By Caoimh Mulvany

County Cork was the epicentre of guerrilla warfare in the Irish revolution; a storm that swept over the Provence of Munster and neighbouring counties.[1]

From the beginning of 1920 to the Truce of 11 July 1921 Cork’s three IRA brigades hit the British forces stationed in the county in increasingly large and sophisticated ambushes.[2]

The Cork No. 1 Brigade, with its headquarters and leadership in Cork city earned its reputation as one of the most formidable fighting units active during the war.[3]

Cork city saw the largest British Army deployment to Ireland during the War of Independence; the 6th Division being headquartered there,[4] as were a company of the elite Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).[5] These formations, alongside the city’s regular police force, recently reinforced with wartime recruits known as Black and Tans, made up a city garrison numbering as many as 4,360 personnel.[6]

The IRA Cork No. 1 Brigade’s two city battalions, the 1st and 2nd, were not cowed however and launched numerous attacks on these forces.[7] These operations usually took the form of assassinations but a number of larger attacks were launched against armed bodies of Crown force personnel. Of the twenty-three Crown force fatalities suffered in Cork city during the war seven were inflicted in IRA attacks on armed RIC or British army units. [8]

Ambushes mounted in an urban environment entailed their own operational nuances and required a particular tactical approach. Volunteers usually operated with their local companies but a city-wide active service unit (ASU) was set up in early 1921.

In the successful ambushes on Barrack Street on 8 October 1920 and Dillon’s Cross on 11 December 1920, the rebels employed the hit and run tactics, armed with only revolvers and home-made grenades.[9] These urban guerrilla tactics were again employed in the third and largest attack launched by the IRA in the city, the Parnell Bridge ambush of 4 January 1921, though this one was also to use rifles and a machine gun.

The Ambush

It was a Wednesday evening, 4 January 1921; Cork city centre was bustling with activity.[10] Despite the on-going guerrilla war and the extension of Martial Law being declared that very day, city dwellers were encouraged by abnormally mild winter weather and flooded the streets.[11]

Just south of the river Lee, in the City Hall/Anglesea Street area, along with the regular tram cars and vehicular traffic, a few citizens were out for their evening walks to and from the affluent suburbs of Douglas and Blackrock.[12]

Here, Parnell Bridge served as a busy junction of the tramway service out of the city, and as a swing bridge that allowed trading vessels access to the south channel of the Lee.[13] The adjacent Union Quay hosted the main police headquarters in the city, from where foot-patrols were deployed throughout the city each evening; a routine that had been identified by IRA intelligence officers in the proceeding weeks.[14]

As the evening progressed, the weather grew harsh and the setting sun left the quietening streets in partial darkness.[15] As usual, a police party of one sergeant and nine constables left the RIC station at roughly 7.30pm[16]. After a few minutes of conversation outside, they moved off in twos making their way in extended order along the quay towards Parnell Bridge.[17]

At the end of the street a contingent of roughly a dozen IRA Volunteers waited in the shadows amid the ruins of Cork City Hall and Carnegie Library – burned by the Auxiliaries in reprisal for an IRA ambush in December 1920.[18]

The IRA party consisted of hand-picked officers and experienced gunmen, all armed with revolvers and grenades.[19]

As the first two policemen neared the end of the quay and approached the bridge several grenades rained down on them.[20] The explosions decimated the patrol’s vanguard and signalled to the rest of the Volunteers to join in the attack.[21] The police party’s commanding officer Sergeant O’Driscoll had been at the head of the patrol and was severely wounded in the initial assault.[22]

Before the smoke cleared from the opening salvo, the ambushers advanced on the patrol with rapid revolver fire; across the river a smaller IRA section opened up with rifles and automatic fire from a Lewis machine gun.[23]

In the initial confusion some of the constables attempted to retreat back to the station, while others fled towards the bridge and inadvertently towards the main body of the attacking force.[24] Those constables in a position to, dived for cover, drew their weapons and responded as best they could, until they too fell wounded to a man.[25]

The ambushers had anticipated a potential encirclement by responding Crown force units, and quickly dispersed into the night.[26] With the IRA Lewis gun no longer firing across the river, constables from Union Quay barracks promptly turned out and tended to their wounded comrades.[27]

The roughly ten-minute-long engagement left the quay clouded with gun smoke and strewn with wounded policemen.[28] The IRA had mounted their third successful ambush on the Crown forces in the city since the start of the war and inflicted a striking defeat on the RIC.

The Casualties

The ambush on Union Quay was a distinctly one-sided engagement with considerable collateral damage.

The RIC patrol’s full complement of ten policemen were all left wounded, two fatally. Constable Francis Luke Shortall suffered a gunshot wound to the right-hand side of his chest and left thigh, he died three days later in hospital.[29]

Constable Thomas R. Johnston lingered for seventeen days before succumbing to his injuries; secondary haemorrhage from bomb fragment wounds in both legs.[30]

Three others, Sergeant Patrick O’Driscoll, Constable Patrick Morrissey and Constable J. W. Evans, were also seriously wounded but survived to be financially compensated for their ordeal.[31] The remaining five constables were lucky to walk away with only minor injuries.[32]

Several civilians were also wounded. Pedestrian Kate Bourke was hospitalised with shrapnel in the hip, though an earlier report said that she had received a bullet in the leg; she was subsequently granted £450 in compensation.[33] George Henry Bouchier, who was shot in the knee as he walked along the South Mall towards Parnell Bridge, also received financial compensation albeit more modest.[34]

Two merchant sailors from a Welsh cargo vessel, William Owen and John Hughes, sustained injuries as they unloaded cargo from the bridge itself.[35] Owen was shot in the right arm and neck, while Hughes sustained wounds through both arms and on the scalp.[36] A young girl called Mary Mulcahy was also slightly injured.[37]

In contrast to this carnage the ambushers walked away from the fray without a scratch; of the roughly sixteen Volunteers directly engaged in the fighting not one was even lightly wounded.[38] Given the ferocity of the attack it is reasonable to presume that the Volunteers were directly responsible for all the civilian casualties, yet as we will see through an assessment of the event below, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Contemporary Accounts and Academic Analysis

The Parnell Bridge ambush was an almost flawlessly executed IRA operation and an excellent example of the urban warfare techniques successfully employed by the rebels throughout the conflict. It is however, arguably the most understudied and misunderstood ambush mounted by the Cork No.1 Brigade during the war.

Richard Abbott’s in his book Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, says the police were on patrol ‘when a bomb was thrown at them as they crossed Parnell Bridge’ and claims that the IRA had simply ‘made their attack from the ruins of a public house’, ignoring the scale and tactical ingenuity of the operation.[39]

He does not mention the IRA machine-gun, though it appears in every first-hand account and was a critical factor in the action.[40] Abbott mistakenly says that the patrol was on route to Union Quay when attacked, a simple error also made in a recent academic account of the episode by historians Andy Bielenberg and James S. Donnelly in the entry for Constable Johnston in Cork’s War of Independence Fatality Register.[41]

Both accounts also incorrectly state that the attack took place on the bridge itself.[42] The party had in fact left Union Quay station and were moving along the quay towards City Hall approaching Parnell Bridge when the attack was opened.[43]

Additionally, Abbott claims that ‘Five civilians were also injured by bullets and bomb splinters caused by the IRA’.[44] Mrs. Kate Bourke, was indeed almost certainly injured in the opening IRA grenade assault as she sustained a bad shrapnel wound in the hip and a wound in the arm as she approached the bridge from Anglesea Street, just as the main ambush party launched their assault.[45]

Mary Mulcahy who was slightly wounded in the back, claimed that she was very close to the first two policemen who fell injured, suggesting that she too was caught in the initial IRA bomb attack.[46] However, the most seriously injured civilians, the two sailors hit with bullets on Parnell Bridge, were likely the victims of the police returning fire on the main ambush party.

Newspaper reports state that the sailors were in ‘the line of fire on Parnell Bridge’ yet the IRA were firing in the opposite direction.[47] Indeed most accounts say that the police responded almost immediately to the attack by firing in the direction of the bridge.[48]

One of the surviving constables, J.B. Cooke, even admitted at the subsequent military inquest to shooting at a group of apparently unarmed civilians as they fled across the bridge.[49] Civilian George Bouchier suffered a bullet wound near his knee when he had been either walking along the South Mall in the direction of Parnell Place or as he had stepped onto the bridge from the South Mall direction.[50]

Either movement would have also placed him in the line of police fire rather than that of the IRA, which was directed in the opposite direction along the quay toward the RIC barracks. While the IRA bore much responsibility for the civilian casualties by launching the attack on a relatively crowded street, RIC fire was directly responsible for the most serious civilian injuries inflicted that evening.

Further, Abbott’s claim that the IRA attack consisted of a single bomb thrown from the ruins of a pub, seriously underestimates the sophistication of the operation.[51] Much to their disappointment, the IRA never possessed grenades powerful enough that one would inflict such damage as Abbott has suggested.

IRA Ambush Tactics

The few ambushes that took place in Cork city during the war have not received adequate attention in the historiography of the period.

An evaluation of the Parnell Bridge ambush based on modern military doctrine and accepted principles of urban combat reveals that, despite certain operational restrictions, the attack was devised, launched, and prosecuted with the professionalism typical of IRA operations mounted in Cork city during the war.

Military analysts identify two types of ambush: (1.) a ‘hasty’ attack mounted on the spot based on opportunism; or (2.) a ‘deliberate’ attack planned in advance like the one in question.[52]  As with the Barrack Street ambush three months earlier, Commandant Michael Murphy had personally devised the operation in great detail.[53]

Earlier that day he had summoned selected Volunteers to a meeting at the South Monastery School, where the plan of attack was discussed and individual duties were outlined.[54]

Once the shooting began, the ambushers would have had no way of communicating with each-other over the din of battle, so it was crucial that each man knew his role and strictly adhered to the plan.

Murphy had astutely selected an ideal location to launch the attack.

As an ambush site, Union Quay had many advantageous features. Like many parts of the city, the area was by night left in almost complete darkness as the Corporation had refused to light street lamps in response to the imposition of a rigorous curfew by British military authorities.[55]

This made it almost impossible for those on the patrol to immediately identify the positions of their assailants and react accordingly. Another benefit for the ambushers was that this part of the city contained the ruins of buildings destroyed in the infamous burning of Cork the previous month.[56] These along with the drawbridge infrastructure on Parnell Bridge itself provided excellent cover for the Volunteers in the main ambush party.

In keeping with modern ambush doctrine, the rebels used the landscape to restrict the patrol’s movement once the ambush was opened.[57] The quay itself presented an ideal kill-zone. Moving from the station towards Parnell Bridge the patrol were hemmed in between the south channel of the river Lee to their left and a series of shop fronts to their right.[58] With no side streets between these structures, the ambushed RIC had no route for retreat or manoeuvre.[59]

The two ambush parties assumed an ‘L’ shaped formation rather than a linear one, with gunmen to the front and left flank of the patrol. Once the attack had commenced, the patrol’s entire left flank was exposed to the party of rebels across the river armed with the Lewis gun and rifles, while the main ambush party positioned at the junction of Anglesea Street and Union Quay directed their fire down the length of the quay.

This deployment created a crossfire, which ensured that the RIC would be trapped in a ‘kill-zone when the ambush was opened.[60]

The ambushers had hoped that such meticulous planning and preparation would offset certain disadvantages they would inevitably face during the ambush. The foremost of these being weapons and time. As in all conflicts, the terrain impacted the nature of the combat.

The ‘closeness’ of urban engagements placed certain operational restraints on the two IRA battalions operating in the city.[61] Unlike rural units, city fighters had far less time to prosecute attacks, owing to the danger of being surrounded by detachments of the vast Crown force city garrison, who would rush to the scene of fighting in the city in minutes.[62]

The rebels were also disadvantaged by their limited weaponry. Unlike their comrades in the rest of the county, city Volunteers could not carry rifles to an ambush site without immediately identifying themselves to all.

Furthermore, the clandestine transportation of the cumbersome Lewis gun and several rifles in a motor car to the city centre for the operation certainly boosted the ambushers fire-power, the main effort was made by the larger ambush party at the top of the quay armed with only revolvers and grenades.[63]

These easily concealed weapons were ideal for urban combat as it allowed the rebels to move through the streets quickly and subtly before and after an operation.[64] Yet the limited range and power of revolvers meant that this party were inevitably outgunned by their rifle-wielding targets. It was therefore necessary for the rebels to mount the attack at close quarters and crucial that they made the most of the element of surprise and threw everything they had at the patrol in the opening strike.[65]

Standard ambush doctrine specifies that the leader of the attacking party should initiate the assault with the highest casualty producing device at their disposal.[66] This was arguably the IRA’s Lewis  gun, which was certainly the highest velocity weapon employed that evening, though the closeness of the main ambush party to the head of the patrol meant that the initial salvo of grenades would undoubtedly cause considerable damage.

By employing both weapons in such quick succession, as to constitute an almost simultaneous assault from both directions, the rebels decimated the patrol’s cohesion.[67] Commandant Murphy claimed that the first burst of the Lewis gun killed seven constables and wounded others; while this is certainly a gross exaggeration, most of the casualties were inflicted in this opening onslaught.[68] The carnage sustained by the RIC in this opening strike was only mitigated by the patrol’s deployment, spread out in extended order along the length of the quay. From this point on, the Lewis gun was trained on the door of the station to block its garrison from turning out, while the riflemen sniped across the river at the pinned-down survivors.[69]

Once the attack had begun, the main ambush party advanced beyond its initial position towards their targets, without going so far as to enter into the line of fire directed by their comrades on the patrol’s flank.[70]

A ten-minute fire-fight ensued in which the rest of the constables fell wounded. If time had allowed, the main attacking force could have capitalised on their temporary tactical advantage and closed in on the remnant of the patrol and brought the ambush to a totally successful conclusion.

Yet the immense numbers of British troops stationed in the city at the time made it critical for ambush parties to promptly break contact during attacks and refuse to engage in prolonged gun-battles. A line of retreat was therefore crucial and on this occasion the IRA had a number of motor vehicles waiting to spirit the ambushers to prearranged safe houses at other parts of the city.[71]

IRA Tactical Shift

The Parnell Bridge ambush represented the last of its type launched by the IRA on the streets of Cork city. The further reinforcement of the already massive city garrison with additional British Army regiments that spring, made it impossible for Volunteers to again inconspicuously assemble, in relatively large numbers, for an operation in the centre of the city.[72]

However, at the same time ambushes were increasingly prepared for in the suburbs under localised initiative and control[73] and as a result patrols by relatively small Crown force detachments beyond the safety of their fortified barracks, became increasingly rare. Beyond the city limits the Cork No. 1 Brigade flying column also found British convoys were refraining from traversing the main roads in the months that led up to the Truce.[74]

Thus while the IRA found it difficult to pull off more large scale attacks  in the spring and early summer of 1921,  by posing a credible threat to Crown forces the latter had effectively surrendered control of the city’s suburbs to the IRA.

Conclusion

The Parnell Bridge ambush was an elaborate and ambitious attack, in which the rebels offset their inferior resources through meticulous planning, launching the attack from close quarters and by making the most of the element of surprise.

The resulting clash showed that this amateur guerrilla force had the capacity to knock out an entire reinforced police patrol in the middle of one of the most heavily garrisoned urban centres in the country; which was ringed with fortified barracks and stations, and flooded with thousands of Crown force personnel of various branches.

It was thus a significant milestone on the road to the Truce of July 1921.

References

[1] Hart, P., The I.R.A. & Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916-1923 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 106.

[2] Crowley, J., O’ Drisceoil, D., and Murphy, M., eds., Borgonovo, J., associate ed., Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork, Cork University Press, 2017), p. 562; Ó Conchubhair, B., ed. Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, 1916-21, Told by the Men who Made it (Mercier Press, Dublin, 2009).

[3] Borgonovo, J., Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’ The Intelligence War in Cork City 1920-1921 (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 5 and 126. According to figures provided by Peter Hart, the Cork No. 1 Brigade inflicted more casualties on the Crown forces than the other two Cork brigades combined. See Hart, The I.R.A. & Its Enemies, p. 106.

[4]  Kautt, W. H., Ground Truths, British Army Operations in the Irish War of Independence (Sallins, CO. Kildare, Irish Academic Press, 2014), p. 27.

[5] Crowley, O’ Drisceoil, and Murphy, eds., Borgonovo, associate ed., Atlas of the Irish Revolution, p. 379

[6] A nominal city garrison of 4,000 troops, roughly one hundred temporary cadets of the RIC Auxiliary Division and 260 regular RIC operated out of the city during the war. See Crowley, O’ Drisceoil, and Murphy, eds., Borgonovo, associate ed., Atlas of the Irish Revolution, pp. 365 and 379. See also Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’, pp. 41 and 62.

[7] The Cork No. 1 Brigade was divided into nine battalion areas. For a list of attacks mounted by the 1st and 2nd Battalions on Crown forces in Cork city during the war, see ‘Activities in Cork city’ in Military Service Pensions Collections, MA/MSPC/A/1, 1 Cork Brigade, Military Archives Ireland.

[8]. These consist of two RIC killed in the ambush examined in this study, one soldier killed in the Barrack Street ambush of 8 October 1920. See Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1708, William Barry, National Archives. One Auxiliary fatality in the Dillon’s Cross ambush of 11 December 1920. See Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 686, Seán Healy, National Archives. Along with the deaths of three RIC suffered in the O’Connell Street attack of 14 May 1921. Military Inquiry, Cork Examiner, 20 May 1921, p. 5

[9] Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1479, Seán Healy, National Archives, p. 55; Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1547, Michael Murphy, National Archives, p. 28-29

[10] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921.

[11] Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office, Issued by the Authority of the Meteorological Committee. Forty-Sixth Year. Vol. XXXVIII. January, 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921.

[12] Cork Examiner, 5 January. 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921.

[13] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; The Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[14] Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1707, Patrick Collins, National Archives, p. 9.

[15] Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[16] Military Court of Inquiry Report, War Office, 35/158A/21; County Inspector’s Confidential Monthly Report for January 1921, Cork, (City and East Riding), The British In Ireland Series, CO 904/114.

[17] Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21; Military and Police Compensation Claims, Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921

[18] Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21. For the Parnell Bridge ambush, IRA Commandant Michael Murphy assembled some of the city’s top gunmen into what was essentially an elite 2nd Battalion ambush unit. See BMH WS 1547, Michael Murphy, NA, p. 35. These included one of the most highly regarded city fighters Tadhg Sullivan who led the main ambush party at the junction of Union Quay and Parnell Bridge. See O’Suilleabhain, M., Where Mountainy Men Have Sown (Anvil Books, Kerry, 1965), p. 114; Cork Examiner, 20 and 23 April, 1921. Manning the brigade’s invaluable Lewis gun during the ambush was ex-British army gunner Christopher Healy. Military Service Pensions Application, 7614, Christopher Healy, National Archives; Military Service Pensions Collection, MA/MSPC/A/1(E)2, Brigade Activity Reports, E Company, 2 Battalion, 1 Cork Brigade, Military Archives Ireland.

[19] These men did not constitute a permanent unit but officers in their respective companies brought together specifically for the ambush in question; as individual fighters they typically operated as part of a smaller local Active Service Unit (ASU). See Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1521, Michael Walsh, National Archives, p. 11; Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1707, Patrick Collins, National Archives, p.5. While the flying column served as the chief offensive arm for rural IRA brigades, ASUs assumed this role in Cork city. See Statements regarding activity in Period 5. in Military Service Pension Application, 59728, Margaret Newlove Lynch, National Archives; A twelve-man, full-time, city-wide ASU was established at the beginning of 1921. See Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1584, Patrick A. Murray, National Archives, pp. 21-22; Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1656, Daniel Healy, National Archives, p. 14. Each of the city’s sixteen companies also deployed at least one local ASU. See Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1741, Michael V. O’ Donoghue, National Archives, pp. 84-85.

[20] Military Court of Inquiry Report, War Office, 35/152/39; BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12; Freeman’s Journal, 6 January, 1921, p. 5;  Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Outrages Against the Police, Weekly Summaries, Cork city, report on the ambush on Parnell Bridge, The British In Ireland Series, CO 904/150.

[21] BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 6 January, 1921, p. 5; Outrages Against the Police, report on the ambush on Parnell Bridge, CO 904/150.

[22] Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21; Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921, p. 7.

[23] See Florence O’ Donoghue’s article on the ambush, Ms. 31,301 (4), National Library of Ireland. See also Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921; BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12.

[24] BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, pp. 9-10.

[25] CI Report for January 1921, CO 904/114; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921.

[26] BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, pp. 9-10; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921.

[27] Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921; Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 869, P. J. Murphy, National Archives, pp. 22-23.

[28] The length of time given for the engagement range from between five minutes, see Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921, and fifteen minutes, see BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 13.

[29] See Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21. For details about Constable Francis Shortall, see Abbott, R., Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922 (Mercier Press, Dublin, 2000), p. 181. Shortall’s widow was awarded £2,250 compensation, while his father and sister received £1,250. See Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921.

[30] Before his death, twenty-year-old Constable Thomas R. Johnston supported his large family in Cavan. He had been a porter in an Edinburgh hospital, before joining the RIC. His father, who was still working as a labourer at the time, was awarded £1,000 compensation. See Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Compensation Claims, Cork Examiner, 10 May 1921, p. 3. See also Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, p. 181

[31] These three constables received financial compensation for their injuries. Sergeant Patrick O’Driscoll was awarded

£350, Constable Patrick Morrissey received £130 and Constable J. W. Evans received £80. See Report of Cork Borough

Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921. See also report in Irish Independent, 26 February, 1921, p. 3.

[32] The lightly injured were constables James Gardiner and John B. Cooke, see Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21 and

WO 35/152/39, along with Constables Chambers, Elliot and John Ahern. See Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921 and

Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[33] See Kate Bourke’s compensation claim in Report of Cork Quarterly Sessions, Cork Examiner, 7 May 1921 and Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921, p. 5.

[34] Cork Examiner, 5 January; Report of Cork Borough Appeals, Cork Examiner, 15 July 1921, p. 3.

[35] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[36] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[37] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[38] BMH WS 1547, Michael Murphy, NA, p. 35; BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, p. 10; BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 13.

[39] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, p. 181; Only one contemporary account claims that a single IRA grenade caused all of the police casualties. See Outrages Against the Police, report on the ambush on Parnell Bridge, CO 904/150; This is contradicted by all other accounts including other RIC reports. See CI Report for January 1921, CO 904/114.

[40] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, pp. 180-181; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[41] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, pp. 180-181; Andy Bielenberg and James S., Donnelly, Cork’s War of Independence Fatality Register, The Irish Revolution, RIC Constable Thomas R. Johnston, http://theirishrevolution.ie/1921-3/#.XXJ5VWZ7nIU (accessed on 5 Aug 2018).

[42] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, pp. 180-181; Bielenberg and Donnelly, Cork’s Fatality Register, RIC Constable Thomas R. Johnston (accessed on 5 Aug 2018).

[43] Only two contemporary sources claim that the patrol was on route back to Union Quay when ambushed. See Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921 and Freeman’s Journal, 6 January 1921. These are contradicted by all first-hand accounts. See Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21 and 35/152/39; Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921; BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12; BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, p. 9; BMH WS 1547, Michael Murphy, NA, p. 35.

[44] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, p. 181.

[45] Report of Cork Quarterly Sessions, Cork Examiner, 7 May 1921; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[46] Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[47] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921.

[48] Freeman’s Journal, 6 January 1921, p. 5; Report of Cork Borough Sessions, Cork Examiner, 25 February 1921.

[49] See Constable J.B. Cooke’s testimony at Military Inquest, WO, 35/158A/21.

[50] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[51] Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922, p. 181.

[52] Ranger Handbook. SH 21-76 United States Army. Rangers Training Brigade. (United States Army Infantry School Fort Benning Georgia. February 2011), Chapter. 7.

[53] BMH WS 1708, William Barry, NA, p. 4.

[54] BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12.

[55] Hart, The I.R.A. & Its Enemies, p. 6.

[56] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1921.

[57] Ranger Handbook, Chap. 7.

[58] Guy’s City Almanac Directory 1921, Postal Directory Cork City and Suburbs, p. 524.

[59] Guy’s City Almanac Directory 1921, Postal Directory Cork City and Suburbs, p. 524.

[60] Ranger Handbook, Chap. 7.

[61] Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 189.

[62] Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 189.

[63] Outrages Against the Police, report on the ambush on Parnell Bridge, CO 904/150; BMH WS 1521, Michael Walsh, NA, p. 12; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 6 January 1921, p. 5.

[64] Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 187.

[65] Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 187.

[66] Ranger Handbook, Chap. 7.

[67] Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[68] BMH WS 1547, Michael Murphy, NA, p. 35; Military Inquest, WO, 35/152/39, p. 4; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[69] BMH WS 869, P. J. Murphy, NA, pp. 22-23; Cork Examiner, 5 January 1921.

[70] Ranger Handbook, Chap. 7; BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, pp. 9-10.

[71] Cork Constitution, 5 January 1921; BMH WS 1707, Patrick Collins, NA, pp. 9-10; The ambush party with the Lewis gun and rifles fled the scene in the motor car they arrived in and made their way to a safe-house in Ballincollig several miles outside the city see BMH WS 1547, Michael Murphy, NA, p. 35.

[72] Crowley, O’ Drisceoil, and Murphy, eds., Borgonovo, associate ed., Atlas of the Irish Revolution, p. 365

[73] Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1675, Jos. O’Shea, National Archives, p. 14; BMH WS 1479, Seán Healy, NA.

[74] Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 194; Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’, p. 98; Bureau of Military History Witness Statement 1669, Stephen Foley, National Archives, p. 10.

By John Dorney

In the wake of the February 2020 Irish elections, former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams compared that party’s success (it scored 25% of the vote and 37 out of 160 seats) as comparable to the ‘last Saturday election’ in December 1918, when Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 Irish seats and went on to declare Irish independence in the First Dáil.

But in fact, a much better comparison is the 1932 election in which Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil tasted electoral victory and entered government for the first time.

‘A slightly constitutional party’

It was just nine years after the end of the Irish Civil War, in which de Valera had been the political leader of the defeated anti-Treaty faction. De Valera himself had been among over 12,000 anti-Treatyites imprisoned in the conflict, only being released in 1924.

His close colleague in Fianna Fáil, Frank Aiken, had been the anti-Treaty IRA Chief of Staff who called an end to the conflict by ordering IRA units to ‘dump arms in May 1923.

For a time, de Valera and his colleagues in (anti-Treaty) Sinn Féin[1] had refused to recognise the Irish Free State or take their seats in its parliament and between 1922 and 1926 had organised an underground ‘republican government’ with de Valera as its President. It even had its own parliament ‘Comhairle na dTeachtaí’. [2]

Many of those who held positions as ministers in this underground government – including Frank Aiken and Sean Lemass – also held senior positions in the IRA. The guerrilla army had never disarmed and still intended, when the time was right, to overthrow the Free State by force of arms.

De Valera was too much of a realist to spend his political career in the wilderness, running a fantasy government with no authority, however. He and his colleagues left Sinn Féin in1926 owing to that party’s refusal to abandon abstentionism and formed Fianna Fáil. Most of the senior figures in the new party such as Aiken and Lemass resigned their positions in the IRA, but at lower level there remained a great deal of crossover between the two organisations.

The early Fianna Fáil was, as Sean Lemass famously said, a ‘slightly constitutional party’; if they could achieve their goals ‘by the present [peaceful] methods we will be very pleased’, he said in the Dáil in 1929, ‘but we will not confine ourselves to them’. [3]

Fianna Fáil espoused a populist and economic nationalist programme as well as its goal of severing the remaining links between the Irish Free State and Britain. But the IRA at this time was very influenced by left wing ideas and several of its leaders, notably Peadar O’Donnell were sympathetic to Soviet communism.

The IRA had not renounced violence. In 1931 alone they carried out six assassinations (two Gardaí; a detective and a Superintendant, and four alleged informers).[4] It was estimated that they had just under 5,000 members in 1931 with not inconsiderable dumps of weapons, including 850 rifles and 29 machine guns as well as many handguns and some explosives. [5]

Their opponents in the government of Cumman na nGaedheal (pro-Treaty victors in the 1922-23 Civil War) saw the IRA as a grave threat to the state’s security and de Valera’s Fianna Fáil as their enablers. In October 1931 the government passed a Public Safety Act, temporarily suspending jury trials and banning a host of republican organisations.

