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—Michael Collins
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The Irish struggle of 1917–21 has been called many things: the Anglo-Irish War, the ‘Tan’War and the War of Independence. The War of Independence was fought to bring to Ireland a native government deriving its authority from the Irish people, and militarily was mostly a guerrilla war. Guerrillas go by many different names: rebels, irregulars, insurgents, partisans and terrorists. Such wars are now characterised as asymmetrical or unconventional warfare.
There was very little public support for the rebels during the 1916 Easter Rising. 1 For the most part, the Irish supported the British war effort in World War I. Moreover, many civilians were killed or lost their property in the fires that ravaged Dublin. When the rebels were marched off to boats bound for prisons in Britain, many were pelted with vegetables, bottles and even the contents of chamber-pots. Nothing that these men and women had done during the week led the people to take their side, though the bitterness of the public was tinged with a little admiration—the Irish had fought well against the regular British troops.
Immediately after the Rising this view had not changed. Soon, however, admiration for the rebels who fought well and honourably against the British began to move closer to approval, and the public would increasingly come to support their position and their political objectives, if
still disapproving of their methods. Shortly after the Rising, one woman wrote in her diary:
Of course this is not Ireland’s rebellion—only a Sinn Fé in rising
… The Sinn Fé in leaders were such good men. They died like saints. Oh! the pity of it! And Ireland wanted them so much. They were men of such beautiful character, such high literary power and attainments—mystics who kept the light burning... But as sure as God’s sun rises in the east, if England does not get things right... if there’s not immediately conciliation and love and mercy poured out on Ireland—all the Sinn Fé in leaders will be canonized... Already the tone is changing. 2
Britain, still engaged in World War I, determined that the Rising was an act of ‘treason’ for which the participants and leaders should suffer the fate of traitors in wartime, and executed sixteen of them. Moreover, the Irish had enlisted German support, a move that prompted outright vilification. 3 The Rising had hardly been the work of a massive conspiracy, but the British acted as if it were. 4 Over 3, 000 men and women were imprisoned after the rebellion, many in jails in England and Wales. Like Michael Collins, most of those imprisoned were never charged, and there were certainly many who had not participated at all. Ironically, it was in the British detention centres that less ardent nationalists came under the influence of more radical comrades who converted them to the principle of resistance to British rule. These mass arrests and the increased British military presence demonstrated bluntly that Ireland was under the control of an oppressive and alien government that could only rule the country by force. Though it was never enforced outside Dublin in 1916, when General Sir John Grenville Maxwell declared martial law throughout the country the people realised that they were being treated as second-class citizens by a British government no longer in touch with Ireland. 5
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The War of Independence could not have occurred without the conversion of the Irish people from supporting Home Rule to advocating an open and, shortly, violent revolution. The Easter Rising should have been an adequate warning to the British that events and forces in Irish society were slipping out of the grasp of the Dublin Castle administration and its
police. Further, the same influences that inspired many of the rebels—the GAA, the Gaelic League and Irish nationalism/separatism—also appealed to the younger members of the clergy. The last words of the executed leaders, reported in a religious vein, contributed to the slow change in clerical attitudes. 6 As time passed, a measure of support for nationalist ideals appeared in the younger priests who came forward at nationalist rallies and on Sinn Fé in platforms, while the conversion of some priests into more outspoken nationalists was vital to the growth of the movement. A police report noted of the priests: ‘They exercise an immense influence over the youth in their parishes and unless some means can be used to make them abstain from interference in politics I fear that disaffection will be dangerously spread’. 7
Some in Ireland began to feel a spiritual kinship with past fighting generations, and the words of James Fintan Lalor were often quoted, ‘that somewhere, and somehow, and by somebody a beginning must be made’. Patrick Pearse, the idealist, and James Connolly, the Lalor disciple, had begun the rebellion, in Lalor’s words, ‘even if [it was] called premature, imprudent or dangerous—if made so soon as tomorrow—even if offered by ten men only—even if offered by men armed only with stones’.
While Collins was imprisoned in Frongoch, he was consolidating his position within the IRB as well as setting up for the future. Richard Mulcahy, in his notes on Frongoch, noted of Collins:
In Frongoch ‘he was very consciously pulling the threads of the IRB together with a view to the situation which would develop politically and organizationally when all the prisoners, including the Lewes prisoners, were back at home and political life was beginning again in Ireland’. 8
The failure of the Rising and the execution or internment of so many of the senior personnel of both the Volunteers and the IRB made it appear, on the surface at least, as if the Irish underground had been virtually destroyed. However, the work of two men in particular—Collins, operating amongst his IRB contacts, and Cathal Brugha, working through the Volunteers—began quickly and effectively to reconstitute it. Brugha, very seriously wounded in the 1916 fighting, escaped execution, and when
discharged from medical care in late 1916 immediately began recruiting for the Volunteers.
