The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (20 page)

Yet, there is evidence that this support was by no means uniform. Garrison towns were seen as unhelpful. The number of civilians executed as suspected spies (a punishment that became more commonplace in 1921 as the conflict intensified) shows that the IRA itself was aware that elements of the population either did not support it or actively sought to undermine it. Longford was a county where the IRA was active and support from the community strong, yet the flying column commander, Seán MacEoin, was arrested as a result of information passed to the police when he was seen boarding a train at Longford railway station (Coleman, 2003: 151–4). It is difficult to say how many of the people executed on suspicion
of spying had actually passed on information. In some cases the IRA produced definite evidence but in others there is strong speculation that some of these victims were dispatched because they were either perceived as threats or alien to the IRA; this is especially true of ex-soldiers, a considerable number of whom were executed by the IRA having been accused of spying (Leonard, 1990).

One important group within the civilian community that had an ambivalent attitude to the IRA was the Roman Catholic clergy. The hierarchy and individual clerics had shown support for earlier aspects of the political resistance, including supporting Sinn Féin in by-elections and spearheading the campaign against conscription. The Church distanced itself from republicanism after the conflict became more violent in 1919, as witnessed by the hierarchy's refusal to recognise officially the revolutionary Dáil éireann. Violence by both sides was condemned and there was a strong sense of disappointment that British Government policy was largely responsible for the escalation of the war, resulting in a powerful and influential body in Irish society being alienated by the authorities. Cardinal Logue, the primate of Ireland who was well known for his antipathy to Sinn Féin, abhorred the activities of the Black and Tans and believed the crown forces carried the greatest share of the blame for the Bloody Sunday killings (Miller, 1973: 458–9).

Actions such as the murder of Canon Magner in Cork in December 1920 and Father Michael Griffin in Galway the previous month drove a deeper wedge between Church and State. One member of the hierarchy, Bishop Cohalan of Cork, issued a decree excommunicating anyone in his diocese guilty of taking part in ambushes, kidnappings or murders, although this appears to have had little effect (Miller, 1973: 456). Some priests continued to provide absolution for IRA men and of course Father Michael O’Flanagan remained active in Sinn Féin in spite of having been suspended by his bishop. Individual clerics, including Archbishop Clune of Perth, were active in seeking to arrange a peaceful settlement, though others, such as his Australian hierarchical counterpart, Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne (both men were born and trained in Ireland), heightened tensions to the extent that he was prohibited from travelling to Ireland in 1920 (Miller, 1973: 471–3).

The military wing of the revolutionary movement had an ambivalent relationship with the political side, in spite of the cross-over of personnel in many cases, including that of Collins who was Director of Intelligence and Organisation for the IRA and the Dáil's Minister for Finance. A number of guerrilla leaders exhibited clear contempt for their political counterparts. According to Ernie O’Malley ‘the men had little use for anyone who was not of the physical force belief’ and they ‘sneered’ at those who were not in
the IRA. Liam Lynch viewed Sinn Féiners and republican members of local government bodies as ‘a burden on the Army’ (Hart, 1998: 229, 238).

This attitude was explicit at leadership level within the IRA. The civilian Minister for Defence, Cathal Brugha, struggled to bring the army under the authority of the Dáil, encountering stiff resistance from both Collins and Mulcahy, who were wary of Brugha's ulterior motive of seeking to weaken the influence of the IRB and, by extension, that of Collins. Bringing the army under the control of the democratically elected Dáil added substance to the republican claim that the independence campaign had a popular mandate. Eventually Brugha was successful in having the IRA adopt an oath of allegiance to the government of the republic in July 1920; however, the IRA continued to act independently for the duration of the war. This personal conflict between Brugha and the senior IRB men within the IRA foreshadowed the split that emerged in 1922 (Valiulis, 1992: 42).

It is difficult to state with certainty how many people died as a result of political violence in Ireland between the Easter Rising and the end of the Irish Civil War. One estimate for the four-year period from 1917 to 1921 recorded 2,141 such deaths, though this excludes the Rising, the violence in Northern Ireland in 1922 and the Irish Civil War. The IRA and the crown forces appear to have been responsible for a fairly similar proportion of these deaths, 46 per cent and 42 per cent respectively, and the proportion of civilian deaths (48 per cent, compared to 52 per cent combatant deaths) was quite high (O’Halpin, 2012: 152).

