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—Freeman’s Journal, 26 September 1917
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The Irish Volunteer organisation was practically obliterated by the Rising. As a result, open political or military activity by those who survived the Rising was almost impossible. There was no central organisation and all public activity was banned. 1 Following the publication of Piaras Bé aslaí ’s book Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland in 1927, many contested Bé aslaí ’s views. In the 1950s Dr Risteard Mulcahy asked his father, General Mulcahy, to read the book and to annotate it. General Mulcahy’s descriptions of Collins show the latter’s development as a leader and how their relationship ripened. In a review of his father’s notes, Dr Mulcahy categorised, analysed and commented on the General’s involvement from the Rising through his later years as leader of the Fine Gael political party. Specifically, Dr Mulcahy presented a table that outlined the sequence of development of the Volunteers following the Easter Rising of 1916:
• End of 1916 rebellion and the deportation of the prisoners to Frongoch and elsewhere, May 1916.
• The return of the Frongoch prisoners, Christmas 1916.
• Return of leaders from Lewes, June 1917.
• Ashe’s death on hunger strike, September 26 1917.
• Sinn Fé in Convention 25/26th October 1917.
• Volunteer Convention, 27 October 1917.
• Conscription threat and formation of General Headquarters, March 1918.
• General Election and first Dá il, December 1918–January 1919.
• Suppression of the Dá il, September 1919.
• Truce, July 1921.
• Ratification of the Treaty, January 1922. 2
Dr Mulcahy wrote that the Volunteers were clearly in disarray after the Rising. Many were imprisoned. The country people were demoralised, and some were humiliated by their failure to take part. For these reasons, and because there was no clear public vision of the Rising, there was no outward Volunteer activity. There was little evidence of formal organisation and there was no central leadership.
Collins was one of the prisoners sent to Frongoch Prison Camp, near Bala, North Wales. Until 1916 it had housed German prisoners of war in an abandoned distillery and crude huts, but in the wake of the Rising the German prisoners were moved and it was used as a place of internment for approximately 1, 800 Irish prisoners—800 in the North camp and 950 in the South camp. Frongoch was the largest of the prisons housing the 1916 prisoners and became a fertile seed-bed for the spreading of the revolutionary gospel, with inspired organisers such as Collins giving impromptu lessons in guerrilla tactics. Later the camp became known as the ‘University of Revolution’, or sometimes ‘Sinn Fé in University’. 3
After his release from Frongoch, Collins assumed a leadership role in all three nationalist organisations: he was Director of Organisation for the Volunteers, Minister for Finance for the Dá il and President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In addition, he was on the Executive of Sinn Fé in, and was a central figure in the leadership of the clandestine government after the departure of É amon deValera to the United States in 1919. In view of the degree of mythology that developed around Collins, it should be noted that he did not start or prosecute the Anglo-Irish war by himself. Nevertheless, no other person held such positions concurrently and that put him at the centre of action in all areas. Moreover, not content with formal titles or positions, Collins would encroach on any area where he thought ‘something should be done’. In ‘exceeding his brief ’ he antagonised other cabinet members and stepped on many toes owing to his brusque and seemingly uncaring attitude as regards organisational boundaries. His manner, which led some in Frongoch to dub him ‘the Big Fellow’, would
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lead to conflict throughout the war and culminated in the many ad hominem
comments made about him in the Treaty debates of 1921–2.
The outlook and attitude of the released prisoners changed when they reached Ireland.