In 1917–18 there were parliamentary by-elections in Roscommon, Kilkenny and Longford. Count George Plunkett was elected under the Sinn Fé in banner in North Roscommon, and Joseph McGuinness, who was in Lewes Jail in England, won the by-election in Longford in 1918 with the campaign slogan ‘Put him in to get him out’. Collins was involved in the organisation and campaigning for these by-election candidates, and it was he who convinced the prisoners in England that Irish opinion had undergone such a change that McGuinness’s election to parliament was possible. In 1917, too, following the Sinn Fé in annual convention in October and a reorganisation convention of the Volunteers that same month, national co-ordination of the IRA began in earnest. 9 Later in 1917, the death of Thomas Ashe from being forcibly fed while on hunger strike aroused tremendous passion. His funeral led to massive defiance of the orders against uniformed marches, and Volunteers from all over Ireland gathered in Dublin to pay their last respects. Collins’s funeral oration gave some hint of things to come when he said merely, ‘Nothing additional remains to be said—the volley we have just heard is the only speech it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian’. 10
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These, then, were the major antecedents of the War of Independence: an increasingly ineffective British administration faced by Irish men and women fired with revolutionary zeal and convinced that they could attain their ends by violence. A set of contingent events was to provide the final catalyst, as there was yet to come another imperious decision that would harden Irish attitudes against the British. Although about 210, 000 men from Ireland, of whom some 35, 000 died, served in the British army during World War I, not one had been conscripted. 11 Most entered the army for financial reasons, because they were poverty-stricken and employment opportunities were so few in Ireland. Others, particularly the Irish National Volunteers who heeded the call of John Redmond, believed that enlisting ‘to fight for small nations’ would lead to Home Rule for Ireland. In 1918, however, a conscription crisis provided the springboard for the change in Irish opinion and the transfer of political allegiance from the Irish Parliamentary Party to Sinn Fé in.
So it was that within two years of the Easter Rising Ireland abandoned
the Irish Parliamentary Party and its goal of Home Rule and went marching forward resolutely under what was then described as the Sinn Fé in banner but was in reality Collins’s IRB standard. For the first time in Irish nationalist history, the advocates of physical force and those of political agitation would work together rather than against each other.
There was, then, a gradual change of political allegiance on the part of the Irish in the period between the end of the 1916 Rising and the onset of the War of Independence in 1919. The perceived legitimacy of the incumbent British administration dwindled in almost inverse proportion to the growing support of the underground government of the Irish Republic proclaimed in front of Dublin’s GPO at Easter 1916 and endorsed through a series of elections culminating in the Dá il É ireann election of 1918. The most tangible change that occurred in Ireland after the Rising was this power shift in Irish politics from the Irish Parliamentary Party to the newly unified Sinn Fé in.
On 21 January 1919 the First Dá il met in the Round Room of Dublin’s Mansion House and at 3. 30 p. m. Count Plunkett called the meeting to order, nominating Cathal Brugha as Ceann Comhairle (speaker/chairperson) for Dá il É ireann, a proposal seconded by Padraig Ó Maille. Brugha presided thereafter, and following the reading of the Declaration of Independence he told the cheering assembly: ‘Deputies, you understand from what is asserted in this Declaration that we are now done with England. Let the world know it and those who are concerned bear it in mind. For come what may, whether it be death itself, the great deed is done. ’
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From 1919 to the end of 1921, the Irish waged the War of Independence with strong reliance on intelligence, propaganda, politics and guerrilla tactics, co-ordinated by Collins in Dublin, Florence O’Donoghue in Cork and the Volunteer GHQ to make up an orchestrated plan of campaign. 12 The Irish forces evolved in both scale and purpose, though in a haphazard manner. The British forces, on the other hand, at no time fought their campaign in all these arenas. Their approach was piecemeal: they had no overall strategy and no conception of a co-ordinated counter-insurgency. During the summer and autumn of 1920 they began to reorganise and develop in the intelligence, political and military fields, but by this time it was perhaps too late to put down the revolt. Collins’s intelligence ring and
his ruthless killers were the linchpin of the war effort in Dublin, and he sent directives across the country to co-ordinate the campaign. 13 The IRA won the battle for the hearts and minds of the Irish people and the IRA/Volunteers became the fighting arm of an underground, alternative government. 14
In the early years of the war, Collins set about reorganising the Volunteer movement as Director of Organisation. 15 In 1918 both Collins and Richard Mulcahy were considered for the position of Chief of Staff of the Volunteer GHQ. Dick McKee, Director of Training, who went on to be the O/C of the Dublin Brigade, agreed beforehand that Mulcahy and not Collins should be Chief of Staff. Mulcahy later noted:
McKee, as he came away from the meeting with me, expressed satisfaction and relief that Collins was not being recommended. The main reason for that was that in the light of what he knew about Collins’ temperament … McKee—like others—was a little bit wary of entrusting him with anything like complete control. In fact he did want time to disclose himself and his qualities. 16
In one of his rare personal remarks about Collins in his annotation of Piaras Bé aslaí ’s books Mulcahy wrote:
If, internally, he [Collins] had grown in power, strength of will and flexibility, as he had, he had done it by tireless, vigorous, almost turbulent hard work, applied to his office work as much as to his widespread and general personal contacts. 17
During this period Collins developed the morale and discipline of the fighting men to the very high level that characterised the Irish for the next four years. He recognised that guerrilla warfare was the only way forward, both in Dublin and in the countryside. In fact, it was the sheer efficiency of Collins’s planning that was his most valuable asset. Physical fighting against the British was of a rather different character in the country than in Dublin, Cork or Belfast. In rural areas, attacks on RIC barracks were first undertaken by men who assembled at night and who resumed their ordinary civilian lives after an operation. Later, small bodies of men in flying
columns remained on full-time active service in the countryside, obtaining shelter and food from the country people, using assistance from local IRA men and Cumann na mBan women and civilians in their activities, and operating in a hit-and-run manner.
