Massacre in West Cork (2 page)

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Prelude to War: 1914–1919

I ask that, no matter what pleas are addressed to them, every man who can be proved to be guilty of murder shall suffer the death penalty. I ask that particularly because I have a case before me at this moment – it has come to me from two quarters in Dublin within the last two hours – where a person responsible for the direct shooting of a police constable in cold blood has been reprieved.

Lord Midleton, 10 May 1916
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It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had a majority on your side. It is the fruit of our life [sic] work. We have risked our lives a hundred times to bring about this result. We are held up to odium as traitors by those men who made this rebellion, and our lives have been in danger a hundred times during the last thirty years because we have endeavoured to reconcile the two things, and now you are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood.

John Dillon, MP, 11 May 1916
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Irish society was on the verge of civil war in 1914. Nationalist Ireland was just about to accept its place within the British Empire in much the same way that the Scottish parliament operates today. However, unionists utterly opposed this Home Rule, fearing that a Dublin parliament would be neither culturally nor economically beneficial to them and would lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom as national demands in Scotland and Wales would be impossible to resist. They were in open revolt and had created all the elements of a provisional government, but had not yet taken the final step and activated it. This direct opposition to the will of the imperial parliament created a British constitutional crisis as great as that of 1653, when the army had deposed the Rump parliament and established Oliver Cromwell as a dictator.

The chosen ground for this very British ‘civil war’ was Ulster and the issues were relatively simple.
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Irish nationalism ultimately demanded that all of Ireland be allowed to govern itself free from the interference of Britain and, in particular, England. Home Rule was seen as a first step. The Ulster unionists were prepared to oppose this step by any means necessary, even through armed revolt. The problem for Britain was that what was essentially a local problem had much wider implications in a changing world. The outcome of these events could have serious repercussions for the rest of the empire. Could Ulster, that most loyal of all British possessions, be coerced out of the British Empire into a United Ireland, and, if it could, what were the long-term implications for the rest of the empire and its possessions? In parliament the Conservative and Unionist parties were fighting to keep the status quo, while Liberals, the Labour Party and the Irish Parliamentary Party combined to try to work out a way of providing for national demands within the empire. The eventual solution was the creation of an informal empire, which survives today in the form of the Commonwealth, but when nationalist Ireland was seeking its independence this piece of creative brilliance was still only a dream in the eye of its leading advocate, Lionel Curtis.
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A full understanding of how Ireland separated from Britain makes it necessary to begin at the first point of true crisis: the Curragh Incident of 14–23 March 1914, often referred to as the Curragh Mutiny. In early March 1914 the Ulster unionists were facing a desperate political problem. The third Home Rule Bill had been introduced into the House of Commons in April 1912 and inevitably rejected by the House of Lords on 30 January 1913 by a vote of 326 to 69. As the Parliament Act had reduced the Lords veto to a two-year suspensory clause, this meant that Home Rule would become operable in Ireland no later than 1915. The unionist campaign against this would fail without guns, as otherwise they could do nothing to stop the British military from imposing the rule of law.

Early in March 1914 intelligence reports reached the British government that plans were being made to seize army arsenals in Ulster, which could allow Edward Carson and James Craig to set up a provisional government in Belfast. No state could allow this to happen. On 14 March British Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith’s Liberal government took preventative action and a cabinet subcommittee ordered regiments from the main army base at the Curragh Camp in Kildare to go north to protect military installations and to support the civil power in restoring order if need be.

However, as the upper echelons of the 1914 British Army contained more than its fair share of wealthy Ulster and Irish Protestant aristocrats, these men instinctively supported their province and their class rather than their King’s government.
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Many were descended from Cromwell’s officers and had a much better understanding than their political opponents of how far they could push the government. On 20 March the officers in the main British Army camp at the Curragh offered their resignations rather than impose Home Rule on Ulster. Asquith, concerned that some of the Liberals who made up their majority might switch sides if the government forced the issue, immediately backed down.
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On 23 March General Gough, who commanded the Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, was called to the War Office and was handed a clarification:

His Majesty’s Government must retain their right to use all the forces of the Crown in Ireland, or elsewhere, to maintain law and order and to support the civil power in the ordinary execution of its duty. But they have no mention whatever of taking advantage of this right to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill.
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The last two paragraphs of the clarification, including these destructive lines, had been inserted by Colonel Seely, the Secretary of State for War, without the approval of the cabinet. Lord French, then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, initialled the document, and this meant in effect that the army guaranteed it would not coerce Ulster. Because the addition of these two paragraphs meant that the guarantee went beyond what the cabinet had agreed, which was that Ulster officers could reasonably expect not to have to coerce Ulster, and had been revealed by the resigned officers’ friends in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State for War resigned on 25 March 1914.
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When the cabinet then disowned the document, French resigned on 6 April.