But it was economic crisis occasioned by the onset of the Great Depression as much as the legacy of the Civil War that worried the government. There was high unemployment and a housing shortage and due to the Depression in the United States, emigration there was no longer an attractive option to relieve social tensions.

Minister Patrick McGilligan warned that ‘falling [government] revenue, increasing demands for services, falling prices and increased unemployment and the absence of emigrants’ remittances’, posed serious risks of public disorder.

This combined with the resurgence of both Fianna Fáil and the IRA would make it, he told his colleagues, ‘sheer madness to operate repressively throughout a miserable and poverty stricken 12 months’, before the next general election was due. And so an election was called for February 1932. [6]

The ‘gunmen are voting for Fianna Fáil’

In the run up to general election of 1932, ‘Free State election news’ warned its readers that ‘your state, the order which it has fostered and encouraged, the faith of your children which it protects, courtesy of its laws against communism and immoral teaching, is in danger’… it is your duty to help the government party to eliminate all the danger of Spanish Republic in Ireland’. [7]

Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy warned the government of a ‘concrete link’ between the IRA and communism. ‘If the Soviet comrades are not dealt with, he warned, ‘the state will perish’. O’Duffy himself tried to sound out senior military figures about a coup to stop Fianna Fáil coming to power, but was largely rebuffed. [8]

Even more bluntly, a poster for the ruling Cumman na nGaedheal party urged voters, ‘the gunmen are voting for Fianna Fáil, the communists are voting for Fianna Fáil. How will you vote?’.[9]

De Valera, countered that the way to head off the danger of communism was for ‘people anxious to get work will get work, that people entitled to decent houses get houses’. [10]

Oddly enough even the normally conservative Irish Times agreed with the Fianna Fáil leader. It too abhorred communism, but argued that such urgings, ‘must be futile so long as 4,830 tenement houses shelter 25,320 families in the heart of Dublin. It is almost a miracle that communism has not flourished aggressively in that hideous soil. What an irony it would be if the Free State, having throttled sedition is killed by the cost of houses’. [11]

The Fianna Fáil constitution said that its aims were to ‘secure the unity and independence of Ireland as a Republic’ and the restoration of the Irish language, but also to ‘make the resources and wealth of Ireland subservient to the needs and welfare of all the people of Ireland’. [12]

Fianna Fáil won the February 1932 election with over 45% of the vote, ahead of Cumman na nGaedheal who polled 35%, and de Valera’s party entered government with support from the Labour Party. A snap election called in January of the following year gave Fianna Fáil an overall majority.

While about a third of the electorate had supported the anti-Treaty Republicans in the 1923 election, directly after the Civil War, Fianna Fáil’s transformation to the party of government was as much to do with offering housing, welfare and land redistribution as nationalist objectives such as removing the Oath of allegiance to the British monarch and recovering the naval bases Britain had kept under the Treaty. Let alone the much more difficult objective of a united Ireland.

In this sense it had much in common with the Sinn Féin surge in 2020, which was far more about housing, rents and public services than a desire for Irish unity. Comparisons are easy to draw also with Cumman na nGaedheal rhetoric in 1932 and Fine Gael’s in 2020, when Taoiseach Leo Varadkar compared Sinn Féin’s policies on housing with the socialist regimes of East Germany and Venezuela.

New masters

It was by no means inevitable, in 1932 that the organs of the Free State, especially the Garda and the Army would obey the new government. After all they had spent their formative years putting down the ‘irregulars’ on behalf of the Free State.

One of de Valera’s first actions in power was to legalise the IRA and free their prisoners. Frank Ryan, a leading left wing IRA member, who was among those freed, declared later in 1932 that, ‘while we have fists, boots and if necessary guns to use, there will be no free speech for traitors’ in Cumman na nGaedheal.[13]

Rioting between the IRA and the pro-Treaty Army Comrades Association (later renamed the National Guard or the Blueshirts) became commonplace as both attempted to break up each others’ meetings.

Just before they left office, the Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Defence ordered Army Intelligence to ‘destroy by fire’, all Intelligence reports, Secret Service Voucher and Military Court Records which ‘contain information that may lead to loss of life’, before the Department of Defence was handed over to their one-time Civil War foes in Fianna Fáil. [14]

In this sense, 1932 was far more fraught than 2020. While many mainstream politicians in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael bridle at thought of a Sinn Féin Minister for Justice, given that party’s ties with the Provisional IRA, there is no street fighting between partisans of rival parties nor does anyone propose legalising an armed organisation that has as its goal the overthrow of the state.

In the 1930s, as it happened, things went far more smoothly than might have been expected. Aside from Eoin O’Duffy, who was sacked as Garda Commissioner and who went on to lead the Blueshirts (and then briefly, Fine Gael) there was no purge of the officer corps of either the Garda or the Army by Fianna Fáil. And by and large, those in the army and police who had fought the Civil War against the ‘Irregulars’ loyally obeyed them when they came to power by legal means.

De Valera’s government banned the Blueshirts in 1933, by passing a bill prohibiting the wearing of uniforms, and abolished the Senate too when it tried to block the bill.  It also recruited about 200 IRA men in an armed police auxiliary ‘Broy’s Harriers’, recruited others into an army Volunteer Reserve and opened military pensions to anti-Treaty veterans of the Civil War. [15]

But it also began imprisoning IRA members in 1934 and in 1936, as that organisation continued to carry out shootings, banned it too. The left wing of the IRA was marginalised and mostly left it to set up the Republican Congress in 1934, but in face of denunciation by the Catholic Church, the far left made little further progress in 1930s Ireland.

By 1936 there was no longer talk, even from the most hysterical anti-Fianna Fáil sources, of de Valera as the ‘Irish Kerensky’ opening the way for social revolution.

‘Not mad’

De Valera succeeded in breaking the link between the Irish state and British monarchy and in 1938, in securing the return of the Treaty ports from Britain, which allowed Ireland to be neutral in the Second World War. By such means, most, though not all, anti-Treaty republicans were brought into the mainstream of peaceful politics.

This, rather than corruption of state institutions by illegal organisations is likely to be the result too of Sinn Féin’s entry into power. Like Fianna Fáil, if threats by extremist republican groups to them continue, Sinn Féin are likely to turn on the ‘dissidents’ with all the power at their disposal.

How did Fianna Fáil in government do in social and economic terms? Certainly Fianna Fáil of the 1930s considerably upped public spending and provision of social services. Whereas the Cumman na nGaedheal government had built around 14,000 houses in in its decade in power, Fianna Fáil built about 12,000 every year between 1932 and 1942. They also introduced unemployment assistance and the widows and orphans’ pension in 1935. [16]

But while employment rose somewhat, emigration continued apace. Under Fianna Fáil’s protectionist policies, Irish domestic industry did grow, but exports fell by some 25%. This was due to de Valera’s ‘economic war’ (punitive tariffs) with Britain, provoked by his refusal to pay back land annuities owed to Britain under the Treaty. Many large farmers in particular blamed the de Valera government for ruining their trade.  [17]

But by the 1940s Fianna Fáil had become a centrist, in many ways a conservative, party. The same may eventually happen with Sinn Féin.

Even the employers’ federation Ibec has said that Sinn Féin’s proposals are ‘not mad’. Brian Hayes of the Banking Federation said, ‘If people were talking about radical change to investment policy and free movement of capital, that would be a worry. But I don’t think they are’. While Dan McCoy of Ibec argued (in an echo of 1932) that the state service did need investment;  “The public sector is too small for the size of the private sector … We agree there needs to be an allocation of resources towards issues that affect people’s everyday lives, like housing.”

Brexit and the north

There is however one major difference between Fianna Fáil of 1932 and Sinn Féin of 2020 and that is that the latter is an all Ireland party. Indeed it could be argued that modern Sinn Féin has its origins in Northern Ireland. Its firm goal remains a united Ireland. By contrast, de Valera’s party, despite consistent rhetoric about Irish unity, never organised in the North, despite many pleas from nationalists there to do so.

So while Fianna Fáil made much of partition when it was negotiating with Neville Chamberlain’s government in 1938 and 1939 on how to end the economic war and on the return of the Treaty ports, it was understood that it was only speaking for the 26 county state.

In negotiations in the present era, both inside Northern Ireland and with the British government regarding Northern Ireland’s status after Britain leaves the European Union, the Irish government has been a third force, separate both from the British and Northern Irish parties.

With Sinn Féin in government in the Republic and in the power sharing government in the North, this would no longer be possible. Which, with Northern Ireland’s status still uncertain in a post Brexit future, could have unpredictable consequences.

References

[1] The Sinn Féin party was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith. It was adopted by veterans of the 1916 Easter Rising and in 1917 committed itself to an Irish Republic. It won the 1918 general election in Ireland and declared Irish independence in January 1919. In 1922 it split over the Anglo Irish Treaty with a slight majority of its elected representatives voting for the settlement with Britain. Pro and anti-Treaty Sinn Féin factions fought the 1922 election with the pro-Treaty faction again coming out on top. In the election of August 1923, just after the Civil War, pro-Treaty (formerly Sinn Féin) candidates ran as a new party Cumman na nGaedheal, while anti-Treaty candidates ran under the title ‘Republican’. But thereafter it was the anti-Treatyite that took and held the name ‘Sinn Féin’.

[2] Donnacha O Beachain, The Destiny of Soldiers, Fianna Fáil Irish Republicanism and the IRA (2009) p.26.

[3] O Beachain Destiny of Soldiers  p.99

[4] Hoare Frank Ryan, p.75-77

[5] Brian Hanley The IRA 1926-1936 (2002) p.220. This total of weapons is similar to the arsenal of the Provisional IRA prior to its decommissioning of weapons in 2005 according to CAIN estimates. Though the 1930s IRA membership was much larger.

[6] O Beachain, Destiny of Soldiers, p.121

[7] John Regan The Irish Counter Revolution, Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland, 1921-1936. (2001) p.280 The Spanish Republic is a reference to the anti-clerical government of the Spanish Republic, declared in 1931.

[8] Fearghal McGarry, Eoin O’Duffy, A Self Made Hero, (2005)  p.182

[9] O Beachain p126

[10] Dermot Keogh, in James Hogan, Revolutionary, Historian and Political Scientist, Ed Donncha O Corrain (2000) p.68

[11] Adrian Hoar, In Green and Red, The lives of Frank Ryan (2005)  p.88.

[12] O Beachain Destiny of Soldiers p.48.

[13] Hoar, Frank Ryan, p.95

[14] Military Archives, CD 334 Destruction Order 7 March 1932

[15] Dermot Keogh, Twentieth Century Ireland, Nation and State, p.84

[16] JJ Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, (1993) p.193

[17] Lee, Ireland 1912-1985 p.190

By Seán William Gannon

On the 30 April 1922, 760 recently disbanded members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division (ADRIC) disembarked at Haifa in Palestine.

They arrived there as the British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie, a strike force and riot squad recruited at the instigation of the secretary of state for the colonies, Winston Churchill.

This British Gendarmerie was the start of a strong association between Ireland and the police of the British Mandate of Palestine that would last until the British withdrew in 1948.

The British Mandate for Palestine

Britain conquered much of the Arab Middle East from the Ottoman Empire during the course of the First World War.

This included Palestine and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), over which it was subsequently granted control under the League of Nations’ Mandate system. This gave Britain legal commissions to administer both territories with a view to preparing their populations for eventual self-government.

Britain’s assumption of these mandates was largely driven by imperial self-interest. It believed that control of Mesopotamia and Palestine would provide it a territorial buffer zone protecting imperial strategic and commercial interests (such as the Suez Canal and the land route to India) from feared Russian regional expansion.

The British mandate for Palestine incorporated virtually unchanged the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. This obligated Britain to facilitate the establishment there of a ‘national home’ for Zionist Jews, who had been settling in Palestine since the late nineteenth century. Local Arab opposition to this settlement had intensified during the Great War and, by the time hostilities in Palestine ended with the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, it was clear that Arab anti-Zionism, despite the tendency of Zionist leaders to dismiss it as contrived, was real and deep-rooted.

Policing Palestine and the British Gendarmerie

The British Gendarmerie was intended to alleviate certain problems posed by Palestine’s army garrison after the Great War, most significantly, its expense.

Military expenditure became a serious concern in the immediate postwar period when economic realities dictated a policy of general retrenchment, this despite the fact that the empire’s territorial extent had increased.

Thus, Palestine and Mesopotamia had to be garrisoned by a British Army already thinly stretched across India, Ireland, and Egypt where concurrent upsurges in nationalist political agitation posed a cumulative challenge to the empire’s stability.

As each of these countries was deemed of critical strategic imperial importance, it was to the new mandates that Churchill turned when seeking to cut the cost of defence.

Cost cutting was to be primarily achieved through a reduction in troop numbers by two-thirds. However, in Palestine this was problematical, as by 1921, Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was assuming the form of an inchoate nationalist insurgency.

And while the maintenance of public order was officially the preserve of the (British officered) locally recruited Palestine Police Force, its overwhelmingly Arab make-up led to partisan policing which rendered it unsuited to the task.

The scale of this problem became evident during anti-Zionist rioting in April 1920 and May 1921 when Arab policemen deployed to restore order began themselves attacking Jews, leaving the chief of police with little choice but to withdraw, disarm and confine them to barracks. In consequence, it increasingly fell to the British Army garrison to keep order in Palestine, meaning that a non-partisan replacement force had to be found before it could be reduced or removed.

This issue preoccupied Churchill throughout the summer of 1921. Initially he proposed the establishment of another British-officered locally recruited force but soon began thinking in terms of a purely British unit rather than one that was merely British led.

His change in thinking was facilitated by developments in Ireland where  the July 1921 truce between the IRA and Crown forces raised the possibility of the disbandment of the ADRIC. Churchill hit on the idea of forming, in the event of an Irish settlement, a gendarmerie for Palestine from disbanded members and approaches to the Irish ‘police advisor’, Major-General Henry Tudor, were enthusiastically received.

Thus, in November 1921, Churchill brought before the British Cabinet proposals for the recruitment from RIC sources of ‘a Palestine gendarmerie aggregating about 700 men’. Despite the staunch opposition of the chief of the imperial general staff, Sir Henry Wilson, who feared the consequences of deploying in Palestine men he privately denounced as ‘a gang of murderers’, the Cabinet approved these proposals on 21 December and formally charged Tudor with raising the force.

Recruitment from the RIC

Recruitment for the British Gendarmerie’s non-commissioned ranks opened in late January 1922. The recruitment of the commissioned ranks began in mid-February with the appointment as force commandant of Col. Angus McNeill, a Boer War and Great War veteran who knew Palestine well.

The recruitment of all ranks was completed by the first week of April and the force was assembled at Fort Tregantle, an old army encampment at Devonport near Cornwall, in preparation for its transport to Palestine.

As intended, the overwhelming majority of recruits was drawn from disbanded members of the RIC: 96 percent of the force’s 720-strong rank-and-file was ex-RIC, as was 83 percent of its 42-strong officer class. In excess of 85 percent of these men were former Black and Tans or Auxiliaries.

Irishmen accounted for 38 percent of the British Gendarmerie’s 1922 draft. They also accounted for 33 percent of its complement of Black and Tans, considerably higher than the percentage of Irishmen in the Black and Tans in general (about 20 percent).[1]

This over-representation underscored the significance of perhaps the primary factor driving Irish enlistment  – localized intimidatory campaigns conducted mainly by anti-Treatyite IRA elements against serving and disbanded police in the post-Treaty period.

While some ex-RIC were targeted in retaliation for real or perceived personal wartime misdeeds, mere membership of the ‘Old Force’ was sufficient cause for intimidation or attack. The actual extent of the danger they faced will, at this remove, never be known.

However, the radius of threat which emanated from those attacks which did occur (over 40 of which culminated in murder) created a climate of panic amongst ex-RIC and thousands took temporary or permanent flight from Ireland.[2] For some of these men, the British Gendarmerie provided an immediate and convenient escape route.

‘The Black and Tans in Palestine’

The re-employment of disbanded RIC personnel as policemen was a deeply controversial issue in 1922, when reports of Black and Tannery in Ireland were still fresh in the public mind. The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries had been widely associated with reprisal killings, destruction of property, and general indiscipline.

Thus, the police forces of Great Britain and the Dominions displayed a marked disinclination to accept applications from them, fearing the consequences of large-scale recruitment from the discredited force.

A scheme to transfer large numbers of Black and Tans to police another colonial theatre was also contrary to the public mood, and British officials soon raised concerns that the new British Gendarmerie would be stigmatized in consequence. Most anxious was Palestine’s high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, who told Churchill that, while he had no objection to the recruitment of ex-RIC into the force provided that the men selected were of good character, it would be:

Most desirable, if it could be avoided, that no public announcement should be made connecting the Black and Tans with our Gendarmerie. Their reputation, as a Corps, has not been savoury and if any idea was created in the public mind in England or here that the Black and Tans, or any part of them, were being transferred as a body to Palestine, the new Gendarmerie might be discredited from the outset.[3]

Churchill, for whom the importance of controlling perceptions of conflict had been reinforced by the recent public relations disaster in Ireland, assured Samuel that, although recruits would be largely drawn from amongst disbanded Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, this would be given as little prominence as possible.

To this end, he directed an extraordinary charade designed to obscure the extent to which the British Gendarmerie was to be recruited from RIC sources, instructing Tudor to conduct recruitment ‘with a view to eliminating as far as possible the moral connection between the new force and the [Black and Tans and the ADRIC], thereby disposing of the inevitable idea that we are importing into Palestine the traditions of recent Irish politics’.[4]

Given the scale of its recruitment from RIC sources, this unsurprisingly failed, and the British Gendarmerie quickly came to be defined by its cohort of Black and Tans. Its ‘Black and Tan’ character was underscored by Churchill’s appointment of Henry Tudor himself to overall command. He assumed the dual role of Palestine’s general officer commanding and Inspector-General of Police and Prisons’ on 15 June 1922.

The Colonial Office was distinctly unimpressed by the British Gendarmerie’s Black and Tan label which it indignantly dismissed as ‘a convenient way of describing the force for controversial purposes’.[5]

But in Palestine, where incidents of police brutality in revolutionary Ireland had been widely reported in the press, elements of the civil administration calculatedly exploited its reputation for deterrent effect and, by the time the force docked in Haifa, propaganda against it was already widespread.

Their success in this was noted by Douglas Duff, a former Black and Tan and British Gendarmerie constable who subsequently forged a career as an author: he reported being asked by a ‘trembling’ Arab brothel-keeper on his arrival whether he belonged to ‘the new Police which she had heard had been sent to Palestine because of the murders we had committed in some land from which the English had been driven because of our brutalities’.[6]

In Palestine

The British Gendarmerie’s prior reputation, given credence by its formidable appearance, was largely sufficient to prevent breaches of Palestine’s peace.

In early July 1922, for example, it maintained public order during a two-day strike in Jerusalem by the intimidatory power of its presence alone and this was similarly sufficient to do so during the official proclamation of the British Mandate two weeks later.

On the rare occasions when the British Gendarmerie was actually required to get physical, its policing was certainly robust: its favoured method of dispersing riotous assemblies was to charge the crowd and beat it back with rifle-butts and batons, while its approach to tackling brigandage was to shoot on sight and to kill.

This confirmed for the populace that the British Gendarmerie’s fearsome reputation was deserved, enhancing its deterrence in turn. Consequently, Palestine was largely peaceable during its time there.

Duff’s graphic (and largely fictionalized) accounts of British Gendarmerie indiscipline and brutality have so shaped perspectives on the force that the view that it lived up to its prior reputation in Palestine is today an historical commonplace. In actuality, it did not fulfill expectations in this regard.

There were initial problems with (mainly) alcohol-related indiscipline amongst the rankers. But, determined that what one officer termed ‘the Irish way of things’ would not prevail in Palestine, it was quickly curtailed through fines, curfews, and dismissals.[7]

Thus, by the end of 1922, force discipline was being variously described by those on the ground as ‘very good’, ‘very high’, and ‘excellent’.

That discipline was relatively good is confirmed by the dismissal rate which worked out at 2 percent annually, which compared very favourably with the rate among the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries in Ireland which Bill Lowe estimates at 4.7 percent, rising to almost 7 percent if those recorded under what he termed ‘the ambiguous category discharged’ are included. And, indeed, 8 percent of the ‘cluster sample’ analysed by David Leeson in his study of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries was dismissed.[8]

Nor, broadly-speaking, did the British Gendarmerie adopt the tactical constants that came to define policing in revolutionary Ireland. Certainly, its use of lethal force against brigandage, which, while seldom self-consciously political had begun to develop an anti-Zionist character by 1922, reflected the strategy adopted against IRA flying columns in 1919/21.

But there was no parallel in Palestine at this time with the policy of reprisals against Republicans and their communities for attacks on the RIC. Retaliation for attacks on the gendarmes targeted the perpetrators alone and even in cases where gendarmes were killed, revenge was not wreaked on the wider community.

That a force freshly drawn from the Black and Tans and the ADRIC (and which included officers responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of the Irish revolutionary period such as the murders of the Loughnane brothers and the ‘Scariff Martyrs’) did not behave with similar license lends support to Leeson’s thesis that historians have undervalued the importance of situational factors when analysing Ireland’s policing in 1919/21.

In his view, the brutality that the RIC and Auxiliaries frequently displayed mainly derived from the challenges of the situation into which they were thrust – a vicious guerrilla insurgency against which they formed an inadequate frontline.

But these men operated in a very different environment during their time with the British Gendarmerie. Despite the persistence of Arab-Jewish tensions, Palestine was largely peaceable during their four years of service (not least on account of their presence) and they spent most of their time at base marking time between the occasional emergencies requiring their deployment.

As one Colonial Office official colourfully put it, ‘McNeill and his men spend much of their time waiting expectantly for the veil of the Temple to be rent in twain, while in the meantime doing nothing in particular’.[9] Furthermore, they were utterly unchallenged by these emergencies, their capacity to quell them never in doubt.

Nor, unlike in Ireland, were they primary target of what violence occurred. In Palestine it was inter or intra-communal – between or within the Arab and Jewish communities – and not directed against the imperial rule the British Gendarmerie upheld. Hence, the stresses and strains of the Irish situation were absent in Palestine to the point that Tudor described the country as ‘a rest cure after Ireland’.[10]

The British administration was not directly targeted by anti-Zionist demonstrators until 1933 and its security was unchallenged until the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, when a significant swathe of Arab society rose up against the government and its Jewish immigration policy.

That the British Gendarmerie would have behaved in a very different way had it found itself the focus of an IRA-style insurgency was indicated by McNeill’s recommendations for tackling the Arab Revolt: then retired outside Acre, he told BSPP friends that they ‘should try to spread terror in the land … you would only have to be really brutal and bloodthirsty for about a month and [the Arabs] would be eating out of your hand’.[11]

The Irish in the ‘British Section’ of the Palestine Police 1926-1948

The British Gendarmerie was a victim of its own success in maintaining public order in the Palestine Mandate: it was disbanded in April 1926 following a reorganisation of the garrison in light of the improved security situation.

It was replaced by a new ‘British Section’ attached to the Palestine Police (BSPP), a 220-strong crack squad intended to stiffen the main locally recruited body of the force. Just under 100 of its original draft were former gendarmes, 72 of these ex-RIC.

However, its strength was dramatically increased in response to emergent threats to public security, trebled in the wake of anti-Zionist riots in 1929 and gradually increased to 2,800 during the Arab Revolt, when anti-Zionist resistance escalated into large-scale insurgency.

Force strength was further increased to over 4,000 between 1946 and 1947 to meet the challenges of the intensifying Zionist insurgency. This was waged by Lehi, Haganah, and the Irgun Zvai Leumi variously, or in concert, since summer 1939 to force a British withdrawal from Palestine and set up an independent Jewish state there. By the time the Mandate ended in April 1948, somewhere in the region of 10,600 men had served in the BSPP.

A handful of the British officers in the original Palestine Police was Irish, most notably Captain Eugene Quigley from Sligo, who went on to have a very high-profile career in the force, and Captain James Mackenzie from Belfast, who drowned in April 1922 trying to save the life of an Arab colleague who had been thrown from his horse into the Jordan River.

But significant Irish enlistment in the Palestine Police did not begin until the raising of the BSPP. Nineteen Irish members of the disbanding British Gendarmerie transferred to the force in April 1926, accounting for 10 percent of its original strength, and small numbers of Irishmen were included in the batches of new recruits dispatched from London prior to the 1929 riots.

Enlistments increased in its wake and sharply increased during the years of the Arab Revolt – approximately 11 percent of all new recruits was Irish – so that, by June 1939, the retired Calcutta Police commissioner and imperial ‘counter-terrorism’ expert, Sir Charles Tegart, who had been drafted in as ‘advisor’ to the Palestine Police in October 1937, could remark that the force was then ‘flavoured with a strong seasoning of Irishmen of the right kind’.[12] (Tegart was himself Irish, the Derry-born son of a Church of Ireland clergyman who grew up in Dunboyne, county Meath).

Irish enlistments declined during the Second World War, and by December 1945 the percentage of Irishmen in the force stood at 8 percent. However, the postwar years saw a sharp rise in recruitment from Ireland in response to an intensive recruitment drive by the Crown Agents for the Colonies which targeted Ireland: 15 percent of those recruited in 1946 were Irish as were 19 percent of those recruited in 1947.

This influx of Irishmen was observed by those on the ground. In July of that year, a visitor to Ireland from Palestine with ‘an intimate knowledge’ of the BSPP told the Irish Times that ‘he had rarely visited a police station in Palestine where he did not find an Irish member’.[13]

Irish visitors to Palestine also noted the presence of large numbers of Irish police, as did Irish BSPP recruits themselves.

For example, a Jerusalem-based Irish photographer reported meeting several compatriots serving in the force: ‘You meet them here from all over Ireland – the Palestine Police Force is full of them’.[14] Within the confluence of contributory factors that influenced each individual decision to enlist, a signal motivation is generally discernible, chief amongst them economics, endo-recruitment, and the quest for less ordinary lives.

Shortly after his arrival in Palestine, Tudor sourly remarked to the attorney-general, Norman Bentwich, that his gendarmes ‘had to leave Ireland because of the principle of Irish self-determination and were sent to Palestine to resist the Arab attempt at self-determination’.[15]

But it was, in fact, to Irish BSPP that this task primarily fell. Like the RIC before them, those recruited in the 1920s and 1930s found themselves forming the British imperial frontline against an anticolonial insurgency, the Great Arab Revolt, which saw the emergence of Black and Tannery in the Palestine Police.

Just two months after the outbreak of this revolt in 1936, Jerusalem’s Anglican archdeacon declared himself ‘seriously troubled at the “Black and Tan” methods of the police’ and, by September 1938, even the hardline high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, was deploring what he termed their ‘black-and-tan tendencies’.[16]

The BSPP’s response to the subsequent Zionist insurgency was, generally-speaking, far more restrained. However, the perceived incidence of excess during authorized counterinsurgency operations, coupled with unofficial police reprisals, was sufficient to evoke memories of Ireland, particularly in the postwar period when the BSPP-Black and Tan comparisons became so commonplace that the colonial secretary was compelled to reject them in parliament.

The frequent brutality of the BSPP’s response to the Arab and Zionist insurgencies is generally attributed to the fact that the force was descended directly from the Black and Tans via the British Gendarmerie and thereby imbued with a ‘Black and Tan ethos’. According to this view, former Black and Tans and Auxiliaries serving in the BSPP, some at very senior rank, imported from revolutionary Ireland a policing model based on brute force.