As the Volunteer Director of Intelligence, Collins masterminded an Irish intelligence network that successfully countered British intelligence in Ireland. It did so by making a mirror image of the British system and then improving upon it. Collins was the first to understand the necessity for an intelligence service that would penetrate the British military and civil administration in Dublin Castle, and the success of the revolutionary movement was largely due to this effort. Inexperienced personnel, who had no rigid ideas about the kind of organisation needed, helped build up the intelligence system from nothing. Collins, through the dual areas of intelligence and operations, co-ordinated the active side of the IRA/Volunteers with the same concentration that he expected of all who worked for him. He knew that the fundamentals of intelligence were acquisition, analysis, implementation and counter-intelligence, and he was entirely clear about what results he wanted from any organisation. In this sphere, success or failure depended largely on his vision and energy, as well as on the efficiency of his operatives. Slackness and inertia, the failure to put weapons to good use and failure to file reports produced harsh rebukes. Collins did not just attend meetings or send out memos; he lived his motto and ‘got on with the work’.
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Though Collins often walked and cycled throughout Dublin after the Dá il met in January 1919, he was never arrested despite the fact that the head of the British army in Ireland, General Nevil Macready, wrote to his superiors in London in March 1921 recommending that the British government offer
£ 10, 000 for his capture. 18 (The average worker’s wage at the time was £ 2 2s per week, yet no one seriously thought of betraying Collins. The story of a
£ 10, 000 price on Collins’s head is not strictly true. After Detective Inspector
W. C. Forbes Redmond was killed on 21 January 1920, a £ 10, 000 reward was offered by Dublin Castle for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible for his death, ‘especially the man who issued the order’. This is where the story of the bounty on Collins probably originated, as he was the one who ordered Redmond’s killing. Rewards of £ 5, 000 had previously been offered in regard of the deaths of other DMP detectives,
Smith, Hoey and Barton, and these offers were now doubled, but there was never a specific reward for Collins’s actual capture. )
Collins recognised at an early stage that his twin enemies were the spy and the informer, the enemies of any revolutionary movement, and he systematically removed both as a crucial element of IRA tactics. As late as the spring of 1921 they were still being shot. Between January and April 1921 seventy-three bodies, with placards around their necks announcing the removal of an informer or spy, were taken from the Irish streets. The secrecy of IRA operations was rigorously maintained and Collins’s intelligence agency could act with a considerable feeling of security.
While this internal sanction of eliminating British agents had been institutionalised, the weapon was also turned, with great effect, on the special branches of both the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) outside of Dublin. (The DMP had always been an unarmed force, while the RIC had been armed. However, the command structure of the RIC had never been designed to deal with a war situation. ) Collins’s view in 1920 was simple:
a man might have been murdered in broad daylight (and many were) in the Dublin streets, and not one policeman have lifted a finger. The uniformed men on point duty would have gone on waving traffic this way and that …The attitude of the police was reasonable—while they stayed neutral they were safe; as soon as they interfered they became marked men. 19
The intelligence network was organised on two distinct levels—the civil and the military. The military side, the more important of the two, operated mainly through the underground cells of the IRB that Collins commanded. Formally, the IRA/Volunteers were organised along British military lines. Each company and battalion had an intelligence officer whose reports were passed through a brigade intelligence officer to the central office in Dublin. This, however, was an adjunct to Collins’s own network of IRB spies operating separately in most Irish communities. On the civil side Collins had men and women in post offices, and the Irish Post Office was certainly one of Collins’s most useful sources. In addition, he had men on the railways, on Channel ferries, in every prison in Ireland and in many
in England. The trade unions were mobilised to hamper police and military movements by road, rail and sea. Collins had many operatives who worked in all the various telephone exchanges, whether military or civilian, as in hotels. Men and women in hotels and restaurants throughout Ireland were especially helpful sources. Similarly, dockers in all parts of Europe and the USA served in what Collins referred to as his ‘Q’ Division.
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Collins studied previous Irish risings and recognised the extent to which espionage had been responsible for their failure. Throughout the centuries, spies had infiltrated every Irish revolutionary organisation—a relatively easy task in a small country like Ireland, where a careless word spoken at a fair or in a pub travelled quickly to the headquarters of the British spy network, Dublin Castle. The eyes and ears of this network, especially in villages and the countryside, were the members of the RIC, who reported all snippets of information to Dublin Castle or to the DMP’s political section, ‘G’ Division, based at Great Brunswick Street police station. Some ‘G’ Division detectives roamed freely around the city, following those suspected of disloyalty to the Crown or meeting informants and taking notes. Other G-men were positioned at railway stations or docks to watch arrivals and departures. At the end of each working shift, all the G-men would transfer their notes and reports into a large ledger-type book held at the police station, so that all members of the division would have access to the same information. This served as a communal cross-reference and also avoided unintentional encroachment on the work of a colleague, which might jeopardise months of intelligence-gathering. All important reports were dispatched to Dublin Castle for sifting and correlation. The system was simple—crude, even—but very effective.
By far the most important amongst Collins’s agents were the men and women working for him in military intelligence and the civilian Special Branches. They were at the heart of the British administration, with access to restricted information, all British military and government codes and the like. In particular, three Dublin policemen, É amon (Ned) Broy, Joseph Kavanagh and James MacNamara, as well as Dave Neligan in Dublin Castle, helped to turn what had been Britain’s greatest security asset in Ireland against itself. In 1916 Kavanagh was assigned to pick out the Rising’s leaders when they were assembled in Richmond Prison. Even then, however, his loyalty was clear, as he walked among the prisoners and asked, ‘Is there
anything I can do for you? ’ or ‘Can I take a message for you? ’. Kavanagh was a key Collins spy for about a year until he succumbed to cancer, but by then he had recruited another valuable agent for Collins in James McNamara, who worked in Dublin Castle. Broy gave Collins a detailed, inside knowledge of the British police system in Ireland. Collins learned how the system worked and how the police were trained—Broy turned him into an intelligence master.
