meeting in Banba Hall, Parnell Square, Dublin, in February 1922. This attempt to bridge the divide did not get off to an easy start, as one anti-Treaty officer thought it appropriate to call Michael Collins a traitor, causing the man in question to leap to his feet in rage amidst cries of ‘withdraw’ and ‘apologise’ from the other Pro-Treatyites present. It took Richard Mulcahy stepping in to mollify the room, with his offer of two places on future GHQ meetings to the Anti-Treatyites.

Richard Mulcahy

This gesture of inclusivity was met with a mixed reception. When the anti-Treaty men withdrew to another room to discuss the suggestion, Lynch was in favour, while the rest, like O’Malley, were not, preferring to go through with the split and set up their own command without further ado; however, as Lynch was in charge of the First Southern Division (encompassing the Cork and Kerry IRA brigade areas), the largest and best armed of the IRA areas outside Dublin, the others had no choice but to follow Lynch’s lead when he threatened to leave them. It was indicative of Lynch’s willingness to pursue a reconciliation with the other side, even in the face of opposition from his own, but also of the leadership clashes and tussles over direction that would continue to bedevil the Republican cause.

O’Malley and Oscar Traynor were selected as the two ‘watchers’, as they were termed, for GHQ meetings; Mulcahy, perhaps buoyed by this minor breakthrough, promised to call an IRA Convention in two months’ time (a promise that, along with others, would not be kept). To O’Malley, however, such amicable playacting could only amount to a waste of time. It was a conviction held from the very start: upon news of the Treaty’s signing two months previously, in December 1921, his immediate expectation was that the returning Irish Plenipotentiaries would be arrested for treason.

Ernie O’Malley

When that did not happen, O’Malley and a number of like-minded military figures, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Séumas Robinson and Lynch, met in private to consider their options. The Dáil was then debating the question of the Treaty, without a decision yet reached, and already O’Malley was among those urging immediate armed resistance. Action, action and more action – everything else paled to insignificance in O’Malley’s mind, regardless of Lynch’s Pollyanna-esque optimism or whatever Mulcahy dangled before them.[3]

Renewing Allegiances

Sitting in on GHQ meetings alongside the men he now considered turncoats was thus the last thing on O’Malley’s mind when he left Dublin for his own command area of the Second Southern Division. After calling a meeting, he put to his subordinates the question of whether they wanted to remain with GHQ and, by extension, accept the Treaty. Of the five brigades represented, only East Limerick was prepared to do so, while the other four (Mid-Limerick, Kilkenny, Mid-Tipperary and South Tipperary) agreed to follow their O/C in his opposition to the new order in Ireland.[4]

Irish Volunteers

As if to make this schism official, a proclamation was posted around Limerick on the 18^th February, printed on behalf of Liam Forde, the O/C of the Mid-Limerick Brigade, whose territory included the city. “The aims of the head of the army and the majority of the GHQ staff,” it read:

…are now unquestionably to subvert the Republic and to support the Provisional Government and to make possible the establishment of the Irish Free State.

So as to not leave its readers in any doubt as to where the Brigade stood:

We, therefore, declare that we no longer recognise the authority of the head of the army, and renew our allegiance to the existing Irish Republic. We are confident that in this stand we will have the support of all units of the IRA and of every loyal citizen of the Irish Republic.[5]

With all that said, O’Malley was not naïve of the logistical consequences: no more ammunition from GHQ. No more money with which to buy food or maintain the men in their barracks. Still, O’Malley was undeterred; at least with his four brigades and their officers he knew exactly where he stood. So did others, as confirmed when the summons arrived from Dublin for his court-martial, which he ignored, as he had the previous requests to report back to the capital. The summons, so far, was all that was sent in response to O’Malley’s defiance. The Pro-Treatyites, or ‘Mulcahyites’ as he dubbed them, “were afraid to enter the area,” even when the British withdrew their garrisons, as per the terms of the Treaty.

British troops marching out of Ireland, 1922

Although O’Malley was to describe the scenes that followed as those of intense violence, with embittered mobs smashing the empty barracks and looting whatever could be grabbed – “It was if they vented their pent-up feelings of hatred, which they had had to supress for so long” – the whole process seems to have been conducted in a civilised enough spirit, to judge by a contemporary newspaper account, as the remnants of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) not already evacuated from Limerick gathered in the William Street Barracks on the 23^rd February. Captain F.J. O’Shaughnessy, the IRA liaison officer, arrived at half past five in the afternoon to receive on behalf of the Provisional Government the strongpoint from the RIC County Inspector. Once the Crown police had departed for good, driving out to Mullingar for disbandment, a detachment from the First Western IRA Division – comprising Clare and south-east Galway – entered the building in their place, to the cheers of the crowd outside, and hoisted a tricoloured flag for all to see. Elsewhere in the city, the barracks at King John’s Castle was likewise handed over by the British military to other units from the same IRA division, with a similar lack of fuss.

IRA members

But, then, British rule was already old news. While the Limerick Chronicle celebrated the “epoch-making” event, the newspaper should perhaps have paid more attention to the choice of division to hold both bases, and its possible implications, for the First Western was in the pro-Treaty camp, a fact not lost on O’Malley when the news reached him.[6]

Setting the Board

“Evidently the ‘Mulcahyites had grown in strength since they dared to enter a hostile area,” he remarked in his memoirs. Only a month had passed since the Treaty was ratified by the Dáil in January 1922, and already O’Malley was set in a ‘us against them’ mentality – as were others, demonstrated when Séumas Robinson and Seán Moylan answered his summons for aid, bringing with them their Tipperary and Cork units respectively. The former impressed O’Malley in particular: seventy IRA men, arriving in a flotilla of cars, lorries and Crossley tenders, complete with a Lewis machine-gun.

IRA men on a lorry

As soon as the Tipperary men came, O’Malley led them to King John’s Castle, under the cover of night, where a friendly Free State officer who had contacted them earlier that day was supposed to let them into the barracks. As it was miserably wet, the Anti-Treatyites huddled close to a wall for whatever shelter it could provide as they waited for the promised traitor to show himself. The hours ticked by until one in the morning, when O’Malley finally gave up and ordered his Tipperary cohort back: either the ‘inside man’ had been caught or lost his nerve. So as to not completely waste the night, O’Malley decided to take over the mental asylum instead. The following morning, he gave orders for the King George and Glentworth Hotels to be occupied in turn, as much for the food they could provide as for anything else.[7]

Anti-Treaty troops outside the Glenworth Hotel, Limerick

Despite the Castle barracks remaining in pro-Treaty hands, O’Malley struck an optimistic, even cocky, note in his reports to Dublin. “Am seizing some rather important positions today,” he told Rory O’Connor breezily on the 9^th March. The two men had been kindred spirits from the start of the Treaty crisis, so it is unsurprising that O’Malley kept the other appraised. Also telling is how they were willing to freeze out Lynch. “[Tom] Hales and Moylan of Cork are bringing their men whether Lynch is going to take action or not,” O’Malley wrote the day after, on the 10^th. This was despite both Hales and Moylan being officers in the First Southern Division and thus under Lynch’s authority – or, at least, so far as he was able to keep his grip on it.[8]

Seán Moylan

For all their shared determination to thwart the Treaty, the Anti-Treatyites at this stage were less a coherent army and more a collection of warbands rallying to another’s banner. Another hint that they could not count on their own for unquestioning obedience was a public letter from Forde denying that three out of the four battalions making up his Mid-Limerick Brigade were wavering in their support of him.

‘A Certain Amount of Tension’

“The action taken by me,” Forde insisted:

…was approved of by an overwhelming majority at a Brigade Convention and no Battalion Commandant and only one Brigade Officer and Supernumerary Officer disconnected themselves from the proclamation.[9]

Not that the Pro-Treatyites were free from their own internal uncertainties. The failure to take the Castle barracks notwithstanding, O’Malley was confident that, should push come to shove, many of the IRA men now opposing him in Limerick would reconsider their loyalties. “Free State units in three Barracks said they would not fight against me,” he assured O’Connor on the 9^th March. After all, during the recent war against Britain, “at one time they had worked for me.” He repeated that assumption in his next letter the following day: “Over 25 men will walk out from one Barracks to-day and will report to me.” The only thing stopping them was O’Malley himself: “I am trying to hold them in until the time the M/D [Minister of Defence – Mulcahy] is due to arrive.”

