The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (16 page)

Financial troubles were not the only difficulties faced by the Dáil-controlled councils. Their day-to-day operations were hindered by the confiscation of important documents in raids by the crown forces. Many Sinn Féin councillors, some of whom were also active in the IRA, were arrested or forced to go on the run resulting in their absence from numerous meetings. Some of the personnel employed by the Dáil, such as rate or rent collectors, were incompetent or corrupt. Interference by local IRA units in the running of
councils was also a problem in some areas (Coleman, 2003: 99–100; Daly, 1997: 71–2).

One side-effect of these financial troubles was the opportunity to implement one of the aims of the Democratic Programme – abolition of the poor law system. In many counties poor law unions were amalgamated initially and finally replaced by county homes and hospitals after 1922. In doing so the hated spectre of the workhouse, so strongly associated with the failures of British rule in Ireland during the famine, disappeared from Irish welfare provision, although the Poor Law System remained in Northern Ireland until it was replaced by the National Health Service after the Second World War (Daly, 1997: 75–8).

The scheme leading to the abolition of the workhouses is one of the best examples of how the Dáil-controlled local authorities made the alternative state created by the revolutionary Dáil a reality in the lives of many, similar to the Dáil courts. For many reasons, principally financial, the Dáil had less success in running local government than in establishing its own judicial system. Nonetheless, the local elections of 1920 put Sinn Féin firmly in control of local as well as national politics, and by the time of the truce the Dáil's Department of Local Government had established a permanent hold on local government throughout the country.

SOCIAL CONFLICT IN REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND

The establishment of the Dáil courts, and especially the land courts, illustrated that there was a strong undercurrent of social tension in revolutionary Ireland. Until recently the received wisdom had been that there was no social aspect to Ireland's political revolution because Ireland already had its social revolution in the shape of the transformation of land ownership from landlords to peasant-proprietors between 1870 and 1909. It was believed that by the late 1910s ‘in rural Ireland thoughts of social revolution were held only by a minority’, as a result of land purchase, the financial benefits accruing from the introduction of the old age pension in 1908 and the prosperity enjoyed by Irish agriculture during the First World War (Lynch, 1966: 41). However, more recent research has shown that the Land Acts had not solved the problem entirely and the level of land agitation emerging in the west towards the end of the war had the potential to cause serious social unrest (Campbell, 2003: 170–1).

The labour and trade union movement was also a significant factor in urban Ireland during these years. The 1913 Dublin lock-out was a significant defeat for organised trade unionism in Ireland. The temporary emigration of
James Larkin to the USA in its aftermath, and the execution of James Connolly for his role in the Rising further depleted the Irish labour movement by removing its most effective and charismatic leaders. The Rising also took its toll on the Irish Citizen Army, which suffered the loss of a number of key figures including Sean Connolly, Richard O’Carroll, William Partridge and Peadar Macken, all of whom died in the fighting and Michael Mallin, who was executed. While the Irish Volunteers revived in the aftermath of the Rising, the Irish Citizen Army did not. The trade union movement's headquarters at Liberty Hall had been destroyed along with its newspaper
The Workers’ Republic
(Mitchell, 1974: 70–1).

The new labour leaders who emerged after the Rising, including the Labour Party leader, Thomas Johnson, and the General Secretary of the ITGWU, William O’Brien, prioritised trade union organisation over political activity (Mitchell, 1974: 78). The First World War provided a significant boost for the trade union movement in Ireland; in 1918 the ITGWU trebled in size and expanded further during 1919 and 1920. As a result strike activity increased steadily during and immediately after the war (Fitzpatrick, 1980: 28–30).

The trade union movement used strikes as a tactic to assist the revolutionary movement during the period 1918–21, when four important strikes linked to the revolution were held. On 23 April 1918 a general strike against conscription was very successful outside of Ulster. A general strike in Limerick a year later, somewhat grandiosely dubbed the Limerick Soviet, was a response to harsh government measures that proclaimed Limerick City as a special military area, requiring permits for those wishing to enter or leave the city, and resulted in the eventual withdrawal of the offending proclamation. In April 1920, a two-day general strike called by Sinn Féin in support of political prisoners helped to secure their release (Mitchell, 1974: 88, 117–20).

