The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (15 page)

The Dáil courts consisted of four tiers. At the lowest level were the threemember parish courts that were empowered to deal with claims involving property that did not exceed £10 in value, evictions from low-rent dwellings and other minor crimes. Its members were not required to have any legal qualifications and one member could be a clergyman. The area covered by these courts corresponded to the local Roman Catholic parish. More serious claims for damage (from £10–£100) were dealt with by district courts, which corresponded to electoral constituencies and also heard cases dealing with land title, trade union rights and workmen's compensation as well as hearing
appeals against judgments of the lower parish courts. There were five arbitrators on the district courts, two of whom could be clergymen and none of whom required a legal qualification. Appeals against the judgments of the district courts were heard three times a year by a circuit court judge, who was a qualified barrister (Davitt, 1968: 113–18; Kotsonouris, 1994: 30–1). The two men appointed to these posts were Cahir Davitt, the son of Land League founder Michael Davitt, and Diarmuid Crowley. The highest court in the land was the Supreme Court, the two members appointed to which were experienced barristers, James Creed Meredith, a Protestant with nationalist sympathies, and Arthur Clery, a Professor of Law at University College Dublin (Casey, 1970: 325–6).

The lower courts which did not require members to be lawyers often contained senior figures in the republican movement locally and nationally. For example, in Dublin, court members included Erskine Childers, Darrell Figgis, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Maud Gonne MacBride, and in Limerick Mary Spring-Rice, the daughter of Lord Monteagle and a prominent republican supporter, sat on her local parish court in Shanagolden (Casey, 1970: 327–8). Parish courts often included the local parish priest or prominent local members of Sinn Féin, the IRA (as the Volunteers were more commonly known after 1919) or Cumann na mBan. Similarly, the administrative staff, the most important of which was the local registrar, usually had a record of activity in the independence movement (Fitzpatrick: 1977, 179).

The establishment of the Dáil courts coincided with the decline of the RIC as an effective police force as the IRA's campaign of intimidation and assault began to take effect. At the end of 1919 the police closed many of their small rural barracks and became increasingly unable to prosecute crimes or enforce decrees and judgments of the crown courts. The republican courts, along with the Irish Republican Police wing of the IRA, played an important role in ensuring the maintenance of law and order at this time, reflecting Sinn Féin's fear that social unrest could derail the independence campaign, and in the process winning many compliments from those who were not traditional supporters of the republican movement. The courts made the Dáil Government a reality in the lives of many and proved that it was capable of governing the country effectively, indeed more effectively than the beleaguered RIC and crown courts.

The courts were at the height of their success in the summer of 1920; Erskine Childers claimed that they were working effectively in 27 counties and were ‘never busier’ (Childers, 1921: 27–8). In Longford, one of the counties where the courts operated best throughout the War of Independence, the district court held three sittings in the north of the county in June and a further three in July (Coleman, 2003: 103). The public's willingness to bring their cases before the courts and abide by their rulings underlay
much of this success and was in part a consequence of the ineffectiveness of the RIC and crown courts, as one correspondent explained to the unionist Walter Long:

The fact is that everybody is going over to Sinn Féin, not because they believe in it, but because it is the only authority in the County; and they realize that if their lives and property are to be secured, they must act with Sinn Féin.

(Costello, 1990: 49)

Even some unionists were prepared to bring their cases to the Dáil courts. One measure of the Dáil courts’ success was the virtual cessation of business at the crown courts in many counties. The inability of the RIC to bring prosecutions was part of this, but it was also clear that litigants were defecting to the new courts (Coleman, 2003: 104–8; Kotsonouris, 1994: 33). The only area of the country where the courts either failed to operate or operated in a very small way was Ulster, especially the six most unionist counties that later constituted
Northern Ireland
(Casey, 1970: 335–6).