Free State soldiers in Beggar’s Bush, Dublin

Even O’Malley was hesitant at this stage from taking steps that would lead to an irreconcilable break; nonetheless, the Pro-Treatyites “will have to climb down as we have decided to start if they do not.” Anything less would only lead to a dissipation of their strength and a chance for the Provisional Government to grow its own, he warned O’Connor when he visited Dublin for a face-to-face meeting with his closest ally.

Rory O’Connor

To O’Malley’s dismay, O’Connor was suddenly a convert to the ‘give peace a chance’ school of thought, even refusing his request for IRA engineers to supplement his forces in Limerick (O’Connor was still GHQ Director of Engineering, and so responsible for explosives training). As if finally feeling the gravity of the situation (one he had helped in no small part to create), O’Connor was uncharacteristically subdued throughout the interview, the impression given that of a man uncertain of what he wanted to happen but wishing for the best either way.

Disappointed but undeterred – no one could accuse him of not knowing his own mind – O’Malley returned to Limerick. Mulcahy was already in the city, as was Eoin O’Duffy as GHQ Chief of Staff. That two such senior figures had been sent showed how seriously the Provisional Government was taking the matter but since the Anti-Treatyites refused to see them in the Castle, with Mulcahy and O’Duffy declining in turn to meet on neutral ground, nothing was accomplished. Stephen O’Mara, the Lord Mayor, made more progress, however fleeting, when he invited members from both armies to lunch together.

“We ate well but there was no result,” was all O’Malley had to say about that mediation attempt in his memoirs. As O’Connor had refused technical assistance, O’Malley turned instead to Moylan to provide the desired expertise and soon they were mulling over the possibility of using bombs, made out of petrol tins with batteries attached, to blow in the gate or a wall of the Castle, through which the Anti-Treatyites could rush in.[10]

King John’s Castle, Limerick

Though that point would not be reached, there were reminders aplenty to be seen of the peril Limerick was in – and by extension Ireland, for if fighting broke out in the city, it would surely spread to the rest of the country.

Captain Stapleton, the pro-Treaty officer in charge of the John Street Barracks, was entering a hotel in Thomas Street when a group of five men followed him into the hallway and shot Stapleton in the arm. As he was not finished off, instead being deprived of his own firearm, theft, not assassination, seems to have been the motive; all the same, Stapleton was lucky that the bullet inflicted no worse than a flesh-wound. Another prominent Free Stater, Brigadier Quartermaster Seán Hurley, found himself arrested outside the city by an armed party while recruiting; likewise, Captain O’Shaughnessy, who had previously overseen the handover of King John’s Castle, was led away under guard from his office in O’Connell Street.[11]

IRA men outside a hotel in Limerick, 1922

“Events in Limerick during the past couple of days have been rather significant,” reported the Limerick Chronicle on the 9^th March, with masterful understatement, “and in the minds of the citizens have created a certain amount of tension.”[12]

‘Our Authority and Right’

It was not just the citizens of Limerick who were feeling the pressure.

Mirroring the opposition, the Pro-Treatyites were likewise trying to decide between their ‘moderates’ and ‘hardliners’, in a tug-of-war that reached all the way to the top of the Provisional Government. Its president, Arthur Griffith, for one, had concluded that conflict was inevitable and, with that being the case, it was pointless to dither and delay. An interview with O’Mara, once again in his thankless role as self-appointed mediator, shows how implacable Griffith could be. When the Lord Mayor suggested the contested barracks be razed so that neither side could claim them over the other, Griffith was dismissive.

Arthur Griffith

“That would not solve the difficulty,” he replied, according to the minutes:

…which is that these men challenge our authority and right. A section of the army are in mutiny, and those who have incited them to mutiny will be responsible. A worse disaster than a continuation of the present situation would be the overthrow of the Dáil and the Provisional Government.