The returning prisoners found a country waiting for leadership and organisation. The prisoners themselves had been transformed. Internment had produced intense rage and resentment among those affected, prisoners and extended families alike. It had brought together men from all parts of the country and bonded them, even those innocent of any involvement in political conspiracy, into an organic unit. A chain of command had been established. The men learnt about ideas and policies and techniques which became common to them all, instead of innovations devised in one place only. Everyone knew everyone else. If they had been in different jails, they had heard on the grapevine about other men from other districts. They emerged from prison as members of an organisation with a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. 4
Volunteer reorganisation began during the summer following the Rising. 5 Seá n Ó Muirthile and Diarmuid O’Hegarty toured the country, establishing contact between the few leaders who had not been arrested. 6 These two were members not only of theVolunteers but also of the secret, oath-bound Irish Republican Brotherhood. The IRB had infiltrated most nationalist organisations founded in the twentieth century and had planned the 1916 Rising. 7 Ó Muirthile’s and O’Hegarty’s contacts within this secret society helped them to reconstitute the broken remains of the Volunteer organisation. Under cover of the Gaelic League Ard Fheis on 7 August, they gathered enough Volunteer delegates in Dublin to form a Provisional Committee. 8 Reorganisation continued in earnest with Cathal Brugha’s release from hospital in November 1916. Brugha had been an active member of the IRB, but after his release he met with Ó Muirthile and O’Hegarty and told them that in his opinion the society had outlived its usefulness. 9 Despite Brugha’s objections, the Provisional Committee was dominated, as the early Executive of the Volunteers had been, by members
of the IRB. 10 The IRB reorganised itself at the same time, electing a new Supreme Council in February 1917. The officers were Seá n McGarry, Michael Collins and Diarmuid Lynch; other important figures included Con Collins and Tomá s Ashe, who was still in prison. All had taken part in the Easter Rising and spent time in British jails. 11 Participation in the rebellion served as a form of political capital in republican circles.
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Collins was in a position, through the IRB, the Volunteers and Sinn Fé in, to have a great effect on all aspects of the war. Moreover, his job as secretary of the Irish National Aid andVolunteers’ Dependants’ Fund, which was his first employment after returning from Frongoch, gave him a vital role in bringing the prisoners together, particularly in advancing the policies they had discussed in the camps. 12 The bulk of them were ready to force the issue of Irish independence onto a different plane. 13 Collins was firm in his determination to make the Irish understand the concepts of guerrilla warfare: to stage unconventional hit-and-run attacks to inflict as many casualties as possible and then disappear into the countryside, keeping the British off guard and demoralised. Not every Irish leader accepted this strategy; Cathal Brugha disagreed and their conflict would escalate throughout the war, ending in violent clashes at the end and in the Treaty debates. 14 É amon de Valera, for all his political skill, tended to think in conventional military terms, and when he sought an attack on the Custom House in 1921 it was at the expense of Collins’s guerrilla tactics.
Like other guerrilla warriors before them, the Irish perfected their own strategy and tactics. Each such conflict brings its own unique requirements; all insurgents modify previous wars, and there are no hard and fast models. The first wars were guerrilla wars—tribal wars. There were no ‘conventional wars’ until there were city-states to raise armies, arm them and support them in the field. Throughout history there have been more guerrilla wars than conventional ones. In particular, the Irish drew inspiration from the Boer War, in which a fewVolunteers had served in the Irish Brigade. Of course, the term ‘guerrilla’ comes from the Spanish partisans during the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic War. They were often called the ‘Spanish Ulcer’ and it was said that they ‘bled Napoleon’s troops white’. 15
Guerrilla war always pits the weak against the strong, and it would be foolhardy for the guerrilla to attack the enemy’s strength. Republican field
commanders necessarily adapted to their local situations, but Collins and the other leaders recognised a number of historical precedents and theoretical influences at work. The potential for such a war in Ireland had been considered decades earlier. For example, in 1847 James Fintan Lalor wrote to D’Arcy McGee, offering advice to the Young Irelanders:
The force of England is entrenched and fortified. You must draw it out of position; break up its mass; break its trained line of march and manoeuvre, its equal step and serried array. 16
As the war developed, the IRA did exactly this by utilising small units to divide the strength of the Crown forces, spreading them thinly over the whole country in a system of patrols. The republican campaign benefited in both the military and the political sense from another piece of advice from Lalor:
You cannot organize, or train, or discipline your own force to any point of efficiency. You must therefore disorganize, and untrain, and undiscipline that of the enemy, and not alone must you unsoldier, you must unofficer it also; nullify its tactique [sic] and strategy, as well as its discipline; decompose the science and system of war, and resolve them into their first elements. You must make the hostile army a mob, as your own will be. 17
That defined what the Irish had to do in their guerrilla war to come.