The most important action by the labour movement in support of the independence campaign was the railway-munitions strike that lasted from May until December 1920. It was initiated by Dublin dockers who refused to handle war materials intended for use by the crown forces
[Doc. 17]
. Soldiers were forced to unload the equipment themselves but were then faced with the difficulty of transporting it as the boycott spread to the railways as transport workers refused to load or drive trains carrying munitions, armed soldiers or policemen, actions which resulted in the dismissal of approximately 1,000 rail employees. The strike had a detrimental effect on the Irish railway system in the latter half of 1920. In some areas train services were suspended completely. No passenger services operated into Galway and the west of Ireland was serviced by only one daily goods train from Athlone. By the end of 1920 the side-effects the strike was having on the general public, which was suffering from the absence of both passenger and goods transit, resulted in it being called off, but not before it had caused
serious embarrassment to the British authorities in Ireland and disruption to the crown forces’ ability to counter the guerrilla campaign of the IRA (Townshend: 1979a).

The activity of land agitators in rural Ireland and trade unionists in the cities and towns provides ample evidence of the potential for social upheaval in revolutionary Ireland. That there was no such revolution owes more to the actions of Sinn Féin and the Dáil in acting to supress it at an early stage through the use of the republican courts, the nationalism of many within the labour movement who were prepared to use strikes for national rather than social reasons, the insurmountable problem of creating a united and effective labour movement out of a nationalist-minded proletariat in Dublin and Cork and a staunchly unionist one in the country's industrial heartland of Belfast, and the failure of Labour's political leaders to position their party to benefit from the political vacuum caused by the demise of the IPP.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

The proceedings and debates of the First Dáil éireann can be accessed online at
www.historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/index.htm
. A detailed documentary account of the foreign policy of the Dáil is contained in
Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume I: 1919–1922
(Royal Irish Academy, 1998), which is also available online at
www.difp.ie
.

The most comprehensive account of the workings of the First Dáil is Arthur Mitchell's,
Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil éireann 1919–22
(Gill and Macmillan, 1995). The work of individual departments is dealt with in their official histories, including Ronan Fanning's,
The Irish Department of Finance, 1922–58
(Institute of Public Administration, 1978) and Mary E. Daly's,
The Buffer State: The Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment
(Institute of Public Administration, 1997). Michael Collins's tenure as Minister for Finance is explored thoroughly in Peter Hart's biography,
Mick: The Real Michael Collins
(Macmillan, 2005). The Dáil courts are examined by Mary Kotsonouris in
Retreat from Revolution: the Dáil Courts, 1920–24
(Four Courts Press, 1992).

The best account of the Dáil's efforts to achieve recognition in the USA is Francis M. Carroll's,
American Opinion and the Irish Question, 1910–23
(Gill and Macmillan, 1978). Keiko Inoue's work on the
Irish Bulletin
in ‘Propaganda of Dáil éireann’, in Joost Augusteijn (ed.),
The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923
(Palgrave, 2002), along with Ian Kenneally's,
The Paper Wall: Newspapers and Propaganda in Ireland, 1919–21
(Collins Press, 2008) and Maurice Walsh's,
The News from Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution
(I. B. Tauris, 2008) show how the Dáil publicised Ireland's cause internationally.

Social unrest in revolutionary Ireland has been highlighted in a rural context by Terence Dooley in
The Land for the People: The Land Question in Independent Ireland
(UCD Press, 2004), and in urban areas by David Fitzpatrick in ‘Strikes in Ireland, 1914–21’,
Saothar
, 6 (1980): 26–39 and Charles Townshend in ‘The Irish railway strike of 1920: industrial action and civil resistance in the struggle for independence’,
Irish Historical Studies
, 21: 83 (1979).