The levels of violence intensified in the last quarter of 1920 when the crown forces reacted to IRA attacks on police by carrying out reprisals which were not officially sanctioned by their superiors. As mentioned above the first of these revenge attacks took place in Fermoy in September 1919, but it was not for another year that they became more widespread following the introduction of the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans. Fermoy was attacked again by soldiers in June 1920 in response to the kidnapping of the army's General Lucas by the IRA. This was followed by raids on the towns of Upperchurch, Templemore and Thurles (Tipperary) and Limerick City in July and August. Attacks on isolated towns such as these did not generate much publicity or attention until the crown forces focused their vengeance closer to Dublin City with the sack of Balbriggan, which took place on 20 September 1920 in a quiet seaside town on the border of counties Dublin and Meath following an altercation between local IRA men and Black and Tans, both of which parties had been drinking in different pubs in the town, that led to the shooting dead of RIC Head Constable Peter Burke. When news of his death reached the nearby Gormanstown camp a contingent of Auxiliaries and Black and Tans descended on the town and by the following morning ‘it was reported [that] twenty-five houses had been burned, fifty had
had windows broken, and four public houses, two groceries, a newsagency and the Deedes hosiery factory had been destroyed’ and two republicans killed (O’Mahony, 2012: 62–6).

Between September 1920 and the truce a number of other towns suffered a fate similar to that of Balbriggan, including Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay (Clare) the following day; Trim (Meath) and Mallow (Cork) a week later; Boyle (Roscommon), Listowel and Tralee (Kerry), Tubbercurry (Leitrim) and Bandon (Cork), in October; and Templemore (Tipperary), Ballymote (Leitrim) and Granard (Longford) in November (Hopkinson, 2002: 80). The most notorious of all these attacks were undoubtedly the Croke Park shootings and the burning of large parts of Cork City, including City Hall and the Carnegie Library, on 11–12 December 1920 by Auxiliaries in reaction to the death of one of their comrades in an ambush by the IRA at Dillon's Cross earlier that day. The incendiarism of the crown forces was no doubt also an expression of their frustration at the recent success of the IRA at Kilmichael and the generally increased tensions in Cork City following the death of Terence MacSwiney (Hopkinson, 2002: 83).

These large-scale reprisals are the most infamous, but were also the least common. Most such revenge attacks consisted of relatively small-scale arson attacks on property or farm livestock and creameries which were valuable community facilities. Reprisals tended to be targeted against people involved in republicanism and their families, or communities seen as sympathetic to them, rather than being random acts. Some murders and personal assaults occurred during reprisals but tended to be much less common than attacks on property (Leeson, 2011: 157–65).

While these reprisals were considered to be unofficial in that they were not authorised or sanctioned by the government or the Irish administration, suspicion existed that there was a level of official connivance in them. Many of the properties targeted in Balbriggan belonged to prominent republicans, and newly arrived Auxiliaries and Black and Tans who did not live in the area would not have possessed this knowledge. Some senior British politicians, including Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, saw the benefits of fighting terror with terror. The British press detected ‘a directing influence’ behind attacks such as Balbriggan (Hopkinson, 2002: 81–2). The Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey, conceded that ‘reprisals are more or less winked at by the Government’. The government, the Irish administration and the leadership of the crown forces in Ireland gave tacit support to reprisals because of their effectiveness in leading to the capture or death of prominent IRA leaders, like McKee and Clancy, or in scaring the civilian population sufficiently into refusing to co-operate with or assist the IRA. Eventually, the government accepted the reality of the situation and made certain reprisals against property official policy in late December 1920; it was estimated that
approximately 150 official reprisals were carried out between then and the truce (Hopkinson, 2002: 81–2; Townshend, 1975: 149).

While reprisals might have been effective in the military campaign they were a disaster on the propaganda front. Balbriggan's proximity to Dublin City meant that the incident was covered widely by journalists based in the city, bringing the extent and impact of reprisals to a wider domestic and international audience. The extent to which the policy backfired on the British Government and strengthened Ireland's cause for independence raises the question of whether some of the actions which led to reprisals were deliberate provocation of the Tans and Auxiliaries by the IRA.