This view was in fact current at the time: writing in 1949, Arthur Koestler described the Palestine Police as ‘one of the most disreputable organisations in the British Commonwealth’, something he partly attributed to the fact that there were ‘Black and Tan veterans in leading positions’.[17]

But the evidence does not bear this out. For example, far fewer RIC veterans remained in the BSPP than has traditionally been thought (43 in the late 1930s in a force of 2,800 and just 25 in the mid-1940s when it was almost 4,000-strong), while the more drastic counterinsurgency initiatives introduced in 1936/48 were instituted by police officers with non-RIC pedigrees, or by external agents.

‘A repetition of the Irish show’

In any case, an examination of both BSPP counterinsurgencies in Palestine presents further evidence for Leeson’s thesis on the primacy of situational factors in explaining Black and Tannery.

Unsettled by the anti-Zionist violence of 1929 riots, one senior Palestine Police officer (and former ADRIC ‘C Company’ cadet) predicted ‘a repetition of the Irish show’ if Arab grievances were not assuaged and the outbreak of the Arab Revolt proved him right.

Like Dublin Castle in 1919, the Palestine government was initially reluctant to interpret the violence of 1936 as anticolonial, treating it instead as a crime wave which, as the guardians of law and order, the police were lined out to suppress.

This insistence that Arab violence was criminal saw the BSPP tackling an insurgency it was ill-equipped to so do other than by brutal coercion, which as in the RIC’s case, was a testament to force weakness rather than force strength. As in Ireland, the targeting by rebels of outlying police stations forced a humiliating retreat to urban centres by an ill-equipped and ill-trained constabulary and the increasing assumption of responsibility by the military for the counterinsurgency.

In Palestine, this culminated in the granting of full operational control of the police to the army in September 1938, although responsibility for the day-to-day maintenance of public security was left in police hands. The fact that the police were left to do the ‘dirty work’ such the expropriation of produce from Arab villages in lieu of collective fines, coupled with the rising police casualty rate, took a severe toll on force discipline and morale, leading to the inevitable emergence of ‘black-and-tan tendencies’.

As BSPP Constable Reubin Kitson noted, ‘it’s very difficult when you’re being attacked not to retaliate in some way and [we] did retaliate … when the so-called terrorism became critical, in order to fight terrorism, we became terrorists more or less’.[18]

Situational factors also drove the excesses of the BSPP’s response to the Zionist insurgency. Despite being even more untrained for the task than it had been in the late 1930s, the force again found itself forming the first line of imperial defence and the pressures this incurred led to occasional collapses in morale and discipline. The situation was exacerbated by anger at the rising police casualty rate.

Like the RIC, which considered the IRA’s method of ‘hit and run’ warfare to be, as the British Army’s rebellion record described it, ‘in most cases barbarous, influenced by hatred and devoid of courage’, BSPP personnel were enraged by the murder of their colleagues by (as they saw them) cowards who shirked a fair fight.[19]

In fact, ‘Zionist terrorism’ was not only repugnant to what the British (officially, at least) considered legitimate conduct during armed conflict. But it also offended a conception of imperial prestige derived from race-based ideas about the relationship of British security forces to imperial subjects, according to which the former dispensed justice to the latter and had an a priori right to a monopoly on force.

Irishmen working in the Palestine Mandate, interviewed by a visiting Irish Jesuit in 1947/48, drew comparisons with the Irish situation 20 years hence.

Recognising the pressure placed on the BSPP by the Zionist insurgency they, ‘now realised, as never before, what the strain of conflict with an underground enemy can do to human nature’ and were surprised that the police counterinsurgency was not more robust. For, while ‘not in the least condoning Black-and-Tan methods of reprisal, [they] knew how strong can be the temptation to resort to them in extremity’.[20]

Partly on account of this insurgency, the British terminated its mandate for Palestine effective from 15 May 1948. The disbandment of the BSPP commenced in January and the great majority had departed by the time the new State of Israel was declared.

Many of the Irish amongst them remained in policing. Some joined the constabularies of Britain and the Dominions, while 130 enlisted in colonial forces, primarily in Malaya (50), Africa, and Hong Kong, continuing a tradition of Irish imperial policing with its roots in the ‘Old RIC’.

Seán William Gannon is a historian of Modern Ireland, the British empire, and their intersections. His book: The Irish imperial service: policing Palestine and administering the empire, is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

References

[1] Seán William Gannon, ‘“Sure it’s only a holiday”: the Irish contingent of the British (Palestine) Gendarmerie, 1922-1926’, Australian Journal of Irish Studies, pp 64-85, at pp 66-7.

[2] Thirty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary were killed during this period as well. Figures abstracted from Richard Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland, 1919-1922 (Cork, 2000).

[3] Churchill Papers (CHAR), CHAR/17/11, Samuel to Churchill, 11 Dec. 1921.

[4] British National Archives (TNA), Colonial Office official correspondence (CO), CO/733/15/639-40, Grindle to Tudor, 24 Dec. 1921.

[5] TNA, CO/733/35/616-7, Shuckburgh, Colonial Office minute, 20 Dec. 1922.

[6] Douglas V. Duff, Bailing with a teaspoon (London, 1953), p. 31.

[7] John Jeans, ‘The British (Palestine) Gendarmerie’, Malayan Police Magazine, 4/9 (1931), p. 257.

[8] W. J. Lowe, ‘Who Were the Black and Tans?’, History Ireland, 12/3 (2004), p. 50; The Black and Tans: British police and auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford, 2011), p. 69.

[9] TNA, CO/733/72/61, Roland Vernon, Colonial Office minute, 9 Aug. 1924.

[10] RAF Museum, Viscount Trenchard papers, MFC76/1/285, Tudor to Churchill, 1 Oct. 1922.

[11] CHAR/2/348, McNeill to Churchill, 20 Dec. 1937.

[12] Palestine Post, 4 June 1939.

[13] Irish Times, 1 July 1947.

[14] Connacht Tribune, 9 Aug. 1947.

[15] Norman & Helen Bentwich, Mandate memories, 1918-1948 (London, 1965), p. 87.

[16] Middle East Centre Archive Oxford, GB165-016 Jerusalem and East Mission collection (JEMC), 61/1, Stewart to Matthews, 17 June 1936.

[17] Arthur Koestler, Promise and fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949, 2^nd edition (London, 1983), p. 15.

[18] Imperial War Museum, Sound archive 10688, Reubin Kitson interview, 26 Apr. 1989.

[19] Quoted in Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945 (Woodbridge, 2008), p. 164.

[20] J. W. W. Murphy, ‘Irishmen in Palestine, 1946-1948’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 40/157 (1951), p. 88.

On this episode of the Irish History Show Cathal Brennan and John Dorney discuss the recent controversy over the planned commemoration of the Royal Irish Constabulary as part of the Decade of Centenaries.

In early 2020 the Irish government intended to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police. This provoked a storm of controversy as many members of the public objected to commemorating the police force that upheld British rule in Ireland and which included the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries.

Here we discuss the RIC, the controversy over its commemoration and its possible impact on the general election of February 2020.

By Conor McNamara

Published by Irish Academic Press, 2019

Reviewer: Kerron Ó Luain

It has been nearly half a century since iconic IRB, IRA and Sinn Féin man Liam Mellows, executed by Free State firing squad in 1922, received a substantial biographical treatment. That task fell to English Marxist activist and historian Desmond C. Greaves who published Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution in 1971.

In more recent times, Brian Hanley documented Mellows’ role in the Easter Rising and national politics between 1918-22 in a small book issued by Teagasc in 2016.

Mellows, therefore, still awaits a modern biography along the lines of Owen McGee’s work Arthur Griffith, Shane Kenna’s Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa: unrepentant Fenian (both published in 2015), or Anne Dolan and William Murphy’s recent thematic Michael Collins: the man and the revolution of 2018.

These biographies all draw on relatively newly released and digitised sources in the form of the Bureau of Military History (BMH) material and Irish, US and British newspapers, much of which was inaccessible to Greaves in the late 1960s.

Conor McNamara’s Liam Mellows, soldier of the Irish republic: selected writings, 1914-19, while not a holistic biography, combines elements of that genre with Mellows’ private letters, speeches, interviews and newspaper articles.

This primary source material has been assembled from various republican newspapers including Fianna, the newspaper of Na Fianna Éireann published between 1915 and 1916 and the IRB’s Irish Freedom which existed from 1910-1914.

Also featured are letters from various collections of personal correspondence between Mellows and his friends and comrades, housed mainly in the NLI.

The biographical sections of the book, meanwhile, offer important contextualisation that frame each piece of Mellows’ own penmanship.

They demonstrate in depth research in the BMH and NLI in their own right, as well as McNamara’s familiarity with the works of Mellows’ contemporaries such as Donegal IRA man Peadar O’Donnell, Cork-based republican Florence O’Donoghue and the Liverpool-raised Piaras Béaslaí, among others.

This collection of writings are a window into the mind of a highly dedicated early twentieth-century Irish republican. As McNamara explains, they are “the disparate public and private utterances of a young man who lived an itinerant life during a time of rapidly changing political realities”.

Mellows the Man

Who, then, was Mellows the man? For one, he idolised Pádraig Pearse, and, like him, “was unmarried, puritanical in habits and ruminated profoundly over his own actions, putting the cause of the republic above all else”.

Strongly influenced by the cultural revolution of the 1890s and early twentieth century, Mellows, who had been known as “Willie” to his family, Gaelicised his name to Liam during his teenage years.

Writing later on in 1917, Mellows asserted that “when Ireland spoke Irish the days of the British government in this country would be numbered”.

In Mellows’ youth his family suffered tragedy with the loss of several children. This left an indelible mark on the young man; his comrades later noting a deeply ingrained fatalism in his character.

Mellows’ charisma earned him many friends. It also won him the admiration of leading figures – along with many among the rank and file – of the republican movement. Athlone organiser Tomás Ó Maoileoin recalled of Mellows that he had “rarely met anyone with such an attractive personality”.

Despite his magnetic personality and confidence in social gatherings, Mellows disliked public speaking and only seems to have engaged in it out of a sense of duty. He believed at times that he had been put “on too high a pedestal” and, ultimately, had “feet of clay”.

The modesty and self-doubt exhibited throughout his writings evokes an empathy in the reader. Mellows was no selfish megalomaniac, as Treatyite enemies and the Catholic Church sometimes alleged of those they branded “irregulars”.

Writings

Mellows became involved with Na Fianna in 1911 where he “championed the concept of national salvation through an insurrection of the young”. His writings on their activities contained here, and titled The History of the Irish Boy Scouts, offer an important and detailed organisational and social history of that movement.

McNamara notes how Mellows was part of a coterie of young men in the IRB who, at the turn of the twentieth century, helped to transform the organisation “from a drinking club for old Fenians to a conspiratorial anti-imperialist sect”.

Mellows found himself under the tutelage of Tom Clarke in the IRB, with whom he established a rapport, having a shared background in a military family and a common belief in the primacy of physical force.

This trajectory saw him eventually leading a band of rebels in Galway during the Rising of 1916.

In his True Story of the Galway Insurrection (1917), Mellows, according to McNamara, attempted to present “an heroic narrative of revolution”. Such accounts did not dovetail with the “more nuanced versions of events” provided to the BMH later on.

Nevertheless, there is much of value in Mellows’ recollection of Galway during the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Not least, and in light of the recent “RIC-gate”, is Mellows’ account of the role of the colonial police force in suppressing the rising and his description of RIC sergeants as the “little caesars of their districts”.

America

Perhaps the most trying time for Mellows came during his spell in the US in the wake of the 1916 Rising. Along with other “1916 exiles” he found himself in New York where he came to be at loggerheads with Clann na nGael over their support for the US in the First World War.

The Clann rowed in behind American imperialism, in the process exposing the cultural rift between the Irish and Irish America.

During his time in the US, Mellows associated with the likes of New York-based and long-time Fenian John Devoy and Philadelphia-based Tyrone republican Dr Patrick McCartan.

Consequently, over twenty of his interviews and speeches from his time there appear in Devoy’s Gaelic American and McCartan’s Irish Press.

Mellows’ speeches did not endear hims to many in Irish America. In the Central Opera House, in New York in 1918, he referred to his audience as “a lot of curs”.

On that, and other, occasions Mellows allowed his anger to spill over regarding what he viewed as the failure of Irish-Americans to speak out about US support for Britain; which, for him, meant by proxy support for British imperialism.

The Treaty and Dishonour

Following his return to Ireland, Mellows soon found himself immersed in the debate over the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Mellows made clear to those in the Dáil the link between the republic that had been declared and physically established and the concept of honour. To renege on the republic and accept the trappings of dominion status and the oath of allegiance meant dishonour.

He went as far as to say that “we do not seek to make this country a materially great country at the expense of its honour in any way whatsoever”.

It is hard not to draw parallels between this train of thought and De Valera’s later 1943 speech “On Language and Nation”, broadcast on RTÉ radio, in which he spoke of “frugal comfort” and “material wealth only as a basis for right living”.

The fundamental failure of Fianna Fáil to arrest the decline of the Irish language, the endemic culture of emigration, or the deep inequalities in Irish society owed much to this attitude. A radical redistribution which would have alleviated the social ills of depopulation, poverty, and language decline was never considered.

Instead, a capitalist-Catholic orthodoxy, with important but ultimately symbolic nods to the Irish language and culture, became entrenched for decades. But would Mellows have fallen into the Fianna Fáil camp of anti-Treatyite “honour”, support for the economic status quo and rigid Catholicity had he survived?

He certainly was not anti-clerical as his several close friends among the clergy and his stay in the Carmelite monastery in Manhattan while in exile demonstrate; as do the numerous references to god and Catholic religious motifs throughout this selection of his writings.

Despite this, Mellows found himself an enemy of the Catholic Church  by 1922 – not just for his refusal to endorse the Treaty but also because of the leftward direction he began to take on socio-economic issues.

A Socialist-Republican Martyr?

This brings us to the question of Liam Mellows’ socialism. It appears that he oriented towards the ideology only while in Mountjoy Gaol following the defeat of the republican garrison at the Four Courts in the summer of 1922.

On the back foot, he sought the support of the labour movement, which was not forthcoming. But as McNamara explains, for Mellows, “the blame lay firmly with Labour, rather than republicans’ unwillingness to frame their analysis in terms that would appeal to workers and the trade union movement”.

All told, Mellows seemed to miss the point when it came to adopting an anti-capitalist stance. Previously, when the First World War broke out, he had believed that “the Irish press was in the hands of the British government, and the Irish people were deluded”.

Later, during the fanaticism engendered by the US entry to the war in 1918, Mellows fretted that the press in New York, where he then resided, was “English controlled”.

This overlooks the fundamental nature of both the Irish and American bourgeoisie and their vested interest in the British and (emerging) US empire.

This ideological strand was in line with much republican thinking in the IRB newspaper, Irish Freedom. In this view the Dublin Lockout of 1913 was not seen as a class struggle between a native working class and ruling class, but instead was a situation that only really became as dire as it did because of the British presence in Ireland.

Having never read the Greaves biography and having had only a surface-level knowledge of Mellows’ politics, it was surprising to learn from his writings collected here that his commitment to socialism was not what I had expected.

This was especially perplexing given his idolisation by what might be broadly termed left-republicans during the twentieth century and up to the present day. At best, his move towards socialism came very late in the day and in response to anti-Treatyite republicanism being on the ropes militarily. At worst, it was opportunistic.

As McNamara contends, those who hold Mellows in reverence as an icon of socialist-republicanism owe much to the later efforts of both Peadar O’Donnell and Desmond Greaves who sought out a stronger leftist tradition in the Civil War than perhaps existed.

Legacy

This is not to take away from many of Mellows’ positive traits. He was a dogged military and political activist. And like his hero Pearse, he held lofty moral standards. It is clear from his writings that he did not fear death and was at nearly every turn prepared to sacrifice himself for the cause he believed in; the Republic.

Paradoxically, these attributes, according to McNamara, also contributed to some of Mellows’ failings, namely “his fixation on the centrality of the soldier’s honour, his unwillingness to recognise the significance of democratic sentiment [and] his detachment from the political process that the building of the new state required”.

On the other hand, Mellows arguably predicted what the compromise of the Treaty would breed – a state that was wed both psychologically and economically to the empire from which republicans had tried, but failed, to cleanly break.

The whole history of the Free State post-1922, “Republic” post-1949, and “Ireland” as it is now called today, demonstrates that there was far more than a mere grain of wisdom in Mellows’ forecast.

Despite not being a socialist, it is clear from his writings that Mellows was an egalitarian republican who understood the alingment of forces that manifested on the pro-Treaty side during the Civil War, which some historians would later deem to have been a counter-revolution.

Nonetheless, Mellows’ legacy, despite being later held aloft as a socialist-republican visionary, is, from the writings assembled here by McNamara, one of a typical Catholic of his era but also a remarkable unrepentant Fenian; devout to both the faith of his religion and the creed of physical force Irish republicanism.

This is an essential collection for anyone seeking to comprehend the mind of Liam Mellows, soldier of the Irish Republic.

The assassination of the Lord Mayor of Cork, March 20, 1920. By John Dorney

Early in the morning of March 20, 1920, armed men in disguises or with faces blackened with soot, banged on the front door of the MacCurtain family home in Blackpool, Cork city.

The head of the household was Tomás MacCurtain, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork and also commandant of the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA.

The intruders pushed past MacCurtain’s wife Elizabeth and upstairs to their bedroom, ignoring the couples’ five children, some of whom had begun to scream. At the door, one of the men called ‘come out Curtin’. When MacCurtain appeared at the bedroom door, they shot him three times in the chest. He died a few minutes later. It was his birthday, he was 36 that day.

The killers rushed downstairs and into the night, amid cries of ‘murder’ from MacCurtain’s family. They were followed for a few steps by MacCurtain’s brother in law James Walsh, until they turned to fire shots at him and he flung himself to the ground. Despite being within sight of King Street Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks, no arrests were ever made. Indeed according to one account the killers returned to that Barracks when the job was done.

It later emerged that other armed men had put out the gas lights in the vicinity of the MacCurtain house, while others stopped traffic in nearby streets. [1]

It was widely believed that the shooting was the work of RIC constables, in revenge for the fatal shooting the day before of Constable James Murtagh in Cork city. Indeed the inquest jury returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against the RIC, ‘directed by the British government’ and Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

It was one of the first killings in Cork during the Irish War of Independence, but far from the last. MacCurtain is listed at a registry of fatalities from political violence in County Cork number 22 out of 528 dead from 1919 until July 1921.

Tomás MacCurtain

Tomás MacCurtain became one of the most famous republican martyrs of that era.

Over 15,000 people attended his funeral. Later a street was named after him in Cork and annual commemorations are still held on the anniversary of his death.

However MacCurtain had a more complicated relationship with the emerging IRA guerrilla campaign than one might suppose.

He, like a great many of his peers in the republican movement, came to separatist nationalism via cultural nationalism, in particular the Irish language movement, the Gaelic League. It was there that he met his wife Elizabeth and it was his enthusiasm for the language that led him to change his name from Thomas Curtin to the Irish form, Tomás MacCurtain.

In between his political and cultural activities he ran a successful business, a factory that produced women’s clothes.

However, at a relatively early stage, he graduated into political militancy, joining the youth group the Fianna, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the military group, the Irish Volunteers. By 1915 he had become the Cork Brigade Commandant of the latter.

At Easter 1916 when the insurrection broke out in Dublin, he received a string of contradictory orders from the capital, as a result of Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding order. First he was to mobilise his men, then to stand them down again and then to mobilise them again. The result, predictably was utter confusion. He and several hundred of his men spent Easter week holed up in their drill hall on Sheares Street in Cork, with the British military threatening to shell the city and the Catholic Bishop Daniel Coholan pleading with him to surrender.

MacCurtain it seems was in favour of surrender, but decided to put the decision to a vote of his Volunteers, who refused. Later in the week it was agreed that their arms would not be handed over to the British but put in the safe keeping of the mayor, Thomas Butterfield and returned at a later date.

This might have sounded plausible to MacCurtain at the time, the Volunteers being, before the Rising, a legal organisation and holding arms openly, but predictably enough the British confiscated the weapons and interned MacCurtain, his deputy Terence MacSwiney and several other prominent Cork Volunteers at Frongoch. [2]

After the general release of prisoners in 1917, MacCurtain and MacSwiney were summoned to Dublin to explain themselves to the Volunteer leadership. They must have done a good job, as they remained at the head of republican organisation in Cork in the years that followed. Nevertheless, both would go to great lengths to wipe out the ‘shame’ of their surrender without firing a shot in 1916.[3]

War of Independence

By 1918, after the national mobilisation against conscription, the Cork Brigade was up to 8,000 men and early in the following year it was decided to split it up into three Brigades, the First in Cork city and North Cork, Number Two in East Cork and Number Three in West Cork. MacCurtain became commandant of the First Brigade.

In January 1920, MacCurtain was also elected as a Sinn Féin candidate, to Cork corporation and elected Lord Mayor of the city by the other councillors.

MacCurtain at this point appears to have been in favour of a ‘second rising’ in which all the men under his command would make massed assaults on police barracks. He was, perhaps fortunately, dissuaded by the more realistic Volunteer Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy, who favoured small scale guerrilla action. [4] MacCurtain was instead brought to Dublin by Michael Collins and participated in one of the failed attempts to kill the Lord Lieutenant Sir John French. [5]

MacCurtain was, however against individual shootings on the whole, as opposed to a mass insurrection. He resisted a suggestion of IRA GHQ that a ‘special squad’ should be set up in Cork, as it had been in Dublin, for this purpose. [6]

Many of his men, however were impatient for action. In part to satisfy them, IRA GHQ sanctioned attacks on police barracks in January 1920, three of which were attacked in a single day in Cork.

However this was not enough for some of the men notionally under his command, notably Sean O’Hegarty. The latter without orders raided the arsenal at a grammar school in Cork (at that time, some prestigious schools instructed their male pupils in arms and drill) and seized 50 rifles. He was also involved in the non fatal shooting of a policeman. For this MacCurtain attempted to have him court martialled, but while the charges of insubordination failed to stick, O’Hegarty left the IRA in disgust.[7]

However by now a vicious cycle of violence was developing between the IRA and the RIC in Cork. As March 1920 dawned, a District Inspector, McDonagh was shot and wounded in the city, after which the police broke the windows of the Sinn Fein club and badly beat several Sinn Féin aldermen.[8]

And on March 19 1920, Constable James Murtagh was shot and killed by IRA members on Pope’s Quay in the centre of Cork. Tomás MacCurtain disapproved of the killing, it being contrary to his ideas of how revolutionary war should be fought.

For one thing it was not sanctioned by his Brigade command. He remarked, ‘we can’t have men roaming around armed shooting police on their own’.[9]

But he also seems to have regretted it on a personal basis, by one account calling to give condolences to Murtagh’s family on the evening before his own death. [10]

This did not stop the RIC from holding him responsible and though the culprits for his killing were never identified, his killers were almost certainly RIC constables operating in plain clothes, but with a significant degree of organisation, indicating some direction from higher ranks.

However, the effect of the assassination of MacCurtain was that the Cork city IRA became more combative, not less. McCurtain was succeeded as commandant of Cork No 1 Brigade by Sean O’Hegarty, whom MacCurtain had sidelined for his militant methods. O’Hegarty proved a capable and ruthless commander in the months ahead. MacCurtain was succeeded as mayor by his friend Terence MacSwiney who would die on hunger strike in November of that year.

One man the IRA held responsible for MacCurtain’s killing was RIC District Inspector Oswald Swanzy, who had ‘dogged’ MacCurtain throughout the preceding months.

Perhaps significantly, directly after the shooting, Swanzy was transferred out of Cork, back to his native Antrim. He was tracked there by the IRA in August 1920 and gunned down as he left Church in Lisburn. One of the gunmen, from Cork, allegedly used MacCurtain’s own revolver in the killing.[11]  That night loyalists wrecked the Catholic quarter of that town, in revenge killing one person and burning 60 houses.[12] Rioting soon spread to Belfast where it claimed more lives.

Tomás MacCurtain’s death was regarded, not unreasonably, as a signal case of the ‘British tyranny’ holding Ireland in subjection. But examined in context, it is also a grim insight into the cycles of killing and revenge that punctuated the Irish War of Independence.

References

[1] For accounts of the killing see Peter Hart the IRA and its Enemies p.78-79, Also Michael Murphy BMH WS 1579

[2] For an account of Cork during Easter Week 1916 see, BMH Michael Walsh WS 1521 and BMH Michael Murphy WS 1547

[3] Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p.104

[4] Hopkinson, War of Independence, P. 105

[5] Charles Townshend, The Republic, The Struggle for Irish Independence, p.107

[6] Townshend The Republic p.109

[7] Townsend, The Republic p.110, Hopkinson War of Independence, p.109

[8] Hart, IRA and its Enemies, p77-78

[9] Townshend The Republic, p.110

[10] Hart, IRA and its Enemies p.78

[11] Michael Murphy BMH

[12] Hart P.79

By John Dorney

At the time of writing, (March 30 2020), Ireland is in lockdown. Almost all normal work and social activity has been suspended in an effort to slow the progress of the coronavirus pandemic.

We have found ourselves in the novel and uncomfortable position of watching the spread of a virus to which no one has any immunity and for which there is at present, no vaccine. Not since the great flu epidemic of 1918-19 has Ireland (or most other European countries) faced anything of this nature.

However, epidemics of infectious diseases was something our ancestors faced at regular intervals over the centuries. While they had no clear idea of the nature of such diseases and usually no effective treatment, their measures to combat them might give us some lessons for our current predicament.

This article can of necessity be more than a sketch, but it aims to give an outline of the most destructive epidemics in Irish history and how they were increasingly effectively countered from the mid 19^th century onwards.

If there is a common thread running through centuries it is: in the absence of a vaccine, the most important measures are vigilance, rapid identification of the infected and their isolation from the healthy population, and good general standards of hygiene.

The Black Death 1348-49 and bubonic plague

Plagues and epidemics are older than recorded history. The suburb of Tallaght in Dublin, for instance is thought to have been named Tamhlacht, ‘plague monument’ after some long forgotten pre-historic pestilence.[1]

However this article will begin with Ireland’s experience of the ‘Black Death’ the terrible bubonic plague that is thought to have killed up to 40 per cent of Europe’s population in the 14th century.

The bubonic plague is a bacterial infection spread by the fleas that live on rats and easily transmitted to humans, especially in densely populated unhygienic urban settlements.

It arrived in Ireland via the eastern ports in the summer of 1348, probably with traders from the French port of Bordeaux, and proceeded to cut a swathe through the population of eastern towns such as Dublin and Drogheda. It is thought to have arrived separately to southern port cities such as Cork and Waterford, from England, but the result was the same; an ‘unheard of mortality’ throughout the mostly English speaking urban settlements.

One Dominican Friar in Kilkenny, John Clynn, famously wrote, before his own death from the plague that he hoped that ‘one son of Adam’ might survive the pestilence.  [2]

Accurate figures are impossible to come by for the medieval period, but it is estimated that the towns lost between 45-50 per cent of their inhabitants as a result of the Black Death and their rural hinterland was also devastated, with a shortage of famers and workers for generations afterwards. What was more, the plague recurred several more times in the 14^th century.

While the Gaelic Irish were less affected, due to living mostly in more dispersed rural settlements, they too suffered, as their annals tell us of several notable clerics and noblemen who died. Nevertheless, one of the long term effects of the Black Death in Ireland was the near collapse of the English colony, the resurgence in political power of the Gaelic Irish and the retreat of the English presence into a fortified ‘Pale’ around Dublin.[3]

Even in the 16th century, plague epidemics regularly blighted Ireland. According to Colm Lennon, plague outbreaks occurred six times in that century. The last, from 1600-1604, coincided with the final phase of the Nine Years War, and plague, war and famine may together have carried off as much as 10% of the Irish population. [4]

War, famine and plague again conspired to cause mortality in the 1650s, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Plague, thought to have been brought to Ireland with the New Model Army again killed in extraordinary numbers.

In the siege of Limerick for instance, in 1651, one in five of the city’s garrison and inhabitants died of the plague by the time the town surrendered to the Parliamentarian forces. Their commander Henry Ireton also succumbed to the plague. Estimates of the mortality in the Irish population in the 1650s vary between 10 and 40 per cent.

All of these calamities occurred well before the germ theory explained that diseases were carried by microorganisms  – the most popular medical view up to the early 19^th century as that they were carried by ‘miasmas or ‘vapours’ – or ‘bad air’. Nevertheless, people in medieval and early modern Ireland did understand that diseases could be transmitted from person to person and that the sick must be kept segregated from the healthy.

All towns for instance had ‘leper houses’ outside their walls where sufferers of leprosy were kept segregated. During times of plague certain officials were designated to isolate victims and to bury the dead. Town watchmen had to scan those entering the walls for signs of sickness and others had to monitor the water and food supplies for the ‘taint’ of infection.[5]

Nineteenth century epidemics

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, bubonic plague was no longer the most dangerous epidemic disease in Ireland, though there were plague scares even as late as 1900.

Rather the biggest killers were now typhus, cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

Such fevers, especially typhus, which was spread by lice and therefore encouraged by unwashed bodies and clothes in close proximity to each other, had been the ‘scourge of Ireland’ for many centuries.

One Cromwellian soldier in the mid seventeenth century had called it, ‘malignant fever’ and said it was ‘commonly accompanied with a great pain in the head and in all the bones, great weakness, drought, loss of all manner of appetite, and want of sleep, and for the most part idleness or raving, and restlessness or tossings, but no very great nor constant heal’. [6]

Cholera is thought to have been introduced to Ireland from India, probably via British troops. Cholera is a bacterial infection caused by water and food contamination. Acute, sudden diarrhoea can cause severe hydration and death. Typhoid (not be confused with typhus) similarly was caused by drinking unclean water.

And added to the lethal mix was smallpox, an acute viral disease which was (like Covid 19) generally transmitted by airborne droplets. Smallpox, in severe cases, caused internal bleeding that could cause rapid death, and characteristic rash that could cause blindness and infertility in survivors and eve in mild cases a scarred, pockmarked face.[7]

A typhus epidemic in 1816-17 killed over 65,000 people out of over 1.5 million infected, one of six such epidemics in the 19^th century, while an outbreak of cholera in the 1830s killed another 50,000 people. [8]

During the Great Famine of the 1840s, hunger and malnutrition-related diseases claimed a large proportion of the over 1.5 million victims, but typhus or famine fever killed at least 400,000 of them. [9] As medical historian Laurence Geary writes, ‘The relationship between famine and fever is complex, but there is no direct nutritional connection.’[10]

In other words, many died not of starvation but of ‘fever’ when the destitute left their homes and packed into overcrowded workhouses where hygiene was bad and the lice which transmitted typhus could spread easily, as could smallpox which was transmitted from person to person by respiratory droplets.

One observer wrote, somewhat unkindly given the rational fears of the populace, ‘the horror of contagion among the Irish poor amounts in general to a perfect monomania [obsession]’.[11]

Over 200 doctors died during the famine, mostly of epidemic disease. However their sacrifice may have been futile, given the state of medical knowledge at the time. As historian of the famine Cormac O Grada writes, ‘medical help was of little benefit when not positively harmful’. ‘Treatments’ included bleeding, by cutting or application of leeches, proscribing whiskey, laudanum (a derivative of opium), mercury or even chalk.  O Grada judges that ‘medical treatment is unlikely to have saved many lives during the famine’.[12]

Dealing with epidemics in the 19^th century

If treatment of epidemic disease remained primitive, there was, however, some progress in what is now termed the ‘non-pharmaceutical intervention’ in epidemics.

The first of these was vigilance, Dr Patrick Rowan writes: ‘Following the 1817 typhus epidemic, a Fever Act was passed the following year which allowed mayors of towns to prevent strangers entering their towns when fever was prevalent.’[13]

The second was isolation of the infection. During the 1816-16 typhus epidemic and again during the Great Famine, hundreds of temporary fever hospitals were established to care for the sick and, just as important, to segregate them from the healthy to limit the spread of infection. Between Poor Law Unions or Workhouses and County Hospitals over 100 permanent fever hospitals had also been established by the 1840s and more followed after 1851.

The poor quite rightly feared these fever hospitals as sites of infection and many local government bodies lobbied not to have them located in their towns. When, during the Great Famine, fever hospitals were overrun with patients, the overflow of patients was accommodated in wooden sheds and tents, where the mortality was fearfully high.

Cork Street Fever Hospital in Dublin, for instance, admitted 14,700 patients in one month alone, March 1847, during the famine. The wealthier preferred to quarantine their sick loved ones at home if at all possible.[14]

But for all that, these fever hospitals did probably save lives by reducing the risk of those sick with ‘fever’ infecting those patients suffering from other malnutrition related illnesses.

Typhus began to decline as a big killer in the second half of the nineteenth century. The acceptance of the germ theory of disease helped to improve the understanding of the importance of hygiene and though anti-biotics were still a long way in the future (they only became widespread in the 1930s), measures such as boiling water and using soap for washing clothes, bodies and hospital surface made a big difference to hygiene in hospitals and elsewhere.

That said, there were still outbreaks of typhus in early 20th century Ireland notably in Connemara in 1913. Poverty and the squalid conditions of many poor urban areas in Ireland (particularly the Dublin slums) meant that typhus was not totally eradicated in Ireland until the 1940s.

Similarly the advent of sanitation and clean drinking water over the second half of the nineteenth century gradually helped to stop the incidence of cholera epidemics. The last major one seems to have been in 1866. A report from Dublin’s Mater Hospital in that year reads:

Dublin – this city received its first case of cholera in the person of a young woman named Magee, who imported the disease from Liverpool into No. 22, City Quay, from which point it spread all over Dublin and the suburban towns, ‘destroying in six months 1193 persons’.[15]

Treating smallpox

The later decades of the 19^th century also saw massive progress made in vaccinations that eventually eliminated smallpox.

In the 1850s smallpox was killing about 1,500 people in Ireland every year, but by 1867 this was down to just 20 and by the 1890s the Irish health authorities claimed that Ireland had ‘totally immunity’ to smallpox. [16]

This was as a result of an 1863 law (following one in England and Wales in 1853) making vaccination of infants against smallpox compulsory. [17] Indeed vaccinations in Ireland, which were administered via the Poor Law Unions and Dispensaries – which amounted to the public health system at the time – appear to have been more successful in Ireland than in Britain itself.

In 1871 a smallpox epidemic broke out in Britain, killing over 45,000 people but causing just under 4,000 deaths in Ireland 1871, mostly, one assumes, among those who had not been vaccinated.[18]

And while it was not true as the Poor Law Commissioners claimed in the 1890s that Ireland had ‘total immunity’ to smallpox – there was for instance an outbreak in Dublin in 1903 that claimed 33 lives[19] – the disease was well under control, due to vaccination, by the second decade of the twentieth century.

There was a smallpox scare in in Ireland in 1966 due to an outbreak in Wales, but by 1980 smallpox had been declared eradicated worldwide.

The 1918 pandemic

There is not space here to deal with the 1918 flu epidemic in depth. Readers are referred to Ida Milne’s recent ‘Stacking the Coffins’ and Catriona Foley’s ‘The Last Irish Plague’ on its impact on Ireland.

Suffice to say that the H1N1 virus, thought to have passed from poultry to humans in military camps in during the First World War, spread around the world in late 1918-19 and killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide.

In Ireland it infected some 800,000 people or about 20 per cent of the population and killed at least 23,000, mostly from October 1918 to February 1919.

One important difference between the 1918 flu and the current Coronavirus epidemic is that while the latter primarily kills the old and sick, the former particularly killed the young and healthy in disproportionate numbers.

However there are a number of important lessons that can be applied from the 1918 pandemic to today’s situation. Firstly, the importance of identifying and isolating cases. Republican activist and doctor Kathleen Lynn complained that the disease was spread by the failure to quarantine sick soldiers who had returned from the war fronts. And in hindsight she was quite correct. The areas with the heaviest mortality – including rural areas such as Kildare and Donegal, were also those a heavy military presence.

Secondly, the professions most likely to die in the 1918 epidemic were doctors, nurses and policemen, highlighting the urgent need for protective equipment for such people. Today at least one in four of the cases of Covid 19 in Ireland are health workers.

Thirdly, the 1918 pandemic highlights the importance of ‘joined up’ strategic healthcare. In 1918 there was no national health authority either in the United Kingdom as whole or in Ireland in particular. Rather health was the responsibility of local health boards under the Department of Local Government. This situation continued in Ireland until the creation of the Department of Health in 1947.

The result was that different measures were taken in different places. Thus while Limerick city for instance closed theatres and cinemas, Dublin did not – though Charles Cameron the head of Dublin public health department had them and the city’s trams, cleaned and disinfected every night. Schools were closed and sporting events suspended, but campaigning for the December 1918 general election, including mass rallies, went ahead, as did the election itself, which must have contributed to the spread of infection.

The most effective response to the epidemic seem to have been from activist and philanthropic groups rather than Local Government Boards, many of whom moved too slowly to tackle the outbreak. This should be borne in mind given that in 2020 there are two jurisdictions on the island with two divergent strategies for dealing with the epidemic.[20]

The pandemic of 1918 was the last mass mortality epidemic in Irish history to date. Though Ireland was impacted by the influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968, they do not seem to have caused large excess mortality here.

Tuberculosis and Polio

Furthermore, the second half of the twentieth century is actually a story of great progress in the field of public health.

Polio, a virus that can cause paralysis and death appeared in Ireland in 1941 and there were outbreaks causing hundreds of deaths in 1947, 1950, 1953 and (localised to Cork) in 1956. [21]

Those seriously affected often had to be ventilated in what was at the time known as the ‘iron lung’. And those who survived were often left crippled.

However, by the late 1950s the disease had been all but eliminated by an extensive vaccination programme.

Similarly Tuberculosis, a disease that routinely killed about 4-5000 people every year in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland, was finally brought under control in the early 1950s. Again, vaccination played a major role in this, but so too did common sense medical measure when properly funded.

Anne MacEllen writes of the approach of doctor Dorothy Price to the disease, ‘she believed that early accurate diagnosis, followed by isolation from the source of the disease along with bed rest were essential for recovery.’ Price was appointed chairwoman of a National Consultative Council on Tuberculosis  by health minister Noel Brown in 1948.[22]

By treating patients in well run sanatoriums, use of anti-biotics for treatment and vaccination against the disease, tuberculosis had effectively been eliminated as a major health risk in Ireland by the late 1950s.

This article is being written in uncertain times. The Irish government has taken early measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus that will hopefully be effective. Historical experience shows that even in the absence of cure or vaccine, suppression measures, as well as general good hygiene, can be effective at limiting and suppressing epidemics. And that once a vaccine is developed, as it will be, it can rapidly be brought under control.

But the public must heed the directives of the healthcare authorities and those health workers confronting the epidemic must be given the protection they need.

References

[1] https://www.libraryireland.com/IrishPlaceNames/Tallaght.php

[2] Maria Kelly, History Ireland, 2001, Unheard of Mortality, the Black Death in Ireland. https://www.historyireland.com/medieval-history-pre-1500/unheard-of-mortality-the-black-death-in-ireland/

[3] Sean Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages, p.151

[4] Colm Lennon Sixteenth Century Ireland, p. 8

[5] Lennon, p.27

[6] Laurence Geary, Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine, History Ireland, Spring 1996. https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/epidemic-diseases-of-the-great-famine/

[7] Geary, Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine.

[8] Dean Ruxton, Irish Times 15 March 2020. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/wakes-beggars-and-bad-air-when-typhus-killed-65-000-people-in-ireland-1.4203488

[9] Cormac O Grada, Black 47, p92

[10] Geary Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine

[11] O Grada, Black 47, p.95

[12] Ibid. p.95-96

[13] The Battle to get rid of Irish Typhus, Dr Patrick Rowan, Irish Medical Times October 2009. https://www.imt.ie/opinion/guest-posts/the-battle-to-get-rid-of-irish-typhus-28-10-2009/

[14] Geary, Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine, O Grada, Black 47, p.178

[15] Mater Hospital Report, August-December 1866 https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-34720790R-bk

[16] Deborah Brunton, The Problems of Implementation, The failure and success of small pox vaccination in Ireland 1840-1873. In Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650-1940, edited by Greta Jones, Elizabeth Malcolm, p.138

[17]Brunton, p.149

[18] Ibid. p138

[19] https://www.dublincity.ie/image/libraries/dd004-smallpox-hospital

[20] For sources on the 1918 epidemic see Milne, Stacking the Coffins, Foley the Last Irish Plague, On Dublin, Padriag Yeates, Dublin A City in Wartime 1914-1918, p270-275. For Limerick see, Des Ryan, The Great Influenza Epidemic 1918-1919, Old Limerick Journal Winter 1996 http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,4106,en.pdf For an overview online see, Guy Biener, Patricia Marsh, Ida Milne, History Ireland 2009,  https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/greatest-killer-of-the-twentieth-century-the-great-flu-of-1918-19/

[21] Laurence Geary, The 1956 Polio Epidemic Cork. History Ireland May June 2006. https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/the-1956-polio-epidemic-in-cork/.

[22] Anne MacLellan, Dorothy Stopford Price and the Tuberculosis Epidemic https://dh.tcd.ie/pricediary/about-dorothy-price-her-family/dorothy-stopford-price-and-the-irish-tuberculosis-epidemic/

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney discuss the (almost) pivotal Irish election of 1927 and its aftermath. Also listen on the Irish History Show page.

On the 16^th of August 1927, the opposition of the Labour party and the republicans of Fianna Fail, along with a number of smaller parties, proposed a motion of no confidence in the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal government.

The vote was a result of the first general election in the Irish Free State after the Civil War of 1922-23.

The election of June 1927 produced the fifth Dáil, which sat for only 98 days and was the shortest Dáil in history.  It was also one of the most historic; during its term Fianna Fáil abandoned abstentionism and finally took their seats in Leinster House.

It was followed by the assassination of minister Kevin O’Higgins by the IRA, after which the caretaker government introduced a new Public Safety Act, allowing for internment without trial. This was objected to not just by republicans but also by the moderate opposition parties, the Labour party and the National League Party – the latter a remnant of the old Redmondite party.

It was calculated that the opposition had one more vote than the government, which would lead to the formation of a new government led by Labour Leader Thomas Johnson.

But one Deputy, John Jinks of the National League, disappeared just as the votes were being cast. The vote was tied and the government survived by the narrowest of margins. Jinks action, or rather inaction, for a time changed the course of Irish History.

See also Cathal’s article on the subject here.

By John Dorney

On August 16, 1864, a citizen of Belfast wrote to a friend of his city, ‘The town is in the hands of an armed mob. This is certainly a peculiar state of things … regarding the flourishing capital of the Protestant North. But such is the case and the property nay the very lives of the inhabitants of the citizens are at the mercy of unprincipled freebooters.’

He judged that if ‘the mob had ‘ever held any right principles they have lost sight of them in their thirst for blood and revenge. The authorities are paralysed, are afraid to act boldly and although the military force at their disposal is quite sufficient to quell the disturbances, we have to endure mob law in its worst forms.’[1]

He wrote that ‘Reports are brought in of men shot in the streets like dogs, of bloody affrays between the rival parties, of school houses wrecked, of churches attacked, of shops plundered, of inoffensive persons beaten, of the law set openly at defiance till we are at length until we are inclined to think that we are living among savages. The press ‘give harrowing pictures of the scenes in the hospitals, dead dying and wounded [and] of the surgeons up to their elbows in gore, of the coolness and fury of the mobs.’

In serious rioting in Belfast between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists, from August 9 to 19, 1864, a subsequent inquiry logged 316 injuries and 11 deaths, including 98 cases of gunshot injuries, of which 34 were ‘severe’. There were a further 212 cases of injuries by blunt force, stabbing or slashing. The inquiry concluded that hundreds of shots must have been fired ‘by fellow townsmen on each other with deadly intent’. They estimated the damage to property at over £50,000. [2]

Ultimately it took a force of 700 Irish Constabulary, many of whom were drafted in from the reserve depot in Dublin and 560 British military, including infantry, cavalry and artillery, as well as several thousand special constables, who were hurriedly sworn in, to restore order.[3]

What prompted this ferocious outbreak of inter-communal violence in Belfast, which the Commission of Inquiry described as ‘a fearful tale of vindictiveness and hate’?

Belfast in 1864

The population of Belfast in 1864 stood at about 140,000, of whom one third were Catholic and two thirds Protestant.[4]

It was also the centre of the industrial revolution in Ireland, with flourishing shipbuilding and linen-spinning industries, amongst others.

These industries had attracted waves of rural migrants to the city, both Catholic and Protestant, and they had brought with them the fierce sectarian strife of rural Ulster to Belfast, which had previously been largely free of such conflict. There were riots throughout the 1850s and rioting in 1857, sparked by anti-Catholic preaching by a Presbyterian cleric named ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna, was particularly lethal, with numerous deaths.[5]

Rioting in Belfast was largely among and between the working class. The Commission of Inquiry into the 1864 riots noted that ‘chief theatre of the disturbances…as on former occasions’ was the interface between the Catholic ‘Pound’ district, today the beginning the Falls Road and Divis Street, and the Protestant Sandy Row neighbourhood. This sectarian frontier, west of the city centre, the Commission stated, was ‘known by evil fame throughout Ireland’ for sectarian violence.[6]

The Commission vividly described working lass west Belfast, both Catholic and Protestant: ‘The class of houses throughout is small; in some streets in each district clean and tidy, in others very squalid and miserable.’

They housed, ‘the working population of the town, mechanics and artisans of all different kinds, mill workers and day labourers, with of course in the larger streets, shopkeepers, generally of the inferior kind…Several of the great spinning mills of Belfast are located within or immediately adjoin the two districts, also foundries and other similar establishments largely employing the inhabitants, both young and old ,male and female’.

The symbolic frontier between the Catholic and Protestant working class neighbourhoods was the ‘Boyne Bridge’, a railway bridge on Durham Street. A Constabulary barracks was located on nearby Albert Street, intended to keep the two sides apart. The Irish Constabulary[7] was an all-Ireland armed police force responsible to the Irish Executive in Dublin Castle. In Belfast they were regarded as a fairly neutral force, but there were only 65 constables stationed in the city, not even nearly enough to keep order in the face of widespread disturbances.

Much more partisan were the Belfast Borough Police (also known as the ‘Town Police’), 160 strong, only 5 of whose officers were Catholics and who were under the control of the town council, which itself was controlled by Protestant Conservatives. The Town Police had reportedly acted in a partisan manner in favour of the Protestants during the riots of 1857, and in 1864 the Inquiry commented that ‘Orangeism prevails to a considerable extent among its members’.[8]

Partly, rioting in Belfast reflected economic tensions. Catholic and Protestant workers competed with each other for jobs, with Protestants all but monopolising the better paid shipyard jobs, while the Catholics were more likely to be unskilled labours or ‘navvies’.

But communal violence was also about symbolic communal control of territory in the city and then, as it still is in the twenty first century, conflict was often caused by the attempt to openly display and to parade the symbols of their own communal identity into the ‘territory’ of the other.

The start of the riots

So it was in 1864. The Orange Order the Protestant fraternal and militantly ant-Catholic, organisation founded in 1795, had had its parades effectively banned in 1850 under the Party Procession Act which was brought in after the bloody faction fight between Orangemen and Catholic Ribbonmen at Dolly’s Brae in County Down in 1849, in which at least 30 people were killed.

The Act prohibited ‘marching together in procession in Ireland in a Manner calculated to create and perpetuate Animosities between different Classes of Her Majesty’s Subjects, and to endanger the public Peace’.

In August 1864, however, nationalists from Belfast travelled to Dublin for a mass rally there to honour the memory of Catholic nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell (who had died in 1847), culminating in a parade to lay the foundation stone to a statue to ‘the Liberator’ in Dublin’s main street.

Protestants in Belfast and particularly Orangemen, were outraged. Our anonymous letter writer, a Protestant himself, though not an Orangeman, opined, ‘This procession in my opinion was without doubt a party one and even worse’.[9] Green banners, green and white rosettes, repeal[10] scarves, the harp without the Crown, are party emblems as much as Orange flags and orange lilies. And the fact of this array being tolerated in the very seat of the Executive while the Emblems Act[11] was brought into operation against the Orangemen raised a spirit of defiance and naturally annoyed Protestants of all kinds.’

When the Belfast nationalists returned by train to the northern city, they were greeted at the train station by what our letter writer termed, ‘the Sandy Row rabble’, who stoned the nationalists leaving the train and burned an effigy of Daniel O’Connell.

That might have been an end to the affair, but the Protestant extremists proceeded to attempt to march on the Catholic Pound district. Police prevented them from entering the Lower Falls/Divis Street area but the following day loyalists in Sandy Row staged a mock funeral for O’Connell, again marching towards the Catholic district, The Pound, causing Catholic to mass to defend the area, tearing up the street paving stones which were stockpiled for missiles.

This confrontation triggered rioting between Catholics and Protestants all over Belfast, but particularly in the Sandy Row- Pound District in west Belfast and around the city’s dock and shipyards in the east, for over a week.[12]

The disturbances escalate

After the initial disturbances around the mock burial (August 9), the Riot Act was read, meaning that police were authorised to use deadly force to disperse crowds who disobeyed their orders. But the following day violence worsened with stone throwing on both sides.

Catholic churches and lay institutions such as Bankmore Female Penitentiary were attacked by the Protestant mob and Protestant schools were attacked in retaliation by Catholic ‘navvies’, with over 400 children inside, some of whom were injured. Stones were thrown through windows and shots fired by the Catholics.

Our letter writer remarked that ‘Roman Catholic navvies who unfortunately were employed here… walked through the principle part of the town, terrifying the inhabitants, barbarously attacked the Brown Street Schools, where the poor little children were at their lessons; but I need not enter into details. Neither side can boast of the spotless character of its champions.’

Mill workers of both religions were attacked on their way to work. Shots were fired on both sides, particularly in heavy rioting around St Malachi’s Roman Catholic Church, which was attacked by the Protestant mob on August 12 and which the Catholics turned out in force to defend. Several rioters were killed when the constabulary opened fire to prevent ‘the Sandy Row mob’ (the commission’s phrase) from attacking the Pound District at the Boyne Bridge on August 16.

A crowd of Protestant dock and shipyard workers marched from east Belfast that day and broke into gunsmiths on High Street, in the heart of the city’s commercial district, and distributed the firearms to their supporters. They also took picks and shovels and knives from a hardware shop. The Inquiry describes these events as ‘The most astonishing instance of lawless daring ever committed in a civilised community’.

Trains from Dublin were attacked and the passengers beaten, due to a rumour that Catholics from the south had come to aid their co-religionist in the rioting. There was also a ‘pitched battle’ between Protestant ships carpenters and Catholic navvies at the New Dock, which ended with the latter being driven into the shallow of the River Lagan. Our eyewitness described how, ‘The brave carpenters drove them into the slop land and then coolly fired on the unhappy wretches when struggling and sinking in the mud and succeeded in wounding several, some mortally and some  dangerously.’

Our letter writer managed to stay out of the way of most of the rioting, which mostly took place in the working class parts of the city; ‘the chief streets are free from annoyance except when the mobs make an occasional irruption’. He remarked that, ‘being neither a soldier nor a special [constable] nor a reporter, I have the fear of being Godfreyed [killed while a bystander][13] before my eyes and seek no hazards. Truly it were an inglorious end to be shot by a Pound Street ruffian or a Harcourt Street butcher’.

He did however witness the looting of gun shops on High Street in the city centre by the Protestant mob; ‘I saw a mob enter a hardware shop on High Street at twelve o’clock noon and seize pitchforks and large knives and after tear down a gunsmith’s shutters and appropriate the firearms. And where were the hussars [cavalry]? Where were the infantry? Where the constabulary? Where the local force? Where the magistrates? An echo answers – where?’

‘Blame they most truly deserve’

The Commission of Inquiry was also highly critical of the forces of order in their report in November of that year.

One problem was political. Belfast was divided by the river Lagan, with most of the city, to the west of it in County Antrim, while the eastern part, including the shipyards in County Down, in another jurisdiction. This hampered coordination of police forces.

In addition since the magistrates who controlled the police were elected from the Protestant dominated town council, there were doubts about their impartiality. As for the military, they appeared to be disoriented in the unfamiliar streets of Belfast, unclear about when and how much force they could use on the rioters. They seem to have managed to attract the opprobrium of both sides.

The letter writer described how ‘The conflicting accounts in the newspapers are amusing and sometimes absurd. The Orange journal accounts the praises of the Orangemen, their forbearance, their courage in defence of home and property, their avoidance of plunder except in the case of arms, the dreadful character of the Pound [Catholic] mobs. The Romish [Catholic] organ denounces the conduct of the Orangemen, asserts the necessity of the Catholic protecting themselves, their premises and their wrongs . And all write in blaming the conduct of our magistrates’

In this at least he letter writer concurred; ‘Blame they most truly deserve. Ere this [i.e. before this] they might know the character of our sons and by exercising a little severity a week ago, much bloodshed and anxiety would have been saved. A cavalry charge would then have effectually dispersed the rioters before the advancing bayonets of the constabulary would’.

The military searched the Sandy Row and Pound districts for arms, finding 21 weapons. However, the Inquiry judged this to be ‘very ineffectual’ given the number of weapons by then in circulation in the city owing to the looting of the gun shops.

Despite the now very considerable military presence there was still a final round of violence. On August 18 fighting broke out when rival funeral parties of those already killed in the rioting collided. The last fatality, a shooting, occurred on August 19. Thereafter, following ten days of violence, the riots finally petered out and calm was mostly restored to the streets of Belfast.

Aftermath: disbanding the Belfast Police

The most lasting legacy of the riots, apart from the loss of life and damage to property, was the disbandment of the Belfast Borough Police, whose conduct in the rioting was heavily criticised by the Commission of Inquiry.

They were replaced as guardians of order in the northern city by the Irish Constabulary, who were under the control, not of the town council, but of the British administration in Ireland, based in Dublin Castle.

Moreover, many of their rank and file were Catholics recruited in the south of Ireland and their deployment in Belfast outraged many Orangemen and other loyalists.

According to Mark Radford: ‘The Belfast News Letter referred to the ‘green badge of disgrace’ and prisoners in custody cursed the Belfast RIC for being, ‘a Popish force, a bloody lot of Fenians [and] Popish brats’ in the mistaken belief, perhaps, that the Belfast force consisted solely of Catholic policemen.’

In riots to come in Belfast, notably the anti-Home Rule disturbances of 1886, the Constabulary and the Protestant extremists would have a most adversarial relationship.

Sadly many of the patterns of violence notable in the disturbances of 1864 – the initial clash over a disputed parade, followed by prolonged violence around contested urban territory, remained familiar throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and even into the twenty first.

As for our anonymous letter writer, he displayed a familiar Belfast stoicism, writing that he smiled when he received letters worried about his safety. He concluded with a quotation assuring his concerned friends in Britain that he was safe, and the rioting had left him untouched; “I think it necessary to quiet you the solicitude which you undoubtedly feel by telling you that our calamities and terror are now at an end.”

In the short term at least, this was true. But rioting in Belfast was very far from being consigned to history after the disturbances of August 1864.

References and notes

[1] This, unsigned, letter was supplied to me by David Williams, who writes: ‘This came from my Great Uncle James Hunter Tate’s (born 1884)  house  who lived in Helen’s Bay’. Digital copies of the letter can be made available to readers on request.

[2] Report of Commission of Inquiry into 1864 Belfast Riots, online here

[3] Commission of Inquiry, 1864, also, Sean Farrell, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886, p.160

[4] Commission of Inquiry 1864

[5] Joe Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1918, p.51. For an overview see Belfast Riots: a Short History.

[6] Commission of Inquiry 1864

[7] Not yet renamed ‘Royal’ that would come in 1867, for their role in putting down the Fenian rebellion of that year.

[8] Commission of Inquiry 1864

[9]‘Party’ here means divisive, probably sectarian in modern usage.

[10]O’Connell led a movement for ‘Repeal of the Union’

[11] This refers to the Party Procession Act of 1850 which was brought in after the bloody faction fight between Orangemen and Catholics at Dolly’s Brae in 1849. The Act effectively banned Orange parades.

[12] Sean Farrell, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886, p.160-161, Commission of Inquiry1864

[13] This is in reference to a story, apparently well know at the time of Michael Godfrey of the bank of England who ill-advisedly went into the front line to watch the siege of Namur in 1695 and had his head taken off by a cannonball in front of King William I

By John Dorney

In early April 1920, a young IRA man, Christopher ‘Todd’ Andrews was arrested by British troops at his family home in Terenure, Dublin.

The first he knew of his arrest was when his mother appeared at his bedroom door with a candle, followed by a polite but businesslike young British lieutenant, who told him to dress and take a few belongings.

Had it been a year later, Andrews wrote, and his captors Black and Tans, he could well have been summarily shot, as were two of his friends, a year later who ‘were told to run for it and were riddled with bullets as they did so’.

As it was though, he had dumped his revolver earlier at a safe house and ‘was neither surprised nor dismayed by news of my arrest’. The young Andrews saw it as rite of passage that every Irish rebel went through. The British troops, he remarked were friendly, one even told him ‘keep your heart up Paddy’ as he was driven by lorry first to the Portobello Barracks and then to Mountjoy Gaol. [1]

Little did Andrews know that he would go on to spend ten days on hunger strike and then be released to jubilant crowds outside Mountjoy Gaol, in one of the most dramatic events of the Irish revolution.

Internment

Andrews was arrested as part of a general ‘round up’ by the British Army from January 1920 onwards. The Lord Lieutenant Sir John French, after his own near death at the hands of the IRA in December 1919, had pressured the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Ian McPherson into a policy of wholesale arrest, internment and in some cases deportation to England of ‘dangerous persons’, by the military.[2]

In Dublin alone there were over 1000 raids and 86 arrests in January, including 6 members of the Dail; the republican parliament declared in 1919. Hundreds more arrests followed in February, March and early April. Many arrested were low level activists and not all of them were republicans, trade union officials also being targeted. Those captured, however, included many important IRA figures, including Peadar Clancy, deputy commander of the Dublin Brigade.[3]

In Cork there were also hundreds of arrests of IRA officers, which Liam Deasy, IRA commander, called, a ‘serious blow’.[4]

A curfew was also instituted in Dublin from midnight to 5am and anyone violating was arrested. Republican propagandist Erskine Childers wrote, ‘as the citizens go to bed, the barracks spring to life, lorries, tanks and armoured cars with searchlights muster in fleets. A thunder of knocks, no time to dress (even for women alone) or the door will crash in. On opening, in charge the soldiers with fixed bayonets and full war kit.’[5]

The British Army report on the campaign in Dublin remarked that in early 1920, ‘things were looking black for Sinn Fein, many leaders were in our hands and the activity of the Crown forces was on the increase’.[6]

The Army’s view was perhaps overly optimistic from their own point of view. The IRA had been attacking police barracks across the country since January. In early April they had systematically burned over 100 abandoned barracks all over Ireland as well as tax offices.

But the British policy of wholesale internment was overturned, in April 1920, not by force of arms but by an extraordinary combination of hunger strike, popular mobilisation and ultimately a work stoppage by the Irish trade unions that, for two days, brought the country to a standstill.

It was the most signal example of mass struggle, as opposed to small group guerrilla warfare, in the Irish War of Independence; exposing at once the shaky will of the British authorities and the fallacy that the struggle was merely one of an isolated ‘murder gang’ against the ‘forces of order’.

Hunger strike

Hunger strike was a weapon that Irish republicans happened upon, in imitation of the feminist Suffrage activists, who had employed the tactic prior to the First World War. It was a tactic of ‘moral force’, refusing food in protest against what activists considered illegitimate arrest.

In 1917, Irish Volunteer leader Thomas Ashe had died on hunger strike after force feeding in Mountjoy Gaol in Dublin, an event that had done much to galvanise public sympathy for the republican movement.

Now in 1920, it was a labour activist, William O’Brien, who first employed the hunger strike as a protest against his arrest without trial.

O’Brien, an official of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, was arrested on March 3 and was deported to Wormwood Scrubs prison in England. He went on hunger strike on March 18. The Irish Labour Party had his case raised in Parliament by the British Labour Party and on March 26, O’Brien was released.[7]

Perhaps inspired by O’Brien’s example, the republican prisoners in Mountjoy Gaol in Dublin, led by Peadar Clancy, followed suit. On April 5 36 of them refused food, followed by 30 more the day after. By April 9, 90 men were on strike.[8]

Their demands were for political status, but more concretely: better food, separation from ordinary criminal prisoners, no compulsory prison work, books, a weekly bath, the right to smoke and five hour exercise per day.[9]

The 18 year old Todd Andrews, who had been imprisoned for only two days, before the strike started, was very impressed by Clancy’s leadership, amounting almost to hero worship. Clancy ‘left on me the indelible impression of a superman, a man whose commands I at least would have had a compulsion to obey’.

On account of his youth, Andrews was told that he did not have to join the fast but he told the older men that he ‘thought it was my duty to strike with the others’. He, like the others, turned down the next meal delivered to their cells, a ‘miserable meal’ of a mug of soup, some potatoes and meat.[10]

The strike was on.

Mass protests

Within days, huge crowds had assembled outside Mountjoy Gaol, demonstrating for the release of the hunger strikers before they died. Very prominent were women activists, many of whom knelt in the front row of the crowds and said the Catholic rosary outside the prison.

The military remarked that, ‘large and menacing crowds, in some cases up to 20,000 congregated outside Mountjoy.[11] Photographs taken at the time show troops in steel helmets and fixed bayonets, as well as tanks, behind coils of barbed wire facing the crowds. At one point Royal Air Force planes flew at rooftop height over the protestors in an attempt to intimidate them.

By April 13, the military were beginning to consider the possibility the possibility of spraying the crowd with machine gun fire from the air in order to disperse them.[12]

Sinn Fein did their best to prevent a massacre, councillor John O’Mahoney telling the crowd to back off and that ‘the prayers of the people is the only effective weapon’. Later, IRA members stewarded the crowd to try to prevent an open confrontation with the troops.[13]

Todd Andrews, in Mountjoy, who had been taken into the prison hospital as a precaution, was elated to hear from the warders of the mass protests outside, but bemused by a newspaper report that he ‘a boy of 18…had collapsed and was in a state of delirium’. He was worried however on seeing photographs of his distressed father outside, who was pictured speaking to republican activist Maude Gonne and Laurence O’Neill, the mayor of Dublin. [14]

The perception on the outside, though not the reality, was that the prisoners were on the verge of death after six days of fasting.

General Strike

The hunger strike and the demonstrations it sparked in Dublin were all worrisome for the British administration in Ireland and for the government in London. They were well aware of the radicalising effect the death of Thomas Ashe had had in 1917 and had no wish to see fresh republican martyrs in the prisons.

John French, however, the Lord Lieutenant, who had been since mid 1918 a kind of military governor in Ireland, was against any concessions, preferring to let the prisoners die than to reverse, as he saw it, the progress the military had made since they had commenced mass arrest in January.

What brought the situation to a head was the action of the Irish Trade Union Council, who called a general strike for April 13, ‘in protest at the inhuman treatment of political prisoners and to demand their immediate release’.[15] The trade unionists had seen many of their own members arrested and acted on their own initiative, apparently without consulting with Sinn Fein or the IRA.

The mobilisation they commanded was impressive. Outside the unionist dominated north, Ireland came to a standstill for two days. While there was some intimidation of reluctant workers and business owners – in Naas, County Kildare, for instance, ‘Red Guards’ forced the ships to shut – the strike could not have succeeded as it did without mass support.

Trains and other public transport stopped running, pickets forced most shops to close and mass rallies were held in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Sligo and elsewhere. In Kenmare, in Kerry trade unionists first ensured that the town’s businesses were shut and then paraded to the church where they said rosary for the release of the prisoners.[16]

Most extraordinary of all were the efforts of the strike committees in towns all over the country, often styling themselves ‘Soviets’ after the workers councils in revolutionary Russia. They endeavoured to police the strike, setting food prices, distributing food and patrolling the streets to ‘keep order’. In Bagenalstown County Carlow, they even declared, ‘a Provisional Soviet Government’ at Kilmallock, County Limerick, ‘red flaggers stopped traffic’ and referred to themselves as a ‘Soviet regime’.[17]

Such tactics are probably realistically seen as a staple of popular labour militancy at the time than as attempts at workers’ revolution. Strike committees for instance issued orders not to interfere with British troops – ‘the forces of occupation’ – and the ‘Soviets’ were voluntarily disbanded as soon as the strike was over.

But what they did do was demonstrate the power of organised labour and after only two days of the general strike the British were ready to backtrack and talk to the hunger strikers.

Release

As a consequence of the strike, the British opened talks with the hunger strikers’ leader Peadar Clancy and offered him concessions, including political status and release on parole, both of which offers he refused. He remarked to his comrades, ‘the general strike has them beat’ and held out for release.[18]

There followed a remarkable foul up on the British side. First it was decided to release those prisoners who had not yet been charged with a crime after a medical inspection.

Someone blundered and in error, all prisoners, including non-political ones were released.  As British legal advisor WE Wylie remarked, ‘ jailbirds, political prisoners, petty thieves, every damn one of them. I nearly fainted when I heard it’.[19]

In an attempt to save some face, French the Lord Lieutenant proceeded to formally release all the  prisoners around the country to make it appear as if it was a preconceived policy of pardon. This amounted to hundreds of IRA prisoners, 100 in Cork alone for instance, as well as the ninety hunger strikers released in Dublin. Small wonder that a subsequent inquiry into the workings of Dublin Castle by a civil servant Warren Fisher, characterised it as ‘chaos’.

French was frozen out of the British administration in Ireland shortly afterwards, though he remained nominally as Lord Lieutenant, and Ian McPherson was replaced as Chief Secretary by Hamar Greenwood, on the recommendation of the new British military commander in Ireland, Nevil Macready.[20]

The released hunger strikers fond themselves to be popular heroes. Todd Andrews was taken out of Mountjoy in an ambulance, through a cheering crowd, ‘hysterical with joy’ to the Mater hospital, which he confessed, he scarcely needed. Within a few days he was back with his IRA company of Fourth Battalion, Dublin Brigade, planning to burn the local police barracks.[21]

For the British military, the whole affair was a disastrous humiliation; ‘the military and police secret service personnel were virtually driven off the streets, owing to those whom they had arrested now being set free and in many cases able to identify them… military and police activities abated …[the IRA’s] morale and truculence began to increase accordingly’.[22]

The British capitulation to the hunger strikers was a cardinal error on their part, making them look at the same time tyrannical but also weak-willed and easily beatable.

For the guerrillas of the IRA it was indeed a great morale boost. And for the labour movement it showed the great power they could wield by a general strike. But over the next year and a half, as the political conflict in Ireland became increasingly bloody, it was increasingly the gun rather than the moral force of the strike and the mass protest that would predominate.

Peadar Clancy, who had held the April 1920 hunger strike was summarily executed by the Auxiliaries in Dublin Castle after his arrest on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in November of that year.

References

[1] CS Andrews, Dublin Made Me (2008) p.144-145

[2] Richard Holmes, The Little Field Marshal, a Life of Sir John French, p.354. Arrest were made under section 14B of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA).

[3] Padraig Yeates, Dublin a City in Turmoil 1919-1921, p.105

[4] Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, p.56

[5] Quoted in C Desmond Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the Formative Years, p.263

[6] William Sheehan, ed. Fighting for Dublin, The British battle for Dublin 1919-1921, p.11

[7] Greaves, p.264

[8] It may be significant that one of the prisoners who joined the republican hunger strike in Mountjoy was also an official from the Transport Union, Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland p.128

[9] Charles Townsend, the Republic, The Struggle for Irish Independence, p.143

[10] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p.148-149

[11] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin p.12

[12] Ibid. p.13

[13] Kostick, Revolution in Ireland p.136

[14] Andrews, p.151

[15] Greaves, p.265

[16] Ibid.

[17] Greaves, p.265-266, See also, Kostick, Revolution in Ireland p.132-134

[18] Yeates, City in Turmoil, p113

[19] Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p.36

[20] Ibid.

[21] Andrews p.152-155

[22] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p.15

By Sean William Gannon

May 2020 marks the centenary of one of the most lamentable appointments in modern Irish history, that of Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor as ‘police advisor’ to the viceroy on 16 May 1920.

Four days previously, the British Cabinet had decided that ‘a special officer, with suitable qualifications and experience’ was now required ‘to supervise the entire organisation’ of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the war secretary, Winston Churchill, recommended Tudor for the job.[1]

Imperial soldier

But Tudor, a clergyman’s son from Devon, had no policing experience. He was in fact a life-long soldier who had made a successful army career. On leaving the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich in 1890, he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Artillery, serving first in India and then in South Africa during the period of the Second Anglo-Boer War: he was severely wounded at the Battle of Magersfontein in December 1899 but recovered well enough to return to duty. He was subsequently stationed in Britain, India, and Egypt.

Tudor served on the Western Front during the Great War, commanding the artillery of the 9^th (Scottish) Division and earning a reputation as a military tactician: he pioneered the use of smoke shells for screening and was one of the first proponents of predicted artillery fire. He held command of the division from March 1918 until it was disbanded in March 1919, and was ultimately promoted to the rank of major-general.

Tudor saw more service in India and Egypt before his May 1920 appointment to Ireland.

It is generally accepted that his chief qualification for the position of ‘police advisor’ in Ireland was his close friendship with the war secretary, Winston Churchill, forged during shared army service in India in the mid-1890s. Indeed, writing to Churchill in September 1923 when he was serving in another Churchill-secured role, he acknowledged that he would ‘probably have been on half pay long ago for a considerable time instead of having three or more interesting years’ had it not been for his friend’s interventions.[2]

‘Chief of Police’

Tudor, who following the retirement of RIC Inspector-General T. J. Smith in November 1920, styled himself ‘chief of police’, saw his task in Ireland as nothing less than the restoration of law and order through a revitalized police operation.

In his view, ‘the whole country was intimidated [by Sinn Féin] and would thank God for strong measures’ and he proposed, amongst others, the blanket introduction of identity cards, communal punishments such as fines, the replacement of civil courts with courts martial, and the deportation of republican prisoners.

He also recommended flogging for hair cutting and other ‘outrages against women’ and the purging of the Irish Post Office of ‘traitors’.[3]

As the then flailing RIC was clearly inadequate to the task Tudor set it,  he embarked on a programme of militarization aimed at boosting its counterinsurgency capability and force morale – replacing the force’s obsolete weaponry with more modern issue, restructuring its feeble intelligence service, improving coordination with the military, and appointing old soldiers to senior roles.

Most notably, he installed Brigadier-General Ormond de l’Épée Winter (an old army friend) as head of intelligence and deputy chief of police. The centrepiece of Tudor’s plan to reinvigorate the police counterinsurgency was the formation of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC (ADRIC), a 1,500-strong gendarmerie-style striking force composed of demobilized British officers. Introduced in summer 1920, 17 companies between 80 and 100 men-strong were deployed to areas of significant insurgent activity where, well armed and highly mobile, they tried to root out and neutralize the local IRA.

Tudor’s militarization of the RIC indeed proved calamitous. Within six months of Tudor’s appointment, the force was internationally notorious, particularly the ADRIC which, while operating quasi-autonomously, remained under nominal RIC command.

In May 1920, chief of the imperial general staff, Sir Henry Wilson, denounced Tudor’s plan for the force as ‘truly a desperate and hopeless expedient … bound to fail’ and his prediction that it would inevitably have ‘no discipline, no esprit de corps, no cohesion, no training’ proved prescient.[4] The Auxiliary Division went on to commit the most infamous crimes of the entire revolutionary period (for example, the torture and murder of the Loughnane brothers, the shooting of Ellen Quinn and Fr Griffin, the burning of Cork, and the Limerick ‘Curfew Murders’) with what appeared to be Tudor’s tacit support.[5]

For while paying lip-service to the requirement for police discipline and criticizing property destruction and reckless, wild fire, he adopted a conspicuously lenient approach to reprisals, which shaded into what assistant undersecretary at Dublin Castle, Mark Sturgis, termed ‘passive approval’ at certain times.[6]

Most notoriously, Tudor reinstated 21 Auxiliaries dismissed by ADRIC commander Frank Crozier in consequence of a looting and burning in Trim, resulting in Crozier’s resignation. Tudor was, however, also constitutionally blind to bad police conduct.

As Sturgis observed in January 1921, ‘he does not consciously deceive but his belief in all that’s good of his Black and Tans and his inability to believe a word against them is superhuman’.[7]

By spring 1921, Tudor had lost the confidence of both the general officer commanding in Ireland, Nevil Macready (to whom Tudor effectively reported although, technically, he outranked him) and Sir Henry Wilson who, in March 1921, wrote in his diary: ‘I am certain that Tudor, Winter and a whole crowd of those wild devils ought to be packed off’.[8]

Tudor’s failure to appreciate the conflict’s political context lost him the confidence of the government in London as well. Thus, Wilson spoke for most on the British side when he appraised Tudor as ‘a gallant fellow on service, but a man of no balance, knowledge or judgement and therefore a deplorable selection for his present post’.[9]

Tudor’s post was abolished in consequence of the RIC’s disbandment in 1922 and he once again required work. Once again his friend Churchill obliged. Churchill was now secretary of state at the Colonial Office, the Middle East Department (MED) of which bore full responsibility for the recently acquired Palestine Mandate.

Palestine

The rationalization of the territory’s security forces was a policy priority at the time, Churchill’s scheme to effect this focussed on the reduction and ultimate removal of its expensive British Army garrison, and the contingent boosting of its civil policing services.

The centrepiece of this scheme was the raising and deployment of a striking force/riot squad to assist the locally recruited Palestine Gendarmerie and Palestine Police forces maintain public order.

This new British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie (British Gendarmerie), overwhelmingly recruited from RIC sources in spring 1922, was supported by Indian troop units and the Royal Air Force (RAF) which the Colonial Office believed had demonstrated the efficacy and cost-efficiency of air policing during the anti-British rebellion in Mesopotamia in 1920.

Churchill first considered Tudor for the position of Palestine’s general officer commanding. But with primary responsibility for public order being devolved onto the territory’s civil forces, his appointment as director of the department of public security, giving him control of the Palestine Police and both gendarmeries, appeared a more appropriate choice.

In the event, Churchill decided to combine the two posts and install his friend at the helm: Tudor was appointed General Officer Commanding (with the rank of Vice Air Marshal) and Inspector-General of Police and Prisons (GOC-IPP) in February and ‘assumed command of all forces, civil and military, employed on imperial defence and internal security in Palestine in [this] dual capacity’ on 15 June 1922.[10]

As with his placement as ‘police advisor’ in Ireland, this appointment has been criticized by historians as patronage at its worst – both posts paid a handsome £3,300 gross salary per year and Tudor’s service in both Ireland and Palestine counted towards qualification for a major-general’s pension.

Yet, there was agreement among officials in the Middle Eastern Department (MED) that Tudor was the ideal choice for the job. According to its assistant secretary, Hubert Young, he was ‘a really capable and experienced soldier who knows all about police work’, and its military advisor, Richard Meinertzhagen agreed, advising Churchill that Tudor’s ‘knowledge of Arabic, his experience of police work, his military record – make him peculiarly fitted for the post’, not to mention that fact that he was ‘familiar with the new [British] Gendarmerie, they are practically his own child and they know and understand him’.[11]

Tudor had learned Arabic while serving in Egypt and passed a first-class interpreter’s examination in the language, an important consideration for Palestine where, with few exceptions, the British security forces were entirely ignorant of the vernaculars. Tudor also, as Meinertzhagen pointed out, knew the British Gendarmerie well.

He had devised, recruited, and organized, and (prior to embarkation for Palestine) administered the force and he was personally and professionally acquainted with many of its officers and men. During a series of valedictory inspections of detachments of disbanding RIC in March and early April 1922, Tudor made a point of saying that he looked forward to meeting some of them again in Palestine.[12]

However, MED officials quickly repented of their support for Tudor’s candidature. For although eminently suitable on paper, Tudor proved ill-suited to the job –  he being an intensely difficult man with whom both subordinates and superiors found it extremely challenging to work. This was particularly evident in respect of his dealings with the British Gendarmerie, which he so regarded as the mainstay of public security in Palestine that he devoted much of his energy micromanaging the force’s affairs.

He maintained generally difficult relations with its commandant, Brigadier-General Angus McNeill,  as a consequence, exacerbated by the fact that McNeill had not been Tudor’s choice for the job. Tudor had strongly recommended the appointment of Ormond Winter but the latter was deemed wholly unsuitable by the MED, on probable  account of his unorthodox professional style which had divided opinion in Dublin Castle, during Winter’s time as head of intelligence in Ireland.

Just two months after Tudor’s arrival in Palestine on 22 June, McNeill was complaining of his short temper and general irascibility, and an impetuous nature which saw him ‘continually starting wild cat schemes without due consideration’.[13] One year later, he was denouncing him as ‘quite the worst commander I have ever served under’ – so dictatorial, capricious, and ‘hopeless at administration’ that ‘if he remains in command either I shall be under arrest for mutiny or he will be murdered by one of his own Black and Tans’.[14]

Tudor’s own superiors in the Colonial Office and Air Ministry found him equally difficult. His outright refusal properly to manage his dual GOC-IPP role was their particular bane. Churchill had instructed Tudor on his appointment to keep ‘his military and civil functions … entirely separate … and discharged through separate channels’, but Tudor wilfully blurred the distinction entirely.[15]

This was particularly pronounced in the case of the British Gendarmerie which, although semi-military in character, formed part of Palestine’s civil forces. Yet Tudor administered it through his military staff and addressed all correspondence on matters pertaining to the Air Ministry rather than the Colonial Office.

One month after his arrival in Palestine, he was asked by RAF chief Hugh Trenchard to desist from this practice. Yet he persisted to the fury of both departments, Air Ministry officials coming to believe that he had had a policy of obeying its orders only when it suited his purposes. MED official Gerard Clauson attributed Tudor’s obnoxious behaviour to his sheer inability as a seasoned soldier ‘to think along civil lines’.

The fact that Ireland was a war-zone and the RIC a military force during the entire period of his command there meant that he had no idea how an ordinary police force was administered, and consequently ran the British Gendarmerie ‘on the same lines as the Auxiliary Division in Ireland, that is on military lines’.[16]

Nine months later, he complained that Tudor was still treating orders given by the civil authorities ‘with disrespect whenever it [suited] him to do so’, particularly the Palestine government of high commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel, towards which was ‘constantly adopting an attitude of independence’.[17]

‘I am not ever going to return’: the abrupt end of Tudor’s marriage

Tudor’s standing with Samuel himself was further undermined by the manner in which he conducted his personal affairs. Tudor had married Eva Edwards in 1903, and their children (a son and three daughters) were born between 1905 and 1913. But they had endured long periods of separation from them on account of Tudor’s military career. Although Lady Tudor had been either unwilling or unable to join him in Ireland, she fully intended to accompany him to Palestine, but delayed her departure due to the death of her father.

Shortly afterwards, however, Tudor demanded that she divorce him, which evidently came as a great shock, for she refused, insisting that she would join him in Palestine instead. Despite Tudor’s instructions that she remain in England, she travelled to Palestine in February 1923 to end to what she described as their ‘absurd estrangement’.

Tudor, who had her travelling facilities stopped at Kantara, initially refused to see her but finally relented, only to reissue his demand for a divorce which, once again, she rejected. Tudor refused to cohabit with her on a visit home to England in April writing: ‘I want you to understand clearly, that I am not going to ever return in any circumstances. Neither will I consent to receive you here [in London] or in Palestine’. This led Lady Tudor to successfully apply for a decree of restitution of conjugal rights (a legal ruling compelling a married couple to live together again) which Tudor ignored.

Although the couple now effectively separated, they never divorced, and legal wrangles over maintenance payments continued for years.[18] Tudor’s personal difficulties were widely reported in the British press and became grist to Jerusalem’s gossip mill after what McNeill referred to as Lady Tudor’s ‘rather mysterious visit’ to the country in 1923.[19]

Samuel, described by his son as having ‘ideas of morality in general [that] were puritanical in the extreme’, was thoroughly scandalized by Tudor’s behaviour and gradually withdrew his support for him.[20]

So unwanted a presence did Tudor become that it was decided to terminate his employment under the cover of abolishing his post. Tudor ‘retired’ as GOC-IPP in March 1924, McNeill speaking for most people in Palestine when wrote in his diary after seeing him off: ‘I never wish again to serve under such a man. He has been no use to us officially or socially since he dropped out of the clouds … twenty-one months ago’.[21]

In keeping with form, Trenchard thanked Tudor on announcement of his retirement for making the Air Ministry’s task ‘in running a new responsibility’ in Palestine ‘as easy as possible’ and Tudor left Palestine unaware of his poor reputation.[22]

To his mind he had, despite insufficient resources, made a considerable success. His ‘own child’, the British Gendarmerie, had ensured inter-communal quiet between Arabs and Jewish settlers, while the serious problem of brigandage was finally being taken in hand.

Moreover, Tudor had very much enjoyed his time there. Palestine was, Tudor told Churchill, a ‘rest cure after Ireland’, giving him time to indulge his twin passions of photography and flying: he took flying lessons in a Bristol F2B and accumulated over 100 hours of flight time during his 21 months there.[23]

In the course of his service in Palestine, he was also knighted, in 1923 (KCB on the New Year’s Honours List).

Retirement in Canada

On leaving Palestine, Tudor returned to Britain. He retired from the army in March 1925 and emigrated to Newfoundland in November where he lived out the rest of his life. It has been suggested that this move was prompted by fears for his safety: according to his biographer, he had continued to receive death threats after leaving Ireland in 1922 and it has been suggested that he believed himself to be still under IRA interdict three years later.[24]

Certainly, Tudor them took IRA threats seriously, especially subsequent to the June 1922 murder of Sir Henry Wilson outside his London home. (“Sir Henry’s was the name at the top of the so-called Death List. General Tudor’s came next”).[25]

But evidence has yet to emerge that he remained under threat, apart from the rather fanciful story of an abortive attempt on his life many years later in Newfoundland recounted by Tim Pat Coogan, citing mysterious ‘sources of [his] own’. According to Coogan, two would-be IRA assassins were dispatched to Newfoundland to kill him but decided to make confessions prior to the murder; the priest dissuaded them from carrying it out and they made their way back to Ireland.[26]

Whatever the truth of this tale, Tudor’s reasons for relocating to Canada were probably more prosaic in nature. First, he desired to move on from his family and, indeed, the scandal in which his abandonment of it had resulted. Secondly, he saw no employment prospects in Britain.

As he told Churchill when news of his removal from Palestine came through, there were few military vacancies suitable for a soldier of his rank and it was ‘not too easy to find a job even in civil life’ either.[27] The fact that he lived openly in Newfoundland – his address and number were listed in the telephone directory – further suggests that the move was not motivated by fears for his safety and he regularly returned to Britain in the interwar years.

Tudor worked as a fish buyer in Newfoundland, first for Ryan & Company in Bonavista, and subsequently for George M. Barr, a successful English fish exporter based in St John’s and a man with whom he developed a close friendship.

Tudor also moved easily in the city’s ‘loyal’ social circles. He was a regular guest at the British governor’s house and was introduced to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth when they visited St John’s in June 1939. (According to one local history, the King asked him if he was the Tudor of Black and Tan (in)fame, much to the general’s embarrassment).He was also an active member of the local sports scene, enjoying boxing, horse racing, polo, and golf.

Tudor suffered significant ill-health in later years (including the loss of his sight) and was cared for by his long-time companion, an Irish Catholic named Monica McCarthy.

He died in the veterans’ pavilion of St John’s General Hospital on 25 September 1965, aged 94 and was buried with full military honours provided by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, a component of his old 9th Scottish Division.

References

[1] According to Sir Henry Wilson, Churchill first choice for the post was actually Dubliner, General Sir Edward Bulfin, but he turned it down. D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British police and auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford, 2011), 32; Imperial War Museum (IWM), Sir Henry Wilson collection, Diaries: 28 Mar. 1921.

[2] Churchill College, Cambridge, Churchill papers (CHAR) 2/126/43, Tudor to Churchill, 21 Sept. 1923.

[3] British National Archives (TNA), Cabinet papers, CAB 24/109/26.

[4] Charles Townshend, The Republic: the fight for Irish independence (London, 2013), p. 139.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Michael Hopkinson (ed.), The last days of Dublin Castle: the Mark Sturgis diaries (Dublin, 1999), p. 95.

[7] Ibid., p. 110.

[8] IWM, Henry Wilson diaries: 16 Mar. 1921.

[9] Ibid, 28 Mar. 1921.

[10] ‘Report on Palestine Administration, 1922’ (London, HMSO, 1923), 38.

[11] TNA, Colonial Office files (CO) 733/18/397, Young to Shuckburgh, 13 Feb. 1922; TNA, CO/733/18/406, Meinertzhagen, ‘Draft note to Secretary of State’, 22 Feb. 1922.

[12] Irish Times, 5 Apr. 1922.

[13] Middle East Centre Archive, Oxford (MECA), Angus McNeill collection, Diaries: 15 Aug. 1922.

[14] MECA, McNeill Diaries: 10 Aug., 26 Nov. 1923.

[15] TNA, CO/733/19/335, Churchill, Memorandum on Tudor’s appointment, undated, Feb. 1922.

[16] TNA, CO/733/29/403-4, Clauson, Colonial Office minute, 26 Dec. 1922.

[17] TNA, CO/733/48/188, Clauson, Colonial Office minute, 13 Sept. 1923.

[18] Quotations from correspondence in TNA, J77/1990/2359, ‘Divorce Court file 2359: Tudor v Tudor’.

[19] MECA, McNeill diaries: 15 February 1923.

[20] Edwin Samuel, A lifetime in Jerusalem (London: 1970), p. 8.

[21] MECA, McNeill diaries: 30 Mar. 1924.

[22] RAF Museum London, Trenchard collection, MFC76/1/285, Trenchard to Tudor, 21 Nov. 1923.

[23] RAF Museum, Trenchard collection, Tudor to Churchill, 1 Oct. 1922.

[24] IWM, Misc. 175/2685, Joy Cave, A gallant gunner general: the life and times of Sir H. Hugh Tudor, K.C.B., C.M.G., pp 326.

[25] Ibid., p. 327.

[26] Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever green is worn: the story of the Irish Diaspora (London, 2000), p. 416.

[27] Churchill College, CHAR/2/126/43, Tudor to Churchill, 21 Sept. 1923.

By Barry Sheppard

The depiction of a family, in rags and despairing at their present situation was designed to show that the ordinary people of Ireland were no better off under a decade of Cumann na nGaedheal rule than they were under the British.

The sight of this family, struggling under this administration, just out of reach of the promised land of plenty helped stir emotions and strike a chord with those who wanted political change.

While it is an obvious cliché to say a picture is worth a thousand words, the editorial cartoon can have a tremendous impact upon the readership of the popular press in any number of countries.  Historian of cartoons, Thomas Milton Kimnetz argued that they are ‘an excellent method for disseminating highly emotional attitudes’.[1]  This argument holds true, especially in times of war, revolution and upheaval.

In an Irish context, this has been shown in the work of Felix Larkin on the Freeman’s Journal cartoonist Ernest Forbes,[2] and in James Curry’s study of Ernest Kavanagh, the illustrator in the radical Irish Worker publication.[3]  These studies cover what we now term the Irish revolutionary period, and show the genius of the artists in capturing complex political themes.

Indeed, as recent commemoration events have shown the actions of one hundred years ago still have the power to elicit highly emotional responses, one can guess what impact representations of these events in the popular press had at the time.  What can be said, however about periods following revolution? Feelings were still raw, yet society was attempting to move on from the upheaval and bloodshed of the late 1910s and early 1920s. How did the artist capture these themes, in a period when political life was still precarious, and the destination still uncertain?

This article will examine the cartoons of Irish Press illustrator, Victor Brown which appeared in the first years of the publication, from 1931-1933. Covering themes of Irish identity, the continued influence of Britain in Irish affairs, and the thorny issue of the Oath of Allegiance, they helped promote Fianna Fail’s political policies to the Irish public via this brand new news source.

Fianna Fail and the rise of the Irish Press

In a fractured society, divided by bitter civil war memories and a partitioned island, many questions were left unanswered and ambitions unrealised.  Ideals which had bounded men and women together in revolution were now either adulterated or dismissed altogether.

One side of the civil war, anti-treaty republicans were licking their wounds and staring down the barrel of electoral oblivion. Faced with a decision of continuing on his path of futility or adapting to the new political dispensation, their leaders had to grapple with difficult decisions, not only to rejoin the political race, but to revive the radicalism which had initially inspired young men and women into action.

This radicalism was now in many cases dormant among the post-civil war Irish population, who had been ground down by violence and upheaval.

In order to achieve their aims, a number of things were needed. A certain break from the recent political past was urgently required.  So too was a vehicle to disseminate ideas which would point to a new future.  This path was embarked upon when Eamonn de Valera and his loyalists departed Sinn Fein in March 1926 after ‘the Long Fellow’s’ proposed motion on the Oath of Allegiance was defeated.[4]  De Valera saw the futility of Sinn Fein’s stance and ‘lost no time in building up an alternative power base’, attracting what Lyons called the ‘more moderate Sinn Fein adherents’.[5]   This group of political dissidents would form Fianna Fáil later that year.

Despite their moderation in relation to the Sinn Fein rump, they still had to present the newly-formed Fianna Fáil as a radical alternative to the dominant Cumann na nGaedheal which under the stewardship of W.T. Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins et al, had began to stagnate.  However, in order to present their radical programme to the Irish public, a national newspaper was needed. The new publication needed to reach those who had been defeated a decade earlier and those who had grown weary of the politics which had dominated since the conclusion of the civil war.

Many within the republican movement had long been aware of the need for some kind of national newspaper which would carry their viewpoints.  As early as 1922 de Valera noted that the propaganda against them was overwhelming.  He lamented “we haven’t a single daily newspaper on our side, and only one or two small weeklies”.[6]

Besides the launch in 1927 of the weekly Fianna Fáil newsletter The Nation, this situation wasn’t rectified until the publication of the Irish Press newspaper in 1931.  The Irish Press would prove an invaluable tool to disseminate Fianna Fáil policies and party propaganda, as well as an increased emphasis on native language, games, and industry.   The paper was a tremendous success, and has been recognised as an important factor in the elections which brought Fianna Fáil to power.

Victor Brown and the disseminating the Republican message

A small, but integral part of this new publication was the editorial cartoons by Press cartoonist Victor ‘Bee’ Brown. Brown was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1900. The son of a soldier in the British Army, he had spent a period of his childhood in Ireland while his father was stationed in the country.

He returned to Ireland in his twenties, studying Irish art, and contributing to numerous book illustrations and magazines, as well as his own vast catalogue of paintings. A friend of W.B. Yeats, he had a tremendous interested in Celtic art forms.

While it is unclear as to how he came to be on the books of the new Irish Press newspaper, his impact in the early years of the publication is undeniable. His work encapsulated much of Fianna Fáil’s policies in the early years, as well lampooning their political rivals in easily-digestible depictions in prominent sections of the paper.  Under the expert guidance of first Irish Press editor, the renowned Republican Frank Gallagher, Brown’s cartoons provided an effective political weapon in the lead up to the 1932 and 1933 general elections.

The Irish Press launched on 5^th September 1931. From the outset the paper was keen to stress its Irish Republican credentials. The mother of two Irish Republican icons Pádraig and Willie Pearse ceremonially switched on the paper’s printing press, with the picture appearing on the front page of the first edition. The overt republicanism of the newspaper and by association the Fianna Fáil party concerned many in the political establishment.  Much had occurred in the years from the foundation of Fianna Fáil to the establishment of the Press, events which had heightened political tensions in the new state, most notably the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins by the IRA in 1927.

Fianna Fáil’s connections with the IRA were widely reported on in these years.  As well as alleged links to the illegal armed organsiation, Fianna Fáil’s dubious political relationship to the state was a bone of contention among established politicians.  Kevin Boland, speaking in relation to the first Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, held in November 1926, notes: ‘The only real difference with Sinn Fein was in the matter of tactics.  There was no acceptance of the legitimacy of the Free State […] It was merely a question of recognising the de facto situation for practical reasons’.[7]  This stance naturally caused great concern among the Irish political elites.

The party’s ambiguous relationship with constitutional politics had a large question mark hanging over it at the best of times.  However, a quip by future Fianna Fáil leader Sean Lemass about being a ‘slightly constitutional party’[8] during a Dáil debate on prisoners in 1928 ruffled many political feathers and is still an instantly-recognisable quote to this day. Key figures in the party such as Lemass and Frank Aiken had close associations with the IRA, an organisation which had ‘never disarmed and still intended, when the time was right, to overthrow the Free State by force of arms’.[9]

It was against this backdrop of political distrust and continued IRA activity that the Irish Press hit the newsstands on Saturday, 5^th September 1931.

Far from mollifying concerns over intentions to overthrow the still-young state, the newspaper published an incendiary cartoon which hinted at overthrowing the old order by revolutionary means.

A depiction of a scene from the French Revolution shows a line of people representing the ‘old order’ in the Irish state on their way to the guillotine. A smiling executioner, holding a parchment, points to the line of the condemned, exclaiming “We’ve got them all on the list, and they’ll none of them be missed”.

This was a bold move for a publication not yet one day old.  Outside of what could be viewed as its intentions for certain sections of Irish society, the depiction of what was classed as the old order, figures in top hats and refined clothing, separate from the ‘real’ Irish people was a theme which would continue throughout Brown’s run as Press cartoonist.

This was perhaps, reflective of prevailing attitudes at the time, certainly among those in Fianna Fáil circles.  Sean Lemass, as Bryce Evans notes, would often caricature the party’s opposition as toffs in top hats, a stance which was a ‘class criticism with Anglophobic undercurrents’.[10]

Painting the opposition as the ‘other’ or alien to Ireland was a strong theme in Brown’s cartoons, ironically so, given his own background.  Nevertheless, it was integral to painting Fianna Fáil on the right side of Irish society. This is something to which we will return. However, being on the right side of society at the present time was something, being on the right side of history was an altogether more important issue. Indeed, one position could not be consolidated without the long story of the other being told, and told correctly.

The importance of carrying on a separatist tradition which spanned generations was a story which Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press had to get right if they were to portray themselves as the rightful inheritors of the tradtion, and Brown’s cartoons were hugely important in framing this story.  From the outset the tone of the Irish Press signalled that the paper and Fianna Fáil were on an election footing.

The wrongs of the recent past were important to emphasise, and this is something which Brown did with aplomb.  However, framing the story of the more distant past was integral to presenting where Irish society now found itself.

‘The Perpetual Flame’

This is perhaps best illustrated by an offering which appeared in time for Republican Easter commemorations in late March 1932. Entitled ‘The Perpetual Flame’, the cartoon featured the figure of Libertas standing aside the perpetual flame which carried within each of its flickers a date of past rebellions in Ireland from 1641 through to 1922.

This cartoon placed Fianna Fáil as the true inheritors of a long and varied Irish Republican tradition. While Brown was the artist, there is little doubt that Frank Gallagher played an important role in its construction.

Gallagher had a strong pedigree in the newspaper industry. A trained journalist by the time he joined the Irish Volunteers in the autumn of 1917, he worked for a number of publications, including the Cork Free Press.  However, it was working alongside Desmond Fitzgerald, and then Erskine Childers in the Irish Bulletin during the War of Independence ‘that his talents were given a proper showcase’.[11]

It was in this publication; in the lead up to the 1921 truce that Gallagher wrote on the ‘permanent tradition’ of Irish Republicanism, stating that the movement had ‘its roots deep in the past and representing the permanent tradition of the Irish race’.[12]

This is unquestionably represented in the Easter 1932 cartoon of ‘the Perpetual Flame’ which streamlines a long and complicated history to produce a simplified narrative.  While this was simply if expertly done within the pages of the Irish Press, it is not to say that this wasn’t a commonly-held belief among the wider Irish Republican community.

Identifying the enemy

Being on the right side of history means little if one could not successfully identify ‘the other’, that is the enemy of your viewpoints and beliefs.  While the ‘enemy’ in this case was Britishness, the view was that it was the remnants of that regime which was causing the lingering disharmony in the Irish state (and the island, with partition being another British-introduced problem).

Everything from dirty electoral money to fashion sense indicated the damage that British influence was still having upon Irish society. Many of Brown’s cartoons in this period deal with these themes of Irishness, ‘the other’ and ‘the other’s’ Irish political allies.

From the publication of the first Irish Press edition, the paper and party were on an election footing.  Anything which could be used to discredit Cumann na nGaedheal was eagerly pounced upon. Countless cartoons in the latter part of 1931 and early 1932 on the lead up to the general election emphasised just how reliant Cumann na nGaedheal were on a variety of interested parties, ranging from the British Government to the Orange Order.

The following brief selection of these cartoons is typical of the longer themes of Brown’s work in the Press. On 24 November 1931, the paper portrayed Cumann na nGaedheal as a spent force on its deathbed surrounded by interested parties whose own survival depended upon Cumann na nGaedheal pulling through.  Among the concerned onlookers is the ‘Orangeman’ the ‘Imperialist’ the ‘Ex-Unionist’ and ‘Ex-Republican’, while at the head of the bed, checking the patients temperature is the recent Cumann na nGaedheal recruit Captain William Redmond.

In early January 1932, a matter of weeks before the dissolution of the sixth Dáil, the Press carried a daring front page cartoon on the matter of still-incarcerated Republican prisoners.  Taking a direct swipe at the famous quote of Michael Collins ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’ it applies it to those still in prison at the behest of the state.

However, it provides us with a stark ‘them vs. us’ example of how divisive Irish politics was at the time.

On one side of the prison wall, banded together are the ‘Unionists’ adorned with top hats and monocles calling for the prisoners to be shot.  While on the other side stands ‘the Irish People’ calling for the prisoners’ release.  This is perhaps as clear an example as can be found of Brown’s work which plays on the notion of the ‘Unionist’ or ‘Ex-Unionist’ as against the goals of Fianna Fáil, and by extension, the Irish people.

An election footing

In the final stretch of the 1932 election campaign the attention of the Irish Press was firmly on ‘ex-Unionists’ (a target from the paper’s first edition).  The front page cartoon on 15^th February 1932, the day before that year’s election highlighted the Unionist interests who had supposedly bankrolled Cumann na nGaedheal’s campaign.

This campaign had resulted in some of the party’s most memorable election posters.  These striking posters, still regularly referenced today were extremely professional, and were indicative of how Irish elections were now fought; something which Ciara Meehan has impressively highlighted.

An interesting point which Meehan has made in relation to this form of election propaganda is that when Fianna Fáil attempted incorporate imagery into their posters it wasn’t as creative or professional as their arch-rivals.[13]

Meehan makes a very valid point here. However, Fianna Fáil despite being late to the game were now being very creative in their election propaganda within the pages of the Irish Press (their cartoons parodied several of Cumann na nGaedheal’s famous 1927 election posters during the 1932 campaign).

In this particular sketch they used a selection of Cumann na nGaedheal’s election posters to highlight what they felt would be that party’s electoral failure.

The central figure in the cartoon, one of  the ‘ex-Unionist’ which had bankrolled Cosgrave’s party, points at the posters in the background, stating “As you can see, it (our money) has been employed by Cumann na nGaedheal to defame the natives far better than we used to do it”.[14]

Felix Larkin notes that the use of the term ‘the native’ used by the Irish Press here is ‘calculated to paint Irish Protestants in a bad light’.  Interestingly, he claims that readers of the Irish Press ‘could be relied upon to take offence at the presumption of racial superiority that it betrays’,[15] indicating that readers of the newspaper were comfortable having their own personal prejudices reinforced by their newspaper of choice.

This, of course has echoes of debates around popular press outlets in the present day. Editorial cartoons can, as Tim Ellis argues, ‘simultaneously influence and reflect social and political attitudes’.[16]  Not only was the Press attempting to attract new readers, it was also, naturally playing to its and Fianna Fáil’s existing electoral base.

Ownership of the past

Alongside claiming ownership of violent revolts of Ireland’s past, the paper sought to claim the Irish cultural past. The period referred to as the Irish cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced many that took part in the revolutionary movement.

Furthermore, it was a hugely important era in relation to the construction of an Irish identity which impacted subsequent generations. Covering, art, literature, sport and language, it offered people an alternative to what some viewed as the aping of the predominant British culture and identity of the time.  It was perhaps obvious that those behind the Irish Press would also seek to co-opt that aspect of Irish Republican identity, and present themselves as the inheritors of those ideals.

A popular feature of the Irish Press over the years was its Irish language section. Indeed, in the first edition of the newspaper in September of 1931 it carried a front page feature addressed as a ‘message to the nation’.  This was penned by the founder of the Gaelic League and future President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, who implored the nation to speak Irish and ‘awaken nationality’.[17]

Arguably the Press had stronger associations with the native language than that of its competitors.  This is reflected in what Mark O’Brien highlights as the editorial objective of the paper, ‘Do cum Gloire De Agus Onora na hEireann’ (for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland).[18]

A prime demonstration of the Press as custodian of the cultural and linguistic past came on the occasion of the newspaper’s first anniversary, 5 September 1932.  In this edition the Brown cartoon claimed the paper was ‘An Claidheamh Soluis’ (The Sword of Light).

This was, of course the name of the organ of the Gaelic League from 1899 (eventually discontinued in 1932 after several name changes), it was for a time under the editorship of Republican icon Padraig Pearse.  Under Pearse’s guidance the publication had, in a number of editorials ‘insisted on the primary importance of the Gaelic revival over all other kinds of ‘national work’’.[19]

While the Irish Press was no doubt more receptive to Irish language concerns than the competition, adapting the ambitions of An Claidheamh Soluis and Douglas Hyde wholesale would have been economic suicide for the publication. Nevertheless, association with a hugely-recognisable brand name from the cultural revival carried with it great political capital.

The Oath of Allegiance

Two of the biggest burning issues of the day were, naturally tackled in Brown’s cartoons. What was known as the ‘Economic War’ of 1932-38, and the hated (from an anti-treaty point of view) Oath of Allegiance to the British monarch, both received the Irish Press treatment.  Fianna Fáil had strongly indicated its intention to abolish the Oath of Allegiance, should it win power in 1932.

The Oath was perhaps the most divisive part of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. This Oath contained a guarantee of faithfulness to King George V and his heirs and successors by law makers in the Irish Free State.

This was highly controversial and had rankled with those who rejected the Treaty back in 1922.  It had, as we have noted, hastened de Valera’s departure from Sinn Fein in early 1926.  Now, with a renewed vigour and crucially, a strong mandate they sought to expunge this highly controversial clause.

While the Economic War took up many column inches, not just in Irish newspapers, the issue extended beyond Brown’s time as cartoonist in the Irish Press.  For that reason, and the fact that to show Brown’s work on the Economic War would need at least two further articles it should be left aside for now.

A further issue which hovered abstractly in the background was partition.  However, this was not really reflected in Brown’s work at the Press, save for a strange warning from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln on the dangers of a divided Ireland.[20] Nonetheless, Irish Press cartoons, like Fianna Fáil for the main, sidestepped the partition problem to deal ‘with the much narrower issue’ of the Oath.[21]

The Oath was one of the main topics on the campaign trail of 1932, and during countless public meetings its abolishment was raised, alongside the justification for Fianna Fáil’s constitutional gymnastics in entering the Dáil in 1927.[22] The message continued to be hammered home right to the line.

In a last-ditch appeal to the Irish electorate on the morning of the 1932 election, 16^th February the Irish Press appealed to the working man (women rarely featured in any prominence in these depictions) to do their duty that day.  The depiction is of a representative of the electorate removing boulders in the way of the ‘National Express’ train.  Tellingly, the one which the electorate figure is attempting to move is that of the Oath.

One of the most striking cartoons which dealt with the removal of the Oath came in the wake of Fianna Fáil’s electoral victory, on the 25 March 1932 entitled ‘Breaking the Chains’.  The powerful image of Ireland in chains (representing the Oath in this instance) has been replicated many times since.

The masculine figure breaking free of the chains is backed up by a pyramid of faces representing the Irish people, and is bolstered with a quote from the celebrated and controversial Irish Australian prelate Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

Mannix was staunch Irish Nationalist and a close associate of the celebrated leader of Fianna Fáil, even accompanying him on part of his famous 1919-1920 tour of America. His belief in de Valera and his ability to deliver freedom to Ireland ‘never wavered’[23]  and was often to offer guidance and words of encouragement in important moments.

One such example was the night before de Valera was on the cusp of power in 1932, when he communicated in a telegram ‘May God uphold and guide Ireland and you in these difficult days’.[24] Mannix’s nationalist leanings were well known in Ireland and would have carried some weight. Therefore including a proclamation of this kind at the foot of the illustration demonstrated the shared goals of Mannix and Fianna Fáil when it came to taking the British King out of Irish society.

The progress of the 1932 Bill to remove the Oath was stymied by the upper house of the Irish legislature, the Seanad.  This caused much strife in political circles.  During the Seanad debate on the Oath removal Bill Cumann na nGaedheal senator Sean Milroy, in a speech which lasted over two hours[25] dismissed the controversy around it as a mere ‘storm in a teacup’ and stated that to remove the Oath now would be ‘folly of the greatest magnitude’.[26]

However, it was far from a storm in a teacup for those who had a decade prior picked up arms against their former comrades.  After the Bill’s passage was paused both Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press went on the attack against those who had pushed against it.  On the 4^th of June 1932, the Press again called on Brown to caricature those who identified as Unionists as the upper class who were standing in the way of the people.  They were depicted as aloof senators in Roman garb sitting in the path of a steamroller representing the Irish people.

When de Valera went back to the people after calling a snap election in January of 1933, he called out the actions of the Seanad in stifling Fianna Fáil and the Irish people’s constitutional ambitions.

Addressing a crowd of 30,000 ‘enthusiastic supporters’ in Dublin in on the 8^th January he exclaimed that the Bill ‘was held up by the Senate, but in the election you can pass it in spite of the Senate.  Once this election is over and we are returned to power the Bill has only to be sent to the Senate and whether they like it or not it becomes law’.[27]

And so it came to pass.  Once the Bill was reintroduced it became law in May of 1933.  The Irish Press was understandably jubilant and produced a memorable cartoon on 6 May 1933 to celebrate the victory. The picture, entitled ‘Down at Last’ shows what appears to be an agricultural worker representing Fianna Fáil with a sledgehammer breaking through a barrier which states ‘Oath of Allegiance – Irish People Keep Out’.

The figure was far removed from the elderly, out of touch Senators which featured in the previous Brown attack on the Seanad. While those figures were elderly, dressed in Roman finery, and out of touch with the Irish people, this figure embodied that which Fianna Fáil held dear, a youthful, masculine and muscular rural worker which had broken through the metaphorical glass ceiling which held back Irish ambitions of nationhood.

In truth this was one of the last memorable cartoons of Victor Brown’s short run in the Irish Press.  His work seemed to feature less and less, with one of the last commissions appearing on the second anniversary of the Irish Press debut.

His reasons for departure are unclear.  However, the years in which Brown was employed by the paper were chaotic and ‘were beset by industrial disputes of one kind or another’.[28] Therefore, the instability may have led him to seek steady employment elsewhere.

However, it seems Victor Brown was never short of work outside of his stint in the Irish Press, and his work took him both inside and outside of Irish republicanism, indicating that he was first and foremost and artist for hire, rather than someone who had a deep ideological conviction for the brand of Irish nationalism which the Irish Press was known for.

He is well known for his stamp design commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Easter Rising. However, his talents reached beyond this.

In the aftermath of his departure from the Press he designed the wedding cake for the marriage of the Duke of Kent in November 1934.[29] Further commissions followed including one on the Irish father of the Argentine Navy, Guillermo Brown (no relation), as well as many other commissioned pieces.

Victor Brown died in Dun Laoghaire in 1953.  His work in the Irish Press was integral to the paper’s success in those first couple of years, and covered many issues which were the burning political topics of their day.  At times divisive, in line with the direction he received from the paper’s editor; they unquestionably helped revive political themes which had lain dormant in vast sections of Irish society over the previous number of years.

Listen to Barry discuss Victor Brown and the Irish Press here:

References

[1] Thomas Milton Kemnitz, ‘The cartoon as a historical source’ in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, iv, no. 1 (1973), pp 84-5.

[2] Felix. M. Larkin, Terror and Discord: The Shemus Cartoons in the Freeman’s Journal, 1920-1924 (Belfast, 2009).

[3] James Curry, Artist of the Revolution: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh, 1884-1916 (Dublin, 2012).

[4] Bryce Evans, Sean Lemass – Democratic Dictator (Cork, 2011), p. 49.

[5] F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, (Glasgow, 1974), p. 495.

[6] Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London, 1993), p. 430.

[7] Kevin Boland, The Rise and Fall of Fianna Fáil (Dublin, 1982), p. 22.

[8] Dail Eireann Debate – Wednesday 21 March, 1928, Vol. 22, No. 14.

[9] John Dorney, ‘The State Will Perish’: Comparing the Elections of 1932 and 2020:  https://www.theirishstory.com/2020/02/12/the-state-will-perish-comparing-the-elections-of-1932-and-2020/#.XpWjeflKjIU

[10] Bryce Evans, Sean Lemass: Democratic Dictator (Cork, 2011) p. 80.

[11] Graham Walker, ‘’The Irish Dr Goebbels’: Frank Gallagher and Irish Republican Propaganda’ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 149-165.

[12] The Irish Bulletin, 4 July 1921.

[13] Ciara Meehan, ‘Politics Pictorialised: Free State Election Posters’ in Mel Farrell, Jason Knirck and Ciara Meehan (eds.) A Formative Decade: Ireland in the 1920s (Kildare, 2015), p. 30.

[14] Irish Press, 15 Feb. 1932.

[15] Felix M. Larkin ‘Carson’s Abandoned Children: the southern Irish Protestant as depicted in Irish cartoons, 1920-1960’ in Ida Milne and Ian d’Alton (eds) Protestant and Irish: The minority’s search for place in independent Ireland (Cork, 2019).

[16] Tim Ellis . ‘Women, gender and masculinity in Irish political cartoons, c.1922-1939’ (MA Thesis, 2016), p. 1.

[17] Irish Press, 5 Sept. 1931.

[18] Mark O’Brien, De Valera, Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press (Dublin, 2000), p. 35.

[19] Bryan Fanning, Irish Adventures in Nation-Building (Manchester, 2016), p. 27.

[20] Irish Press, 18 February 1933.

[21] Jim Maher, The Oath is Dead and Gone (Dublin, 2011), p. 296.

[22] Donegal News, 9 January, 1932.

[23] Joe Broderick, ‘De Valera and Archbishop Daniel Mannix’ in History Ireland, Vol. 2, Issue 3, (Autumn 1994).

[24] Jim Maher, The Oath is Dead and Gone, p. 277.

[25] Irish Press, 26 May, 1932.

[26] Seanad Eireann Debate – Wednesday 25^th May 1932, Vol. 15, No. 13.

[27] Irish Press, 9 Jan. 1933.

[28] David Robbins, The Irish Press 1919 -1948: Origins and Issues (MA Thesis, 2006), p. 8.

[29] Evening Herald, 29 Nov. 1934.

By Dónal Hassett

The recent Centenary of the Irish General Strike of 1920 has underlined the potential power of a movement that can marshal the forces of labour behind the cause of resisting colonial repression and securing national liberation.

The co-ordinated withdrawal of labour has long been an important weapon in the arsenal of those opposing colonial rule in different geographical and historical contexts. However, if the strategic potential of the general strike was almost universal across imperial possessions, the ability of activists to implement it effectively was not.

The weight of the repressive apparatus of the colonial state and the discriminatory exclusion of certain categories of its subjects was never equally distributed within and between colonial Empires.This would have major implications for those seeking to deploy the General Strike to further the anti-colonial cause. The comparison between Ireland and Algeria is particularly illustrative. 

Neither Colony Nor Metropole

Algeria and Ireland occupied unique but parallel positions within the French and British Empires. Both were not legally considered colonies but rather integral parts of the imperial metropole.

Their histories had been shaped by the mass importation of settlers, the expropriation of land and the imposition of new cultural and religious norms. They were, at least in theory, governed directly from the respective imperial capitals and represented in Parliament.

However, the fiction of integration was evident on the ground in both Ireland and especially in Algeria. Ireland was the only part of the United Kingdom to have a militarised police force in the form of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the highly centralised administration in Dublin Castle was more redolent of British institutions in African and Asian colonies than anything in Cardiff or Edinburgh.[1]

By 1920, much of the country was in turmoil as the elected representatives of the majority of the Irish people rejected British rule and pledged their allegiance to an alternative separatist Parliament, the first Dail.

The disparity between the rhetoric of integration and the everyday reality of colonial rule was far more extreme in Algeria. Unlike the Irish, the Algerians had been relegated to the status of subjects, not citizens, for most of the colonial period and denied many basic civil and political rights. The combination of the hard-fought battles for Catholic emancipation, electoral reform and female suffrage meant that 1918 saw Sinn Féin triumph with an electorate of all men over 21 and women over 30. Victory at the ballot box was simply not an option for Algerian nationalists.

Although Algerians were eventually granted a form of French citizenship in the wake of World War Two, this did not mean equality with colonial settlers or the citizens of metropolitan France.

The franchise was denied to Algerian women until 1958 and the electoral system was designed to ensure that a settler’s vote was worth eight times that of an Algerian. In any case, the French authorities had no qualms about banning political parties, stuffing ballot boxes and rigging elections in the colony.[2]

Nor were they reticent about the use of brutal tactics in their efforts to crush the armed rebellion of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), launched in 1954. While the atrocities and abuses perpetrated by Crown Forces during the Irish Revolution are well-documented, they pale in comparison to the systemic use of torture, napalm, blanket bombing and mass internment in wartime Algeria.

Algerians enjoyed significantly fewer rights than their Irish equivalents and even these limited rights were more likely to be breached, often with dire consequences. This would shape both the form the anti-colonial struggle would take and the role labour would play in it.

Labour and Nationalism: Co-operation, Co-option or Circumvention

In order to effectively mobilise the power of labour against the occupying forces, the nationalists in both Ireland and Algeria would have to either co-operate with, co-opt or circumvent the existing trade union movement.

In Ireland, the presence of a powerful indigenous trade union movement, which had staked out a central role for itself in the politics of the island, meant that simply bypassing labour was not an option.

The foundation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1909 and its rapid expansion throughout the revolutionary period confirmed the importance of labour to mass politics in Ireland.

The nationalist movement, convinced that a cross-class coalition with the tacit support of some elements of the Catholic Church was essential to achieving its immediate goal of independence, was reluctant to endorse most forms of class politics.

It was, however, happy to ally itself to labour to rally working people behind specific campaigns that (at least nominally) transcended class and neither totally excluded nor wholeheartedly embraced calls for social revolution.

For its part, the labour movement outside of Protestant Northeast, although jealous of its organisational independence, seemed increasingly willing to weigh in behind radical nationalism in a push for an end to Empire in Ireland. Indeed, an off-shoot of the trade union movement, the Irish Citizen Army, had participated in the armed insurrection of 1916, its leader James Connolly was executed and several leading labour activists, such as William O’Brien and Cathal O’Shannon were interned in the Rising’s aftermath.[3]

Unlike their equivalents in Ireland, the nationalists in the Algeria of the 1950s could not count on a pre-existing labour movement to mobilise workers in a general strike against colonial repression. Trade unions in the colony, by and large, remained subservient to the national organisations in Paris.

The repressive legal regime that governed Algerians limited their rights to participate in trade union action and the discrimination that permeated colonial society saw them and their issues largely excluded from the mainstream trade union organisations.[4]

Eager to mobilise the people, the FLN set about both subsuming existing political or civil society movements into their organisation and building mass organisations of their own. The driving intellectual force behind this strategy, Abane Ramdane, had read about the Irish struggle while in jail in France and was an admirer of Eamon de Valera.[5]

The policy he advocated resulted in the foundation of the Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (General Union of Algerian Workers- UGTA) in February 1956. The organisation circumvented the existing trade unions, recruiting heavily among the Algerian workers in the cities, though making few inroads among the huge population of rural labourers. The UGTA, the key force for the mobilisation of Algerian workers, was not, like Irish labour, an ally of the nationalist movement, but rather an integral part of the FLN, bound to follow its strategy and the orders of its leadership.

The Goals of the General Strikes: Incremental vs Insurrectional.

While over the course of their respective revolutionary periods, Algerian and Irish nationalists would both mobilise labourers in general strikes designed to contest colonial rule, the strategies that informed and the goals that defined these strikes were radically different.

In Ireland, the two great general strikes of April 23^rd 1918 and April 13^th 1920, brought the labour movement (outside of the Protestant and unionist dominated Northeast) together with various nationalists and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, on a shared platform that challenged British rule by demanding specific concessions.

In 1918, the focus was on resisting conscription, refuting the right of the British Empire to force Irishmen to fight on the battlefields of the Great War. It sought to impress on the administrators of the British State in Ireland and the political class and electorate of Great Britain itself that any effort to shove conscription down the throats of the Irish would make the kingdom’s second island ungovernable.

The action rallied workers, supported not just by their unions and the clergy but also by many employers, against a policy that was seen as particularly unjust and symptomatic of the broader exploitative nature of the Anglo-Irish relationship. It was not, however, a strike that sought, in and of itself, to bring the edifice of British rule crashing down.

Although the situation had further radicalised by the time Irish workers downed tools once more in support of the General Strike of 1920, much of the same logic underpinned their action.

Once again, the labour movement came together with the nationalists of Sinn Féin, the Catholic Church and the employers to mobilise around a specific issue that neither expressly precluded nor included a call for social transformation.

The work stoppage was once again a means of communicating to Dublin Castle, Whitehall, Westminster and the British electorate that the imprisonment of political activists, who had gone on hunger strike, was not the solution to the Irish question. While labour activists in some parts of the country set up Workers’ Councils, even using the term Soviet,[6]  the main focus of the strike remained the call for the liberation of political prisoners and the protection of the lives of the republican hunger-strikers.[7]

Many of those who withdrew their labour hoped their action would hasten the end of British rule. Some hoped it with also bring the class system tumbling down with it. These were not, however, the stated goals of the strike action. The General Strikes in Revolutionary Ireland were nationalist in their tone, domestic in their target audience and incremental in their strategy.

In an Algeria where both the intransigence of the French state and its willingness to use the most brutal forms of violence made concessions unlikely, the general strike would take a very different form.

The newly-founded Algerian union, the UGTA, decided to flex its muscles with a first general work stoppage on July 5^th 1956 to mark the 126^th anniversary of the French invasion of the colony. In contrast to their brethren in Ireland, the Algerian workers did not have any specific demands but rather framed their action as an ‘insurrectional strike that will, for once and for all, free us from colonial oppression’.[8]

Although largely limited to major urban areas, the strike was an important show of strength for the nascent union, indicating support for the FLN its revolutionary cause among the population.

This first strike underlines how different the dynamics of class, ideology and politics were in the Algeria of the War of Independence from the Ireland of the revolutionary period. The impoverishment of the Algerian population at the hands of French colonialism meant that the FLN paid less attention than the Irish nationalists to assuaging the fears of property owners about the mobilisation of labour.

The movement’s absorption or elimination of rival political organisations saw it exercise an effective monopoly over the political action of Algerians and freed it from the need to build coalitions.

Finally, the FLN’s embrace of an explicitly anti-imperialist politics that advocated the implementation of an Algerian and Islamic form of socialism meant it was far more willing to use the tactics and the language of social revolution. The July 5^th strike in Algeria, although more limited in its geographical reach, was more ambitious and radical in its rhetoric than its equivalents in the Ireland of April 1918 or April 1920.

As the FLN found itself increasingly under pressure militarily from the French, the nationalists looked beyond Algeria and France to the world stage to garner support for their cause. While the Irish had tried (and largely failed) to secure diplomatic recognition overseas during their independence struggle, the FLN saw the ‘internationalisation’ of the Algerian question as a key strategy to bolster their cause.[9]

They sought to profit from both the existence of the United Nations as a global forum and the growing presence within its National Assembly of newly independent and anti-colonial African and Asian states.

The movement sent representatives to New York to coordinate a campaign for Algerian independence and were favourably received by some of the Irish delegation, especially a young Conor Cruise O’Brien.[10]

Back in Algeria, the FLN’s key strategists, sought to focus the world’s attention on their struggle by shifting the conflict away from the isolated mountains and into the heart of the major cities.[11] There, the general strike could be deployed to bring the economic life of urban Algeria to a halt and bring the Algerian Question to the front pages of the international press.

In November 1956, the Committee of Coordination and Execution, the driving force of the FLN, planned an eight-day strike at the end of January/beginning of February 1957, designed not only to coincide with a debate on the issue of Algeria at the UN but also to rally the urban masses to the cause, solidify its monopoly on leadership of the Algerian nationalist movement.[12]

On January 28^th, the first day of the work stoppage, the Arab quarters of the major cities were deserted, as the Algerian population complied with the FLN’s strike order, whether motivated by conviction, fear of reprisal or a mix of both.

The capital, Algiers, as the point of entry for most international journalists writing on events in the colony, became the focal point for the all-important coverage of the strike, even though its impact was felt throughout the territory.

The planned duration of the strike and the broadness of its aims indicated a radical challenge not just to the existing political order but also to the related economic order in the colony. The general strikes in Algeria were revolutionary in their tone, international in their target audience and insurrectionary in their strategy.

The Response of the Authorities: Concessions vs Coercion

The Irish General Strike of 1920 was a resounding success for the nationalist movement. The immense pressure exercised by the combined forces of labour, nationalism, civil society and the Church secured an immediate and important concession from the British authorities in Ireland: the release of large numbers of republican prisoners.

It underlined the extent to which British repressive tactics were severe enough to provoke outrage and engender solidarity among the Irish but not sufficiently coercive as to crush the movement outright.[13]

This dynamic, undoubtedly linked to the position of the Irish within the imperial hierarchy as a white colonial population that enjoyed formal legal equality with the British but who were subject to specific forms of state violence, fuelled the rise of a cross-class coalition willing to mobilise en masse against the authorities.

While the strike did not immediately bring an end to British rule- this was never its goal- it reinforced the sense that Ireland was ungovernable, further diminishing the desire of the British state and electorate to spend valuable financial, human and political capital on shoring up a collapsing order.

The Algerian General Strike of 1957 met with a completely different response. Faced with this unprecedented challenge to its authority at a delicate time for its international reputation, the French government and its agents in Algeria decided that the strike must be crushed at all costs.

In Algiers, the epicentre of the movement, responsibility for the security of the city had effectively been devolved to the notorious parachute regiment, which quickly set about locking down the Casbah, a FLN stronghold. In scenes immortalised not just in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film The Battle of Algiers but also in contemporaneous newsreels produced by the French Army, the paras sought out Algerian shop-owners and forced them to re-open their businesses at gun point.[14]

Workers were rounded up and compelled to return to their posts. The French forces seized the opportunity to arrest hundreds of nationalist activists, crushing the nascent UGTA union in the colony’s capital. The widespread use of torture by the Army in Algeria at the time meant that many of those captured suffered horrific trauma at the hands of the French.

The strike was effectively crushed by the brute force of the French military, its leaders arrested and in some cases executed by the French.[15] Following the defeat of the strike, the FLN dedicated its energies to a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the city designed to attract global attention.

The so-called ‘Battle of Algiers’ would also end in military defeat at the hands of the paras, but not before substantial damage was done to France’s claim to be an agent of peace and progress in its North African colony.

If the Irish propaganda campaign around atrocities was an embarrassment to the British in the 1920s, the global condemnation of French brutality was an existential threat to colonial rule in the Algeria of the 1950s and 1960.

The post-WWII effort to recast Empire as a humanitarian and developmentalist project, the scepticism of the two global superpowers about older systems of colonial rule and the enhanced importance of post-colonial states on the global scene meant that, while the repression may have been far more extreme in Algeria than in Ireland, it came at a far greater cost to the French than to the British.

The General Strikes in National Memory Narratives

The General strikes in Ireland and in Algeria may have differed in tone, form and outcome, but they came to share a broadly similar place in the narratives of both post-independence states.

In Ireland, the emergence of a conservative polity dominated by parties who traced their legitimacy back to the military and political struggle of the nationalist movement meant that the strikes (and the labour movement more broadly) were overshadowed by the emphasis on the actions of Sinn Féin and the IRA. In Algeria, the post-colonial one-party state was ruled by figures who had spent much of the war in exile and who viewed the strike as a strategic error.

It became a footnote in the narrative of the FLN’s heroic military resistance in the Battle of Algiers. The sidelining of the strikes served not only to minimise the role of organised labour in the respective national struggles but also to occlude the centrality of women as key organisers and participants in this form of political action.[16]

Furthermore, the thorny question of how workers who remained loyal to the French and British states, the vast majority of both European settlers in Algeria and Protestants in Ulster, reacted to the strikes was ignored. The story of the strikes was made to fit the dominant and often exclusionary narratives promoted by the new ruling elites.

 While nationalist movements in both Ireland and Algeria sought to mobilise labour against colonial rule in their respective countries, the form their strikes took, the reactions they provoked and the outcomes they secured differed radically.

The contrasts and commonalities that define the Irish and Algerian General Strikes remind us of the benefit of cross-colonial comparisons in helping us understand our own past and how we remember it in a broader, international perspective.

Dr Dónal Hassett is a Lecturer in French at University College Cork who teaches on topics relating to the history, the politics and the societies of France and the wider Francophone world.

References

[1] Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, “Exemplar, Outlier, Impostor? A Reflection on Ireland and the Discourses of Colonialism,” in The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, Rósín Healy and Enrico Del Lago (eds.), (Palgrave: London, 2019), 36-53, 39.

[2] James MacDougall, A History of Algeria, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2017), 84 and 88.

[3] Pádraig Yeates, “HAVE YOU IN IRELAND ALL GONE MAD’ – the 1918 General Strike Against Conscription,” published by Century Island, November 2019, 13. Available here: https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland//images/uploads/content/Ed125-ConscriptionStrike1-Yeates-UpdateNov2019.pdf

[4] Algerians’ rights to participate in the labour movement were restricted under the 1884 law governing trade unions, Loi relative à la création des syndicats professionnels, Journal Officiel, 22 Mar 1884, 1577-1578.

[5] Bélaïd Abane, L’Algérie en Guerre: Abane Ramdane et les fusils de la rébellion, (L’Harmattan: Paris, 208), 216.

[6] Conor Kostick, “The Irish Working Class and the War of Independence,” Irish Marxist Review, Vol.4, No.14, (2015), 18-28, 25.

[7] John Dorney, “The General Strike and Irish Independence,” The Irish Story, 06 June 2013, https://www.theirishstory.com/2013/06/06/the-general-strike-and-irish-independence/#.XqBp2MhKjIU

[8] “Tract du FLN à l’occasion de la grève générale du 5 juillet 1956,”, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, available online in the online depository of the CVCE: https://www.cvce.eu/obj/tract_du_fln_5_juillet_1830_5_juillet_1956-fr-e7f4369e-0947-4de0-9527-fb0ce0102452.html.

[9] See Matthew Connelly’s excellent book A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2003).

[10] Christophe Gillissen, “Ireland, France and the Question of Algeria at the United Nations, 1955-62,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 19 (2008), 151-167, 155.

[11] Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2016), 57.

[12] BenYoucef Ben Khedda, “Contribution à l’historique du FLN,” in Les Archives de la révolution algérienne, Mohammed Harbi (ed.), (Jeune Afrique: Paris, 1981), 312-321, 313.

[13] John Dorney, “The Hunger Strike and General Strike of 1920,” The Irish Story, 13 April 2020, https://www.theirishstory.com/2020/04/13/the-hunger-strike-and-general-strike-of-1920/#.XqBZMMhKjIU

[14] Les Actulaités Françaises, 06/02/1957, Institut National Audiovisiuel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNfcQGLdWVs.

[15] MacDougall, History of Algeria, 214.

[16] For an exploration of place of women in the narratives of both Revolutions see: Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012, (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2015) and Linda Connolly, “Honest Commemoration: Reconciling women’s ‘troubled’ and ‘troubling’ history in centennial Ireland,” MUSSI Working Paper Series, no.9, available here: http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/11108/.

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney here talk to Kieran Glennon, author of From Pogrom to Civil War, on the ‘Belfast Pogrom’ of 1920-1922.

We place the eruption of violence in Belfast in the context of the Irish War of Independence and of the long history of sectarian rioting in that city.

We discuss the role of state forces in particular the Ulster Special Constabulary and loyalist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Protestant Association.

The Truce of July 11 1921 coincided with some of the worst violence in the city, including Belfast’s Bloody Sunday of July 10, 1921.

We also talk about Michael Collins and the abortive IRA Northern offensive of May 1922.

Finally, Kieran talks about how the violence of the 1920s fed into the later Troubles that broke out in the late 1960s.

Internment in Northern Ireland 1922-23. By Ann-Marie McInereny

It has been argued that Ireland experienced not one but two civil wars in 1922. The first between Republicans and the new unionist government of Northern Ireland in the first half of the year and the second in the latter part of that year and into 1923, between pro and anti-Treaty factions in the Irish Free State.

Both ended in defeat for Irish Republicans and both led to mass internment of their fighters and activists. In the North, the principle site of internment was on the prison ship Argenta.

A month before the outbreak of Civil War in southern Ireland, the Stormont administration was in the process of arresting and interning men and women who were suspected of acting in a ‘manner’ prejudicial to the state. As early as March 1922, politicians warned of the growing conflict in the North. Ulster Unionist Party M.P., Robert Lynn, highlighted the growing unrest in an address to the Stormont government in which he remarked that

…it is the business of every loyal man and woman to rally around the Government…I have told my constituents often when they complained of what was happening before the 21^st November [when power was transferred to the new Northern Ireland parliament] to “wait until our own parliament gets control.” We have got control, and I am sorry to say the position is not better but worse…it is time it should end…[1]

The situation to which Lynn referred was the downward spiral of law and order in Northern Ireland.

The social and political change that engulfed the island from 1919-21 had resulted in a rapid escalation of violence. The IRA, though divided by the Treaty, launched a renewed offensive on Northern Ireland in May 1922. Conflict between Republicans and the state was accompanied by severe sectarian violence, especially in Belfast.

David Fitzpatrick remarked how ‘riots, killings, burnings, and economic conflicts initiated in the mid-1920 resumed with increased ferocity after the truce…Sectarian and political violence peaked in 1922, when nearly 300 murders were officially enumerated in Northern Ireland. The murder count exceeded 30 in each month between February and June, rising to 80 in May before subsiding to a trickle after September’.[2]

Internment

In response to the IRA assassination of the Unionist M.P. William Twaddle, the Northern government decided to implement sweeping arrests and on the night of the 22^nd-23^rd May large scale ‘raids commenced’.

Some ‘202 people were picked up’ and within a few weeks 300 persons ‘almost all Roman Catholic males- were detained, most to be served with internment orders’.[3] Though a handful of loyalist paramilitaries were interned after October 1922, the vast majority of those imprisoned from May 1922 onwards were Republicans.

Sean McConville stated that ‘within two and a half years, a total of 732 persons were interned. They were drawn from across Northern Ireland as follows: Belfast, 217; Antrim, twenty six; Armagh, seventy two; Down, ninety eight; Fermanagh, sixty four; Derry, seventy five; Tyrone, 180’.[4]

However, the Stormont government had only three prisons at its disposal (Derry Gaol, Belfast Jail and Armagh Prison). Due to the limited accommodation available for internees, the government later acquired a prison ship, the S.S. Argenta and Larne Workhouse as   internment centres.[5]

The majority of those arrested in Belfast were sent to the S.S. Argenta and then sent to Larne Workhouse, Belfast Prison or Derry Jail. The prison in Armagh was used solely for the internment of female prisoners, similar to the North Dublin Union in the Free State, which interned female prisoners in 1923.

As a result of the escalating internment figures, the prison system became the focus of political debate in Stormont. Dawson Bates continued to highlight the inadequacies of the prison system, in particular, the burden of financing extra accommodation and provisions for the growing internee population. In parliament, he provided a rough outline of the internment situation stating

The provision for clothing, etc., is increased owing to some extent by the renewals rendered necessary by the malicious destruction of property by Sinn Féin prisoners…repairs and new buildings…also increased… I am referring to the time prior to the period we took over.[6]

Political and practical considerations were at the heart of Bates’ internment policy. He decided not to reopen internment camps on the basis that they were more convenient for internees, as it allowed prisoners considerable freedom of movement. Thus the prison ship, was seen as a greater deterrent and Bates stated that ‘many of these internees have been accustomed to enjoying the luxury of an internment camp, but I think they find that things on board a ship are not quite so pleasant, and many of them try to avoid going on a ship…’.[7]

One advantage of using a ship as a place of internment was that it allowed the government to completely isolate the internees from the mainland which ultimately separated the men from the immediate community. This greatly reduced the possibility of internees interacting with members of the public by shouting from their cell windows or putting their hands through bars. It also lessened the chances of escape attempts, as reported by Klienrichert in her study of internment.[8]

Wire fencing was erected around the Argenta deck to prevent internees jumping ship and swimming ashore. One disastrous but memorable escape attempt occurred when an internee, Chuck Brown, decided to bore a hole in the side of the ship, only to discover he had made this hole below sea level. Fellow internees had to hold him ‘against the deluge until the warders could get it repaired’.[9] The Argenta effectively limited the number of possible escapes which were specific to the prison environment.

Conditions

The ship itself was built in 1917 as a wooden steamer vessel and was first launched in May 1919.[10]

However, by 1922, the Argenta was condemned and ‘declared unseaworthy’ by US determination and its certificate of Inspection expired. Despite this, it was considered for purchase by the Stormont government and on 17 May 1922, the Northern administration bought the ship.[11]

The ship was purchased on the grounds that it would be less costly than internment camps.[12]  Throughout the civil war period, the Argenta was used to imprison Republican activists in Northern Ireland and the conditions on board were overwhelmingly described as cramped and unsanitary.

The under deck of the ship was converted into iron cages for the internment of prisoners.[13] Irish Volunteer, John Shields remembered in his Bureau statement that he was interned in his cage with 45 men.[14]

He recalled how the ‘under-deck conditions in the cages were so congested and we were so crowded into such a small space that there was not room for either chairs, tables or lockers.’[15] Internees complained of having no stools to sit upon and reports emerged that prisoners had to ‘squat’ upon their ‘hunkers’ to eat their food.[16]

The food was reportedly of ‘inferior quality’ with the milk provided being sour.[17] The toilets were at the either end of the deck and were ‘often stopped up, so that the overflow runs away down the cages…’.[18] Some of the men slept in hammocks while others slept in ‘lower tiered iron bunk beds’[19] Internees were given ‘wire mattresses with straw palliasses (canvass bags filled with straw)’ and as time passed, news spread that the blankets and mattresses were not changed since the prisoners arrival.[20]

Unlike internment camps, where prisoners could freely associate, the prison ship provided no such recreational area. The opportunity for exercise was minimal so when the weather was good, prisoners could walk around on the upper deck.[21]

Newspaper accounts of internment on the Argenta supported claims of poor living conditions on the ship. One account reported that there were between 300-400 internees on the wooden cargo boat.[22] Men were tightly packed into steel cages of 40-50 men, with an electric light that was left on all day.

Prisoners reportedly cut their food on the steel floor of their cages due to lack of tables.[23] It is unsurprising that in these living conditions, reports emerged of ‘kindred ailments’ among the internees including tuberculosis.[24]

While the majority of internees complained of the unsanitary conditions on the ship, there were some exceptions to the rule. One internee reportedly preferred the Argenta to the confines of the prison cell and asked to go back to the ship, as the regime there had been more open. He wrote to the Minister for Home Affairs pleading:

I beg to be transferred from Derry Prison to the S.S. Argenta or Larne Internment Camp. I have been removed from the Argenta three months ago, and I do not know why I have been removed, no charge having been preferred against me…Also I am very depressed having to spend 20 hours out of the 24 in confinement.[25]

Internal Strife

Those imprisoned on the Argenta in 1922 were fully aware of how useful the tactics of non cooperation and internal rioting was within the prison system.

As historian William Murphy highlighted in his book, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1912-1921, various groups of Irish prisoners had regularly fomented internal disruption within camps and prisons once they were interned.

By 1921, Murphy noted that ‘the erosion of the prison system in the face of the revolution was undeniable’ as a ‘rebellious prison population had reduced an ordered system to chaos’.[26] Within months of their internment, the prisoners on the Argenta began their agitation from within.

By September 1922, the Governor of the Argenta, Drysdale, warned of the ‘aggressive and threatening attitude’ towards the prison staff on the ship.[27] In October, an unruly cohort of prisoners threatened a warder on the Argenta. The prisoners, Peter Trainor and John Boyle, told one of the warders to ‘clear out of the passage’ and threatened to throw a bucket of ‘slop’ over him and ‘punch’ the warder in the face.[28]

Two more prisoners, Robert Boyle and Charles Burns, encouraged the prisoners not ‘to clean their cages with the result that the occupants…felt a sense of intimidation’.[29]  Consequently on 16 November 1922, the men were transferred to Derry Gaol and placed in solitary confinement.[30]

Prison transfers were frequent during this period, as a means of removing the unruly element within a prison or camp and break the morale among the prisoner population. However, it was through the method of passive resistance, the Hunger Strike, that prisoners led the ultimate protest against the prison regime.

The civil war in the Free State ceased in May 1923 but internment levels remained high throughout both the Free State and Northern Ireland.[31] In 1923, there were still some 752 people interned in Northern Ireland.[32] By October a series of hunger strikes spread throughout the country for the mass release of Republican prisoners. In the south, some 8000 prisoners took part in the hunger strike[33] while in Northern Ireland; there were some 500 prisoners on hunger strike by November.[34]

The internees on the Argenta also participated in this mass strike action. By the week ending 27 October 1923, there were around 157 men from the Argenta on strike.[35] In order to divide the internees, the prison staff recruited the prisoner’s commandant, James Mayne, and three others who were not on strike, to prepare food for the ships internees.[36]

Privileges were extended to those who did not participate in the hunger strike, such as the granting of personal visits from family members.[37] The prison administration removed water from the cells of those on strike and withdrew smoking privileges.

This created divisions between the men who were on strike and those who were not. Irish Volunteer, John Shields, recalled that eventually prisoners who participated in the hunger strike were removed from the Argenta to either Belfast Prison or Larne Workhouse. Shields, who did not participate in the protest, remained on the boat.

He recalled that some ‘100 men went on strike and were taken to Belfast’ and the men who later broke their strike were ‘returned to the boat’ while ‘some of the strikers were sent to Derry gaol after the strike had finally collapsed.’[38]

Release

In January 1924, the 101 remaining men on the Argenta were transferred to Belfast Jail on the Crumlin Road.[39] The men were separated into two groups and then transported by motor to the train station for Belfast. A silent crowd gathered at the railway platform when the men arrived at the station.

As part of the release process, internees had to enter into a guarantee not to engage in anti-state activity and some prisoners were only granted release after agreeing to an exclusion order from some or all of the six county state. [40]

These exclusion orders were enforced as a means of limiting the potential threat to nascent state and ensuring that those who were released from prison were hindered from fomenting any further conflict.

Those released from the Argenta often had to start a new life elsewhere. Many ex-internees migrated south to the Free State in search of employment while others left Ireland for a life in America. [41]

Anne-Marie McInerney is a Librarian in Dublin City Library and Archive and holds a PhD in Irish history from Trinity College Dublin. Her PhD thesis explored the Internment of the Anti-Treaty IRA in the Free State 1922-24. She is working on a publication with Liverpool University Press on Military Imprisonment in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s.