Northern Ireland
: Sixcounty home rule entity created by the Government of Ireland Act (1920) comprising Counties Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

The cases brought before the courts give an insight into the mundane aspects of life that continued in spite of the revolutionary atmosphere of the time. In rural areas the subjects were usually related to property – land ownership disputes, allegations of trespass, rights of way and claims for damage. There were fewer criminal cases such as debt, assault, slander or intimidation. Social and family issues, such as child maintenance, were also dealt with on occasion (Coleman, 2003: 225). Judgments were based on the law in operation on 21 January 1919 and citations from ancient Irish Brehon law, Roman and French law were permitted, but British legal texts were prohibited. The courts earned a reputation for conservative judgments, reflecting their origins in an attempt to quell social unrest. Common punishments included the exclusion of an offender from an area for a period of time, the confiscation of illicit alcohol, the destruction of
poitín
(illicit whiskey) stills and fines (Laffan, 1999: 314).

Such conservative judgments were most noticeable in the distinct land tribunals that operated in parallel to the Dáil courts, staffed by Kevin O’Shiel, Conor Maguire and Art O’Connor. The judgments of the land courts often favoured the landowner or established tenant. In a case in Ballinrobe, County Mayo in May 1920, O’Shiel pronounced in favour of two tenants of a 120-acre grazing farm, against the claims of a number of labourers who wanted the estate in question divided among them. The dissatisfied claimants rejected the decision and occupied the land in defiance of O’Shiel's judgment, forcing him to employ the local IRA to arrest and imprison the men in question (Campbell, 2003: 168).

The scheme for the land courts, drawn up by O’Connor, was based on the principle that only untenanted land would be redistributed. The Dáil's National Land Bank, financed with the proceeds of the national loan, provided £340,000 in loans to allow 850 people to purchase 16,000 acres of land (Dooley, 2004: 47–9). The experiment was successful in keeping a lid on potentially explosive land agitation for the duration of the War of Independence. However, the re-emergence of land disputes during the Civil War indicated that it had solved neither the land question nor the class conflicts of the revolutionary period.

Initially the authorities adopted a tolerant approach to the courts, another factor responsible for their early success. However, by the summer of 1920 the British were clearly losing the battle for law and order on both the political and military fronts and the decision was taken to suppress the courts. The assault on the courts had mixed success. While Lloyd George claimed in April 1921 that they had ‘vanished’, there is evidence that the courts continued to operate effectively in some parts of the country; between March and July 1921 Cahir Davitt held circuit courts in Longford, Clare, Limerick and Cork and after the truce the Minister for Home Affairs, Austin Stack, praised these counties, along with Dublin City, for continuing to function throughout the repression. All of these were areas where the IRA was strong. Judges such as Maguire and O’Shiel believed that the government had waited too long and allowed the courts to become too well established to destroy them completely
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. The courts might not have been as successful from autumn 1920 onwards, but their survival in these key areas until the truce represents one of the greatest successes of the Dáil's domestic policy (Coleman, 2003: 105–6).

The Dáil courts were permitted to operate openly after the truce and enjoyed their most effective period in the six months from the truce to the treaty. From November 1921 until July 1922 the Supreme Court alone heard 150 cases (Casey, 1970: 332–3). However, when the republican movement split on the treaty in early 1921 the courts became a victim of their success. Anti-treaty republicans began to have recourse to the courts in an effort to embarrass the Provisional Government and when Count Plunkett applied to the courts for a writ of
Habeas Corpus
following the capture of his son George in the surrender of the Four Courts in June 1922, the government hastily rescinded the original decree of the First Dáil that set up the courts, on the dubious grounds that the then Minister for Home Affairs, Austin Stack, had acted outside his jurisdiction. A winding-up commission was established to dispense with the outstanding business of the Dáil courts before their eventual demise in 1925 (Kotsonouris, 2004).

The Dáil had more limited success in another key area of domestic policy – local government. The 1898 Local Government Act had introduced a very
significant reform of Irish local government, replacing the old unrepresentative grand jury system, which was the preserve of the landed elite, with democratically elected county and district councils. Since the first local elections under the new Act in 1899, local government in most of Ireland, outside the unionist-controlled areas of the north, was dominated by the IPP. After the 1918 general election this was the only political power retained by the party but its hold on it was limited, with local elections due to be held in 1920.

