 |
8. Conclusion: Aftermath and influence of the Irish War of Independence
|
|
|
|
Notes
1 The Times, 23 June 1921.
2 A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (London, 1965), pp 156–7.
3 Francis Costello, ‘King GeorgeV’s speech at Belfast, 1921: prelude to the Anglo-Irish Truce’, É ire-Ireland, vol. 22, no. 3 (1987).
4 The Times, 24 June 1921.
5 Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, vol. I, Doc. No. 135, 24 June 1921.
6 Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, vol. I, Doc. No. 136, 24 June 1921.
7 The Times, 28 June 1921.
8 Irish Bulletin, 9 July 1921.
9 Con Casey, in Uinseonn MacEoin (ed. ), Survivors: The Story of Ireland’s Struggle as Told Through Some of Her Outstanding Living People. Notes 1913–1916 (Dublin, 1966), p. 373.
10 Seá n MacBride, That Day’s Struggle: A Memoir 1904–1951 (ed. Caitriona Lawlor) (Dublin, 2005), p. 39.
11 Liam DeRoiste, Treaty Debates, Dá il É ireann, vol. 3, 22 December 1921.
12 General Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life (2 vols; London, 1925; 1942), vol. 2, p. 596.
13 Ibid., p. 602.
14 James Mackay, Michael Collins: A Life (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 201.
15 Rex Taylor, Michael Collins (London, 1970), p. 142.
16 Sheila Lawlor, ‘Ireland from Truce to Treaty, war or peace? July to October 1921’,
Irish Historical Studies, vol. 22 (1980).
17 Many of the leaders of the IRA outside Dublin were blindsided by the Truce and most disagreed with it. They thought the IRA was ‘winning’ and would soon have a military victory. See Liam Deasy, Brother Against Brother (Cork, 1998), p. 11 et seq.; Ernie O’Malley, The Singing Flame (Dublin, 1978), p. 13: ‘We were gaining ground, each day strengthened us and weakened our enemy; then why was it necessary to stop hostilities? ’‘The IRA of July 1921 were stronger in number—in spite of several thousands arrested—than they were in July 1920. In addition there were ten times more experienced, tough fighters’—Tom Barry to Raymond Smith, Irish Independent, 7 July 1971.
18 Peter Hart, Mick: The Real Michael Collins (London, 2006), p. 277.
19 T. Ryle Dwyer, I Signed my Death Warrant: Michael Collins and the Treaty (Cork, 2007), p. 32.
20 Tim Pat Coogan and George Morrison, The Irish Civil War (London, 1998), p. 20.
21 P. S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fé in (Dublin, 1924; 1998), pp 46–8.
22 Calton Younger, Ireland’s Civil War (New York, 1969), p. 166 et seq.
23 See http: //www. difp. ie/docs/1921/Anglo-Irish-Treaty/145. htm.
24 Seá n T. O’Kelly, Witness Statements 611, 1765; George Gavan-Duffy, Witness Statement 381; Patrick McCartan, Witness Statements 99, 100, 766; É amon Bulfin, Witness Statement 497.
25 Second Dá il, Dá il É ireann, private session, p. 153. Members of the IRA in Northern Ireland were particularly distressed at de Valera’s statement that ‘For his part, if the Republic were recognized he would be in favour of giving each party the power to vote itself out …’. In his statement, de Valera was confirming what he had told the Dá il on 22 August 1921, before the Treaty was negotiated. Jim McDermott, Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms, 1920–1922 (Belfast, 2001), p. 107.
|
|
|
26 Dwyer, I signed my death warrant, p. 61.
27 Batt O’Connor, With Michael Collins in the Fight for Independence (London, 1929), p. 171.
28 Dwyer, I signed my death warrant, p. 46.
29 Manuscript of Seá n Ó Muirthile, Richard Mulcahy papers, UCD.
30 Benjamin Kline, ‘Churchill and Collins 1919–1922: admirers or adversaries? ’, History Ireland, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993).
31 See http: //oireachtasdebates. oireachtas. ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack. nsf/ takes/Dá il1921121900003.
32 O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fé in, p. 87.
33 Collins, Dá il É ireann Treaty Debates, Dá il Reports, GSO, p. 32.
34 Dwyer, I signed my death warrant, p. 24.
35 Frank Gallagher [writing as David Hogan], The Four GloriousYears (Dublin, 1953), p. 321.
36 J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 48; ‘De Valera’s use of words: three case-studies’, Radharc, vol. 2 (2001).
37 Gallagher/Hogan, The Four GloriousYears, p. 322.
38 Desmond FitzGerald, ‘Mr Packenham on the Anglo-Irish Treaty’, Studies: The Irish Jesuit Quarterly Review, vol. 24 (1935).
39 Jim Maher, Harry Boland: A Biography (Cork, 1998), p. 159 et seq.
40 Younger, Ireland’s Civil War, p. 166.
41 Robert Kee, The Green Flag (London, 1972), p. 724.
42 Diary of Thomas Jones, 10 November 1921. He was Lloyd George’s personal secretary. (See note 56 for further comment on partition and the Boundary Commission. )
43 The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (pamphlet, 1904).
44 Though all discussion in the Dá il, the newspapers and most books refer to a ‘Treaty’, the English and Irish delegates did not sign a Treaty. They signed a document entitled ‘Articles for Agreement’. The words ‘For a Treaty’ were added to the English copy, but by that time the Irish copy was being delivered to Ireland. Frank Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal (London, 1935; 1972), p. 246. For consistency and to conform to other sources, the discussion here will refer to the ‘Treaty’.
45 Hart, Mick, p. 319.
46 Joseph Curran, The Birth of the Irish Free State, 1921–1923 (University of Alabama, 1980), p. 130.
47 Michael Hopkinson, Green against Green (Dublin, 2004), p. 35.
48 See Padraig Colum, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1959), p. 309. ‘Griffith expected objections to [the Treaty], but he was reckoning on the President’s support. ’ Desmond FitzGerald had to tell him, in the words he had heard himself from Austin Stack, ‘He’s dead against it now, anyway’.
49 Many of the IRA felt betrayed as well. ‘The officers and men I met seemed dazed. Some had been crying, their eyes were swollen. We awaited the arrest of the delegates. They had no authority to sign without first referring the matter to their Cabinet. ’ O’Malley, The Singing Flame, p. 43.
50 Robert Barton, Witness Statement 979; Russell Rees, Ireland 1905–25, Volume I. Text and Historiography (Newtownards, 1998), p. 289.
51 T. Ryle Dwyer, De Valera: The Man and the Myths (Swords, 1992), p. 85.
|
|
|
52 Irish Independent, 9 December 1921.
53 Frank O’Connor, The Big Fellow (London, 1969; 1979), p. 134.
54 T. Ryle Dwyer, Michael Collins and the Civil War (Cork, 2012), p. 82.
55 McDermott, Northern Divisions, p. 156 et seq.; G. B. Kenna, Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogroms 1920–1922 (Dublin, 1922; 1997, ed. Thomas Donaldson).
56 When Collins told Kathleen Clarke on 22 December that he was going to ‘work the Treaty’, he was indicating his future intent. Publicly he said that the Treaty ‘gives us the freedom to achieve freedom’ or that it was a ‘stepping-stone’, but his true plan was to ‘work the Treaty’ and move to a united Ireland. All the evidence indicates that Collins was totally committed to ending partition. In the months after the Treaty was signed, he had not only exerted diplomatic pressure but also taken political risks in giving military support to the IRA divisions in the North and on the border. In the debates, Seá n Hales (who was pro-Treaty and was killed by the IRA for voting for the Treaty) said: ‘If I thought this Treaty which has been signed was to bar our right to freedom, if it was to be the finality, I wouldn’t touch it but I took that it is to be a jumping off point to attain our alternative ends, because if it is one year or in ten years, Ireland will regain that freedom which is her destiny and no man can bar it. The only thing is that at the present moment if there is anything like a split it would be more dangerous than anything else... Posterity will judge us all yet. There is no getting away from that. When the time comes there is one thing certain. Speaking from the column which I was always with through the battlefields and willing and ready to carry on the fight but still I look upon that Treaty as the best
rock from which to jump off for the final accomplishment of Irish freedom’ (http: //oireachtasdebates. oireachtas. ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack. nsf/ta kes/Dá il1921121900003). Liam Weeks and Michael O’Fathartaigh, The Treaty: Debating the Irish State (Sallins, 2019). While Rory O’Connor and the anti-Treaty party held the Four Courts from April to June 1922, Collins was trading the new weapons that the British were providing to the Free State army with O’Connor, who sent those new weapons to the IRA in the North. Moreover, Collins was knowingly involved in the kidnapping of Northern RIC men and holding them as hostages. Collins was the only one of the signatories to the Treaty to mention the word ‘partition’ in the debates, and it was he, far more than anyone else in the Free State government, who was willing to invade the North in order to achieve unification. He did believe in the Boundary Commission, but his other actions indicate his willingness to use military force in the North if necessary. Collins was greatly affected by attacks on Catholics in the North, and was engaged in many schemes that he thought would give them relief. While he indicated that he was greatly opposed to partition, he said that he would not countenance ‘coercing’ Ulster. ‘If we are not going to coerce the North East corner, the North East corner must not be allowed to coerce. ’ Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Volume III, Ireland 1918– 1925 (ed. Keith Middlemas) (London, 1971), p. 77. Collins addressed partition in a speech in Armagh on 4 September 1921, stressing that the Unionists would not be coerced by republicans, but he also emphasised his opposition to partition, promising ‘to those who are with us that no matter what the future may bring we will not desert them’. É amon Phoenix, Northern Nationalism: Nationalist Politics, Partition and the Catholic Minority in Northern Ireland, 1890–1940 (Belfast, 1994), p. 147.
It is difficult to reconcile some of Collins’s statements and writings with his apparent military intentions. Further, others have written that some of Collins’s efforts were counterproductive. See Robert Lynch, ‘The Clones affray, 1922: massacre or invasion? ’, History Ireland, vol. 12, no. 3 (2004): ‘The Clones affray also illustrates the shadowy and confused role of Michael Collins, who, stuck in his cocoon of conspiracy, continued in his deluded belief that an aggressive IRA policy could achieve similar results to those of the War of Independence. His failure to understand the Northern situation meant that his policy was at best a failure and at worst counterproductive, doing little else but confirming unionist prejudices and highlighting the Northern Catholic minority’s vulnerability. ’ Even among those who believed in the Boundary Commission it was thought that there would be a one- sided transfer of land from the North to the Free State; when the Commission met in 1925 and some land in Donegal was to be transferred to the North the Commission fell apart. Enda Staunton, ‘The Boundary Commission debacle 1925, aftermath and implications’, History Ireland, vol. 4, no. 2 (1996).
|
|
|
57 Dá il É ireann, private session, p. 153. Members of the IRA in Northern Ireland were particularly distressed by deValera’s statement that, ‘For his part, if the Republic were recognized he would be in favour of giving each party the power to vote itself out
…’. De Valera was confirming what he had told the Dá il on 22 August 1921, before the Treaty was negotiated. McDermott, Northern Divisions, p. 107. McDermott opines (p. 138) that that is the reason why so many republicans in the North sided with Collins rather than de Valera when the split occurred over the terms of the Treaty.
58 See http: //oireachtasdebates. oireachtas. ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.
nsf/ takes/Dá il1921121900003.
59 Kathleen Clarke (ed. Helen Litton), RevolutionaryWoman: My Fight for Ireland’s Freedom (Dublin, 1997), p. 188. Further, Collins, Mulcahy and Eoin O’Duffy all gave assurances to the divisional commanders of the IRA in the north-east that, ‘Although the six counties did not benefit as much as the rest of Ireland by it [the Treaty], it was the best that possibly could have been got at the time and it was the intention of the Dá il members and the members of the GHQ staff who supported it, to work to try to overcome the Treaty position with regard to Ulster’. Letter from Sé amus Woods to Mulcahy, 29 September 1921, S1801/a, SPO.
60 See http: //www. oireachtas. ie/parliament/education/historicaldebatesandspeeches/.
61 Dá il É ireann, Official Report: Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, 21 December 1921, p. 105–6.
62 Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, Article 4.
63 See http: //www. oireachtas. ie/parliament/education/historicaldebatesandspeeches/.
64 See Jason Knirck, Ghosts and Realities: Female TDs and the Treaty Debate (New Jersey, 1997); Women of the Dá il (Dublin, 2006).
65 Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy, Female Activists, Irish Women and the Change, 1900– 1960 (Dublin, 2001), p. 80.
66 Diary of Kathleen Lynn, 7 December 1921.
67 Dá il É ireann, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 3, 7 January 1922.
68 Padraig de Burca and John Boyle, Free State or Republic? (Dublin, 1922; 2002), p. 78.
69 Dá il É ireann, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 3, 7 January 1922.
8. Conclusion: Aftermath and influence of the Irish War of Independence
What few remember is that the script followed by groups as diverse as the Vietcong and the Taliban was written in Ireland during its 1919– 1921 War of Independence …
|
|
|
—Max Boot
However spontaneous and idealistic it may appear, guerrilla warfare has become understood as a science, calling for objectivity on the part of its practitioners and giving guerrilla struggles a tendency towards universality. Collins clearly did not underestimate the importance of organisation and administration, even in a guerrilla war. He ultimately controlled the apparatus. As in most guerrilla wars, however, and certainly in the few successful ones, the Irish tactics, techniques and procedures do not appear to have been part of a plan deliberately conceived and constructed in advance. All wars are unique but guerrilla wars have similarities, and the successful warriors learn to use the best strategies and tactics from the ‘last’ wars to fight the ‘next’ wars. 1 The Irish learned from the past, and guerrilla warriors who followed learned from the Irish as well. In combating insurgency, the failures often have more to teach than the successes. The odds are always stacked against the insurgents: in terms of resources and manpower their opponents usually vastly outmatch them, so their eventual defeat is hardly surprising. When the insurgents ‘succeed’, however, it is worth sitting up and paying very close attention indeed. 2
Colin Gray put it thus: one should not suggest that the judgements drawn from the Irish war can serve as a general paradigm or template for the conduct of all insurgencies that followed, but when those judgements are reviewed and translated into ‘lessons’ it is tempting to suggest that, if one understands the belligerents in, the course of and the outcome of the Irish war, then one has the lessons to learn for the conduct of future insurgencies or counter-insurgencies. 3 Context is crucial. The ‘how-to’
requires an examination of what worked and what did not. For example, both sides in the Irish War of Independence used coercion. Both sides resorted to terror: murder, executions or extra-judicial killings. Such actions on the part of the Irish deterred others but more importantly provoked the official and unofficial reprisals of the British—and that is exactly what Collins wanted. It makes no sense to isolate such actions from the record of the war. They were integral to it and its results.
Ireland’s war presents an interesting variation of what is now called ‘compound war theory’, and as a result the Irish War of Independence is timely and relevant far beyond its historical interest. In an age of worldwide communications and a pervasive media, with conflicts often muddied by conflicting moral and ethical claims to the high ground, it is difficult for a democracy to wage a counter-insurgency campaign. Politicians and soldiers would do well to examine the unique circumstances of the Anglo-Irish struggle and attempt to anticipate the traps that ensnared both sides and eventually led to a British withdrawal. Often the military actions required to quell the insurgency will provide the insurgents with the other elements of compound war needed to ensure success, i. e. lack of political will on the part of the larger forces and the effects of propaganda on that political will. In reality, the purpose of the IRA was not so much to defeat the British army as to force Britain to negotiate a settlement based on the Irish claim to independence.
The Irish did not ‘have a plan at the outset and stuck to it’. Just as in succeeding insurrections, the Irish adopted previous strategies and tactics, then adapted them, and adapted them again and again. The lessons learned from the Irish war worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in World War II, were of limited value in Malay, inspired the Israelis in their war of independence and then were considerably used by Che Guevara in Cuba. All warriors must improvise and adapt, and guerrilla warriors more so than conventional warriors. Later revolutionaries sought to learn from the Irish experiences (as the Irish did from their predecessors) what to avoid, what to employ, and what is possible, probable and profitable. They learned what to do, what not to do, how to exploit their opponent and, hopefully, to change more than just the name plates on the doors after years of fighting. Historian of guerrilla war Max Boot elaborates:
In the 21st Century we’ve become used to ragtag rebels beating military superpowers. Armed with little more than the will to carry out shocking acts of terrorism and the savvy to cultivate worldwide sympathy through the media, the little guy has come out on top more often than you’d expect. The paradigms are the 1962 French defeat in Algeria, America’s 1975 withdrawal from Vietnam, and Russia’s disaster in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The United States was similarly dealt defeats in Beirut in 1983 and in Somalia in 1993. It almost happened in Iraq—and may yet happen in Afghanistan. What few remember is that the script followed by groups as diverse as theVietcong and the Taliban was written in Ireland during its 1919–1921 War of Independence, the first successful revolt against the British Empire since the creation of the United States of America. 4
|
|
|
In retrospect, it is clear that Collins and the Irish leaders realised during 1919–21 that the three-cornered approach of military action, politics and propaganda, all augmented by intelligence, was the approach they had to take in order to achieve native Irish governance. It was this realisation, rather than specific theorising about a prolonged guerrilla war in Frongoch or the other British prisons, which led to the pursuit of a guerrilla success that ended in the Truce of July 1921. Any early discussions of the course the war was to take were in recognition of a complete rejection of open regular warfare, but the specifics were unknown. Charles Townshend wrote that ‘the means were dictated by circumstance. Slender resources created the style of warfare, rather than a conviction that it held a real hope of success. ’5 Collins was deeply conscious of the sufferings of the Irish, but he realised that these harsh guerrilla tactics must continue. With few men and little ammunition, he knew that he could not beat the British by force, but he could defeat them through their retaliatory conduct and the resulting propaganda pressures brought to bear on them. Collins was not the only one who saw what was happening to the people of Ireland during the war. One of the Black and Tans (who were never known for compassion) wrote that ‘as always happens the real sufferer in this fratricidal war was the non combatant—civilians were being targeted by both sides’. 6
The Irish had the benefit of a natural growth of the historic guerrilla
idea of not committing the whole force at the start. A series of favourable circumstances (British mass imprisonments, an attempt at conscription, British over-reactions, British reprisals and international opinion against the British, among others) all contributed to the Irish ability to control the pace of the war and employ larger numbers ofVolunteers at critical times. Once the war was under the overall direction of GHQ, the possibilities for the Irish quickly became evident and ensured that the many varieties of guerrilla war could be used to the full. As Florence O’Donoghue summarised:
The seeds of all subsequent growth and expansion would appear to be contained in the vital decision not to repeat the pattern of earlier risings, not to commit the national destiny in that day to the hazard of a single blow. 7
The Irish nationalist of 1919–21 took little account of the history of British rule. Following the 1916 Rising, nationalism took account only of the fact of British rule. In 1920 Richard Dawson wrote:
Our Nationalism is not founded upon grievances. We are not opposed to English misgovernment, but to English government in Ireland. Here, then, we are face to face with an abiding principle of insurgency. Evil memories may be transient, withered by time or effaced by gratitude, but hatred of a fact persists so long as the fact continues. 8
Ultimately, the Irish strategy was based on the fundamental principle that superior political will, properly employed, could defeat a greater economic and military power. Collins and the Irish organised to ensure political rather than military success, after understanding that the Irish could not ‘win’ militarily but neither could the British defeat them by military power alone. The strategic function of the Irish guerrilla war was to defeat the British psychologically and politically. The tactical function of the Irish flying column was to remain alive and in operation. As the ultimate pragmatist, Collins realised that since he could not win a military campaign his prime mission was to keep the IRA vital and active. He had to prevent
the restoration of order, and he sought to keep the IRA’s military forays going until the British government decided that it had had enough of the violent disorder in Ireland—and the negative publicity that entailed. Collins did not seek an unattainable military victory but a dignified British withdrawal. Learning to adjust is the key to success in any insurgency, and the Irish adjusted and improvised their military—and their political— strategies better than the British. (It must be noted, however, that by the end of the war the British military were catching up; had the war continued, they would have exerted even greater military pressure on the Irish forces. ) A government cannot outfight an insurgency; it must out-govern the rebels. Bernard Fall, one of the most respected writers on guerrilla warfare of the twentieth century, wrote that ‘a government which is losing an insurgency is not being outfought—it is being out-governed’. 9 The British did not govern Ireland well. The Irish did not ‘win’ the war but they ‘succeeded’ by defeating the British political will. The British never did learn that ‘the more force you use in counterinsurgency action, the less effective you are’. Collins recognised that the war would not be won militarily. The IRA would play an important role but it would not be decisive. If guerrillas attempt to win solely by military force they will lose. The Irish War of Independence demonstrated that, given some favourable circumstances, an insurrection has a fair chance of success. The
Irish conditions that contributed to that were:
The opposing army [the British] is for one reason or another prevented from exerting its full strength. Not only were the guerrilla tactics of harassment and hit-and-run preventing the British from taking on the Irish using their full might, but the political climate in Britain prevented it as well.
The general population must be sympathetic to the revolutionary forces, and be prepared to give secret support. In the Irish war, this was magnified because of the general homogeneity of the population throughout the country.
The IRA was at least loosely controlled and there was a general military strategic and political plan.
Operations can be carried on over a long term, and mistakes like being surrounded in buildings in Dublin, as was the case in the Easter Rising, are avoided. The long-term process continues to escalate, and in doing so the Irish wore down both the military and political morale of the British. The actions can be carried on in the countryside, where the geography will give quick cover to the insurgents, and the same principles apply in the city. 10
It is vital to understand the relationship between the British armed forces and the community of Britain: Parliament, the press, the churches and the general population. These relations developed as the war continued, and finally led to the progress of the war being influenced by the whole social and political scheme of Britain as well as by its military.
The British post-mortem on the Irish War of Independence attributed their ‘failure’ to strategic intelligence shortcomings as well as military shortcomings.
The Army is only the spear point; it is the shaft of the spear and the force behind it that drives the blow home. During the last two years it would appear that the true state of affairs in Ireland was not realised in Great Britain, at all events, until it was too late. Consequently, the want of a suitable and clear policy was felt and sufficient importance was not, perhaps, attached to coZnvincing the country of the need for putting one into force
…The first lesson we learn is the necessity for a good intelligence system so that the Government advisors may be in a position to appreciate the situation justly and to put it squarely, fully and honestly before the Cabinet. 11
Equally clearly, it was apparent that the British military did not understand the true effect of the Irish effort in politics and propaganda on British and international opinion until it was too late.
One of Michael Collins’s critics, Peter Hart, still placed Collins—and the Irish War of Independence—in context for future conflict:
Irish republicans invented modern revolutionary warfare, with
all its mass parties, popular fronts, guerrilla warfare, underground governments, and continuous propaganda campaigns. What Michael Collins and company did in post-Great War Ireland, Mao, Tito, and Ho Chi Minh would do during and after the next great war. 12
The events of the Irish War of Independence are relevant to the conduct of irregular warfare in the twenty-first century.
Scarcely two years after the Truce, Ireland’s place in history and contributions to guerrilla war techniques, tactics and procedures were firmly established by two British officers who had fought hard against them. In October 1923 Major A. E. Percival, who had served as Intelligence Officer of the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment in Cork, wrote to his friend Major Bernard Montgomery, who had served with the 17th Infantry Brigade in Cork. Percival was preparing two lectures on guerrilla tactics, using Ireland as his model, and asked Montgomery’s advice. Montgomery wrote back:
My own view is that to win a war of this sort, you must be ruthless. Oliver Cromwell or the Germans would have settled it in a very short time. Nowadays public opinion precludes such methods, the nation would never allow it, and the politicians would lose their jobs if they sanctioned it. That being so, I consider that Lloyd George was right in what he did, if we had gone on we could probably have squashed the rebellion as a temporary measure, but it would have broken out again like an ulcer the moment we removed the troops. I think the rebels would probably [have] refused battles, and hidden their arms etc. until we had gone. The only way therefore was to give them some sort of self-government and let them quash the rebellion themselves; they are the only people who could really stamp it out, and they are still trying to do so, and as far as one can tell they seem to be having a fair amount of success. 13
Those who wish to study guerrilla warfare in the Irish War of Independence and to determine its effect on subsequent guerrilla actions
need look no further than the British ‘irregular’ efforts in World War II. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was established in 1940 to support or create resistance movements in Europe and to organise widespread sabotage and subversion as an extension of the British war effort. It was consciously outside and contrary to the Rules of War and was accompanied by military coups and sabotage raids organised by other branches of the secret services in pursuit of British war aims. 14
M. R. D. Foot, a British intelligence officer involved in clandestine activities, went on to write numerous books and articles on the subject, including the official history of the SOE. In 1969 he delivered a lecture in Dublin to the Military History Society on ‘Michael Collins and Irregular Warfare’. Present at the lecture, he subsequently noted, were
an alarmingly large number of former participants [in the Anglo- Irish War] … including Collins’s chief of staff in the Troubles [Richard Mulcahy], subsequently commander-in-chief of the Irish Army … three silent survivors of the Twelve Apostles; his personal bodyguard [Dave Neligan]; and two former members of the detective division in Dublin Castle, who had doubled their official task by acting among his leading intelligence agents [É amon Broy].
Foot emphatically noted that lessons (or personnel) from the ‘goings-on in Ulster in 1913–21’ played no role in subversive British activity in the war of 1939, but that
what Collins did in Dublin had a noticeable impact … through two of his junior but intelligent opponents, [Major] J. C. F. Holland and [Major] C. McV. Gubbins … Both were profoundly impressed with the powerlessness of regular troops against the resolute gunmen who could rely on the local population not to give them away … both saw the advantages, in economy of life and effectiveness of effort, of the Irish guerrilla they could not see. And both were determined that next time, if there had to be a next time, guerrilla tactics should be used by the British instead of against them.
…
Ireland had become a world model of how to conduct a successful insurrection against an occupying colonial power.
Following the removal of British forces from Ireland in 1922–3, J. C. F. Holland undertook a special study of irregular warfare at the War Office and was put in charge of the secret service unit set up to work on it in 1938. When offered the chance to pick an associate, he chose his old colleague Colin Gubbins, whom he had met as a major in Ireland during the War of Independence. In early 1939, and building on their Irish experience, they proposed a comprehensive plan for an army of sabotage and subversion to operate outside the laws of war in taking on the enemy through flying columns, civic disobedience, the execution of traitors and enemy agents, explosions and intelligence. In 1940 they were tasked with establishing the SOE, which General Gubbins later went on to command. Foot concluded:
The Irish can thus claim that their resistance provided an originating impulse for resistance to tyrannies worse than any they had had to endure themselves. 15
Gubbins got the hang of guerrilla warfare whilst serving in Ireland, and learned how much mayhem could be caused by a disciplined and shadowy army of operatives fighting on their own territory and employing hit-and-run tactics. He served as an intelligence officer in Kildare in 1921– 2 and his introduction to guerrilla warfare consisted of a three-day course organised by the HQ 5th Division. The course was an indication that the British were beginning to understand guerrilla war tactics as applied by the Irish, and all officers arriving in the country after October 1920 were required to attend it. When the IRA’s ambush tactics became clear, the British army developed a manual of standard operating procedures to be followed in responding to them, and their records indicate that this tactical doctrine reduced their casualties. Gubbins characterised his service in the conflict as ‘being shot at from behind hedges by men in trilbys and mackintoshes and not allowed to shoot back’. 16 His experiences in the Anglo-Irish War stimulated his lifelong interest in irregular warfare, and his
personal reflections on the conflict indicate his view that the British responses were lacking in flexibility and individual initiative. When Gubbins was assigned as the training officer for the SOE, he applied the tactics and used the lessons that he had learned in Ireland twenty years earlier. 17 He was an admirer of Collins’s tactics and considered him the master of guerrilla warfare. 18
One of the lessons drawn from the Irish War of Independence was the importance of captured enemy documents, which provided the British forces with a wealth of invaluable intelligence on the IRA—the British in fact made their best intelligence discoveries from captured Irish documents. In his memoirs Ormonde Winter argued that British intelligence gradually improved between Bloody Sunday and the Truce, ‘largely because the Irish had an irresistible habit of keeping documents which were likely to be uncovered in raids’. 19 As the war continued and the pace of raids increased, intelligence gleaned from captured documents could lead to two or three further raids. The War Office report after the war stated:
In Dublin both the military and the police agreed that their most important sources of information were captured documents.
…
After the first important capture which, to a great extent, was fortuitous, other searches were made from the addresses noted and names obtained, and the snowball process continued, new arrests and the obtaining of a more intimate knowledge of the plans, resources, and methods of the rebel organisation, besides material for valuable propaganda.
…
These documents were not only the foundations on which the IRA List and Order of Battle were built, but seizure usually led to further raids and the capture of more documents until GHQ, IRA, were entirely demoralised. Up to 1920 Sinn Fé in had taken few precautions to safeguard or destroy their papers and the documents taken in Dublin in this period were of the highest importance in that they contained more details and completer [sic] and more accurate lists of names than was the case later. It is possible that, had the importance of documents been realised in
country districts, and had those captured at this time been more carefully scrutinised and analysed, the source might have proved a fruitful one, but, unfortunately, many papers were destroyed, many were not examined, and this side of intelligence was not developed until the IRA had begun to take what steps they could to safeguard themselves.
…
Fortunately, however, IRA officers often did keep documents that they could have destroyed with advantage and without loss of efficiency, and these provided excellent evidence against persons whom it was intended to try or intern. 20
Some British troops in the country were able to recover documents, and they proved invaluable. In December 1920, Auxiliaries captured Ernie O’Malley in a raid in Kilkenny, where he was breaking his journey on his way back to Dublin. O’Malley customarily carried all his notes and papers with him. He was eating in a safe house when the Auxiliaries broke in, and his notebooks were on the window-sill. When the British examined O’Malley’s notes, they found that the Kilkenny area had ‘four brigades of eight battalions with 103 rifles, 4, 900 rounds of rifle ammunition, 471 shot- guns and 3, 490 rounds of shot-gun ammunition’. The notebook also listed all the names of the Kilkenny Brigade. As they left, the Auxiliary O/C announced ‘We have the lot! ’ and they were delighted.
The Auxies were so pleased with what they found in the book that they ran to tell each other and decided to burn the premises. They set fire to hay, straw and outhouses and sent a Crossley tender to Woodstock for petrol to burn the dwelling house.
…
The petrol having arrived, the occupants of the house were compelled to leave, and the Auxies spilled the petrol on the bedding, furniture, floors, etc. They broke windows to ensure a draught and, having set the house on fire, remained for some time watching the flames. 21
In the days that followed, the Auxiliaries used the notebook to seek out
and arrest most of the leaders of the Kilkenny Brigade. While in prison O’Malley met two other prisoners from the area, who told him that the Auxiliaries had arrested ‘the whole countryside’ and that, mad with rage, they were murdering half the people they took’. 22
Richard Mulcahy’s flat in Cullenwood House was raided on 31 January 1920 and many of his papers were found. They caused a sensation in Dublin Castle, as they ‘gave evidence of a really big, determined and fairly well organised conspiracy’, along with plans describing Volunteers going abroad to put the electricity plant for Manchester out of action and for the destruction of the Liverpool docks. 23 Mulcahy never seemed to understand the risk of keeping comprehensive records, or the potentially disastrous effects of their capture. Several times the British captured his records and those of Collins. Once Mulcahy wrote to Liam Lynch, ‘These things have to be put down in writing’, arguing that this outweighed the ‘accompanying danger that if any of this material falls into enemy hands it discloses our mind fairly completely to them’. 24 That same night, a raid on Eileen McGrane’s home at 21 Dawson Street yielded a bundle of Collins’s documents, which he had foolishly left there. This was one of Collins’s weaknesses: he hated to part with files, even when they ceased to be useful, and he never took sufficient precautions to ensure that the people referred to in the files could not be identified. 25 This raid gave the Castle the first intimation of the effectiveness of Collins’s recruitment within their own ranks, and they began a long process of elimination that led them to É amon (Ned) Broy. Some documents traced to Broy were found in McGrane’s home, leading to his arrest. Mulcahy didn’t learn his lesson, and on 21 March 1921 another of his houses was raided; included in the captured documents was a list of all the individuals the IRA had marked for assassination, as well as plans for the demolition of a canal in Manchester. Upon establishing the SOE, one of the key security features that Gubbins introduced was: ‘Commit as little as possible to writing. Memorise if you can. If you must carry documents, select what you must carry. Burn all secret waste and carbons. ’26
Several British officers who served in Ireland during the war as intelligence officers went on to leadership positions in World War II. Five who later achieved fame were Major (later General) Kenneth Strong, Major (later General) Arthur Percival, Major (later Field Marshal) Bernard
Montgomery, Lieutenant (later Field Marshal) Gerald Templer and Major (later General) Colin Gubbins.
Gubbins and Holland were not the only officers with Irish experience to formulate intelligence and partisan tactics to be written down and then used in later wars. General Hugh Tudor chose as his Chief of Intelligence an artilleryman, the Anglo-Irish Colonel Ormonde de l’Epé e Winter, who had some little previous experience in British intelligence. Winter had risen to command a division in World War I and Tudor himself came from the Royal Artillery, as did Gubbins. In fact, it is surprising just how many British artillery officers serving in Ireland were involved in counter- insurgency/intelligence and propaganda roles and went on to write about their Irish experiences or to play key roles in British intelligence operations in World War II. Col. Hervey de Montmorency, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, was another World War I artillery officer who returned to Ireland as a bitter opponent of separatists and worked under Winter as the intelligence officer of the Auxiliaries in County Westmeath. Books by or about all of them were written, including their memories of the Irish campaign, and all contained lessons that were used in later wars. 27
The IRA inspiration for SOE strategy is, however, regularly played down in some British accounts of the SOE (Foot is an exception), and this is hardly surprising. Britain is not in the habit of announcing to the world that it learns anything much from Ireland. After fighting Irish insurgencies for centuries, to be promoting and organising them, as they did in World War II, was a novelty. Moreover, Foot’s views on this issue have come under attack. That post-war British military officials might have second thoughts about legitimising the Irish as a source of terrorism and insurgency like the SOE, as Foot argued, is entirely understandable.
Eunan O’Halpin has written extensively about Ireland and British intelligence. He dismisses the notion of an IRA/Sinn Fé in inspiration for the SOE—or, indeed, the idea that Britain learned anything from its war in Ireland:
Few British military thinkers sought to draw wider lessons from the Irish War of Independence. A number of officers who were to make their names as intelligence or irregular warfare specialists, such as J. C. F. Holland of the War Office think-tank GS(R), which
in 1939 developed into MI(R), Colin Gubbins of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence in 1944–5, had served in Ireland between 1919 and 1922. (Gubbins commanded the detachment which provided the field gun with which the Provisional Government troops shelled the Four Courts at the commencement of the Civil War, and was also in charge of the handover of the gun- carriage lent to the Irish to bear the remains of Michael Collins. )
Undue emphasis has been placed on the importance for such officers of the experience of Irish rebellion and counter- insurgency. In 1969, M. R. D. Foot, the official historian of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France, presented a celebrated lecture in Dublin on ‘Michael Collins and Irregular Warfare’. Amongst his audience was the British Ambassador, Andrew Gilchrist, himself an old SOE hand, who thought the lecture brilliant. So too did Gilchrist’s closest Irish friends, Colonel David Neligan and Major-General Seá n Collins-Powell, respectively Collins’s spy in the Castle in 1920 and 1921 and Collins’s nephew. Gilchrist bemoaned the absence of a single politician from the ruling Fianna Fá il party at the lecture. But perhaps the Fianna Fá ilers were right to doubt the weight of the speaker’s argument, because a survey of inter-war British military thought and planning yields very few references to the intelligence, counter-insurgency, or irregular warfare lessons of the Irish campaign of 1919–21. 28
O’Halpin’s colleague, Keith Jeffery of Queen’s University Belfast, who also specialised in British intelligence and was appointed to head the team writing the official history of MI6, drew the same conclusions as O’Halpin with regard to the Irish counter-insurgency:
Scarcely any lessons with regard to counter-insurgency campaigning generally were drawn from the Irish experience …
M. R. D. Foot has, however, asserted that in the persons of J. C. F. Holland and C. McV. Gubbins, both of whom had served in
Ireland, the experience of that campaign was not entirely lost, at least in its contribution to SOE. 29
Jeffery, however, seems to have changed his opinion of the value of the Irish war, even if the British army did not study it, as he wrote in 2014:
The Record [of the Rebellion in Ireland 1919–1921 and the Part Played by the Army in Dealing with it, Imperial War Museum, Box 78/82/2] is full of fascinating detail, and explanations advanced by soldiers who had lost the campaign in Ireland. It would have been of tremendous assistance after 1969 when British troops once more were deployed in Ireland against a violent republican challenge, but there is no evidence that in the late 1960s anyone thought to revisit the experience of the early 1920s to ascertain if there might be any ‘lessons learned’ of use in the new situation. 30
For over fifty years the Irish War of Independence seemed to be forgotten in some military literature, except in Ireland. In the period between the World Wars, when Britain was formalising its counter- insurgency doctrine, Ireland was ‘airbrushed’ from official British histories. Nevertheless, Black-and-Tan-style policing policies (and some of the personnel) would reappear in Palestine, a campaign that ended in 1948 with a British exit even more ignominious than in Ireland. 31 Despite a seeming lack of interest on the part of the British military to acknowledge anything learned from Ireland, a number of commentators have summarised the principal lessons. Apart from the obvious ones about having a unified and coherent policy, not seeking quick fixes and not underestimating the enemy, the principal lessons that can be drawn from the Irish campaign are the following:
• The need to have a unified intelligence system, particularly between civil and military authorities.