The British had seen and fought a series of such wars before this time. Colonel C. E. Callwell collected a number of lessons from these campaigns in his book SmallWars, which dealt with fighting against armies who would not meet the British in the open field. Callwell stressed the difficulty for a British commander:
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No amount of energy and strategic skill will draw the rebels into risking engagements, or induce them to depart from the form of warfare in which most irregular warriors excel and in which regular troops are seen at their worst … it is the difficulty of bringing the foe to action which forms, as a rule, the most
unpleasant characteristic of these wars. Having drawn out an enemy, a superior force will almost always prevail in combat, but it is the prelude which frustrates the regular commander. …
… an adept guerrilla leader will avoid confrontation … 18
With this principle in mind, Callwell called guerrilla warfare a type of operation to be avoided by the conventional commander above all things. The writers of An t-Ó glá ch, the newspaper of the Irish Volunteers, also drew guerrilla inspiration from the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s invasion, the Cuban insurgency against Spain, and the campaigns waged against the British by Boer General Christiaan de Wet19 and German General Paul-Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. 20 Despite variations in time and place, all of these examples preceding the Irish War of Independence stressed the importance of mobility, of choosing the terrain for combat, of avoiding unsustainable casualties and of winning the active support of the local population. That was exactly how the Irish pursued the guerrilla war against
Britain.
T. E. Lawrence, a contemporary guerrilla leader, wrote:
The guerrilla army resembles a gas—able to disperse as molecules to prevent a counter-strike—but able to coalesce for its own operations.
British responses to the Irish demand for their own government were unimaginative and foolish, starting with the executions and mass imprisonments after the Rising. Arthur Griffith, a nationalist who was most in favour of constitutional action, spoke of the executions after the Rising by General Sir John Maxwell: ‘I knew the English were brutal enough to do it; I did not think they were stupid enough. Had I foreseen that, perhaps my views on the whole matter might have been different. ’21 With such displays of brutality the British attempted to strike terror into the hearts of any remaining nationalists in Ireland. Maxwell’s executions were meant to create a fear that would resonate throughout the country, thereby preventing any further rebellions. The British acted as if all the Irish were against them, so they did not bother to differentiate: to be Irish was to be guilty. Nothing could have brought the Irish to the nationalist/separatist side more
completely. Tom Kettle once wrote: ‘Dublin Castle, if it did not know what the Irish people want, could not so infallibly have maintained its tradition of giving them the opposite’. General Nevil Macready, ultimately O/C of British troops in Ireland, wrote in 1920 that ‘whatever we do we are sure to be wrong’. 22
As in all guerrilla wars, the Irish were the weaker side and as such were dependent for strategic and tactical successes on the errors committed by the British. A military maxim is that ‘when your opponent is doing stupid or foolish things, don’t interfere’. Collins followed this assiduously, and encouraged the British to continue their ways. Perhaps apocryphally, Collins is quoted as saying, ‘Tell Winston we could never have done it without him’. 23 The people were driven into the arms of the IRA, exactly as Collins had hoped. Collins is the prototype of the urban guerrilla. He wrote the blueprint for subsequent revolutionary movements from Malay to Israel and from Cuba to Vietnam and Afghanistan. His plans worked well and the British continued to make mistakes.