The actions of the crown forces in Ireland prompted the British Labour Party to send a delegation to Ireland, led by the party's chief whip, Arthur Henderson, to investigate and report on crown force reprisals. The commission collected much valuable evidence about the nature and extent of violence carried out by both sides in the conflict
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. The counterproductiveness of reprisals was being recognised in the lead up to the truce, and its continuation was not helping to achieve a peaceful settlement. Elements within the crown forces, especially the army, which were much less culpable in carrying out reprisals than the police, and many members of the government disliked the policy and the damage it had done to Britain's reputation. As a result the policy of official reprisals ceased on 3 June 1921 (Townshend, 1975: 184–5).

For decades it was popularly held in Ireland that the Black and Tans who carried out most of these reprisals were the sweepings of the English prisons, ‘ex-convicts and psychopaths hardened by prison and crazed by war’. However, new research into the personnel of both the Tans and the Auxiliaries has shown that if anything the Auxiliaries ‘behaved with even greater licence’ than the Tans, and that Irish members of the RIC were much more involved in reprisals than previously believed and few had criminal records (Leeson, 2011: ix). The view held by historians for some time that the lawlessness of the Tans and Auxiliaries was explained largely by the traumatic effects of First World War has also been challenged; professional soldiers who had served in the army prior to 1914 – rather than those who entered for the war – were much more likely to carry out reprisals.

The motivation of these otherwise law-abiding men to resort to apparently uncharacteristic and unrestrained violence can be put down to a mixture of poor leadership, alienation, frustration and boredom. On arrival in Ireland the new recruits received cursory training that was wholly inadequate to prepare them for a guerrilla conflict in a hostile environment and very little effort was taken by their leaders to instil or ensure proper discipline. With the exception of some friendly elements within the loyalist community, the Tans and Auxiliaries had no connections with the local civilian population
by whom they were despised, a feeling that intensified as their campaign of reprisals progressed. The psychological impact of the deaths of their comrades, the failure of coroners’ inquests to return murder verdicts (as in Fermoy) and the sense that the IRA was winning often led to frustration boiling over into violence. The dangers involved in travelling outside barracks led to the effective incarceration of these forces in their quarters even during periods of leave, where there were very few recreational pursuits other than alcohol consumption, which was a prevalent factor in many instances of reprisals (Leeson, 2011).

INTELLIGENCE

A successful guerrilla campaign needed to be complemented by effective intelligence. Michael Collins's operation of the IRA's intelligence system is generally seen as one of the greatest successes of the republican campaign during the War of Independence. In March 1918 an IRA GHQ was formed under the leadership of Richard Mulcahy as Chief-of-Staff. The first Director of Intelligence was Eamon Duggan, though in practice Collins gradually assumed responsibility for this role as 1918 progressed and was eventually made Director of Intelligence in his own right in 1919.

During the first year of the war in 1919 he gradually put together the structure and personnel of his intelligence system. His first success was in recruiting spies from within the British system, including four relatively junior members of the G (Intelligence) Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police – Ned Broy, James Kavanagh, James McNamara and David Neligan – all of whom had access to important documents which were passed to the IRA. In March 1918 Broy furnished Collins with a list of names of leading members of Sinn Féin and the IRA who were about to be arrested as part of the alleged German plot. The highest ranking spy from the British side was probably RIC Head Constable Peter Forlan, based in the Phoenix Park. (Foy, 2006: 14, 49–50).

Female clerical workers in government offices were also important informants. Nancy O’Brien, who was Collins's cousin, worked as a government typist and ‘Many of her lunch hours were spent in the GPO lavatory copying out decoded messages which she then smuggled out to him [Collins] in her bodice’ (Coogan, 1990: 82). Piaras Béaslaí's cousin, Lily Mernin (codenamed the ‘Little Gentleman’), worked in Dublin Castle, where she was able to discover and furnish Collins with the addresses of the intelligence officers targeted on Bloody Sunday (Foy, 2006: 145). From his own experience working in the Post Office in London, Collins was well aware of the significance of this agency as a conduit for official communications and established a
dedicated postal section within his intelligence department that was aided by postal employees who passed confidential information and stolen RIC cyphers to help the IRA decode enemy correspondence (Foy, 2006: 50–1).