The first set of elections for urban district councils was held in January 1920 and resulted in Sinn Féin taking the largest number of seats nationally (550), followed by Labour (394), Unionists (355), Nationalists (238), independents (161) and municipal reformers (108). The overall results gave Sinn Féin control of 72 of the country's 127 urban councils. The main reason why Sinn Féin won fewer than one-third of the seats was the use of proportional representation by single transferable vote (PRSTV), rather than first-pastthe- post, which had helped the party to a massive landslide in the 1918 general election. The new system was first tried in a special local election in Sligo the previous year, in which Sinn Féin came second, taking only seven of the 24 seats on offer; the government had found a way to curtail the electoral success of Sinn Féin (Laffan, 1999: 323–7; Daly, 1997: 50).

However, PR was less successful in stemming the Sinn Féin tide six months later, when the more important county council elections took place, as well as those for rural district councils. In the intervening period, the republican movement had asserted a stronger hold on the country with the successful establishment of the Dáil courts and the routing of the RIC from large parts of the country. Determined to be more successful on this occasion, local Sinn Féin organisers also brought considerable pressure to bear on potential opponents for the nationalist vote, including Labour and constitutional nationalists, resulting in many of them refusing to contest vacancies leaving the field open for Sinn Féin. As a result the party took control of 28 of the country's 33 county councils (each of the 32 counties had one county council except Tipperary, which had two – North Tipperary and South Tipperary). Intimidation was one of the most significant factors explaining the result (Laffan, 1999: 328–9; Daly, 1997: 52).

After the January elections the Dáil requested that the new local authorities pledge allegiance to it and repudiate the existing Local Government Board (LGB). Very few councils did so initially, preferring not to act unilaterally without support from county and rural councils. The Dáil did not pursue the issue either, for fear that the more important June elections might be postponed. However, once Sinn Féin had taken control of such a large proportion of councils in mid-1920, the majority of these councils acted fast to declare their allegiance to the revolutionary government, a move that was
of great symbolic significance in bolstering the Dáil's claim to be the legitimate government of Ireland (Daly, 1997: 50–2).

The patriotic fervour of the new councils was also to be seen in some of the motions passed at their early meetings, such as adopting resolutions on supporting the Dáil courts, refusing to co-operate with British tax collection, purchasing only Irish manufactured goods and reserving public service appointments for ‘loyal citizens of the Republic with a knowledge of Irish’. Offending motions passed by outgoing councils, in particular those condemning the Rising, were rescinded; in the case of Longford Rural District Council one such motion was cut out of the minute book and burned by the chairman (Coleman, 2003: 91–2).

Councils that transferred their loyalties from the LGB to the Dáil soon felt the financial effects of their actions; one-fifth of the local authorities’ income (£1.6 million) came from the LGB, in addition to various other infrastructural grants for housing and road maintenance. Dublin Corporation was brought to the brink of bankruptcy in August 1920 as a result. Dáil éireann did not have the resources to compensate councils for the loss of such a significant portion of their income; alternative income sources, such as increased rates would be needed, and councils would also have to cut back on their services (Daly, 1997: 58–60; Coleman, 2003: 93).

Defection from the LGB also affected rate collection, with local rate collectors facing demands for the return of rates from both the LGB and the Dáil Department of Local Government and many rate-payers exploiting the dispute to avoid paying (Coleman, 2003: 94). Added to this was the fact that by 1920 and 1921, income from rates was more badly needed than ever because of the damage to roads and bridges caused by the fighting during the War of Independence. The significant increase in damage to property and personal injury during the fighting was a further financial burden as local authorities were expected to provide the compensation. When Sinn Féin-controlled councils refused, the British Government passed legislation to compel the banks which acted as the councils’ treasurers to make these payments. As a result many councils removed the banks as their treasurers, resulting in the loss of overdraft facilities. Many councils were so close to bankruptcy in 1921 that they were forced to reinstate the banks (Daly, 1997: 59–61).