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Collins’s views on violence were carefully considered. He said that he had ‘strong fighting ideas, or I should say I suppose ideas of the utility of fighting’. Above all, Collins was a realist. He was always concerned about shaping public opinion and about the political impact of violence. He stressed the use of the minimum force necessary to achieve the objective in a politically acceptable and productive way. Nevertheless, he was a believer in the principle of getting your retaliation in first.
The Prussian Carl von Clausewitz wrote:
It is dangerous—but necessary—to try to predict the actions of the enemy. To do that, one must see the battle like your enemy.
Insurgent and counter-insurgent commanders must ask:
• How can I get the advantage?
• What is the opponent thinking/going to do?
• What do I need to do to outguess him—to out-play him on this field?
Collins and the Irish were better than the British at answering these questions. Among Clausewitz’s lessons pertinent to the Irish situation
between 1917 and 1921 was his insistence on the subordination of military strategy to political authority and objectives, as well as the advantages (and disadvantages) of surprise in combat.
The Irish War of Independence contributed four concepts that we see in later insurgencies:
• The Irish could only fight a guerrilla war. It must be noted that the British greatly contributed by overreacting—part of the Irish strategy.
• It is not necessary to wait until all the conditions exist for the war to start. The war can create them. That was one of the guiding principles used by Che Guevara in Cuba.
• Use of roadside explosives—Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
• The countryside was the usual arena for guerrilla fighting in wars prior to the Irish War, but Collins showed that guerrilla principles worked well in Dublin. The Irish War was probably the first urban guerrilla war to succeed.
To accomplish these objectives, Collins, Florence O’Donoghue and the other Irish leaders relied on:
• Intelligence
• Propaganda
• Politics
• A loosely co-ordinated military campaign
In current worldwide counter-insurgency manuals, insurrections are defined as a violent competition between a State and a rival political group to control a population or to establish an alternative political order. That is what separates them from bandits, and that defined the Irish War of Independence. The insurgent challenges the status quo; the insurgent initiates. The counter-insurgent seeks to reinforce the State and so defeat the challenge. Before fighting begins, moderates are in charge. Radicals sideline the moderates and resort to violence against the enemy. That is how the war began. In any conflict, whatever the cause, at the start there will be:
• An active minority for the cause
• An active minority against the cause
• A passive neutral majority
The Irish had to convince those who were neutral to become supporters. To turn the IRA campaign into a success, it was imperative to convince a majority of the Irish population of the necessity and legitimacy of the use of violence. In 1773 Samuel Adams said, ‘It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority’.
When Clausewitz published On War in 1832, he posited his most famous military principle: ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’. The political view is the object; war is the means. Clausewitz’s dictum had as its central tenets:
• Military action without a clear political objective is useless, and vice versa.
• A guerrilla war event must include propaganda and politics alongside military action.
• All events must recognise a military purpose.
T. E. Lawrence didn’t think that many of Clausewitz’s principles applied to a guerrilla war, but he agreed with this one: bad government drives insurrections. Recognition of an Irish civilian authority was an absolute necessity for Irish and international perceived legitimacy, and that was the main objective of the Irish leaders.
The release of the prisoners was extremely important for reorganisation in all areas, and when they returned they were more determined than ever to further the cause of Irish freedom. The ecstatic welcome given to the returning prisoners should have been a clear warning to the British, who thought that the Easter Rising would be soon forgotten. Shortly after their return, they began drilling and training. Displays of strength were mostly limited to demonstrations at by-elections and funerals, but following the death of Thomas Ashe after force-feeding while on hunger strike in September 1917 such displays became more common, and more violent clashes with the authorities ensued.
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Until the end of 1917 the Volunteers remained a relatively small and inactive organisation in most counties. 24 The conscription crisis that followed
in early 1918 changed this, and afterwardsVolunteer membership and public displays of disregard for the law were widely accepted and established Sinn Fé in as the main representative of public opinion. Joost Augusteijn notes that several aspects influenced the further development of theVolunteers:
• Action of any kind was a strong impetus to further activity, both to the men involved and others who were inspired by what took place.