A realist like Collins knew that it was necessary to shut down the British sources of knowledge and blind the Dublin Castle administration. The information obtained enabled him to identify G-men, who were warned to stop their intelligence activities or the IRA would kill them. Collins realised that in order to defeat Britain they would have to take out their spies, as they would be unable to replace them. ‘I am a builder, not a destroyer. I get rid of people only when they hinder my work, ’ he told Broy. He warned the detectives to look the other way or suffer the consequences. Those detectives who scoffed at the warnings paid the price.
Collins’s passion for secrecy was so intense that for many months none of these men knew of the existence of any of the others. On occasion they actually followed one another. Broy was godfather to Kavanagh’s oldest son before he knew that they were both working for Collins.
One evening, we were walking in St Stephen’s Green, and we both made the discovery that we were in contact with Michael Collins. I told him about Mick’s visit to No. l Great Brunswick St. He nearly fell, laughing, knowing the mentality in the G. Division office and knowing Mick. He got me to tell it to him a second time, and he laughed so much that people looked at him as if he were drunk or mad. He asked me what did Mick look like in the office, and I said: ‘He looked like a big plain-clothes man going out on duty, with a stick’. Shortly afterwards, when I met Mick, he apologised for not having told me about Kavanagh. I told him that that was what I had been preaching to him since I met him, not to tell anything, that the Irish people had paid too big a price for carelessness like that, in the past. Michael similarly apologised to Joe the next time he met him, but Michael was glad the two of us knew and understood each other. 20
Collins, Broy and Richard Mulcahy agreed that the war had to be taken to the DMP detectives and that pre-emptive strikes were necessary.
The authorities were apparently biding their time to have certain preparations made before the Dá il was suppressed. The work of men like Smyth, Hoey, and Barton [‘G’ Division detectives], and the G Division generally was being effectively snowballed to increase the information regarding the persons who were particularly active and important both on the political and volunteer side. To allow it to have developed any way effectively would have been disastrous. The initiative against the detectives was only begun in time. 21
Although he knowingly embarked upon his ruthless path, Collins was also aware of a possible public backlash. Republican newspapers and those sympathetic to the ideals of Sinn Fé in were fed with appropriate propaganda. This policy of killing G-men led in turn to suppression and censorship by Dublin Castle. Such a knee-jerk reaction, together with the obvious alarm caused by the killings of the G-men, confirmed to Collins that he was hurting the British intelligence system, and he realised that London and Dublin would increase their efforts to smash his organisation. The first killings were carried out by Volunteers, but he reasoned that a specialist unit was needed, a killing unit (the ‘Squad’), who would react to orders efficiently and, most importantly, without qualms of conscience.
Collins’s intelligence system was a crucial asset in the War of Independence. In all the important military centres throughout the country, on the railroads, and on the docks and ferries Collins succeeded in planting someone who kept him well supplied with information. Nevertheless, he decried the need for it: ‘This damn spying business plays hell with a man. It kills the soul and the heart in him. It leaves him without pity or mercy. I am fed up with the whole rotten business … Look how the poor girls are ruined by us. There is no softness in them anymore! ’22 There was, however, one serious drawback in his intelligence organisation: Collins never knew what was happening in the inner circles of power in Westminster. Although he had a first-rate military intelligence system, he had no political intelligence organisation whatsoever. Ultimately, this was a major flaw,
particularly since there is strong evidence to suggest that the British had a fairly good idea of the thinking within the Dublin cabinet, and it became a grave defect as the Treaty negotiations ensued in late 1921. Still, the British intelligence war was widely acknowledged as being ineffective, with Collins and his men and women operatives consistently out-spying His Majesty’s secret services. 23
The streets of Dublin were the front line in Collins’s conflict between the police and the IRA. Well known to their putative targets, the G-men who specialised in political work proved particularly vulnerable to IRA attacks. Collins’s decision to assassinate these men was partly pragmatic. Their elimination would remove a vital source of intelligence from the British administration in Ireland, allowing the IRA vital breathing space. But there were also political and symbolic motives. The G-men were the most hated symbols of the British regime, particularly despised for their role in picking out the leaders of the rebellion for execution in 1916. Their killings could be depicted as justifiable, while the British response to them would escalate the conflict. Between July 1919 and May 1920 a dozen DMP men were assassinated. By the end of Collins’s brutal but effective campaign, the DMP’s intelligence-gathering capabilities had been destroyed and the force was on the verge of collapse. The DMP was compelled to withdraw from direct involvement in the conflict, its members refusing to carry arms or assume any responsibility for political crime. 24 When the new Secret Service men were assigned to Dublin, there were few policemen of the old persuasion who could or would help them. Collins forced each man to start from scratch, and the British intelligence system was never the same. 25
The leading edge of the terror campaign of Collins’s Squad was selective assassination, involving groups of three to ten men. 26 Collins recognised the ever-present possibility that public and international opinion would react against such killings, so precautions were taken. (This is not to say that the killings were always of the correct person but that a serious attempt was made to identify the person and the activity that had to be targeted. ) The selection of targets reflected Collins’s and the Irish concern for legitimacy and the prevention of wanton violence. The aim was not to kill massive numbers of people but to limit the killing, where possible, to targets that could be justified as legitimate objects of military or political resistance. 27 Collins set out to undermine the morale and effectiveness of
