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—Michael Collins
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This chapter concerns a controversial topic in all guerrilla wars: the utilisation of terror as a weapon. ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. ’1 The mere term ‘terrorism’ is one that is imbued with fear, outrage, panic and political fervour. In few other insurrections was terror as important to the result as it was in the Anglo-Irish War—on both sides. Terrorism is as old as insurgency, and questions regarding it abound.
What is terrorism? How should it be defined? Could it ever be justified? Some have argued that terrorism is not necessarily morally wrong and not morally worse than war, and that if war can be justified then so can terrorism. 2 It is often hard to distinguish between terrorism and guerrilla warfare. 3 Methods of insurgency and counter-insurgency are brutal, involving fear, torture, executions, extortion and a forcible conversion of the civil population to the goals of the insurgent organisation. While terrorism and guerrilla tactics are two distinct phenomena, there is nonetheless an overlap between them, and in the Irish War of Independence both the British and the Irish used both. 4 Insurgency breeds its own escalatory dynamics: excesses on one side produce excesses on the other side. The British forces used terrorism to continue the subjugation of Ireland, and the Irish used terror to achieve independence. 5 Each side blamed the other for what has been called the turn to terrorism. Indeed, it is in such contexts that the distinction between ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’ becomes increasingly blurred. 6 Although initially such actions shocked the civilian population, the harsh responses from the British government resulted in a heightened public sympathy towards the
Irish, though some of the Irish actions caused just as much terror.
Terrorism is often used to conduct armed conflict against a militarily stronger enemy when the insurgents are not yet at a stage where guerrilla warfare is viable. Terrorism can also be used to supplement guerrilla warfare. In such cases it is employed to keep the enemy off balance and distracted, principally by conducting strikes against vulnerable targets at the enemy’s rear. The mode of struggle adopted by insurgents is dictated by circumstances rather than by choice and, whenever possible, insurgents concurrently use a variety of strategies. Terrorism, which is the easiest form of insurgency, is practically always one of these modes. In the War of Independence, the Irish were the ones using terrorism to keep the British off balance and to intimidate the local population, 7 and it was one of the modes of warfare that they required to achieve their political objectives. 8
The ‘central goal of an insurgency is not to defeat the armed forces, but to subvert or destroy the government’s legitimacy, its ability and moral right to govern’. 9 The Irish, like most insurgents, had a natural advantage in this regard because their actions were not constrained by codified law. States, however, must avoid not only wrongdoing but also any appearance of wrongdoing that might undermine their legitimacy in the community and international political opinion. As historian Thomas Mockaitis points out, ‘In counterinsurgency an atrocity is not necessarily what one actually does but what one is successfully blamed for doing’. 10 During an insurgency there are three ways to conserve State legitimacy: the use of proportionate force, the use of precisely applied force and the provision of security for the civilian population. The British failed in the application of all of these, not only in fact but also in international opinion.
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For example, the core tenet of British military strategy was that overwhelming force deployed against the Irish would result in military victory. In a counter-insurgency, however, ‘winning’ through overwhelming force is often inapplicable as a concept, if not problematic as a goal. In practice, the application of overwhelming force has a negative, unintended effect of strengthening the insurgency by creating martyrs, increasing recruitment and demonstrating the brutality of State forces. Nothing could define the Irish reaction to the terrorist actions of the Black and Tans or Auxiliaries more clearly than that. The use of excessive force may not only legitimise the insurgent group but also cause the State to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the
civilian population and internationally. Repression breeds radicals.
A definition of terrorism should meet three criteria. First, it should cover certain paradigmatic instances of what we consider terrorism. Second, the definition should not yet include any moral assessment of the act in question; defining an action and evaluating it are distinct tasks. Third, the definition should single out a certain group of actions, enabling one to clearly distinguish these actions from other kinds of actions—that is, to clearly identify which acts are terrorist by their nature and which are not. 11 Nevertheless, while one cannot initially conflate the evaluation and the classification of acts, one must ultimately consider the morality of such acts.
Some have defined ‘terror’ as ‘apart from a state of mind, a conscious attempt to create an acute fear of violence against the person or property, which may affect individuals, groups or the population at large’. 12 Any definition of terrorism returns to the concept of fear. There is an ancient Chinese proverb of war: Victory is gained not by the number killed – but by the number frightened. The US State Department and NATO define terrorism as ‘premeditated, motivated violence perpetrated against non- combatant groups by sub-national or clandestine agents, acting as individuals or in groups, intended to influence an audience wider than the immediate victim or victims’. 13 That definition seems to eliminate actions by or against State agents, and any definition of terror must include actions by and against State as well as non-State agents. A more inclusive definition is that terrorism is an indirect strategy of using fear or terror induced by violent attacks or force (or the threat of its use) against one group of people (direct target) or their property as a means to intimidate and coerce another group of people (indirect target) and influence their actions in order to reach further political objectives. The violent acts that form part of such a strategy should be called terrorist acts. 14 One of the goals of terrorism is to disturb the normal lives and liberties that people have which is against human rights. The UN stresses that this one of the most important ways in which terrorism should be defined. However expressed, almost any definition of terrorism will include the following essential elements:
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• the use of violence (or fear of future violence),
• directed at combatants or non-combatants (or civilians),
• intended to induce extreme fear in a population or government
• in order to achieve a political, religious or ideological end.
In the War of Independence, the Irish in particular directed many acts of what must be considered terror at government individuals and forces. The killings of the ‘G’ Division detectives in Dublin by Collins’s ‘Squad’ provide just one example, as they must be considered ‘combatants’. Some of the Irish recognised that at the time and were revolted by such killings in the street. Later, Frank Gallagher wrote about the members of the Squad who became leaders of the Dublin Guard in the Civil War that followed and their easy ‘acceptance’ of the killings:
I know there are different views of how to best further the establishment of an Irish Republic. Those who came to worship the gun before 1921 were the first to surrender to Britain at the Treaty time. And they afterwards became those who committed the most terrible outrages on captured Republicans [in the Irish Civil War]. 15
One of the bloodiest days in the war was Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, when fourteen men were killed in Dublin on that morning and another fourteen men and women were killed at Croke Park that afternoon. (See Chapter 5 for a full discussion of Bloody Sunday. ) Terror lives long after its initial application, and one must consider the nature of the terror used and what it does to those individuals who commit it, as well as its effects on those (or their families) against whom it is committed. 16 For weeks afterwards, the wife of one of the British officers killed claimed that she was haunted by the sounds of gunfire and the laughing of the gunmen, and by the image of one of the killers washing her husband’s blood from his hands in her sink. Three weeks after the events she gave birth to a stillborn child. 17 On the Irish side, Charles Dalton was only seventeen when he took part in the Bloody Sunday raid at 38 Pembroke Street. That night he was distraught and couldn’t sleep because he ‘kept hearing the gurgling of the blood of the man he shot’. His friends tried to comfort him by saying that it was just a faucet running in the upstairs flat. 18 Dalton was later involved in the killings of innocents in the Civil War. What effect did his actions on Bloody Sunday, and throughout the War of Independence, have on him as an intelligence officer in the Civil War?
In the 1940s he was judged to be ‘permanently and completely insane’. He had taken to hiding under his bed, convinced that his enemies were coming to take their revenge. 19 He died in hospital as a paranoid schizophrenic. Some others in Collins’s Squad seemed to revel in killing. Vinnie Byrne, who gave newspaper and TV interviews until he was an old man, said that ‘It was the joy of my life when I was handed a. 45 revolver and six rounds …’, and that he ‘Liked pluggin’ British soldiers’. 20
Some of those who took part in the Bloody Sunday raids were even rebuked immediately by members of their family, but didn’t understand their concern:
I was told that the British had raided the Tipperary Football team where they were staying in Gardiner’s Row. We, therefore, decided that there would be no football match for us that day; that we would not attend it, as we thought there would possibly be trouble there. I returned home about 2 o’clock and lunched. After lunch I had been in the habit of going to football matches on a Sunday, and my family asked me was I not going to the match. I said no, that I was feeling tired and would lie down and have a rest. I lay on the couch in the room and fell asleep. I was awakened that evening about 4 o’clock. My wife came into the room crying, with a ‘Stop Press’ in her hand. I woke up and asked her what was the matter. Before speaking she handed me the‘Stop Press’ and wanted to know was this the fishing expedition I had been on [he had told her that he was fishing that morning]. Seeing that there was no use in concealing things any longer from her, I said: ‘Yes, and don’t you see we had a good catch’, or words to that effect. She then said: ‘I don’t care what you think about it, I think it is murder’. I said: ‘No, that is nonsense; I’d feel like going to the altar after that job this morning’, and thus I tried to calm her. I don’t think she put out any lights in the house during the following winter. I did not stay at home then for about a week. That Sunday night I slept in a grove in the demesne known as St Anne’s, which was nearby. 21
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One of those killed on Bloody Sunday was Thomas Herbert Smith, the owner of the house at 117 Morehampton Road in Dublin. At 9. 00 a. m.
ten-year-old Percival William Smith opened the door at his home. Ten minutes later, Thomas Smith, Percy’s father and an innocent man (one of these ‘mistakes’), lay dead. We must wonder about little Percy—and we should grieve for everyone lost to violence. We can’t forget that all those killed and those injured physically or emotionally were human beings, and we should recognise the trauma that haunted them for the rest of their lives. Terror does not end with the event.
Terror and violence can be one and the same, and fear and forcible actions often are not classified as ‘terror’ when they should be. Physical and sexual violence was waged against both men and women during the War of Independence, and historians are just now addressing that perpetrated against women. Rape and sexual assault can certainly be considered forms of terror, and in wartime they are used to punish women as well as to intimidate a population. While serious sexual assaults and the targeted killing of females were apparently rare, actions do not have to descend to that degree to terrorise the female population. Moreover, rape is always under- reported, and even more so during that period. Women were not going to come forward for fear of rejection by their husbands, their families and their communities. Physical abuse was also known to occur during raids, and women in their nightdresses were especially vulnerable to dehumanising actions when their homes were raided and they were forcibly thrown out of their beds. Both the British and the Irish used hair-cutting and other forms of humiliation, and the effects would last far longer than it took the hair to grow out. While much of the terrorising of women by the British occurred during raids, most of the violence against women perpetrated by the IRA consisted of the ‘victimisation of policemen’s wives and barrack servants’. This included eviction from and destruction of their homes, verbal and written threats, enforced resignation from employment in police barracks, ostracism and exile. The overall absence of reported sexual violence by both sides might indicate a relatively high level of discipline among the Crown forces and the IRA, but research must continue in that vein. Some British reports argued that, far from being a lawless mob, the violence of the Tans and Auxiliaries was somewhat orchestrated: a certain level of venting of frustration and retaliation was permitted but this was controlled and curtailed. Any such argument should not minimise the degrading treatment nor excuse it in any way. Purely and simply, they were criminal
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acts of the most abhorrent kind. 22
Terror in Ireland was exacerbated because the actions were so close— most lives were taken at close range, many by a shot from a handgun. That proximity to the violence caused a ‘wounding of the mind’ that affects one more, and longer, than falling bombs or artillery. Many of those who took part in the violence remained haunted by the blood and fear that they saw on the faces of those killed or wounded right in front of them.
Terrorism necessarily involves spectacle. This is what grants it the power to terrorize, to assault relations between someone and the world. Terror’s damage is contagious: it is not simply the victims of a bomb blast who suffer, but those touched by its rippling consequences and mediatized representations. While terrorism’s traumas can be local and specific to the event, its distinctiveness as terror is contained in the excess of effect its violence produces. 23
To understand the use of terror in the Irish war, we must try to understand its context and meaning. Tactically, its initial and primary purpose was to intimidate the military/police opposition—for example, throwing a grenade into an RIC barracks to make all the RIC men afraid that every time a door or window was opened a grenade could come through it. At a slightly higher level it was used to eliminate political and military leaders and officials in order to destabilise the government. 24 Che Guevara addressed killing by insurgents: ‘Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful. But the killing of persons of small importance is never advisable, since it brings on an increase of reprisals, including deaths. ’25 So-called ‘leadership targeting’ is a most effective guerrilla tool, and was utilised in Dublin as well as throughout the country. Todd Andrews wrote in Dublin Made Me:
Assassination, correctly applied by Michael Collins, was the real basis of our relative success. 26
Such ‘selective assassination’, refined by Collins, has been deemed the ‘pivot of the war effort’. 27 Lord Londonderry, a Northern Ireland minister in 1922, reached much the same conclusion:
Mr Collins … achieved his position … by being one of the leaders of a campaign which Sinn Fé in called war, and which I call assassination. He has maintained his position by challenging the British government and by succeeding in compelling the British government to make terms and terms of a character far exceeding the wildest hopes of Mr Collins or any of his supporters. 28
To view terrorist acts in the War of Independence, it is necessary to distinguish as far as possible between the use of sabotage, which is an effective method of warfare, and terrorism, which is questionably effective and indiscriminate in its results.
TERRORISM is seen as a law enforcement or military problem. INSURGENCY spawning guerrillas is a social problem.
TERRORISM is a particular tactic. INSURGENCY is the rejection of a political order. TERRORISM is concerned with means.
GUERRILLAS are concerned with political change. TERRORISTS are seen as unrepresentative and outliers in society.
GUERRILLAS are the manifestation of deeper, widespread issues in society.
TERRORISTS resist negotiation.
GUERRILLAS try to win over the population, leading to a political settlement.
COUNTER-TERRORISM is tactical, focusing on catching individual terrorists.
COUNTER-INSURGENCY is strategic, seeking to undermine the insurgent’s strategy; capture is a secondary consideration. 29
Guevara also addressed the effect of terror and sabotage on the civilian population:
Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier. Except in special situations, there ought to be no execution of justice without giving the criminal an opportunity to clear himself. 30
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Terror, including murder, reprisals and burnings, was used by both the British and the Irish. 31 Charles Townshend wrote that ‘The IRA could win an arson competition easily’. Further, Seá n Lemass, who was on the Bloody Sunday raids, said: ‘On both sides they did terrible things—and they knew it’. Collins’s Squad, the IRA Intelligence Unit, began the assassination of detectives and informers in 1919, but by 1920 the State forces had also resorted to a policy of lethal reprisals. British forces employed terrorism in order to maintain the conquest of Ireland and subdue the Irish nationalist movement during the war. 32 Once the War of Independence began, however, the IRA embarked upon its own campaign of terrorism. In time, IRA terror was so effective that many of the British representatives in the courts, police, magistrates and local authorities eventually ceded the authority of their positions to their Irish counterparts, who, with the support of Dá il É ireann, were already running large portions of Ireland. 33 The commission of British reprisals was exacerbated when the Irish propaganda machine successfully capitalised on them, despite the fact that the Irish themselves were carrying out their own reprisals. 34
In order for terror to be effective, intimidation is key. Guerrillas must balance persuasion and coercion. Coercion is often necessary in any insurgency, as the revolutionaries vie with the government for the loyalty of the people, and so it was for the Irish. 35 All revolutionaries—and certainly the Irish—need assistance, whether it is given willingly or unwillingly. 36 Those who do not wish to help the cause must be intimidated so that they do not hinder it. 37 Further, the Irish often had to settle for merely preventing assistance to the British through coercion. While most
discussions of terror in the period concentrate on the actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, who certainly committed many acts of gross terror, it cannot be denied that Collins and the Irish engaged in their own campaign of terror in order to intimidate and control the Irish population, as well as committing acts of terror against loyalists and cities and individuals on the British mainland in order to affect the British political position. The British soldiers were told to keep practising shooting when they went home on leave because they might need to use their gun at any time, and the Irish population feared what would happen to their village when they heard of terrorism against another town. Terror can be imagined as well as experienced.
The traditional view that there uniformly existed a symbiotic relationship between the IRA and the community at large has been successfully challenged since the mid-1990s. 38 It is acknowledged that there was widespread support for Irish nationalism, but it must be stressed that the IRA often had to resort to intimidation in order to enforce allegiance to their cause and to its alternative government. It is apparent that important differences existed between parts of the country, and often the level of acceptance for the republican cause was in proportion to the success of the IRA, as well as to the numbers of Protestants and loyalists in the area. 39 Attempts by Sinn Fé in supporters to garner support were enforced by intimidation as early as the winter of 1916. In Wexford, people received letters accusing them of sneering at Sinn Fé in and threatening that they ‘would be made to pay at the next rising’. In Dublin, the ‘separation women’ (so called because they were given a ‘separation allowance’ as the wives of British soldiers serving in World War I) were targets of abuse, and threats were made against employers to urge them to reinstate the male Irish prisoners taken after the Rising and to terminate the women’s employment. 40
All revolutionaries must strike a balance between controlling a population and harming it in the process. To do too much damage to the local infrastructure would harm the local economy, which would backfire on the Irish. Controlling too much of a community’s affairs would make the IRA appear overbearing and not too different from the British. Intimidation came in many forms, and one that aroused terror in many men—and especially in their families—was the ostracising of the RIC.
Beginning in 1917, and then officially in April 1919, the Irish were told to avoid RIC members and their families throughout Ireland. In January 1919 the Dublin County Inspector wrote:
There is no boycotting but intimidation in a great way exists owing to the malign influences of Sinn Fé in. People are afraid to offend the extremists and comply with their wishes [avoiding contact with the RIC or their families] fearing injury if they did not do so. Also there is no doubt a general scheme on the part of Sinn Fé in to intimidate and cow the police to prevent them from doing their duty and to deter young men from joining the police. 41
‘Fearing injury by extremists’ is a not-so-subtle form of terrorism. Rumours of terror generate further terror. 42
The policy of ostracism is more complex than it appears at first glance, and the effects were felt not just by the RIC men and their families but also by many Irish people in the community. The majority of the constables in rural areas were drawn from the same social class, religion and general background as their neighbours. While measures were taken, not always successfully, to maintain an arms-length relationship between police and public, most of the constables and their families became an integral part of their communities. Constables in charge of police stations were required to make regular reports to their superiors, and would from time to time be moved around the district to prevent acquaintanceships from developing too closely, but this policy was not followed assiduously. A constable was not permitted to marry until he had been in the force for some years and was not supposed to serve in his home county, nor in that of his wife, but after marriage their families mingled in schools, churches and community life. Despite their status as an armed force, constables seldom carried guns— only a waist belt, handcuffs and baton. Enforcement of eviction orders in rural Ireland caused the RIC to be widely distrusted by the poor Catholic population as the mid-nineteenth century approached, but later policing generally became a routine of controlling petty misdemeanours such as moonshine-distilling, public drunkenness, minor theft and wilful property crimes. 43 And when violence was involved, it was usually fuelled by passion,
alcohol or a combination of the two. Often, along with the priest, the constables would have an informal leadership role in the community and, being literate, would be appealed to by people needing help with forms and letters. Of the RIC’s senior officers in 1919, 60% were Irish Protestants and the rest Catholic, while 70% of the rank and file were Roman Catholic and the rest Protestant. RIC men generally conducted themselves with forbearance and dignity in the face of a ruthless terror campaign directed at them. It was their unwillingness to respond in kind that prompted the British government to import the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to wage a counter-terror campaign. A majority of RIC men were Catholics like their fellow countrymen, and they probably had the same range of political opinions. Their primary loyalty was to their job of keeping the peace and serving the community rather than to any political party or ideology. The RIC were trained for police work, not war, and were woefully ill prepared to take on the counter-insurgency duties that were required in 1919.
On 10 April 1919 É amon de Valera called for all the police forces to be socially ostracised. He stated:
The people of Ireland ought not to fraternise, as they often do, with the forces that are the main instruments in keeping them in subjugation … Given the composition of these forces, boycott meant accentuating divisions among Irish people, including family members and community residents.
Even though friendships developed between the RIC and their families and the Irish, by 1919 the RIC as an organisation were reviled as the most obvious instrument of British rule in Ireland. 44 In October the County Inspector for Clare reported:
The people appear to regard the police as their enemies and have ceased all friendly intercourse with them. Shops continue to supply provisions, but they would rather that the police did not come to them. 45
It is clear that there was a ‘double-edged’ intimidation in the ostracism of the RIC and their families. When the Irish were admonished not to have
any social or economic congress with them—not to share a pew in church, nor to meet and talk with the families, nor to drink a pint in the pub with the men, nor to sell goods or provisions to them in shops—there was an expressed or implied ‘or else’, as well. Those Irish who ignored the warnings not to have any dealings with the men and their families ran the risk of being ostracised themselves—or worse.
By mid-1920 those RIC men who were going to be intimidated out of their jobs had left. Those who remained were men who decided to ‘stick it out’ in the RIC for the duration, or recruits who joined in 1919 or 1920. 46 Later in 1920, however, ostracism of the RIC began to lose its effect. It must be understood that most constables were Irish and that they and their families had been essential and welcome members of their communities before the war. Many Irish people found that they could not ‘cut off ’ connections with men and their families with whom they had had neighbourly relations for many years. Reports noted that boycotts were collapsing around the country, as most of those who could be intimidated had already left the force. The Roscommon County Inspector reported that many of the traders in the area continued to supply the RIC and their families under the pretence that the goods were commandeered.
The majority of the people are not in favour of the criminal campaign and realise it is not good for them to boycott or display hostility to the Crown forces. 47
It was said that, ‘like the burning of vacant police barracks, by 1921 the work of intimidation [of the RIC] had been largely accomplished’. 48
Intimidation was bilateral when the policy of ostracism was instituted, and that was another form of terror for the entire community. As always, the simple thought of ‘them’ versus ‘us’ is incorrect when recounting the times. When Voltaire wrote pour encourager les autres, he could have been thinking of the Irish War of Independence 130 years in the future, and one must continually ask: who were the ‘others’ the terror was to ‘encourage’? In so many cases, the Irish intimidation was directly or indirectly aimed at the Irish people themselves, and was much more complex and nuanced than is often thought. It is impossible to understand what must have been an inescapable part of life—the
uncertainty of living in a community where no one was immune from the daily possibility of violence.
Just as the military phase of the guerrilla war changed as it went on,
over the revolutionary period, the practice of terrorism was radically altered, as all protagonists discarded their initial inhibitions, devised new tactics to cope with increasingly difficult opposition, and expressed their growing frustration in ever more ruthless brutality. 49
As the war continued, intimidation on both sides progressed into actual violence, murders and burnings, and the British began with unofficial and then moved into official reprisals—‘authorised punishments’. Lord Hugh Cecil summed up the British position cynically: ‘There is no such thing as reprisals, but they have done a great deal of good! ’The British used what they called ‘extra-legal’ means: torture, murder, the burning of homes, businesses and creameries in an attempt to restore order. 50 (Late in the war, in May 1921, Richard Mulcahy wrote to Cathal Brugha giving formal sanction for Irish ‘counter-reprisals’. 51) British military and police discipline mostly held firm throughout 1919, but by January 1920 RIC men began to retaliate in a manner that terrorised the local populations. The British did not understand the will of the Irish and often overreacted. Mao Zedong later had as one of his principles of guerrilla warfare to let the State ‘overreact with human rights abuses’. 52 In fact, it was clear that the Irish provoked British reprisals in order to generate propaganda. Michael Hopkinson wrote that
… a central, if unstated, aim of the IRA was to provoke a harsh response and hence to court publicity and international sympathy. 53
British ‘reprisals and counter-reprisals’ proved to be counter-productive time and time again. Collins needed the British to overreact, and when they did he was able to manipulate that overreaction to mobilise Irish and international opinion to win the all-important political and psychological war. Collins and the Irish continually attacked the British in ways calculated
to provoke their blind reactions. This handed the propaganda initiative to the Irish internationally and extended the movement’s control over the population, although that was at least partially due to the fact that the Irish were also engaging in terrorism, to intimidate the population.
A further indication of the fact that the Irish also utilised terrorism— and of the confusion that was apparent throughout Ireland as to which side was the ‘terrorist’ and which the ‘counter-terrorist’—is demonstrated in Chapter XVIII, ‘Terror and Counter-Terror’, of Edgar Holt’s book Protest in Arms. 54 While it is commonly thought, and written, that the first terror came from the British, and especially from the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, Holt presents the Irish as being the first to use terror and the Black and Tans as the ‘counter-terror’ forces. He lists various Irish actions which he deems to be terrorist in nature: the events that followed 20 May 1920, when Irish dockers embargoed British ‘war materials’ and railway workers followed suit; the killing of Colonel Gerald Smyth in the Cork County Club for his speech to RIC members at their barracks in Listowel on 19 June (‘Sinn Fé in has had all the sport up to the present, and we are going to have the sport now’); and the killing of policemen in Cork in July. Holt indicates that these led to counter-reprisals by the British. As a further example there is Frank Brooke, the chairman of the Dublin and Southeastern Railway. On 30 July Collins intervened in the embargo by making ‘non-combatant’ supporters of the British war effort in Ireland legitimate targets, and Brooke knew that he was in danger. That day Brooke chaired a meeting at Westland Row Railway Station, and Collins sent Jim Slattery to lead Squad members to kill him. 55 Holt points out that the witnesses and observers at these events raised no outcry because the IRA and its terror had so intimidated them, and that it was clear that the British administration and law were no longer respected. Confusion reigned in Ireland—and in the historiography ever since.
In reality, the British policy of ‘unofficial’ reprisals (i. e. officially carried out but unacknowledged as such) had been sanctioned at the highest level. In June 1920, British Prime Minister Lloyd George met privately with General Hugh Tudor, the top police ‘adviser’ at Dublin Castle, appointed by Winston Churchill, and affirmed his full support for the reprisals policy. Tudor was appointed head of the RIC the following November and thereafter the number of reprisals was expanded and more publicly justified.
In August 1920, the month before the burning of Balbriggan, Tudor endorsed the publication by Dublin Castle’s propagandists of their newspaper, the Weekly Summary. This was a propaganda sheet designed not for the press and public but for the Crown forces themselves, in order to boost morale and ‘psyche them up’ to carry out the terror policy.
By mid-/late 1920, British reprisals had become accepted British government policy. 56 Lloyd George was willing to place several counties under martial law and allowed the trial of Irish suspects by court martial. He was even willing to turn a blind eye to Black and Tan and Auxiliary rampages and the forcible interrogation and occasional killing of suspects ‘while trying to escape’. He said that the activities of the Irish ‘could only be met by reprisals’, 57 but there were limits beyond which he would not go. He was not willing to bomb cities, as Lord Herbert Kitchener, British Chief of Staff, had done in the Boer War. He was not willing to execute Irish en masse, as had been done in the Boer War, nor was he prepared to place them in concentration camps. Actions in war that create fear and terror can become so widespread that historians have questioned whether some situations of atrocity were not so much a consequence of a defect of character as of a misguided sense of judgement of the value of intimidating and coercing the local populations. Of these there are many examples, many involving senior military British leaders in times of stress within a counter-insurgency. Perhaps most notable, or most notorious, was that which took place in South Africa between 1900 and 1902, when Kitchener was in command of British troops. Besides the 1, 000 deaths from typhoid as a consequence of inadequate sanitation and hygiene in the field, the internment of civilians was to lead to 3, 854 deaths after 155, 399 of them had been interned. The burning of 30, 000 farms and forty towns in the Orange Free State by May 1901, plus the overall detention without trial of 320, 000 internees, of whom 51, 000 died, may have been carried out with the best of intentions—to bring the Boer War to a speedy close—but by atrocious means. It took two humanitarian investigations, initially by Emily Hobhouse58 and then by Dame Millicent Fawcett, 59 to bring matters to public attention. How prescient was Kitchener in his remark that ‘I fear it will be many a generation before the Boers forget or forgive this war’!
Lloyd George was not, in short, prepared to treat Ireland as the
British had treated the Boers, or as they treated the Iraqis in 1920, when a much larger revolt was ruthlessly suppressed at a cost of approximately 9, 000 lives. 60 These political limitations imposed by British public and parliamentary opinion frustrated many soldiers in Ireland; in the words of Field Marshal Henry Wilson, ‘the Shinners are at war with our men, whilst our men are at peace with the Sinn Fé in’. 61 General Nevil Macready wrote back: ‘If this country was Mesopotamia or Egypt, I should have the greatest pleasure in the world in putting on the most extreme Martial Law, and have done with the thing once and for all’. 62 Earlier in his career Macready, who was known to be a ‘hard-liner’, had been promoted for his actions in the 1910 miners’ strike in Tonypandy, Wales, where he threatened to shoot strikers and earned himself the nickname ‘strike breaker’. 63 (At that incident in the south Wales town riots erupted after police attempted to break the miners’ picket line. The then Home Secretary, Churchill, sent 200 officers of the Metropolitan police and a detachment of Lancashire Fusiliers to stop the riots. One miner was killed and almost 600 people were injured. ) As O/C in Ireland, Macready did not seem to fully comprehend that the Irish would not give up and that such measures as he could take in ‘Mesopotamia or Egypt’ would not work in Ireland. He was to write that ‘no Englishman can fully grasp the psychology of the Irish rebel character’. 64
As with so much of the war, the British reports afterwards never recognised the effect that their actions truly had on the Irish, or on Irish and international opinion. Regarding reprisals, the official report noted:
It is not proposed to touch on the question of unofficial reprisals which occurred about this time [late 1920] beyond saying that, thanks to effective Sinn Fé in propaganda, they were greatly exaggerated. 65
Just as that propaganda was a boon for the Irish, it was a bane for the British home audience; there were limits that the British public would not allow to be crossed. Terror was to be restrained by the realpolitik of politics and propaganda. Lloyd George and the other Cabinet ministers knew that Churchill’s ‘iron repression’—a policy of ‘murder and counter-murder, terror and counter-terror’—would not be acceptable
to the British public. 66 Having just waged a war to liberate Belgium, the British people were not willing to fight indefinitely to subjugate Ireland, especially when the Irish people had expressed their preference for independence. 67