• The understanding of hit-and-run tactics, escape and evasion.
• The need to target the most radical elements, including the use of less coercive methods against moderates.
• The avoidance, if possible, of tit-for-tat violence and terror measures against civilians.
• The need to consider effects on the wider stage, i. e. propaganda.
• Rapid and secure communications.
• The need to deal promptly with security breaches and to protect sources, i. e. protection of documents. 32
The current UK Ministry of Defence position is in agreement with Gubbins and Foot as regards the value of studying the Irish War of Independence:
The 30 months between these killings in January 1919 [Soloheadbeg] and the truce in July 1921 also represent a counter-insurgency campaign by the British military and political establishment. This campaign would become extremely influential for insurgent groups throughout the 20th century as it demonstrated how an ill-trained, ill-equipped but well- motivated movement can combine political and military approaches in an economical and successful way, even against a much larger and technologically powerful enemy. It is also useful and instructive for analysts studying today’s counter-insurgency campaigns, as it is reasonably well documented, was fought around modern concepts of guerrilla warfare, including religiously inspired propaganda33 and martyrdom operations, and showed the effectiveness or otherwise of a range of security policies and insurgent responses. 34
In addition, the current US Army Field Manual Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures notes the performance of the Irish War of Independence and theVolunteers’ strengths and structure, including security, efficiency and speed of action, unity of effort, survivability, geography, and the social structures and cultures of the society. 35 This manual also notes that ‘the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot bullets’. The Irish political and propaganda efforts were at least as effective as their military weapons.
To win the support of the population, counter-insurgency forces must create incentives for co-operating with the government and disincentives for opposing it. The leaders of both the counter-insurgency and insurgent forces must stress the importance of focusing more on the social, economic and political development of the people than on simple material destruction. In a later Irish war, British General Frank Kitson noted that ideas are a motivating factor in insurgent violence: ‘The main characteristic which distinguishes campaigns of insurgency from other forms of war is that they are primarily concerned with the struggle for men’s minds’. 36 Insurgencies fight for political power as well as for an idea. According to US Marine General Charles C. Krulak, to fight back ‘you need a better idea. Bullets help sanitize an operational area … They don’t win a war. ’37
While the strategy and tactics used in Ireland were not much of a factor in the British counter-insurgency in Malay in the 1950s, winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people has become enshrined as a pivotal component of counter-insurgency warfare ever since General Sir Gerald Templer declared in 1952 that it would be the key to success in fighting the communists. 38 Templer famously remarked that ‘The answer [to the uprising] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’. 39 His plan of war was not to terrorise the population but to control them, offering the Malays independence. His view was that ‘the shooting side of this business is only 25% of the trouble’. 40 He realised that it was not a popularity contest but that the counter-insurgents must provide, first, security for the population and then, second, the legitimacy of the government. Insurgency versus counter-insurgency is a struggle to see who can provide better governance for the population; Templer realised this and the population made its choice. The Malayan Emergency is still regarded as the shining paradigm of how to properly wage a counter-insurgency campaign, and Templer’s emphasis on hearts and minds established a fixation on these operations in military circles. (It must be understood that the Malay insurgency, and Templer’s method of combating it, was characterised by geographical and demographic factors that were peculiar to it and were not often possible to replicate in later insurgencies. Under the Briggs Plan employed by Templer, however, the British administration replaced soldiers with civilian police who gained the trust of the community by building long-term relationships. The British
also developed an information campaign to portray the police as civil servants whose job it was to protect civilians. By 1953 these efforts had reduced violence and increased trust in the government and have been used in successful counter-insurgency actions ever since to win ‘hearts and minds’. 41) Certainly the IRA won, and the British lost, the hearts and minds of the Irish population in the War of Independence.
A youngVietnamese expatriate named Nguyen Ai Quoc was working as a cook in London until 1919. He later changed his name to Ho Chi Minh. Clearly, Ho and Võ Nguyê n Giá p launched the war against the French and Americans in Vietnam with the classic guerrilla tactics of hit- and-run operations, assassination of government officials and terrorising the local population into submission. In addition, Ho executed an effective international propaganda offensive that undermined American resolve in the same way that Collins and the Irish had turned British and international public opinion against London’s Irish policy. While the ‘urban legend’ that Ho cried when he heard of Terence MacSwiney’s death is probably apocryphal (he left London before October 1920), there is no doubt that his guerrilla tactics mirrored those used by the Irish. 42
In her book Tom Barry: Freedom Fighter, Meda Ryan recounts how both Menachem Begin in Israel and Che Guevara in Cuba wrote to Barry for advice. 43 Diverse nationalist guerrilla movements in the decades that followed emulated Collins’s pioneering urban warfare tactics and skilful use of propaganda. While governments regularly decry terrorism as ineffective, the terrorists themselves have an abiding faith in their violence, and for good reason. Terrorism’s intractability is also due to the capacity of terrorist groups to learn from one another. Those terrorist groups that survive the onslaught directed against them by governments and their police, military, and intelligence and security services do so because they absorb and apply lessons learned from their predecessors. Theirs is a trade and they learn it from one another. For instance, the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, led by Begin, consciously modelled itself on the IRA and studied the Irish War of Independence. Israel’s Yitzhak Shamir so revered Collins that he took the code name ‘Micail’ during Israel’s war for independence in the late 1940s. As a further example of a guerrilla studying the Irish War of Independence, Che Guevara utilised the Irish tactics in developing his own
tactics in Cuba. He concluded:
Popular forces can win a war against the army.