• Diverse experience of action led to an increasing differentiation between areas.
• The dominance of those among the leaders who saw theVolunteers as a political instrument over those who felt that a military conflict was necessary meant that military operations were not led from above but by the most radical of local leaders. 25
Because many of the most radical Volunteers were young and wanted to protect their livelihoods and families, only a few were prepared to engage in open activities that would jeopardise both. As a result, many of the regional differences became more apparent: development towards violent confrontation with the British occurred most often in Dublin and Munster, particularly in Tipperary in 1918. Even in Dublin, however, the Volunteers did little up to 1920. Activities were limited to a few in Collins’s ‘Squad’, rendering most companies militarily inactive. The entire work of an average Dublin company during that year consisted of three arms raids. 26
Richard Mulcahy wrote that theVolunteers were the hard core of the emerging political organisation of Sinn Fé in, and that much of the continuing reorganisation of the Volunteers in 1917–18 took place under cover of the by-elections of that time. 27 Shortly after the release of the prisoners held in British jails, a parliamentary seat opened up in the Roscommon North constituency. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP)— the moderate nationalists who supported Home Rule—ran Thomas Devine. A consortium of radical nationalists decided to run George Noble Plunkett, father of the executed 1916 leader Joseph Mary Plunkett. The sixty-five-year-old, a papal count, had been inducted into the IRB in April 1916, 28 and on 3 February 1917 he won the seat by a landslide, receiving in excess of 1, 300 votes more than the Irish Parliamentary Party candidate. 29 The Sinn Fé in party founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905 advocated abstention
from the Westminster parliament as a means of achieving political independence, but Plunkett did not subscribe to this stance until after the election.
This success encouraged the radical nationalists to take an even bolder step, and when a seat opened in South Longford in May the Sinn Fé in nomination was definitely made by a group of IRB members. A series of covert negotiations between Michael Collins in Dublin and Thomas Ashe in Lewes Gaol resulted in the nomination of Joseph McGuinness, a prisoner in Lewes Gaol. 30 The election slogan was ‘Put him in to get him out’. McGuinness won the seat by a mere thirty-seven votes. 31 The first count indicated a win for the IPP candidate, Patrick McKenna, but those thirty- seven votes were found—or were manufactured ‘by some skilful vote rigging’, as some later contended—and McGuinness gained the victory. 32 The South Longford result was described in the Manchester Guardian as ‘the equivalent of a serious defeat of the British Army in the field’. 33
Later that year Sinn Fé in nominated another prisoner for the vacant East Clare seat. 34 Their candidate was É amon de Valera, who had commanded Dublin’s Third Battalion during the Rising. At Mount Street Bridge over the Grand Canal, troops under his command had decimated the British Sherwood Forester reinforcements entering the city, and his reputation from then on relied on this action. The Times noted a more violent tone in the East Clare election speeches than in previous Sinn Fé in campaigns. De Valera and speakers on his behalf continued to use internationalist rhetoric, insisting that Ireland should be recognised at a peace conference at the close of the European war. They tinged these optimistic pronouncements with aggressive oratory, claiming that they were in favour of the violent overthrow of British government if a suitable opportunity presented itself. 35 Following de Valera’s victory, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, Ivor Churchill Guest (Lord Wimborne), in a secret report for cabinet not released until 1978, wrote that ‘The Sinn Fein victory in East Clare is a fact of cardinal importance … [I]t marks the definite failure of the policy to rehabilitate constitutional nationalism or disarm Sinn Fé in defiance of English rule … [I]n a remarkably well conducted political contest … the electors, on a singularly frank issue of self-Government within the Empire versus an Independent Irish Republic, have overwhelmingly pronounced for the latter. ’36
The assertion that Sinn Fé in would gain independence via an international peace conference was an attempt to capitalise on a deep reservoir of goodwill towards the Allied Powers, now joined by the United States. US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which endorsed democracy and national self-determination, resonated powerfully in nationalist Ireland. The republican speakers at deValera’s rallies emphasised this but made it clear that they were willing to use force if the peace conference failed them. DeValera told a crowd at Creeslough, Co. Donegal, that ‘winning freedom internationally was infinitely preferable to any attempt to win it from England … Sinn Fé in will use every means that common sense and morality would admit of to achieve its goals’. 37 He was more explicit later when he said that ‘… they were prepared and organised and they could be in such a position, if a suitable opportunity presented itself to secure their demand by force of arms’. 38 The mixture of peaceful and violent rhetoric resulted in an overwhelming victory for deValera, and presaged his future ambivalence in his speeches. He was elected by a wide margin on 10 July 1917.