The brutal reprisal operations carried out by the British from the spring of 1920 brought uniform international condemnation of the policy. While they were often in response to IRA actions, they were more aggressive, long-drawn-out and indiscriminate than the actions to which they were responding. In Britain, the war-weary public were sickened and disgusted by the actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, whom they viewed as immoral mercenaries. David Fitzpatrick has correctly written that ‘the reprisal [was] always more vicious than the incident provoking it’. 68 In fact, their first O/C, General F. P. Crozier, resigned in February 1921 and later described the Auxiliaries as ‘soldiers in disguise, under no army and no RIC code’. 69 He claimed that they were being employed to ‘murder, rob, loot and burn up the innocent because they could not catch the few guilty on-the-run’. 70 When he resigned, he said, ‘I resigned because the combat was being carried out on foul lines, by selected and foul men, for a grossly foul purpose, based on the most Satanic of all rules that “the end justifies the means”’. Crozier summarised the dark stain on the reputation of British Forces:
Had I been told, in 1918, after four and a half years of blood- letting, that in our own British Isles I should be witnessing acts of atrocity, by men in the King’s uniform, which far exceeded in violence and brutality those acts I lived to condemn in the seething Baltic, I—well, I would have laughed out loud. I am concerned here with the conduct of Englishmen in the uniform of the Crown, because I greatly respect the Crown and have no wish to see it dragged in the mud. 71
Within the British military establishment, two of the most vocal critics of the British policy of reprisals were Field Marshal Henry Wilson and General Nevil Macready. Both were concerned that the undisciplined paramilitaries would have an adverse effect on the morale of regular British Army troops. 72 Wilson had a conversation with Lloyd George
and Bonar Law on 29 September 1920:
… I told them what I thought of reprisals by the Black and Tans, and how this must lead to chaos and ruin. Lloyd George danced about and was angry, but I never budged. I pointed out that these reprisals were being carried out without anyone being responsible; men were being murdered, houses burnt, villages wrecked … It was the business of the Government to govern. If these men ought to be murdered, then the Government ought to murder them. I got some sense into their heads and Lloyd George went for Hamar Greenwood, Macready, Tudor, and others to come over tomorrow night …73 [Emphasis added]
Clearly, Wilson did not object to the reprisals per se, but he wanted them taken out of the hands of the Black and Tans and directly overseen by the British military and government.
Macready wrote to Sir John Anderson in February 1921 that the Auxiliaries ‘treat the Martial Law areas as a special game preserve for their amusement’. 74 (Some Auxiliaries were arrested and tried for crimes, including three murders, but few were imprisoned for any period and most were granted probation and returned to their units. 75) While noting that reprisals were not officially sanctioned, he wrote in his memoirs:
Although these unauthorised reprisals at that time had a marked effect in curbing the activities of the IRA in the immediate localities, and on these grounds were justified, or at all events winked at, by those in control of the police, I saw that they could only result in the police taking the law into their own hands. And lost no time in protesting to the Chief Secretary [Hamar Greenwood] on the subject, urging him to carry out reprisals as authorised and controlled operations, or to stop them at all costs. Unfortunately at that time certain persons in London were convinced that terrorism in any description was the best method with which to oppose the
gunmen, not realising that apart from all other reasons the gunmen could always ‘go one better’. 76
British General Sir Hubert Gough went even further in condemning their actions:
Law and order have given way to a bloody and brutal anarchy
… England has departed further from the standards even of any nation in the world, not excepting the Turk and the Zulu, than has ever been known in history before! 77
Further, The Times editorialised:
Methods, inexcusable even under the loose code of revolutionaries, are certainly not fit methods which the Government of Great Britain can tolerate on the part of its servants. 78
Collins viewed the Black and Tans, the Auxiliaries and the terror that followed them as a sort of mixed blessing. Clearly the terror instilled by the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries drove any doubting nationalists into the arms of Sinn Fé in, and Collins took full advantage of that. ‘Apart from the loss which these attacks entail, good is done as it makes clear and clearer to people what both sides stand for. ’79 Nevertheless, Collins and the Irish did not hesitate to use terror when they felt it necessary for their aims.
Some of the British in Ireland had a different view of the Auxiliaries. Caroline Woodcock, wife of the Colonel Wilfred James Woodcock who was wounded in a raid on Bloody Sunday, spent most of 1920–1 in Dublin and her diaries were later published as a book. She described the Auxiliaries on the streets of Dublin and the street scene:
Soldiers piqueted every corner, and a house-to-house search was made and usually numerous streets affected. Throughout tanks waddled slowly up and down the street …
During these raids ever the most awe-inspiring sight for me was the car loads of Auxiliaries: eight or ten splendid-looking men
in a Crossley Tender, armed to the teeth …
I know little of what the Auxiliaries have done or left undone but I do know that they have put the fear of God into the Irish rebels. When criticising them, it should be never forgotten that these men are the survivors of the glorious company of those who fought and died for England. 80
The Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans were always on their best behaviour with their compatriots and very careful to hide their excesses from the British people.
The Black and Tans, fearful of the fact that any civilian could be a guerrilla fighter, unleashed their campaign of terror against the entire civilian population as well as the IRA. Simply put, they attempted to use terrorism to crush nationalist sentiment. The sole purpose of their terrorist actions was to ‘make an appropriate hell for rebels’ in an effort to reduce support for Sinn Fé in and the IRA. 81 Major Bernard Montgomery, serving in Cork, dismissed the actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, saying that ‘it never bothered me how many houses were burned. I regarded all civilians as “Shinners” and I never had any dealings with them. ’82 Officially, the Black and Tans were sent in to reinforce the RIC, but they had no intention to ‘police’ Ireland. 83 While their acts of terrorism were due in part to their lack of discipline, it is clear that many of the methods they employed were a result of British policy rather than the passion of the soldiers. 84 If there was anything that distinguished the terrorist actions of the sides, and the propaganda reactions to them, it would be that the British actions seemed part of a policy whereas the Irish actions seemed more ad hoc and employed locally by individuals or individual leaders.