Stephen O’Mara

He was similarly unimpressed when O’Mara blamed the pro-Treaty IRA for starting the crisis by entering the city barracks. “IRA troops went in there in accordance with the Treaty,” Griffith said. “They went in because the Mid-Limerick Brigade repudiated the authority of Dáil Éireann.” When ‘unauthorised troops’ – as in, the Cork and Tipperary men – came in turn, the Lord Mayor should have ordered them out, Griffith said, in a pointed rebuke of his own.

To Griffith, more than the peace and quiet of a single city was at stake: “These men in Limerick should withdraw, otherwise the Treaty is broken.”[13]

Ernest Blythe

He felt strongly enough on this subject to speak at a Cabinet meeting, the only formal speech one minister, Ernest Blythe, could remember the president delivering on such an occasion. For half an hour, Griffith stressed to his colleagues that they were now a government, with all the responsibilities that entailed, and thus must assert their prerogative. Collins, on whom the final decision rested – a connoisseur of power, Blythe had no doubt on that, despite Griffith’s nominally higher position – looked inclined to agree – that is, until Mulcahy intervened.

Playing the same role he had done in Banba Hall, that of peacemaker, the Minister of Defence proposed that Liam Lynch should be the one to hold the contested barracks in Limerick. Relieved at finding a way to avoid fighting his old comrades, Collins jumped at the suggestion, much to Griffith’s annoyance – never again would he treat the Corkonian as anything more than another co-worker, referring to him in tones of frosty civility as ‘Mr Collins’ and not ‘Mick’ as before.

“Mulcahy apparently had a great belief in Liam Lynch,” recalled Blythe, “and a great confidence that he understood him and could rely on him” – which might strike readers as bizarre, considering how Lynch would not only go on to command the anti-Treaty forces in the Civil War but do so determined not to yield an inch. At the time, Lynch had already displayed a willingness to work with the Pro-Treatyites, even if it put him at odds with the likes of O’Malley and O’Connor. While part of that might have been on pragmatic grounds, he had never stopped holding Collins in high regard.[14]

Michael Collins

“Sorry I must agree to differ with Collins, that does not make us worse friends,” Lynch wrote in a letter to his brother. “If the war is to be resumed [against Britain] he will again surely play his part as before.” Calling Collins a traitor like others had done, in Banba Hall and elsewhere, would never have occurred to him.[15]

‘A Dramatic Turn of Events’

Liam Lynch

On this, Mulcahy’s instincts proved correct. To the “intense relief” of Limerick’s inhabitants, a settlement was announced on the morning of the 11^th March 1922: both sides would be pulling out of their city that day, leaving the barracks to the local IRA brigade that had stayed neutral throughout the manoeuvrings and posturings of Pro and Anti-Treatyites alike. And not a minute too soon, given how “it was a decidedly unexpected and dramatic turn of events, as the position late last night was menacing,” according to the Limerick Chronicle.[16]

Unexpected indeed, for, up to the eleventh hour, the balance between war and peace could have tilted either way. “A final effort is being made to settle this matter,” O’Connor had written to O’Malley the day before, the 10^th March. “If this fails it is the last.” Clearly anticipating the worst, he signed off on an especially heartfelt note: “I wish you all good luck and hope for your personal safety and that of your comrades.”[17]

Upon news of the peace deal, reactions in both armies were mixed. “We had won without firing a shot,” O’Malley crowed in his memoirs. “We had maintained our rights” – the Anti-Treatyites were not to be pushed around or trifled with. When IRA men from the East Limerick Brigade – the only one in the Second Southern Division to stay with GHQ – dawdled in their evacuation, O’Malley, their former O/C, took vindictive satisfaction in threatening to arrest the officer in charge if they did not hurry up and hightail it out of the city.[18]

Tom Barry

Others, having been marched so close to the top of the hill, were sorely disappointed at being marched down again. “We had an awful job with [Tom] Barry,” remembered Oscar Traynor. “We had to try and impress on Barry that there would be fighting at some time.”[19]