5 The Military Campaign for Independence, 1919–21

THE IRISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

A
t the same time that the First Dáil was convening in the Mansion House on 21 January 1919, a group of IRA men from Tipperary, including Dan Breen, Seán Treacy and Seamus Robinson, ambushed an RIC convoy at Soloheadbeg in an attempt to capture a consignment of gelignite that the police were escorting from the military barracks in Tipperary town to a local quarry. The aim of the action was to use the gelignite for the manufacture of explosives and to strike a symbolic blow against the RIC. The ambush resulted in the deaths of two police constables, James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell, making them the first casualties of what became known variously as the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish War or, more colloquially in Ireland, the Tan War (Abbott, 2000: 30–3).

While the Soloheadbeg ambush is generally seen as representing the start of the war, it was purely coincidental that it took place on the same day as the Dáil opened; it was an isolated incident and did not spark off an immediate military confrontation between the IRA and the crown forces. The escalation of military activity during 1919 was gradual; indeed many volunteers were more occupied with the work of the Dáil, such as collecting for the national loan. Nevertheless there was a noticeable increase in what the police referred to as outrages, including raids for arms, threatening letters, assaults on police and civilians and resisting arrest.

Many of these were attacks on police. On 10 April 1919 the Dáil decreed a peaceful boycott of the RIC decreeing that people should avoid all forms of social and commercial interaction with them and their families. There is evidence that the social ostracisation of the police, a tactic popularised in Ireland during the Land War, was well underway before this decree; in Clare ‘[b]y April 1918 most barracks were no longer supplied locally with turf,
butter, eggs or milk’, and attacks on police by the Volunteers were growing in West Cork throughout 1918 and early 1919 (Fitzpatrick, 1977: 7; Hart, 1998: 62). An editorial in the IRA's journal
An tóglach
on 31 January 1919 was seen as legitimising the use of violence against the RIC:

Every Volunteer is entitled, morally and legally, when in the execution of his military duties, to use all legitimate methods of warfare against the soldiers and policemen of the English usurper and to slay them if it is necessary to overcome their resistance.

(Valiulis, 1992: 40)

The police were targeted not only because they were the face of British rule in every locality, but also because their local knowledge of republican activities and activists made them a valuable source of intelligence and as an armed force they were also an obvious target for arms raids by the IRA as it sought to increase its own arsenal.

The assaults on the police became more violent as 1919 progressed and eventually resulted in more fatalities; in April Constable Martin O’Brien was shot dead while guarding a hunger-striking IRA prisoner being held at the hospital in Limerick City's workhouse, while Sergeant Peter Wallace and Constable Michael Enright died during the IRA's rescue of Seán Hogan at Knocklong railway station in County Limerick the following month. Ten more policemen, members of both the RIC and
Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP)
, were to die in 1919 as the violence increased in the latter half of the year (Abbott, 2000: 33–50).

Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP)
: Police force for Dublin until 1925.

The assault on the RIC was one of the reasons for the intensification of violence in 1919. The apparent failure of the Dáil's political initiatives, including the failure to gain a hearing at the Paris Peace Conference and the suppression of the Dáil in September 1919, were also factors in convincing some volunteers that military action might achieve more. British actions, such as the suppression of the Dáil, along with the outlawing of Sinn Féin, the Volunteers (IRA) and the Gaelic League in July, led to a further militarisation of the conflict. Even the head of the British Army in Ireland, Sir Nevil Macready, later admitted that the banning of Sinn Féin ‘was not tactically a sound move’ because it turned many moderate politicians into ‘extremists’ (Macready, 1924: 437).

Two incidents in the last third of the year indicated that the IRA's campaign was intensifying significantly. On Sunday, 7 September, in Fermoy, County Cork, an IRA party commanded by Liam Lynch ambushed 18 soldiers of the Shropshire Light Infantry on their way into the town's Methodist church; one soldier died, four were injured and the IRA made a valuable capture of 13 rifles. When a local coroner's jury refused to return a verdict of murder
on the grounds that the aim of the raid was to seize arms rather than to kill, the soldiers destroyed business premises in the town that belonged to members of the jury. This was the first incident of the crown forces resorting to reprisals, a tactic that would become increasingly widespread as the conflict progressed (Townshend, 1975: 30).