References

[1] N.I.P.D., Vol. II, Col. 24-5, 14 Mar. 1922.

[2] David Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands 1912-1939 (Oxford, 1998), pp 118-9.

[3] Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1920-62: Pilgrimage of Desolation(London, 2014), p. 327.

[4]McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1920-62, p. 327.

[5]Denise Kleinrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta1922 (Dublin, 2001) p. 74; Home Affairs Minute Sheet, 26 July 1922 (P.R.O.N.I., HA/5/2028.).

[6] N.I.P.D., Vol. II, Col. 515, 17 May 1922.

[7] N.I.P.D., Vol. II, Col. 515, 17 May 1922..

[8] Klienrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta (Dublin, 2001)

[9] Klienrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta, p. 162.

[10] Klienrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta, p. 66

[11] Klienrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta, p. 68

[12]Klienrichert, Irish Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta, p. 68

[13] John Shields, BMH WS 928, p. 21

[14] John Shields, BMH WS 928, p. 21

[15] John Shields, BMH WS 928, p. 22

[16] Ulster Herald, 11 Nov. 1922

[17] Freemans Journal, 30Mar. 1923

[18] Fermanagh Herald, 16 Sept. 1922

[19] John Shields, BMH WS 928 p.22 ; Kleinrichert, p. 84

[20]Klienrichert, p. 84 ; Freemans Journal, 30 Mar. 1923

[21] John Shields, BMH WS 928, p. 22

[22] Fermanagh Herald, 21 July 1922

[23] Evening Herald, 21 July 1922

[24] Irish Independent, 13 July 1922.

[25]Joseph McClure to Minister for Home Affairs, 13 Mar. 1923 (P.R.O.N.I., HA/5/1502.).

[26] William Murphy, Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921 (Oxford,2014), p. 215

[27] Governor Drysdale, Argenta to Secretary of Home Affairs, 26 Sept. 1922 (HA/5 2207, P.R.O.N.I.).

[28] Report on Peter Trainor and John Boyle SS. Argenta, 23 Oct. 1922 (HA/5 2207, P.R.O.N.I.).

[29] Klienrichert, p. 131

[30] Klienrichert, p. 131

[31] Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green, (Dublin, 2004), p.268; Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1920-1962 Pilgrimage of Desolation, (New York, 2014), p. 338.

[32] Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1920-1962 Pilgrimage of Desolation, (New York, 2014), p. 338.

[33] Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green, p.268

[34] Fermanagh Herald, 3 November 1923.

[35] Klienrichert, p. 218

[36] Klienrichert, p. 217

[37] Klienrichert, p. 217

[38] John Shields, BMH WS 928 p.24

[39] Irish Independent, 31 Jan. 1924

[40] HA/ 5 series contains a number of files on internees who received exclusion orders upon their release. See files of HA/5/1555 John Corr; HA/5/1559 John Cox; HA/5 1560 Andrew Corrigan, P.R.O.N.I.)

[41] (See files of Michael Hanratty, HA 5 1525 & A.K Dooris, HA 5 1573, P.R.O.N.I.).

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney speak to early modern military historian Padraig Lenihan about siege warfare in early modern Ireland, as broadcast on the Irish History Show.

The 1600s were the era of great sieges in Irish history as Ireland was wracked by three major wars, the Nine Years War (1594-1603, the Eleven Years War (1641-1652) and the Jacobite-Williamite War (1689-91).

You can also listen to Padraig talk about this era of calamity in Ireland here.

Here we talk about the techniques involved in siege work. These ranged from surrounding a town and letting starvation and disease takes its toll, as at Derry in 1689, to direct and bloody assaults as at Drogheda by Cromwell in 1649, to failed assaults such as those at Clonmel in 1650 or Limerick in 1690. They also included more technical operations that involved extensive sapping and artillery bombardment such as Thomas Preston’s siege of Duncannon in 1645.

We also talk about the dreadful toll that such sieges too on the civilian population of Irish towns in that period.

By Stephen McGarry

May, 2020 marks the 275th anniversary of the Battle of Fontenoy (1745) which took place during the War of the Austrian Succession between France and an English-led coalition in modern-day Belgium.

The actions of the Irish Brigade of France there are generally regarded as being the pinnacle of Irish military prowess.

The Duke of Cumberland’s Anglo-Hanoverian infantry were at the cusp of victory, when the French commander, Maurice de Saxe sent in six infantry regiments of the Irish Brigade of France at the last minute to halt the Allied advance. The Irish charge smashed violently through the English foot and secured victory for France.

The battle of Fontenoy, fought at the height of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws in Ireland, was looked upon with ferocious pride back home in Ireland. Among other things, the Penal Laws forbade Catholics from bearing arms and serving in the military, and thousands of Irish Catholics, nicknamed the ‘Wild Geese’ were recruited into military service with the Catholic powers, principally France and Spain in the first half of 18^th century.

The British defeat was deemed as vengeance for the Catholic or Jacobite defeat in the Williamite War and the broken 1691 Treaty of Limerick – the terms of surrender had guaranteed civil and religious rights for Catholics, a promise subsequently disowned by the Protestant dominated Irish Parliament. The Irish Catholic victory over their oppressors at Fontenoy loomed large in the Irish psyche for many years afterwards.

The memory of the battle was even adopted by Protestant Irish nationalists such as the United Irish leader Theobald Wolfe Tone as an example of Irish bravery in arms.

‘Irish valour’

Wolfe Tone recalled Irish valour at Fontenoy in his memoirs. Miles Byrne, who served in Napoleon’s Irish Legion, mentioned an occasion in 1810 when the French commander called on them to remember Fontenoy, prior to the Battle of Bussaco against the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Portugese army during the Peninsular War.

Thomas Francis Meagher, who had fought in the 1848 Irish Rebellion, raised an Irish brigade from Irish-Americans in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Meagher also famously rallied his troops with ‘Remember Fontenoy!’ prior to their charge at the battle of Bull Run in 1861.

Irish valour at Fontenoy was proudly celebrated in stories, poems and songs. During the nineteenth century, Thomas Davis’s ‘The Battle of Fontenoy,’  ‘The Battle Eve of the Brigade’  and J.C. O’ Callaghan’s magnum opus; ‘Irish Brigades in the Service of France,’ in particular, helped to establish the cult of the Wild Geese in Irish nationalist tradition.

The exploits of the Wild Geese captured the romantic imaginations of many Irish writers in the early twentieth century, notably the poet Emily Lawless and Arthur Conan Doyle. MIchael O’Hanrahan, who was executed after the 1916 Rising, penned ‘Swordsman of the Brigade,’ a novel about the adventures of a soldier in the Irish Brigade of France during the early 18th century.

There were streets and GAA clubs named after the battle. James Joyce, for example, lived for a time in 44 Fontenoy Street, in Dublin 7. Clanna Gael Fontenoy GAA Club recently visited the Fontenoy cross, from whence the club takes its name. This is perhaps fitting, as two years after the battle, a hurling match was played on the battlefield by the Irish Brigade in memory of their fallen comrades.

The Fontenoy Committee of 1905

In 1904, the founding member of the Irish Literary Society in London, Richard Barry O’Brien was touring Belgium and stopped off at the village of Fontenoy. The village had changed little since the battle.

It was described at the time as being a scattered village of twenty or thirty modest, single-story, red roofed cottages with a brick church in its centre. Upon his return to Ireland, O’Brien proposed that an official trip should be made to Fontenoy to remember the fallen Irish.

The idea gained the support of the Lord Mayor of Dublin and a ‘Fontenoy Committee’ was established with a view to conducting an official ‘pilgrimage’ to Fontenoy the following year. The preparations for which were regularly reported in the Freeman’s Journal and in other nationalist papers.

In June 1905, a large Irish entourage – according to the Irish Independent numbering three-hundred people – travelled to Belgium. Among the eminent visitors were John McBride, who would be later executed following the 1916 Rising, he had recently fought with the Boers in South Africa and had organised an Irish Transvaal brigade there to fight the British.

The elderly Fenian leader John O’ Leary and Patrick Pearse were also present along with Richard Barry O’Brien, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Joseph Hutchinson. The Irish were warmly received by the Bourgmestre of Tournai, along with other representatives, and following a religious service in Irish by Father McInerney in Tournai, the entourage travelled the 10km to the historic battlefield of Fontenoy.

It was felt that a proper monument to the Irish should be erected, as the only memorial displayed at the time was a white marble plaque on the wall of Fontenoy’s graveyard. It was erected by Frank Sullivan in 1902, an Irishman living in San Francisco,  which reads in English and in French. ‘In memory of the Irish soldiers who changed defeat into victory at Fontenoy, May 11, 1745. God save Ireland.’

Two years later, the Irish Literary Society had raised sufficient funds by public subscriptions in Ireland, Britain and America to finance a memorial. The Dublin-based architect Anthony Scott from Co. Sligo was commissioned for the project.

Scott designed a five-metre Celtic cross, the base of which was hewn out of rough Irish grey granite on a plinth of Limerick marble and the cross was sculpted out of blue Kilkenny granite. The initial site for the monument was to be in the nearby city of Tournai, but due to initial anti-clerical opposition by the inhabitants there to the erection of a cross, the proposed location was changed to Fontenoy.

The cross travelled from Dublin by sea to the Belgian port of Antwerp, from there it was placed on a train to Tournai and hauled onto a horse drawn cart to its inauguration site at Fontenoy’s village green. In August of 1907, Anthony Scott arrived in Fontenoy to oversee the project together with his Dublin firm of building contractors. The Thompson brothers dug foundations, erected wooden scaffolding and began assembling the cross, and in no time, the three-piece cross was hoisted and cemented into position.

The cross’s inscription, written in French and Irish, was dedicated to the Irish Brigade who avenged the violation of the 1691 Treaty of Limerick. Carved into the base of the cross’s base is a relief of the Treaty of Limerick stone, with an inscription written in Irish.

‘On this stone was signed the treaty by which England should have granted religious freedom to the Irish people. It broke that treaty and the Irish, driven from their homelands, enrolled in the French armies and won fame on the battlefields of Europe.’

These were strong words, indeed, but Irish memories are long.

On August 25th, 1907, the monument was proudly unveiled by the newly-elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, Joseph Nannetti, President of the New York Committee J.Grimmins, Richard Barry O’Brien of the Irish Literary Society and the Bourgmestre of Tournai, amid much fanfare.

A religious service followed before the entourage attended a ’Banquet Commémoratif des Irlandais’ at the upmarket Hotel des Neuf Provinces in nearby Tournai. The sumptuous meal was washed down with crates of fine French wines and by locally brewed, strong trappist beers.

Many thumping, rebel rousing ballads and bellicose speeches, one supposes, completed the evening. There were many sore heads, no doubt, when the entourage boarded the train the next morning on their long journey back to Calais, and onwards back home to Ireland. The inaugural event had proved to be a resounding success.

Fontenoy firmly established

The memorial firmly established Fontenoy as a stop-over point for Irish tourists tracing Irish footprints on the Continent. In 1910, a game of hurling between Tipperary and Cork was played at Fontenoy, organised by the Pan-Celtic Congress which was being held in the Belgian city of Namur at the time.

The players reportedly arrived with leaflets written in French, Irish and English describing the game, while the local school children impressed them by singing the unofficial Irish national anthem ‘God Save Ireland’ in French.

The cross, located close to the Western Front, luckily survived the bombardment of the First World War. The 16th (Irish) Division of the British Army, by a strange coincidence, was serving on the historic battlefield of Fontenoy at the time of the armistice on Nov 11th, 1918 and halted there when the hostilities ceased. The memorial also luckily emerged out of the Second World War unscathed.

The Irish State takes charge of the monument

In 1947, William Fay, Ireland’s chargé d’affaires in Brussels, was requested by the  Department of External Affairs to inspect the Fontenoy cross. Fay reported back that the villagers appeared to be proud of their monument and he met an old woman there who recalled the unveiling of the cross.

Fay was told that the local children are still taught Irish songs and commemorate the battle at the cross every year on May 11th. He recommended that the Irish Government take charge of the monument, arguing, rightly, that Fontenoy was one of the few glorious moments in our ‘long’ eighteenth century.

The monument is now under the care of the Office of Public Works,  renovation works to the value of 20,000 euro have been completed on it in 2014, and the cross proudly takes part in the annual Global ‘greening’ initiative for St. Patrick’s Day.

The quiet village of Fontenoy, located in the province of Hainaut in French-speaking Belgium, has a population today of just over 700 people, and probably hasn’t changed that much since 1905. However, unlike Waterloo, located less than 100km due east, the battlefield at Fontenoy has changed a great deal.

The local sugar refinery occupies part of the battle site, and a crematorium was built over it several years ago, while the A16 motorway linking Tournai to Mons cuts right through the field of battle, but the cross survives.

Today, the locals continue to remember the Irish dead by raising the Irish tricolour on the monument on May 11th. The local historic military association of Le Tricorne, and of Fontenoy 1745,  seek to perpetuate the memory and raise awareness of the battle through conferences, exhibitions, guided tours, publications and exhibitions.

Commemorations

On the battle’s 250th anniversary in 1995, Defence Forces personnel, along with representatives from France, Belgium and England, took part in a wreath laying ceremony at the memorial. A game of hurling was organised by the historian and president of the Gaelic Sports Club of Luxembourg, Eoghan Ó’hAanracháin, who has written extensively about the Wild Geese.

The Belgian and Irish Post Offices also issued a joint stamp depicting two officers of Clare’s and Dillon’s standing beside the Celtic cross.

A commemorative event at Fontenoy marked the 260th anniversary, with a reading of Davis’s poem ‘Fontenoy’ and with bag-pipers playing; ‘The White Cockade,’ followed by a welcome in the local Café des Irlandais and a civic reception in the Hôtel de Ville in nearby Tournai. President Jacques Chirac sent a delegation to the French Embassy in Dublin, comprising a contingent of the Élysée Palace guards, dressed in 18th century uniform, for a special ceremony there.

An event to mark the 275th anniversary was planned for May 10th. The city of Tournai and Antoing had been coordinating commemorations for many months, with representatives drawn from Ireland, Belgium, France and Britain planned to attend.

These will sadly now not take place as the Belgian Government has prohibited all official events until the end of August due to the Covid-19, and neither will commemorations take place in Dublin for similar reasons.

This is, indeed, a great shame as the memorial has never looked better since the Thompson brothers erected it so many years ago. The memorial sits on Fontenoy’s well maintained village green, now called the Esplanade d’Irlande.

The iron railings surrounding the memorial have been repaired, the cross stabilised, and the granite and marble cleaned, with the incised lettering gilded for the first time since 1907. It is a big change from when I visited the cross a number of years ago, for it then looked sad and forlorn.

I have been reminded that this will not have been the first time commemorations at Fontenoy have been cancelled, for the bicentenary of the battle in 1945 was interrupted by the Second World War as the armistice was signed with the forces of the Wehrmacht just days earlier. There were then, bigger fish to fry. Readers, instead, may choose to commemorate the fallen on May 11th by recalling the last lines of Davis’s poem;

‘On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun,

With bloody plumes, the Irish stand-the field is fought and won!’

Stephen McGarry is the author of Irish Brigades Abroad (Dublin, 2013).

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney talk to Brain Hanley here about the efforts of the Irish Republican Police to fight ‘ordinary crime’, during the Irish revolutionary years. First braodcast on the Irish History Show.

We talk about what Brian describes as three ‘crime waves’ that accompanied the breakdown in state power; the first in 1919-1920 as the RIC withdrew from much of the countryside, the second during the Truce period when British police and military began to withdraw from Ireland and the third at the end of the Civil War in 1923-24.

In 1920 Republicans set up the Dail Courts and the Republican Police, which were a major plank of their claim to be a viable ‘counter state’ to the British administration. These functioned to some degree throughout most of 1920 but were both suppressed by the British forces late in that year. They reemerged in the truce period.

However during the Civil War these were replaced by the much more militarised Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and Special Infantry Corps which helped the Free State to reestablish state power after a period of virtual lawlessness in much of the country during the conflcit.

Brian also talks about the legacy of those years in terms of policing and armed crime in Ireland. Bank robbery became a part of IRA activities, though intermittently deployed between the 1920s and 1970s. At the same time, armed crime became fro several decades a rarity in indepndent Ireland until it surged again the 1970s.

By Mark Holan

At midday Sept. 20, 1919, as “squally,” unseasonably cold weather raked across Dublin, “armed soldiers wearing trench helmets” joined by “uniformed and plain clothes police” made simultaneous raids on three printing works that published six anti-establishment newspapers.^[1]

Their targets:

• Fainne an Lae, the Irish language Gaelic League gazette edited by Colum Murphy, and Nationality, seperatist Sinn Fein’s official organ edited by Arthur Griffith, at Mahons Printing Works, 3 Yarnhall St.
• New Ireland, edited by Patrick John Little, and The Irish World, overseen by Patrick Sarsfield O’Hegarty and Seán Ó Murthuile, at the Wood Printing Works, 13 Fleet St.
• Voice of Labor, a socialist sheet edited by Cathal O’Shannon, and The Republic, a three-month-old paper edited by Darryl Figgis, at Cahill & Co., Ltd., 40 Lower Ormond Quay.

British government authorities in Ireland wielded suppression powers over papers and printing works they deemed were “used in a way prejudicial to the public safety” or potentially bothersome to King George V, as quoted in the headline.^[2]

These officials–headquartered at Dublin Castle, a 10-minute walk from all three print works–ordered the seizure of the offending papers and the dismantlement of key parts of the printing presses to stop more copies from being published.

Their power came from the Defense of the Realm Act, sometimes called “Dora.”

Authorized in August 1914 at the start of the Great War, the law was ostensibly aimed at restricting what papers could publish about military activity. Within months, however, the IRB’s Irish Freedom, Griffith’s Sinn Fein and James Connolly’s Irish Worker were suppressed. After the April 1916 Easter Rising  “an increasing proportion” of directives from the government censor at Dublin Castle referred “to purely Irish [political] affairs.”^[3]

Dozens of Irish newspapers were suppressed during the Irish revolutionary period. Ironically, the Sept. 20 raid fell on the fifth anniversary of John Redmond’s speech to Irish National Volunteers at Woodenbridge, County Wicklow, when had encouraged them to enlist in the British forces during the war.

At the Wood presses on Fleet Street, Little and Ó Murthuile were “forced to remain spectators of the raiding operations, but were refused admission to the works until the military and police had departed.” Three of the firm’s female employees also were prevented from leaving the premises to make their intended bank withdrawal to pay the staff.

At Mahons, “a Sinn Fein flag was hoisted amongst the large crowd which had assembled outside the building” as the soldiers and police departed from the works. At Ormond Quay, “a large crowd collected at the rear of the buildings, but were moved on.”^[4]

Before the raids

Since January 1919, when separatist parliament, Dail Eireann began to deliberate at the Mansion House, Dublin Castle had tried to manage the Sinn Fein weeklies and the mainstream press. On April 29, five months after the armistice, the censor reminded editors that Dora remained in effect because

“it is impossible for the Government to permit any section of the Irish Press to be used as an instrument of incitement to organized or other defiance of the law, or for the purpose of inflaming public opinion to a pitch in which acts of lawlessness become possible. There is sufficient reason to fear that [if] there were no effective legal restrictions upon publication, attempts might be made to secure publicity for matter of this description.”^[5]

The Castle issued a similar directive on Aug. 28, when it also announced the censor was being discontinued. Irish editors braced for worse. Young Ireland, another of Griffith’s papers, predicted: “The latest move is merely a subterfuge to embark on a wholesale campaign of closing down not only the Sinn Fein papers, but any publication committed to the demand that Ireland be granted the right of self-determination.”^[6]

Days later, the Castle outlawed the Dail and declared that a fledgling loan drive to support the separatist government was seditious.

Minister for Finance Michael Collins had asked newspapers to publish notices of the £250,000 loan drive. In part, the content said:

“The proceeds of the Loan will be used for propagating the Irish case all over the world; for establishing in foreign countries Consular Services to promote Irish Trade and Commerce; for developing and encouraging the re-afforestation of the country; for developing and encouraging Irish industrial effort; for establishing a National Civil Service; for establishing Arbitration Courts; for the establishment of a Land Mortgage Bank, with a view to the re-occupancy untenanted lands, and generally for national purposes”.

“It was cleverly worded, and not one of the objects set forth in it were, or could possibly be construed as being in any way illegal from the British angle,” recalled Kevin R. O’Shiel, a Sinn Fein separatist who narrowly missed election in 1918. “Nevertheless, all the papers that published that advertisement were at once suppressed by an Order of the British Military Authorities.”^[7]

The Cork Examiner and Evening Echo of the city were suppressed a few days before the six Dublin papers. In an example of the irregular way that Dora was administered, however, authorities lifted the sanctions on the Cork papers even as they raided the republican titles for the same reason.

Press reactions in England & USA

The September raids raised the eyebrows of London editors, including those at The Times, the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily News. “A feeling of uneasiness at the sweeping suppression of newspapers in Ireland is beginning to be manifested in the English press,” reported the Freeman’s Journal, which had not published the loan prospectus but would itself be suppressed by three months later. “

“Since the rigorous action of the British authorities in Ireland under the Defense of the Realm Act, which is still operative in Great Britain, it is now recognized that, whatever the political merits of the case may be, the liberty of the Press, of which Englishmen are so proud, is at stake.”^[8]

Wire service accounts of the suppressions were widely published on the front pages of American newspapers. “Many persons were injured during the raids,” United Press reported^[9], though most accounts do not mention any physical confrontations.

News of the suppressed republican papers reached the front page of The Irish Press on Oct. 25. Máire de Buitléir, said to have suggested the name Sinn Fein to her friend Griffith, filed the dispatch from Dublin. Her perspective well-suited the Philadelphia weekly, which had direct ties to the Dail through editor Patrick McCartan:

There are few things about which the average Britisher boasts so loudly as he does regarding the freedom of the press of those living under the glorious British constitution. Doubtless he will not cease to boast while the military and police continue to raid the offices of Irish newspapers, destroy the machinery, break up the type and threaten with pains and penalties the publishers and editors, if they are to resume publication. …

The immediate result of the suppression of the journals printing the prospectus of the national loan was a boom in shares.

People were so indignant of this muzzling of the press that they determined to show what their opinion was by subscribing promptly and generously to the loan. I have heard of dozens of cases in which people have double the amount which they had intended to give, and I know of several touching instances in which poor workingmen and women have put all their savings into the loan.^[10]

Afterward

More Irish newspapers were suppressed in October 1919. Near the end of the month, Dublin Castle compiled a list of 43 titles it had acted against since May 1, 1916. Sinn Fein produced its own list for the same period, which contained the names of 51 publications.^[11]

Young Ireland and a few other papers sympathetic to the republican cause “carried on a precarious existence in 1919-1921, but the publication through normal channels of books, pamphlets or journals upholding the authority of Dail Eireann or commenting on the news of the day in a spirit openly favourable to Sinn Fein became almost impossible.”^[12]

Fainne an Lae resumed publication as Misneach Nov.22, 1919, a month after New Ireland began to publish from Scotland as Old Ireland.^[13] Patrick Little recalled:

I went to Glasgow, and … continued there until the 1st February, 1920. It was the Socialist Press, who published my paper for me.  … I brought the journal back to Dublin, and, from the 7th February until the 6th March, 1920, I published with Cahill [on Lower Ormond Quay; he was at Wood Printing Works in September 1919]. It was again suppressed … so, I went to Manchester, and published the paper with the National Labour Press, starting on the 13th March, 1920. … In the issue of October 9th, 1920, ‘Old Ireland‘ published the official report of the results of the First Dáil Loan, amounting to £271,849, signed by Michael Collins.^[14]

In November 1919, The Irish Bulletin became the official publication of Sinn Fein. It contained summaries of the public and secret session of Dail Eireann, its ministries and reports of the Irish Volunteers. The twice-weekly–typewritten, not typeset–was copied off of a Gestetner machine, then bundled into packets and parcels disguised as laundry, groceries, or stuffed into a child’s pram for circulation, mostly outside of Ireland.^[15]

As the conflict grew more violent in 1920, the Irish press “became extremely guarded in its news and comments.” Dora was incorporated into the more draconian Restoration of Order Act, August 1920.

In the most troublesome areas, where martial law was imposed, British police and military officers “assumed control of the local press, not only censoring proofs, but compelling the editors to insert matter unfavorable to Sinn Fein” and the republican cause.^[16] The Castle also seized foreign papers sympathetic to the Irish cause.

Such efforts, however, had become largely self-defeating. One American correspondent in Ireland observed that among Irish papers suppressed and then allowed to resume publication, “it is the custom to come out in the next issue with a blast against the government which makes the previous ‘libel’ read like a hymn of praise.” (“British suppression of Irish newspaper raised big storm of protest,” New York Globe, March 20, 24, 1920.)

References

^[1] “More Papers Suppressed”, Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 22, 1919. Weather from Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 20, 1919.

^[2] September 1919 suppression warrant in War Office: Army of Ireland, Administrative and Easter Rising Records, Subseries – Irish Situation, 1914-1922, WO 35/107, The National Archives, Kew. Viewed online.

^[3] James Carty, Bibliography of Irish History, 1912-1921, Dublin, 1936, pages xx-xxi. Viewed online.

^[4] Description from the Freeman’s Journal, and “Suppression of Six More Papers”, Irish Independent, Sept. 22, 1919.

^[5] Carty, Bibliography, page xxiii, quoting the April 29, 1919, directive.

^[6] Young Ireland, Sept. 6, 1919, cited by Drisceoil, Donal Ó. “Keeping Disloyalty within Bounds? British Media Control in Ireland, 1914-19.” Irish Historical Studies 38, no. 149 (2012): 52-69.

^[7] Bureau of Military History Statement of Kevin R. O’Shiel, WS 1770, p. 861, including loan language.

^[8] “English Unease”, Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 23, 1919.

^[9] ”Sinn Fein Newspapers Being Suppressed”, The Butte (Montana) Daily Bulletin, Sept. 22, 1919.

^[10] “Sinn Fein Convention Meets”, The Irish Press, Oct. 25, 1919. Máire de Buitléir’s dispatch, dated Sept. 30, 1919, is among several stories under the banner headline.

^[11] Army of Ireland, Administrative and Easter Rising Records, Subseries – Irish Situation, 1914-1922, WO 35/107, The National Archives, Kew, and The News Letter of the Irish National Bureau, No. 21, Nov. 21, 1919, p. 5., and Dec. 5, 1919, (No. 23), pgs.1-2, 9-10, citing the Sinn Fein lists.

^[12] Carty, Bibliography, p. xxiv.

^[13] Newspaper publication dates, including The Republic, from Newsplan Project Newspaper Database, National Library of Ireland.

^[14] Bureau of Military History Statement of Patrick J. Little, WS 1769, p.47.

^[15] Carty, Bibliography, p. xxv.

^[16] Carty, Bibliography, p. xxiv.

See Mark Holan’s blog series American Reporting of Irish Independence. He can be reached at markaholan@gmail.com. © 2020 by Mark Holan

Mark Holan © 2020

John Dorney interviews Dr Ida Milne on the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918.

Ida Milne is the author of Stacking the Coffins, a history of the 1918 flu in Ireland. The flu killed as many as 50 million people worldwide and about 23,000 in Ireland.

We talk about how the flu originated and how it was spread it the context of the First World War and its aftermath.

We also discuss the characteristics, infectiousness and deadliness of the 1918 flu and its chronology, both worldwide and in Ireland. Symptoms of the disease included patients turning blue, violent headaches, bleeding from orifices and even hair loss.

We go on to talk about the mostly ineffectual medical remedies used against it and the social and political impact of the disease, especially the momentous General Election of 1918.

One point that Ida makes is that 1918 pandemic, gruesome though it was was not as unusual as one might think in the context of a society where epidemics were much more common than they are today.

Inevitably we also discuss the parallels between 1918 and the current Covid 19 pandemic.