the police in order to knock out the eyes and ears of the British administration. Policemen, magistrates, informers and men prominent in public life were shot. Assassinations ran the gamut from the police killings and military killings (such as that of an officer in the British army, Captain Percival Lea-Wilson, who severely mistreated Tom Clarke and other combatants of the Rising) to those arising from necessity. W. C. Forbes Redmond, Chief Inspector of the DMP, had to be removed because he was pressing Collins too hard. Similarly, the magistrate Alan Bell, taken in daylight from a Dublin tram and shot without anyone interfering, was assassinated because he was carrying on a most successful investigation into the origin and whereabouts of the Dá il Loan deposits. 28 Collins regarded assassinations such as these, and particularly the removal of spies, as essential to the success of the IRA campaign. Police intelligence reported in 1919 that ‘according to information received from various sources the Irish Volunteer HQ has directed all county commanders to hold a certain number of men armed and in readiness to execute orders to attack barracks and assassinate police’. 29
The War of Independence was a guerrilla campaign mounted against the British government in Ireland by the IRA/Volunteers from January 1919 until the truce in July 1921, under the proclaimed legitimacy of the First Dá il. Military operations remained limited during 1919, although raids for arms became a regular occurrence. Even though the Irish abandoned the idea of Home Rule and embraced separatism, the violence was at first deeply unpopular with the broader Irish population. Attitudes gradually changed, however, in the face of the terror of the British government’s campaign of widespread brutality, destruction of property, random arrests, reprisals and unprovoked shootings. The small groups of IRA/Volunteers on the run were extremely vulnerable. Their success could make or break the activity of the IRA in a particular district—losing them often meant the end of operations. The local populace provided more than just moral support; in many cases they provided logistics, intelligence, and men and women for local actions. In September 1919 the Dá il was banned by the British, which served to make it easier for IRA/Volunteers to carry out attacks, because their more moderate politicians no longer had a public platform from which to restrain them.
For the remainder of 1919 and into 1920 the level of violence
throughout Ireland increased. The British had to exert effective control over much of the countryside or lose the war. Nearly all the Irish lived in the country, on farms or villages, and various quasi-official bodies like the Dá il/Republican Courts or the IRA police effectively neutralised loyalists throughout Ireland. The IRA benefited from the widespread support given to them by the general Irish population, which regularly refused to pass information to the British. Much of the IRA’s popularity was due to the excessive reaction of British forces to insurgent activity. An unofficial government policy of reprisals began in September 1919 in Fermoy, Co. Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town after a soldier was killed when he refused to surrender his weapon to the local IRA. Actions such as these increased local support for the IRA and international support for Irish independence.
The British government was unwilling to admit that a rebellion existed that had to be countered with military methods. The conflict was never defined as a war, and the issue was obscured by attempting to distinguish between war and insurrection, summed up by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s comment, ‘You don’t declare war against rebels’. 30 The struggle was never a conventional war; it was rarely more than a police action. The British army was used only sparingly, and the soldiers greatly resented the blame that accrued to them from the actions of the police, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. 31 In fact, with some exceptions, the military enjoyed a more civil relationship with the civilian population. The Black and Tans were not all prisoners released from English jails, as has been claimed, but they were too ignorant of the law to be useful at police work, and too undisciplined to have any military value. 32 The British were never able to distinguish properly between the role of the army and that of the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, who were attached to the police. Good policemen don’t shoot first. They provide order. They protect. They reduce chaos. The Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans did none of these things.
The arrival of the Black and Tans in March 1920 changed the entire complexion of the war. 33 The ‘Tans’ were established as a section of the RIC and first appeared in the village of Upperchurch, Co. Tipperary. The British government needed more troops in Ireland to maintain its position, and turned to demobilised soldiers from World War I who were
unemployed. The name came from their uniforms, which were black tunics and dark tan or khaki trousers, some with civilian hats but most with the green caps and black leather belts of the RIC. 34 Collins viewed the Black and Tans and the terror that came with them (and with the Auxiliaries who soon followed) as a sort of mixed blessing, which clearly drove any doubting nationalists into the arms of Sinn Fé in. ‘Apart from the loss which these attacks entail, good is done as it makes clear and clearer to people what both sides stand for. ’35 The Black and Tans were a force calculated to inspire terror in a population less timid and law-abiding than the Irish. There was no question of discipline: they robbed and killed on a daily basis. Collins took advantage of the public’s reaction and knew that the terror backfired on the British. By late 1920 General F. P. Crozier, the O/C of the Black and Tans, had dismissed or imprisoned over fifty of them for indiscipline or criminal acts. 36
Their appearance in Dublin altered the whole view of the city. Kathleen Napoli McKenna, who worked on The Irish Bulletin and saw Collins almost daily, wrote of what a Sunday morning in Dublin looked like. Instead of empty streets with only Mass-goers about,
… citizens were thronging to hear Mass through the streets filled with British Regulars carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, Auxiliary Cadets, Black and Tans and here and there, broad- shouldered plainclothesmen distinguishable as members of the ‘G’ Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police engaged in political espionage. A tank was ambling along Bachelor’s Walk, military lorries, filled with armed-to-the-teeth troops, their rifles at the ready, were racing through O’Connell St., and military cordons were drawn with barbed wire around entrances from Grafton St. from Nassau St. and College Green. 37
A British army private, J. P. Swindlehurst, stationed in Dublin from January to February 1921, concurred:
Dublin seems to be a rotten place to be … people hurry along the streets, armoured cars dash up and down, bristling with machine guns … The men who style themselves as Black and
Tans walk about like miniature arsenals … They dash about in cars with wire netting covering at all hours of the day bent on some raid reprisal or capture of some Sinn Fé iners … One can sense the undercurrent of alarm and anxiety in the faces of the passers-by. 38
That was the Dublin that resulted from Collins’s plans and actions from March 1920 onward.