In addition to the rhetorical escalation in de Valera’s campaign, there was an increase in actual clashes with the RIC officers observing them. Constables regularly attended Sinn Fé in meetings to make notes of what they claimed to be seditious speeches, and their reports reveal overt hostility from republican crowds. These early conflicts with the police seemed to validate Sinn Fé in’s most incendiary rhetoric, which was reserved for the RIC itself. Many speakers called them the ‘eyes and ears’ of the British government in Ireland, while Peter Clancy of Ennis went so far as to call them ‘murderers’. 39 Gearó id O’Sullivan called the police ‘their principal enemies’ and advised no one to even speak to them. 40 Martin Walton noted the prevalence of the RIC throughout the country and their capacity for intelligence: ‘the country was studded at the time with small police barracks every few miles … they were the eyes and ears. You couldn’t travel from Dublin to Swords—that’s a distance of about seven miles—without going into three RIC outposts, and everybody passing up and down the road was noted carefully. ’41
Though the IPP did recover somewhat and win two by-elections in February and April 1918, in South Armagh and East Tyrone respectively, it must be noted that both IPP candidates, Patrick Donnelly in South
Armagh and T. J. S. Harbison in East Tyrone, benefited from long-time IPP organisation, and at least as much from the fact that the demographics of the constituencies were largely Protestant. Further by-elections in Offaly (then King’s County, where Patrick MacCartan was elected in April), East Cavan (where Arthur Griffith was elected in June) and Kilkenny City (where William Cosgrave was elected in August) later cemented the view of the Irish people that the IPP was out of touch with the southern Irish electorate’s wishes. In Kilkenny, Peter de Loughry clearly staked out the Sinn Fé in position against the IPP: ‘it was time to get rid of diplomacy because deep down in the hearts of everyone was the idea of independence’. 42 (Any real prospect of an IPP recovery was shattered by the conscription threat of early 1918, as discussed in Chapter 3. )
Throughout the period, republicans debated whether the organised use of force was necessary or was the best means of achieving Irish independence. 43 P. S. O’Hegarty was of the opinion that
after 1916, there should not have been a shot fired in Ireland, nor a gun bought. They were totally unnecessary. We had the Sinn Fé in policy, the men who made it, the enthusiasm and the support of the people. Without firing a shot we could have forced from England anything that we forced from her and more. We would at the same time have maintained our solidarity, escaped Partition, and avoided the irreparable moral disaster [the Civil War] which has overtaken us. 44
He was equally cynical regarding Ireland’s efforts at international recognition: ‘So far as the Peace Conference was concerned, it was all waste labour, and might just as well have been recognised as such at the beginning. We never had a chance of getting into the Peace Conference. ’45 Fr Pat Gaynor, an early Sinn Fé in convert, claimed that the only benefit of violent action was the international exposure it gave the republican cause: ‘The one solid argument in favour of our war was that the shootings were news and received world-wide publicity’. 46 In the light of some later guerrilla actions, some remarkably pacifist statements were made on the republican platforms as well. An RIC sergeant recorded that, while sharing the platform with de Valera on New Year’s Day 1918, Revd J. W. O’Meehan said that ‘It was not
by lying in wait for a victim behind a ditch, or attacking a man’s house at night that they would obtain their independence. Such outrages were said to be the work of cowards, were un-Irish and foreign to the methods of the men of Easter Week. ’47 At the time, even the most active Sinn Fé in supporters viewed physical force with great apprehension, but the fact that these types of statements did not stop the violence shows the determination of those who committed it. It is possible that denunciations of physical force restrained aggressive attacks at that early time, but by and large members of the growing IRA engaged in whatever activities they felt would strengthen their organisation in local areas. 48 Despite the mounting disorder, British officials were reluctant to deal with the Irish situation while the European war continued. Further, the British parliament was divided on the question of publicly recognising what was happening in Ireland.