As the war progressed, the British army increasingly burned and looted key economic locations in an effort to impoverish the Irish people, illustrating what the cost of fighting Britain would be. 85 Starting in April 1919, creameries became a prime target. The destruction of creameries caused severe food shortages in the winter, leaving many Irish families starving in the cold. 86 Later in the war, the Black and Tans burned down creameries because they viewed them as recruiting agencies for the IRA. 87 In total, over a hundred were burned to the ground by the war’s end. 88 Moreover, as reprisals increased, in June 1920 an RIC report indicated that
the force was feeling the effects of Irish actions and that the public shouldn’t be surprised that they engaged in reprisals:
There is a feeling among the police which is becoming prevalent in places where murders of police have been committed that the only way to stop these murders is by way of reprisals or retaliation
… It is becoming difficult to restrain men’s passions aroused at the sight of their murdered comrades and when they have the means of executing vengeance it is likely that they will use them when driven to desperation. 89
On 9 August 1920 Parliament passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act. In practice it suspended most civil rights, including trial by jury, and allowed trial by courts martial without access to legal representation. The British hard-liners declared victory, but it proved to be a pyrrhic victory at best. Broadening their activities, throughout the summer of 1920 the British systematically destroyed co-operative creameries, mills and bacon factories, effectively destroying much of Ireland’s agricultural economy. As reprisals against innocent citizens increased throughout south-western Ireland later that year, the international press reflected almost universal condemnation of the British policy, thus handing another propaganda victory to the Irish.
September 1920 saw an intensification of the war in Ireland, with the British army, the RIC, the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries targeting the civilian population in ‘reprisals’ that had the sanction of the British government. 90 On 3 September the British regime abolished coroners’ inquests in ten Irish counties and replaced them with military inquiries, shielding the Crown forces from the consequences of the reprisals. The previous March, the jury in the inquest on the murdered Sinn Fé in mayor of Cork, Tomá s MacCurtá in, had laid the blame squarely at the door of the RIC and the British Cabinet: the jury at the inquest had no doubt who killed MacCurtá in. The coroner, James J. McCabe, examined ninety-seven witnesses in all, sixty-four of them being members of the RIC. The inquest took nearly a month before the jury, unimpressed by conflicts of evidence among senior RIC officers in the city, issued a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against British Prime Minister Lloyd George and against a number of
policemen, some named but with the actual killers described as ‘unknown members of the RIC’. Collins’s intelligence determined that the killer had been transferred for his own safety to Lisburn, Co. Antrim, and Detective Inspector Oswald Ross Swanzy was shot outside a church there on 22 August 1920. Swanzy was one who had been indicted for ‘wilful murder’ by the investigating jury. The IRA man who fired the first shots was Seá n Culhane, who used MacCurtá in’s own gun in the shooting. Dick Murphy and Roger McCorley were also present. 91 Collins wrote of a ‘vicious circle’:
As I was in command I decided to collect all my evidence and play them at their own game. This was the start of the vicious circle—the murder race. I intercepted all the correspondence. Inspector Swanzy put Lord Mayor MacCurtá in away so I got Swanzy and all his associates wiped out, one by one, in all parts of Ireland to which the murderers had been secretly dispersed. What else could I do? 92
The Unionists’ reaction to his killing was beyond Collins’s worst expectations. Catholic homes (including the parish priest’s house) and businesses were burnt in retaliation, and after three days of looting and destruction the entire Catholic population of 1, 000 could take no more and fled the town en masse. This pattern was soon to establish itself. IRA attacks were followed by the inevitable reprisals. Many of these were the work of Orange mobs and UVF gunmen, but there is clear evidence of an official policy of reprisal at senior level. 93
Throughout Ireland that pattern emerged whereby attacks by the IRA on Crown forces were followed by British reprisals in which civilians were killed and injured and buildings destroyed or looted. Many such reprisals took place around the country, but the burning of the small town of Balbriggan in north County Dublin in particular received worldwide attention because of its proximity to the capital, where national newspapers and foreign correspondents were based. 94 In addition to the death of two suspected IRA men, the local hosiery factory was burned down, and forty- nine houses and four pubs were destroyed. 95 Further, in December 1920 the Black and Tans sacked County Cork and its capital, Cork City, in a ‘wild orgy of looting, wrecking, burning, and drinking’. 96 They set fire to the
whole of Patrick Street (the main business district in Cork City), and when the fire brigade came to put it out the Black and Tans cut the hoses with bayonets and turned off the hydrants in order to ensure its complete destruction. 97 In total, the Black and Tans caused damage costing £ 2. 5 million in Cork alone, an amount equal to approximately £ 90 million today. 98 These examples demonstrate how the British forces used terrorism to crush Irish nationalism by showing the Irish population the debilitating economic consequences of fighting Britain. Florence O’Donoghue wrote that the burning and looting of Cork was not an isolated incident but the application of a policy initiated and approved, implicitly or explicitly, by the British government, and that the British actions were
a policy of subjugation by terror, murder and rapine, of government by force of arms, of the deliberate destruction of those industries and resources whose absence would inflict the greatest hardship and loss upon the nation; of ruthless hunting down and extermination of those who stood for national freedom. 99
The British scorched-earth policy began with the burning of the town of Balbriggan by a Black and Tan detachment. 100 On 20 September two Black and Tans were shot in a public house. No evidence was submitted to a court as to who fired the shots and one account said that the shooting was the result of a quarrel, but one of the IRA men later described what happened in his witness statement:
I ordered them [Black and Tan Head Constable Peter Burke and his brother Sergeant William Burke] to clear out, instead of doing so, they made a rush at me and I had no option but to fire. I shot one of the Head Constables [sic] in the head and wounded the other, who later recovered [Sergeant Burke died on the spot and Head Constable Burke died later], and then my pal and I cleared out the back door and got safely away. 101
Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were based at the nearby Gormanstown Camp and up to 150 of them descended on Balbriggan that night, intent
on revenge. Two young local men, Sé amus Lawless and Seá n Gibbons, were bayoneted to death on the street by the ‘Tans’, and a memorial today marks the spot where they were murdered. 102 The British forces proceeded to smash the windows of shops and houses in the small town and then set fire to a hosiery factory, which was completely destroyed. They burned down forty-nine houses, forcing families to flee. Some had to take refuge in the fields.