Between November 1920 and the Truce in July 1921 the pace of the war intensified, and bitterness increased on both sides. No description of guerrilla warfare can fully convey the horror of a situation in which soldier and civilian occupy the same area and are turned with hatred on each other. In Ireland, the sole purpose of the police and the military was to subjugate the IRA/Volunteers by whatever means they could. The purpose of the civilians was to support the Irish forces arrayed against the British. The civilian population inevitably suffered the most, emotionally as well as physically. They were in a constant state of trauma. 39 The British were clearly out of touch with the temper of the Irish people, as was evident from some of the ideas proposed in the British Cabinet. In 1920, the General Officer Commanding the British Army in Ireland, General Sir Nevil Macready, proposed to take on the IRA with more mobile forces, but Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson said that Macready’s plan was useless. Wilson pressed the British ‘to collect the names of Sinn Fé iners by districts; proclaim them on church doors all over the country; and shoot them whenever a policeman is murdered; pick five by lot and shoot them! ’40
General Macready refused to take responsibility for the RIC, the Black and Tans or the Auxiliaries and openly condemned their acts of indiscipline. This friction between the military and the police was a major factor in Britain’s failure to implement an effective security policy during 1920. By October 1920 the ‘King’s Writ’ no longer ran in the countryside. The Irish strategy of making Ireland ungovernable by Britain was beginning to work. British rule in Ireland had virtually collapsed, and the Dá il made astonishing strides in setting up the counter-state. Some people dutifully paid their rates to local republican authorities and ignored the tax demands of the British. The wholesale destruction of tax offices made the British tax-gathering system unworkable. In addition, the Dá il/Republican Courts proved far
more effective and prompt than the old system ever was. All British forces were now being concentrated in the towns, or at least in very strong barracks, obviously with a view to shortening the front. The IRA/Volunteer forces opposing them were becoming stronger and highly organised, albeit with little overall coordination from Dublin. Collins had begun to exert some control over matters outside Dublin but still concentrated his efforts within the city. 41
Further complicating matters for the British, there was usually little co-ordination between the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Black and Tans, the Auxiliary Cadets and the regular British Army. The lack of control over the Tans and the Auxiliaries caused widespread hostility throughout Ireland, often directed at any British official. Consequently the British military and civil administration was torn between those who thought it best to ride out the storm, letting politicians negotiate a settlement, and those who advocated sterner measures to stamp out the IRA/Volunteers completely.
Neither the Black and Tans nor the Auxiliaries exhibited much in the way of military discipline, and the levels of their violence and reprisals mounted daily. Their arrival and the brutality of their tactics drove more and more Irish to support the IRA. The Irish, ruled by the British for so long, now began to think of their resistance as patriotism. By late 1920 public opinion had swung wildly against the British presence in Ireland. The Dublin execution of an eighteen-year-old medical student, Kevin Barry, for killing a British soldier, 42 the shooting of the lord mayor of Cork, Tomá s MacCurtá in, in front of his wife, and the arrest and death on hunger strike of the succeeding lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, were events that made the British position in Ireland ever more untenable. 43 Terence MacSwiney’s death on 25 October 1920 seemed the most important event that occurred in the country at that time. Ireland went into mourning when he died on the seventy-fourth day of his fast. 44
The IRA had shot 182 policemen and fifty soldiers by the end of 1920. In response to the growing violence, the British government introduced the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act. This Act, passed in August 1920, allowed for the internment and court-martial of civilians and led to the arrest of a large number of IRA officers. The level of public support for the IRA, however, continued to rise. The British government initially asserted that it was dealing with civil disorder rather than war, but by this stage it had realised
otherwise. The struggle was embittered by successive acts of violence and terror, and the reprisals and counter-reprisals that followed. In December 1920 the British sanctioned official reprisals, raising the level of violence to new levels and further alienating the local populations.
The condemnation of British reprisals was not limited to the Irish, nor expressed just in quiet British government communications. It was open on the part of the British, as well. General Sir Hubert Gough wrote to the Manchester Guardian in early October:
In Ireland at the moment murder and destruction are condoned and winked at, if not actively encouraged. The murder of policemen and others by the ‘Irish republicans’ have been inexcusable. As you say the leaders of Sinn Fé in and the Irish priesthood are very greatly to be condemned for not having taken a far more active part against such methods, but that is no excuse for any government, and especially a government of the great British empire, adopting such methods. 45
And so rebellion continued in Ireland, not with a great take-over of Dublin or with pitched battles but with brutal city and country ambushes designed to demoralise representatives of the British government and the British people themselves. The war was primarily between the British Secret Service, the DMP and the RIC and Collins’s network in Dublin, a similar war led by Florence O’Donohue’s intelligence operatives in Cork, a war of harassment and reprisal in the country, and a war of propaganda. Collins’s plans for urban and rural guerrilla warfare kept the British from exerting control over the country and inexorably turned the tide of opinion against British rule in Ireland.