Beginning in 1917, the prisoners who had been charged and taken to jails in Britain returned to Ireland, and there was a resurgence of political violence. One of the earliest shooting incidents presaged what would become standard IRA operating procedure: a unit created a reason for the RIC to leave their barracks and then ambushed them as they went to investigate. On the night of 17 February 1917, local RIC received a report that shots had been fired into a farmer’s house outside Portumna, Co. Galway. A patrol left the barracks, and five people opened fire on them as they neared the house, wounding one constable. 49
The first fatality among government forces since the Rising occurred in Dublin. On 10 June 1917, Cathal Brugha and Count Plunkett led a group of several thousand Sinn Fé in supporters into Beresford Place, where Brugha began to address them. Dublin Metropolitan Police Inspector John Mills and a detail of officers approached and declared the meeting illegal. As Mills was escorting prisoners to Store Street Police Station, a man leapt from the crowd and fractured his head with a hurley. As early as mid-1917 the IRA was beginning to be organised and aggressive, though its weapons were crude.
During 1917 and 1918 great progress was made in the recruitment and training of Volunteers, and in the reorganisation of the military command with the formation of General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin in March 1918. 50 By early 1919 the country had a force that was very loosely organised under a GHQ command structure, and there was a ‘unity
of purpose, a high standard of voluntary discipline, and a growing eagerness to serve’. 51 As Charles Townshend points out, however, from the point of view of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the national movement had passed out of their hands and into the control of non-IRB men like Griffith, de Valera and Brugha. 52 It was this, rather than any theorising about future military possibilities in the wake of the Rising, which led to the guerrilla initiative of 1919. The means were dictated by circumstance. Slender resources created the style of warfare, rather than a conviction that it held a real hope of ultimate military success. The campaign of violence, which occurred sporadically in the first six months of 1919, was unattractive to most ‘political’ Sinn Fé iners. And although theVolunteers after January 1919 claimed that they were the legally constituted army of a lawful state and began to call themselves the IRA, their connection with the Republic represented by Dá il É ireann was tenuous. They resisted the oath of allegiance to the Dá il which Brugha, as Minister of Defence, sought to impose; they tended to resist all central control, especially political control; and there was a long delay (until April 1921) before the Dá il took public responsibility for their actions. In reality the physical-force men acted independently, compelling moderates to move towards their extreme position and so regaining their grip upon the independence movement as a whole. 53
At this early stage of the conflict the Volunteers undertook actions based on their own initiative or that of local leaders, but GHQ in Dublin began directly encouraging arms raids and defensive violence from the first issue of An t-Ó glá ch on 15 August 1918. This bi-monthly journal published General Headquarters orders, gave tips on technical aspects of weapons and equipment, and constantly encouraged Volunteer units to engage in operations. An t-Ó glá ch (‘The Young Warrior/Soldier’) was ‘The official newspaper of the IrishVolunteers’. It was conceived by Collins in 1918 and edited by Piaras Bé aslaí. Collins played an active role in guiding editorial policy and finding writers. He also contributed its ‘Organisation Notes’ until May 1919. In this column he laid out the official formula for unit organisation and the duties of officers. The paper was a ‘secret’ internal journal printed in Dublin and distributed to theVolunteers throughout the country by the IRA, clandestinely circulated in flour sacks and by other means. It was not only a ‘military journal’ but also contained much of the
Sinn Fé in ideology and had a great influence on the IRA/Volunteers. Throughout the war, An t-Ó glá ch took the most aggressive military stance against the British.