Lynch, in contrast, was happy to point to Limerick as an example of what could be achieved through mutual understanding. “It was a happy consummation for me to see about 700 armed troops on either side who were about to engage in mortal combat, eventually leave Limerick as comrades,” he wrote in a letter to the press a month later, on the 27^th April.[20]

‘Comrades’ may have been an overstatement. For many in the pro-Treaty ranks, the climb-down had been too much of a back-down. An unsigned dispatch on the 12^th March, the day after the deal, protested at a decision “which the people of Ireland seem to regard as something nearly approaching capitulation to mutineers, and which, we have reason to think tended to cause demoralisation amongst Units loyal to GHQ.” In a separate report, Seán Hurley, one of the Free State officers taken prisoner in Limerick, expressed a similar opinion: “The mutineers regard the present arrangement as victory over GHQ.”

And why shouldn’t they? After all, continued Hurley:

As regards my position and the position of the other loyal Brigade, Batt. and Coy. Officers – at this moment we can do absolutely nothing in Limerick city in an official capacity, and in our opinion we can do very little either way in the present circumstances.[21]

But then, the Pro-Treatyites could have done very little even at the time, according to Michael Brennan, the commander of the Clare contingent. “There are 500 mutineers here at present, all armed with rifles and most of them with revolvers also,” he had told his superiors in Dublin as the crisis unfolded. The Anti-Treatyites also had Lewis, Vickers and Hotchkiss machine-guns, as well as “a splendid transport service”, all of which Brennan and his troops conspicuously lacked. Furthermore, “too many of my men here have too many old associations with the mutineers to be properly reliable” – in this, he was unknowingly concurring with O’Malley’s belief that there were plenty of the Free Staters in Limerick ripe for the turning.

And then there was the problem of the pro-Treaty position. While Brennan remained determined to stand his ground, he also took it as “a foregone conclusion that the mutineers will be able to lock us” in where they were in the city.[22]

Vickers machine-gun

The odds facing the Pro-Treatyites in Limerick had thus not been good (which may have influenced Collins’ and Mulcahy’s final decision as much as a hankering for peace and comradeship). Nor were they particularly encouraging the next time Brennan squared off against the opposition in Limerick later that year, in July. Civil War had broken out for real and, while the situation differed from the one in March, much remained alike. The question now was whether the end result would be a peaceful one as before – or war?

To be continued in: Making War Out of Peace: Limerick as a Battleground in the Civil War, July 1922 (Part II)

References

[1] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970), p. 370

[2] University College Dublin (UCD) Archives, Moss Twomey Papers, P69/28(108)

[3] O’Malley, Ernie. The Singing Flame (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012), pp. 58, 61-2, 70-2

[4] Ibid, p. 72

[5] Limerick Chronicle, 18/02/1922

[6] O’Malley, The Singing Flame, pp. 72-3 ; Limerick Chronicle, 25/02/1922

[7] O’Malley, The Singing Flame, pp. 74, 77-9

[8] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), p. 16

[9] Limerick Chronicle, 25/02/1922

[10] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 16 ; O’Malley, The Singing Flame, pp. 80-1

[11] Limerick Chronicle, 04/03/1922 ; 07/03/1922

[12] Ibid, 09/03/1922

[13] UCD, Richard Mulcahy Papers, P/7/B/191, pp. 39-41

[14] Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), pp. 143, 145

[15] National Library of Ireland (NLI), Liam Lynch Papers, MS 36,251/22

[16] Limerick Chronicle, 11/03/1922

[17] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 17

[18] O’Malley, The Singing Flame, p. 82

[19] Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004), p. 65

[20] Irish Independent, 27/04/1922

[21] NLI, J.J. O’Connell Papers, MS 22,127/29 ; MS 22,127/37

[22] Ibid, MS 22,127/28

Bibliography

Books

Hopkinson, Michael. Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007)

O’Malley, Ernie. The Singing Flame (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War ([London]: Fontana/Collins, 1970)

Bureau of Military History Statement

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Newspapers

Irish Independent

Limerick Chronicle

University College Dublin Archives

Moss Twomey Papers

Richard Mulcahy Papers

National Library of Ireland Collections

J.J. O’Connell Papers

Liam Lynch Papers