In an effort to placate those in the North who were still opposed to any movement in the direction of Home Rule in Ireland, the Government of Ireland Act was passed in the British House of Commons on 11 November 1920 and was enacted on 23 December. It proposed separate parliaments for Southern Ireland and for Northern Ireland. A Council of Ireland was to be set up with members from each parliament in a move to one day remove partition and potentially reunite the two entities. Both parliaments would be subject to Westminster. The Parliament of Northern
Ireland came into being in 1921. At its inauguration in Belfast City Hall on 22 June 1921, King George V made his famous appeal for Anglo-Irish and north–south reconciliation. The speech, drafted by David Lloyd George’s government on recommendations from Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, with the enthusiastic backing of the king, opened the door for formal contact between the British government and the Republican administration of É amon de Valera.
The Parliament of Southern Ireland never became a reality. Both it and the Parliament of Northern Ireland were to be bicameral legislatures as part of ‘Home Rule’. The Second Dá il was elected on 19 May 1921 in the Twenty-Six Counties of the South and on 24 May in the Six Counties of the North. This election became known as the ‘Partition Election’ because it was the first time in which an election in the Six Counties was held at a different time from that for the Twenty-Six Counties. All 128 MPs elected to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland were returned unopposed, and 124 of them, representing Sinn Fé in, declared themselves TDs and assembled as the Second Dá il of the Irish Republic. James Connolly had predicted that a partition previously proposed in 1914 by British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and agreed upon by John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, would be a disaster for Ireland. In the Irish Worker he wrote of partition:
It is the trusted leaders of Ireland that in secret conclave with the enemies of Ireland have agreed to see Ireland as a nation disrupted politically and her children divided under separate political governments... Such a scheme as that agreed by Redmond and Devlin—the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster—would mean a carnival of reaction both north and south, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour Movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it endured. To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death if necessary. 46
Those 1920/21 partition actions again backfired on the British government because they infuriated the IRA/Volunteers, but they did establish the
partition that exists to this day. 47 Nevertheless, as Connolly had foreseen, the British had agreed partition with the North long before 1920. On 29 May 1916 (just a month after the Rising), David Lloyd George, at the time Britain’s Minister for Munitions, wrote to Edward Carson:
My Dear Carson
I enclose Greer’s draft resolutions.
We must make it clear that at the end of the provisional period Ulster does not, whether she wills it or not, merge in the rest of Ireland.
Ever sincerely
D. Lloyd George
P. S. Will you show it to Craig? 48
É amon deValera returned to Ireland from an eighteen-month sojourn in the United States in December 1920, and the continued British and US newspaper references to the IRA/Volunteers as ‘murderers’ led him to press for a full-scale engagement with the British as opposed to the guerrilla tactics used by the IRA. Soon after he returned from America, de Valera told Richard Mulcahy: ‘You are going too fast. This odd shooting of a policeman here and there is having a very bad effect, from the propaganda point of view, on us in America. What we want is, one good battle about once a month with about 500 men on each side. ’49 De Valera overruled Collins’s objections to the strategic error of attacking the British in large numbers in a single battle, and plans were discussed for a large-scale attack. On 25 May 1921 the IRA burned down the Custom House, the centre of British administrative rule in Ireland. The attack was calamitous for the IRA/Volunteers in Dublin and a disaster as a military operation, with over one hundred men captured and five killed. The venture into conventional warfare was a setback, and Collins knew it. As worldwide propaganda, though, it was a huge success, demonstrating to the wider world how strong the IRA was and how weak the British position now was in Ireland. That Irish ‘strength’ was illusory, however, and most IRA leaders, especially Collins, recognised that the organisation’s desperate shortage of weapons and ammunition would soon allow the British to wear it down.
Throughout the war, IRA propaganda, like its intelligence, was highly
efficient. It was planned to reach, and did reach, all the major European capitals and the US. The Irish Bulletin was its main organ and was distributed free to press correspondents and liberal-minded men of political influence in England.
Of the intelligence and propaganda war, Collins himself wrote:
Ireland’s story from 1918 to 1921 may be summed up as the story of a struggle between our determination to govern ourselves and to get rid of British government and the British determination to prevent us from doing either. It was a struggle between two rival Governments, the one an Irish Government resting on the will of the people and the other an alien Government depending for its existence upon military force—the one gathering more and more authority, the other steadily losing ground. 50
As British hopes of controlling the country faded, they began to wonder whether Ireland was worth the price: it now cost more to defend and control than it was worth. On the Irish side, morale was deteriorating with the escalating British reprisals and raids. The IRA/Volunteer numbers had been greatly reduced by imprisonments and internment. In the rural areas, the need for intelligence had not really been understood, and Collins did not have the same sources throughout the countryside as he had in Dublin. 51 Although their positions were greatly different, both sides began to realise their own shortcomings.
At that time, as president of Dá il É ireann, de Valera authorised members of the government to open negotiations with Britain. ‘Peace feelers’ were extended progressively throughout the first half of 1921, until a truce was agreed which went into effect at noon on 11 July. Frank Thornton, one of Collins’s most important lieutenants, wrote that the Truce came with dramatic suddenness:
Whether the truce was a good thing or not remains for historians to record, but, in my humble opinion, had it not taken place we would have found ourselves very hard set to continue the fight with any degree of intensity, owing to that very serious shortage of ammunition, because men, no matter how determined they
may be or how courageous, cannot fight with their bare hands. 52
Collins, too, emphasised that suddenness of the Truce. ‘When we were told of the offer of a truce, we were astounded. We thought you [the British] must have gone mad. ’ But there was trepidation as well. Mulcahy agreed that to drive the British from anything more substantial than a police barracks was beyond them. 53 Further, Collins said, ‘once a Truce is agreed, and we come out into the open, it is extermination for us if the Truce should fail. … We shall be … like rabbits coming out from their holes. ’54 It has been said that Collins was an extremist, but the evidence of history shows that he was really more moderate than de Valera.