The inaugural issue appeared on 15 August 1918 and declared:
TheVolunteer does not talk, but acts … Whenever and however an opportunity occurs of offering effective resistance to an attack of the enemy, that resistance must be offered. Volunteers with weapons in their hands must never surrender without a fight.
We will strike in our own way, in our own time. If we cannot, by force of arms, drive the enemy out of our country at the present moment, we can help to make his position impossible and his military activities futile. 54 [Emphasis in original]
Clearly, even at this very early stage, the Irish intent was to make the country ungovernable by the British—and ultimately they did. An t-Ó glá ch also took on the issue of the peace conference. Predicting that the European war would soon end, the journal stated on 29 October that ‘the freedom of Ireland depends in the long run not upon the play of politics, nor international dealings, but upon the will of the Irish people to be free and maintain their freedom … [They should] leave no stone unturned in the effort to arm and equip themselves thoroughly. ’55 Instead of preaching the politics of a party or of any particular leader, it always emphasised that the Volunteer’s allegiance was to the Irish nation.
The first editorial by Piaras Bé aslai included:
Volunteers are not politicians; they were not created for the purposes of parades, demonstrations, or political activities; they follow no particular leader as such; their allegiance is to the Irish Nation. To their own chosen leaders they render the obedience that all soldiers render to their officers. Their obedience to their officers is not affected by personal considerations. It is the office, not the man, to whom deference is due.
The IrishVolunteers have chosen in open Convention those leaders in whom they have confidence to control the public
policy of the organisation. It is the duty of those leaders to conform that policy to the national will, by co-operating on the military side with those bodies and institutions which in other departments of the national life are striving to make our Irish Republic a tangible reality. 56
Though GHQ staff were united in their call for decisive action, different views existed as to what form the conflict would take. In an early edition of An t-Ó glá ch Collins emphasised the importance of the company as the basic Volunteer unit, but wrote: ‘forget the Company of the regular army. We are not establishing or attempting to establish a regular force on the lines of the standing armies of even the small independent countries of Europe. ’ Instead, Collins described the Volunteers as a ‘body of riflemen scouts, capable of acting individually or in units’. 57
Later in 1918 An t-Ó glá ch went further, calling on the Irish to
acknowledge no limit and no scruple in resistance to the British
… we must recognize that anyone, civilian or soldier, who assists directly or by connivance in this crime against us, merits no more consideration than a wild beast, and should be killed without mercy or hesitation as opportunity offers … the man who voluntarily surrenders when called for … the man who drives a police car or assists in the transport of army supplies, all these having assisted the enemy must be shot or otherwise destroyed with the least possible delay. 58
The paper continued publication throughout the war, and always addressed the ‘official’ response to British announcements. For example, in September 1918 Lord Lieutenant French indicated that the English ‘Government’s policy toward Conscription for Ireland remains unchanged’. In response, An t-Ó glá ch, the mouthpiece for the most violent opposition to conscription, editorialised:
It is desired that we should eliminate all talk and all thought of passive resistance [against conscription], because passive resistance means, in effect, no resistance at all.
We must fight with ruthlessness and ferocity …59
The article went on to quote George Bernard Shaw: ‘Nothing is ever done in the world unless men are willing to kill each other if it is not done’. Collins liked the article, had many copies distributed and asked its author, Ernest Blythe, for more of the same.
Whether the Irish were prepared to take the next step is arguable, but politics, in the election of 1918 and the establishment of Dá il É ireann on 21 January 1919, was to make the leap to the War of Independence
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