It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.
In underdeveloped Cuba the countryside was the basic area for armed fighting.
Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare could be considered a review of the tactics, procedures and procedures of the Irish War of Independence. Consider the following:
In these conditions [in Cuba] popular discontent expresses itself in more active forms. An attitude of resistance finally crystallizes in an outbreak of fighting, provoked initially by the conduct of the authorities.
Let us first consider the question: Who are the combatants in guerrilla warfare? On one side we have a group composed of the oppressor and his agents, the professional army, well armed and disciplined, in many cases receiving foreign help as well as the help of the bureaucracy in the employ of the oppressor. On the other side are the people of the nation or region involved. It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves. The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in firepower. Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defence against oppression.
Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery. He launches himself against the conditions of the reigning institutions at a particular moment and dedicates
himself with all the vigor that circumstances permit to breaking the mold of these institutions.
As blows are dealt the enemy, he also changes his tactics, and in place of isolated trucks, veritable motorized columns move. However, by choosing the ground well, the same result can be produced by breaking the column and concentrating forces on one vehicle. In these cases the essential elements of guerrilla tactics must always be kept in mind. These are: perfect knowledge of the ground; surveillance and foresight as to the lines of escape; vigilance over all the secondary roads that can bring support to the point of attack; intimacy with people in the zone so as to have sure help from them in respect to supplies, transport, and temporary or permanent hiding places if it becomes necessary to leave wounded companions behind; numerical superiority at a chosen point of action; total mobility; and the possibility of counting on reserves. If all these tactical requisites are fulfilled, surprise attack along the lines of communication of the enemy yields notable dividends. 44
If one substitutes ‘Irish’ for the Cuban situation, one can see how remarkably closely the two wars resemble one another. In Ireland the war developed slowly, as more and more Irish came over to the side of the Volunteers. Certainly, Guevara’s ‘provoked initially by the conduct of the authorities’ could refer to the executions and imprisonments following the Rising and the threat of conscription in 1918, in addition to the hundreds of years of the Irish living under British rule. The British in Ireland could certainly be defined as ‘a group composed of the oppressor and his agents, the professional army, well armed and disciplined, in many cases receiving foreign help as well as the help of the bureaucracy in the employ of the oppressor’. Why did the IRA fight and why was it successful? Guevara’s answer is that the ‘guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery. He launches himself against the conditions of the reigning institutions at a particular moment and dedicates himself with all the vigor that circumstances permit to breaking the mold of these
institutions. ’ While the Irish War of Independence did not lead to a great social revolution, there is no doubt that it was fought to give the Irish their own government. Finally, Guevara could be defining flying columns when he writes: ‘the essential elements of guerrilla tactics must always be kept in mind. These are: perfect knowledge of the ground; surveillance and foresight as to the lines of escape; vigilance over all the secondary roads that can bring support to the point of attack; intimacy with people in the zone so as to have sure help from them in respect to supplies, transport, and temporary or permanent hiding places’. To this day, the Irish War of Independence can provide inspiration and direction to insurgents.
Guevara’s tenet that it was ‘not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them’ was certainly true of the Irish war and mirrored James Connolly’s views on revolt. Connolly spent a lifetime studying revolution and he knew that Irish history was filled with men who waited for the right moment and then lost their chance. In Connolly’s view, an insurrection must be a ‘leap in the dark’. 45
One of the major problems in all guerrilla wars is what happens after ‘regime change’—what is now called ‘nation-building’. Order does not arise by chance; someone has to design it and make it happen. The Truce of July 1921 caught the rank and file of both sides by surprise; both thought that they were winning. Neither side ‘won’, however; both sides went to the bargaining table to make pragmatic compromises. And it must be said that James Connolly and other socialists who pursued goals in the 1916 Rising would have been sorely disappointed. Indeed, Sinn Fé in subscribed largely to a doctrine grounded in a conservative nationalism. It was with some accuracy that Kevin O’Higgins stated during the early days of the Free State government: ‘I think that we were probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’. 46 Todd Andrews described the men of his local Sinn Fé in Club in Rathfarnham as being
… astonishingly conservative. It might be expected that men who were prepared to support a rebellion against the political status quo would have shown some liberality of view but social questions such as housing, public health, education were seldom mentioned. 47
In any event, the concept of a ‘socialist republic revolution’ was never in the plans thereafter. 48 It should be emphasised that the active leadership in 1916–21 of such Irish republicans of the left as Peadar O’Donnell and Liam Mellows does little to alter that reality. According to O’Donnell, ‘All the [IRA] leadership wanted was a change from British to Irish government: they wanted no change in the basis of society. It was a political not a social revolution. ’
Michael Laffan agreed:
Sinn Fé in’s interventions in labour, agrarian and other social problems were not designed primarily to help the underpaid or the landless, but to calm them, and its leaders showed little concern with improving the living standards of the poor before the British departed. Here Sinn Fé in followed an established tradition. Its predecessor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, had feared the British remedies for Irish grievances might blunt the demand for Home Rule. 49
The War of Independence, while bringing the British to the bargaining table for the first time, was not a clear military victory and certainly did not produce a social revolution. There were many forces opposing one another in Ireland—liberalism v. conservatism; socialism v. capitalism; dominion (or even monarchy) v. republic—but no new form of government was certain. Florence O’Donoghue wrote:
I do not think that i
|
|
|