Unlike the President [de Valera] who tended to portray a moderate public image while advocating a more hardline approach, Collins tended to do the opposite. Privately he was much more moderate than generally believed. 55
The Truce was formal and was reported to the League of Nations, giving de facto—and possibly de jure—legitimacy to the IRA, since one can only conclude a truce with an equal. 56
Following the Truce, deValera and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George engaged in meetings in London to determine how negotiations should proceed. Both had reputations as skilled negotiators, and they probably possessed the shrewdest political minds in Europe at the time. De Valera continually pressed his interpretation of the meetings in correspondence through the next few months, but Lloyd George just as firmly made it clear that Britain would not enter negotiations on the basis that Ireland was ‘an independent sovereign state’. 57
The basis of the conference was the ‘Gairloch Formula’ proposed by Lloyd George. According to this formula, the status of a republic as previously demanded by deValera was unacceptable, and instead the purpose of the Irish delegation was to ascertain ‘how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’. It was said that de Valera’s difficulty was that Lloyd George ‘offered the Irish what they don’t want [a dominion], and the one thing they do want—unity with Ulster—he had
no power to give them’. 58
On 18 September 1920 Lloyd George wrote:
From the very outset of our conversation I told you that we looked to Ireland to own allegiance to the Throne, and to make her future as a member of the British Commonwealth. That was the basis of our proposals, and we cannot alter it. The status which you now claim for your delegates is, in effect, a repudiation of that status.
Finally, after more correspondence between the two over the next two weeks, on 30 September de Valera chose to write:
Our respective positions have been stated and are understood and we agree that conference, not correspondence, is the most practical and hopeful way to an understanding. We accept the invitation, and our Delegates will meet you in London on the date mentioned ‘to explore every possibility of settlement by personal discussion’. 59
The ‘date mentioned’ was 11 October, and on that date treaty negotiations began in London. Arthur Griffith, Collins, George Gavan-Duffy, Robert Barton and É amonn Duggan represented the Irish, as plenipotentiaries.
The day before he left for London, Collins wrote presciently:
At this moment there is more ill-will within a victorious assembly than ever could be anywhere except in the devil’s assembly. It cannot be fought against. The issue, and persons, are mixed up to such an extent as to make discernability [sic] an impossibility except for a few. … the trusted ones, far from being in accord, are disunited. … This is a time when jealousy and personal gain count for more than country. 60
Although Griffith was the top-ranking delegate, Collins was recognised as the de facto leader. Collins was extremely uncomfortable with being chosen as a delegate. It was not his field of expertise, but it was his duty and he
accepted it grudgingly. 61 Batt O’Connor, a close friend, described how Collins bitterly complained that, ‘It was an unheard-of thing that a soldier who had fought in the field should be elected to carry out negotiations. It was de Valera’s job, not his. ’62
On 6 December 1921 the British negotiating team and the Irish plenipotentiaries signed the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty, and the Irish delegation returned to Ireland for ratification. DeValera was much opposed to the Treaty, though it has been said that he was more affronted that he had not been consulted on the final day before signature in disregard of his ‘instructions’. On learning of the details of the Treaty, de Valera announced that it was a matter for the Cabinet. At an acrimonious Cabinet meeting the Treaty was approved by a four-to-three majority. When the Cabinet approved the agreement, de Valera said that it was a matter for the Dá il. It was then presented to the Dá il for ratification, where the divisions of ideology and personality that had always existed were put on public display. The ‘Treaty debates’ in the Dá il took place between 14 December 1921 and 7 January 1922, when the Dá il voted 64–57 in favour of the Treaty. Those debates were considered by some as the most vituperative in Irish history. Invective was hurled at and by both sides, personality conflicts that had simmered for many years degenerated into name-calling and ad hominem insults, and the vote was considered a ‘betrayal of the ideals of 1916’ by those who felt that the only acceptable treaty would be one unequivocally recognising an Irish Republic. Accusations of bad faith filled the air. Most importantly, the Treaty called for an oath of fealty to the British Crown, and Republicans considered that traitorous. Finally, the Treaty called for partition of the North, and although partition was an established fact after 1920 the conflict in the South only served to further undermine any possibility of reunification. Partition, however, was hardly mentioned in the
Treaty debates.
Terence de Vere White described the debates and their descent into eccentricity:
… much latent hysteria; the calm, courteous, but unsound reasoning of Childers; the restless, sometimes effeminate emotionalism of de Valera; the moderation of Collins; the firm manliness of Griffith; the withering blight of Mary MacSwiney;
the naivety of the other women; the weakness and candour of Barton; the sterile bitterness of Brugha; the incorrigible idealism of Mellows; the cynicism of J. J. Walsh; and the intelligence of two young men, Kevin O’Higgins and Patrick Hogan. 63
Finally, that democratically elected body of Irish men and women had spoken, but de Valera led the anti-Treaty contingent from the assembly. De Valera claimed to know ‘in his heart’ the wishes of his Irish countrymen, and refused to accept the Dá il vote as binding. Collins led the fight for Treaty ratification in the Dá il and in the country, and was vilified by the most hard-case republicans for selling out to the British.
The armed resistance of the Irish was strong enough to make reconquest prohibitively expensive, militarily and politically, for Britain, but not to achieve complete victory. Once again, nationalist Ireland split on the issue of compromise.
There was bitterness among the men and women of both sides, and the seeds of the Irish Civil War were sown.
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