The foreign press covered the destruction of Balbriggan, the Manchester Guardian editorialising about an ‘Irish Louvain’ and continuing:
To realise the full horrors of that night, one has to think of bands of men inflamed with drink, raging about the streets, firing rifles wildly, burning houses here and there loudly threatening to come again tonight and complete their work. 103
The Irish and foreign press were united in their condemnation of the Black and Tan reprisals. The Freeman’s Journal compared it to ‘one of the Belgian towns that had been sacked by the invaders’104 and the London Daily News editorialised on ‘the barbarous “reprisals” now being systematically and openly carried out by the Black and Tans’, 105 while the Birmingham Post commented in its editorial that ‘it is not by means of reprisals that order can be restored’. 106
Hamar Greenwood stated in the House of Commons that the Balbriggan episode was regrettable but he proposed no punishments for those involved. He believed instead that ‘the best and the surest way to stop reprisals is to stop the murder of policemen’, 107 a sentiment he had expressed almost word for word twelve days earlier in the Weekly Summary. 108 Mark Sturgis wrote in his diary that if the Auxiliaries had simply ‘confined themselves to the dignified shooting of the two prominent Shinners, notorious bad men, the reprisals would have been not so bad … worse things can happen than the firing up of a sink like Balbriggan’. 109 At the same time that individuals at various levels of the British administration were permitting and encouraging both reprisals and the killings of alleged Sinn Fé iners, the press was beginning to recognise that these things were taking place and to criticise the government for allowing them. While the Irish Bulletin, which reported such acts throughout the conflict, gained
greater credibility among the mainstream press, the Weekly Summary’s defence of reprisals made the newspaper increasingly infamous and unbelievable.
In fairness, not all descriptions of the Balbriggan ‘incident’ are Irish- oriented. In his Protest in Arms Holt describes the attack as ‘the somewhat exaggerated account of the raid on Balbriggan’. 110 He relates that
Irish propaganda described the affair as ‘the sack of Balbriggan’, but in fact the damage, wanton though it was, was confined to one part of the town, and only one out of several factories was destroyed. Balbriggan was certainly not burnt to the ground. When Macready went there a few days later he thought that a person who did not know what had happened might have motored through the town without realising there had been an incident.
In his essay ‘The price of Balbriggan’, David Fitzpatrick gives an indication of the damage to the town. The compensation for the damage paid out by the British government could never fully recompense the victims for their material losses—nor, obviously, for the human costs of the war—but the amount noted by Fitzpatrick would indicate that there was a great deal of damage to the town. 111 However much the Irish propagandists embellished the story, it was certainly effective in creating a worldwide view of the brutality and wanton actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. The New York Times reported the story as ‘two attacks’ in ‘a special cable to the New York Times’:
The first onslaught early this morning lasted for two hours, and the second began in the afternoon.
…
These reprisals followed quickly on the murder of Head Constable Burke and his brother Sergeant Burke.
When news of the outrage reached Gormanstown, where the RIC are stationed, a large body started off in motor lorries … and the town was given over to ruthless reprisals.
Scenes of the wildest disorder reigned. Some of the
inhabitants assert that they were driven from their homes at the point of a bayonet. One woman only just succeeded in rescuing her baby from its cot before the house was burned.
This morning the roads leading from the town were crowded with fleeing women and children, some wheeling perambulators
…
In many cases they were bleeding as a result of being hit by flying glass and debris. The Dublin hospitals are dealing with casualties. 112
Six weeks later, British reprisals took place in Granard, Co. Longford, where the IRA assassinated District Inspector Philip Kelleher on 31 October. On the night of 3 November uniformed men entered the town and burned down a number of buildings. The same night, a convoy of military and police was ambushed in the nearby town of Ballinalee and forced to retreat. 113 The Times correspondent visited both towns the following day and described Granard as a scene ‘that can scarcely be imagined in a town which is not in the throes of actual war. Most of the businesses and the market hall were smoking ruins. ’114 Despite official denials, the writer concluded that ‘No reasonable man … could come to any other conclusion than that this terrible punishment had been inflicted on the town by the R. I. C. ’.
By late 1920 some Irish newspapers were risking official censorship by their editorials. The Irish Independent declared that ‘Nobody in Ireland accepts as truthful any statement made by the British Government’. 115 Even the Irish Times, usually a loyalist paper, editorialised about the reprisals:
If only the people in Britain knew. Everywhere in Ireland today you hear that cry ‘why do these things happen? ’Why are servants of the Crown not charged with pillage and arson and what amounts to lynch law even with drunkenness and murder! How can the reign of terror be stopped? 116
Despite the wave of attacks, in November 1920 Lloyd George assured a Guildhall audience in the City of London that British forces were winning the conflict. According to the prime minister, ‘We have murder by the throat
in Ireland’. He described the rebel campaign as ‘a spectacle of organized assassination, of the most cowardly character’. He then insisted that ‘There will be no peace in Ireland, there will be no conciliation, until this murder conspiracy is scattered’. After the reorganisation of the police, ‘we struck the terror, and the terrorists are now complaining of terror’. 117 An editorial in The Times argued that the prime minister ‘committed himself to war upon large sections of the Irish people and his government was engaged in an effort to scourge Ireland into obedience’. 118
Tom Barry put the Irish strategy of retaliation for British burnings into effect in County Cork:
… what I did was to stop the destruction of our property by the British. It was [British Major A. E. ] Percival started it: they started burning up houses in the martial law area, small farmers’ houses, labourers’ cottages. Well, the only way you can fight terror is with terror, that’s the only thing that an imperialist nation will understand. We sent a message to them that for every house of ours they burned, we’d burn two of the big houses, the Loyalist mansions. That wasn’t a policy from Dublin. If you had a GHQ at the time of seven Napoleons it wouldn’t have done any good because of the lack of communications. But the British went on with their burning campaign, and they found out that we meant what we said because we kept raising the ante …When the
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