While leader of the opposition Bonar Law and his Conservative Party criticised Asquith for his stupidity in attempting to coerce Ulster, James Ward, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, hammered home the real significance of the crisis for the British aristocracy. Their ‘democracy’ was not a democracy and would have to be changed. In a fiery response to the brainless upper-class goading of Earl Winterton, he said of General Gough and his officers:

We workmen have had an illustration in the Debate today … that the moment we get the authority to impose our will on the country in the shape of law then the aristocracy are prepared to use force in the shape of the Army or anything else to maintain their position. The law and force are for us only; the privilege is for hon. Gentlemen who sit opposite and the class they represent in this House.
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The debate also brought into focus the political problem for the Liberal Party. Why should working people trust them to face down the aristocracy when it came to a fight between classes? After all, workers could guarantee their position by voting for their own Labour Party. (This is what happened between 1922 and 1931, and the great Liberal Party would not return to power in Britain until 2010.) It took junior Liberal Hamar Greenwood, a man who was to become inextricably linked with the ‘Irish Problem’, to dissect the treason at the heart of the ‘Curragh Incident’:

The Crown never acts personally, but acts through the Government of the day, and anyone who does not know an elementary proposition of this sort should not be in the House at all. If an officer is to fix terms upon which his allegiance depends, if he at any time fails to carry out the commands of the Executive Government, I cannot believe that such officer should be allowed to draw the pay of the nation.
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Because the Conservatives had used the aristocrats in the army to block the will of the British people, they exposed the democratic deficit at the heart of the British government.
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The rise of the Labour Party in the House of Commons over the next ten years might have led to a desperate confrontation if many of the aristocracy had not been destroyed in the Great War, which broke out soon afterwards.

Two groups came out of the Curragh Mutiny and the political crisis it provoked as victors, no matter how effectively Asquith tried to cover over the mess. The generals had proved their political mettle – a terrifying development in any democracy. The Ulster unionists had added to their ranks of supporters among the British decision-makers, had faced down the Liberals and the nationalists, and, although Home Rule remained on the Statute Books, it seemed clear that they would never be forced into a United Ireland. The appropriateness of the guarantee, and the reasoning behind it, overshadowed Irish history for many years. A month after the guarantee, on 25 April 1914, the Ulster Volunteer Force landed 37,000 guns and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition at Larne,
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which gave teeth to those who had declared in the Ulster Covenant:

Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V., humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority.
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The lack of proper ammunition for the Ulster rifles landed at Larne meant that they were not as useful as they might have been.
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On 24 June 1914 the nationalist Irish Volunteer Force (the Volunteers) landed 900 Mauser single-shot rifles and 29,000 rounds of ammunition at Howth in response to the Larne gun-running.
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Although the Ulster unionists had guns but little useful ammunition and the Volunteers had ammunition but few guns, the gun had now returned with a vengeance to Irish politics. The chances of working through the problem of Home Rule around the negotiating table were dramatically reduced. Then, just at the point at which it looked as though this cold war could turn hot, a small incident in an obscure town in the Balkans changed the world forever.

During a visit by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, to Sarajevo in June 1914, a bomb was thrown at their car, but it bounced off and failed to injure the royals. Bosnia had been annexed by Austria in 1908, and despite neighbour Serbia’s agreeing to a small territorial concession to settle its demands for Bosnia to be independent, Serbian nationalists had remained incensed, leading to this attack on the Austrian royal family. The failed assassin, Čabrinović, swallowed a cyanide pill and jumped into the Miljacka River, but the pill only induced vomiting and as the Miljacka was just thirteen centimetres deep, police dragged him out. He was severely beaten by the crowd before being taken into custody. As the motorcade sped away, three other assassins, including Gavrilo Princip, missed their opportunity to kill Ferdinand.

The angry Archduke berated the unfortunate Mayor of Sarajevo who, unaware of the bomb attack, presented him with an address of welcome. Although neither royal was hurt, twenty other people had been injured in the attack. Following the reception at the City Hall it was decided to abandon the visit, but for some reason the motorcade retraced its earlier steps, giving Princip, who was still nearby, his opportunity. He fired two shots from a distance of about one-and-a-half metres at the car, which eyewitness accounts say had either slowed to take a sharp turn or was reversing after taking a wrong turn. The first bullet wounded the Archduke and the second hit the Duchess. Both died before they reached the hospital.
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The resulting row between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia, and their allies on both sides, led to the outbreak of war. Slightly more than one month after the assassination, the
Manchester Guardian
reported that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had declared war on Germany at eleven o’clock the night before: