John Dorney wraps up a three part series with a look at the weapons of the Irish Civil War. See Part I 1914-16 here and Part II the War of Independence here.

One of the paradoxes of the Irish Civil War, fought between pro and anti-Treaty nationalist factions, was that the IRA, which a year earlier had been almost out of ammunition, was now armed to the teeth.

As a result, areas such as counties Sligo, Wexford and Kildare saw far more fighting in the civil war than in the war against the British.

A return to arms

There were several reasons for this relative abundance of arms. In the beginning no one in the IRA thought the truce would be permanent and the leadership, including those who later accepted the Treaty, was actively preparing for a resumption of war with the British.

During the truce the IRA managed to import a significant amount of arms; modern Mauser rifles (not the obsolete ‘Howth’ 1871 models used in 1916 but the G98 type used by the German Army in the First World War) of which several hundred were landed at Helvick County Waterford in November 1921 and more in April 1922, along with thousands of rounds of 7.92 mm ammunition (some of it armour piercing) and more 9mm handguns – most of which were sent to IRA units in the north[1].

Collin also imported another batch of Thompson submachine guns from America.

By October 1921, Richard Mulcahy, IRA Chief of Staff estimated that the IRA arsenal was already up to 3,295 rifles, 49 Thompson sub machine-guns, 12 machine-guns, about 6,000 pistols and 15,000 shotguns. A surge of post-Truce recruitment also saw the IRA’s membership rise from about 5,500 active fighters to a (probably nominal) total of 72,363 officers and men.[2]

After January 1922 when the Dail accepted the Treaty, the IRA split and there were, effectively, now two rival armies seeking to fill vacuum created by the departing British. The IRA, particularly anti-Treaty elements, took advantage of the truce to seize large quantities of weapons off evacuating British forces.

In February 1922 IRA officer Ernie O’Malley took over Clonmel RIC barracks and took 600 rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition. On March 29 an IRA unit under Sean Hegarty raided the British warship Upnor, which was docked off Cork, and got back to shore with 400 rifles, 40 machines guns, hundreds of thousands of rounds of .303 ammunition and numerous crates of high explosive[3].

And yet a third factor was that the British were committed to arming the Provisional Government’s new National Army with small arms – the standard British Lee Enfields, Lewis Guns and Webley revolvers.

A very significant amount of these arms and concordant ammunition, ended up in anti-Treaty hands – either because, like the garrisons of Waterford and Dundalk, the IRA units concerned changed sides once the Civil War broke out, or because in a murky scheme in the Spring of 1922, Michael Collins handed over British arms to anti-Treaty units in return for their passing arms to IRA units (pro and anti-Treaty) who were to attack across the new border into Northern Ireland.

Each of the four Northern IRA Divisions was to be given 500 rifles and 2-300 revolvers. Although in some cases arms failed to be delivered in these quantities and although the ‘Northern Offensive’ turned out to be something of fiasco, it seems certain a large quantity  of weapons was sent north to the border in early 1922. [4]

The balance of weapons at the start of the civil war

So when the Civil War broke out on June 28 1922, lack of arms was not the main problem faced by the anti-Treatyites or ‘Irregulars’. At Limerick one guerrilla recalled ‘at Kilmallock…I saw one man with three guns…and two bandoliers of ammunition – about 1,000 rounds’[5].

IRA units in places as far apart as Cork, Sligo and Dundalk had armoured cars, rifles and machine guns in relative abundance, though they probably still did not have enough to arms their roughly 15,000 fighters. The Provisional Government at the start of the war estimated that the ‘Irregulars’ numbered about 12,900 with, between them about 6,800 rifles, as well as some machine guns and armoured cars[6].

Their problem was of course that they still could not match the arms the British supplied to the National Army. First there was the volume of arms. Between January and June 1922, when the Pro-Treaty authorities were trying to build up an army, principally from their supporters in the IRA, the British supplied them with nearly 12,000 Lee Enfield rifles, 80 Lewis machine guns 4,000 revolvers and 3,500 grenades.

This military aid increased exponentially after the Civil War broke out and the Provisional Government set about putting down the Republican ‘diehards’. Another 27,000 rifles, 256 Lewis light machine guns and 5 Vickers heavy machine guns were donated between early July and September alone. [7]  With British aid the National Army swelled to 58,000 men by the war’s close and there was no difficulty in arming them.

The key difference, however, between the two sides was artillery. At the start of the war the Free State infantry were already slightly better equipped than the anti-Treatyites, but what enabled them to drive the republicans from Dublin, Limerick, Waterford and Cork as well as many other small towns around the country in July-August 1922 was their possession of field artillery, of which the British donated 8 18 pounder field guns by 1922. The Four Courts, the republican headquarters in Dublin, a fortress-like 18^th century monolith might have held out indefinitely if it had not been bombarded by four 18 pounder guns in July 1922.

In Limerick city similarly, had weapons been confined to small arms, fighting probably would have dragged on inconclusively for weeks in protracted fire fights in the streets. But once the Free State forces brought a single 18 pounder artillery piece to bear on the anti-Treaty headquarters in the Strand Barracks, blasting a breach in its walls, the republicans abandoned their positions throughout the city within a day.

The anti-Treaty IRA never possessed any artillery. Liam Lynch their Chief of Staff tried repeatedly to import mountain guns from Germany, but could not get either the cash or the contacts in Germany together. It is difficult to see, in any case, how they could have got past the Royal Navy blockade.[8] The result was that, with rare exceptions, the IRA could not take even a well defended barracks let alone large towns, certainly after the autumn of 1922.

Their attempts at improvised mortars were also largely a failure. In Kerry for instance in January 1923 a strong column led by Tom McEllistrim and John Joe Sheehy attacked the National Army post in Castlemaine, trying out an improvised ‘trench mortar that fired 12-15 shells at the Army post.’

Most of the shells did not explode at all and the only one to hit the barracks did no damage, leading the Kerry Volunteers to satirically name it, ‘the 6^th commandment’, thou shalt not kill’.[9]

At the start of the civil war both sides had access to armoured cars but as the conflict went on, the armoured vehicles in the anti-Treatyites’ possession either broke down or were put out of action in combat. By contrast the Pro-Treaty forces received an ongoing supply of armoured vehicles from the British, with the result that by the winter of 1922 the Free State forces also had a marked superiority in armoured vehicles and mobility.

The impact of Civil War weapons

Peter Hart made the point that the Civil War’s relatively low casualties showed that it was not the availability of weapons, but the will to kill that upped the conflict’s body count. To some extent this is true, the early battles of the civil war were characterised by a great deal of shooting and relatively low casualties.

For instance in July 1922 a 400 strong National Army force under Sean McEoin, complete with an 18 pounder artillery piece, re-took the village of Collooney county Sligo after a bombardment and a protracted fire-fight. The fighting lasted the better part of a day and involved hundreds of fighters firing thousands of rounds and an artillery barrage, but produced only one fatality, an anti-Treaty IRA Volunteer[10]. There are numerous examples in these early days of fighters on both sides being reluctant to shoot to kill.

And yet the fighting of July-August 1922 was still probably (except for the Rising of 1916) the bloodiest compact period of the Irish revolution, with, by my estimate about 3-400 killed in action within about 8 weeks. The widespread availability of modern weapon and ammunition did make a difference.

In Tralee for instance on August 2nd, the Free State column took the town from its Republican garrison after some hard fighting that left 9 Pro-Treaty and 2 Anti-Treaty soldiers dead with a further 20-30 Free State wounded.  One well-sited Lewis machine gun, in a mill overlooking a crossroads, alone killed seven of the National Army soldiers. The Free State troops, using mortars and armoured cars eventually stormed the mill and put the Anti-Treaty fighters into retreat. [11]

The Thompson submachine gun, now in quite wide use, could be deadly at close range. At the ‘Clones Affray’, a skirmish in February 1922 between the IRA and the Ulster Special Constabulary at Clones train station, one Volunteer raked the Specials’ train carriage with his submachine gun, killing 4 and wounding 13, in the space of a few seconds.[12]

Similarly during Frank Aiken’s successful assault on Dundalk barracks in August 1922, Todd Andrews, who was there, wrote of the assault that two groups of ten men attacked the northern and southern gates of the barracks. Five in each group carried a ‘mine’ and five carried Thompsons. When the mines were exploded the machine gunners rushed into the breach and ‘silenced’ the Free State sentries.[13]

A third example is the attack on Wellington Barracks, Dublin in November 1922 when a an IRA squad of 3 men, one armed with a Thompson and a 100 round drum, the rest with handguns, on an overlooking rooftop sprayed over 100 National Army soldiers lined up on the parade square – they manage to hit 22 in just five minutes of firing, killing  one and seriously injuring 14.[14]

Nevertheless, the Free State forces’ superiority in small arms and ammunition grew more and more marked and more important as the Civil War went on. In a typical engagement, such for instance at Leixlip in December 1922,  National Army troops ‘suppressed’ with rifle and machine gun fire – i.e. kept stuck under cover in one place – an anti-Treaty unit and engaged them until they ran out of ammunition and then took them prisoner. The National Army detachments were often supported by Rolls Royce armoured cars mounted with Vickers belt-fed machineguns. The options for the guerrillas were either to run or surrender. [15]

Small wonder perhaps that only around 500 IRA Volunteers died in the war but as many as 12,000 were imprisoned.[16]

Weapons and ammunition could certainly be taken from Free State forces – 400 rifles and 4 Thompsons at Dundalk in August 1922 for example, along with nearly 45,000 rounds of ammunition, and 110 rifles and two Lewis guns, with 20,000 rounds in a raid on Kenmare the following month. [17]. But ammunition was difficult to replenish and by the end of the civil war many rifles were stored in dumps for lack of ammunition.

National Army seizures of weapons also greatly depleted the anti-Treaty stocks as the war went on. For instance in Dublin by the end of the war, both IRA Brigades (city and south county) could between them muster about 250 men (not all of them active) and about 50 rifles (with about 25 rounds each), 90 handguns and two Thompsons and a small amount of explosives. These were split into small dumps around the city and county. It was enough to continue a minor harassing campaign against a Dublin garrison of about 3,000 National Army troops – with 5,000 more nearby in the Curragh, but no more than that.[18]

However, there was one sense in which the National Army’s abundance both of arms and of inexperienced recruits was a mixed blessing. Their weapons safety was often appalling. For instance, out of 68 Free State personnel who died violently in Dublin city, 20 men, or nearly a third, died either in firearms accidents while cleaning their weapons or were shot by their own nervous or careless comrades.[19] If this pattern was repeated around the country (as seems likely), then perhaps 200 of the roughly 800 National Army and other members of the Free State forces who died in the civil war may have been the victims of firearms accidents.

Adapting guerrilla tactics in the Civil War

As the Civil War went on the IRA found that the conventional infantry weapons of rifle and light machine gun were of less and less use for their brand of guerrilla warfare. Lack of training and perhaps ruthlessness meant that IRA marksmanship was usually abysmal.

In urban areas they typically needed weapons that were easily concealable, and by the end typically they were held by women sympathisers and only carried for ‘jobs’. For instance in April 1923, in Dublin  a woman named ‘Josephine Evans was arrested at 29 Georges Place at safe house where the Active Service Unit came to collect their weapons. She had 2 ‘Peter’ [C96 Mauser] automatic pistols, 2 revolvers and  one Winchester rifle with stock cut off. [20] As they had been against the British, the IRA’s urban guerrillas’ main weapon was the improvised hand grenade and the pistol.

Even in open country the improvised explosive or ‘mine’, remotely detonated, was found to be a much better bet than the rifle – capable of inflicting large amounts of casualties at minimal risk to the attackers. The mine probably inflicted the majority of the National Army’s dead and wounded in combat.

To take just one of many examples, in November 1922, at Carrickmacross County Monaghan, an area where the anti-Treaty guerrillas generally accomplished very little, a remotely detonated mine totally destroyed a troop lorry, killing or wounding all ten soldiers aboard at no loss to the 12 man IRA ambush party, who afterwards collected the troops’ arms and ammunition.[21]

‘Mines’ were also a staple of the IRA’s attack on fortified positions – Aiken’s attack on Dundalk is the best example but one could also instance the capture of Clifden, Connemara, in October 1922,  the report of which was circulated to all IRA units as a textbook example of how to use ‘mines’.

In order to capture the three National Army barracks in the town, teams of engineers, under covering fire from rifles and Lewis guns placed petrol tin mines by the walls and detonated them via an electric cable. The Free State garrison of over 100 surrendered when the walls of the main barracks collapsed.[22] These improvised explosives were also widely used to blow up the houses and businesses of the republicans’ political enemies, particularly Senators, though simple arson was also used for this.[23]

The use of mines was considered the ‘Regular’ or Free State troops to be a terror tactic, a cowardly form of warfare. The bombs could horribly mutilate a body without giving the victim any chance to fight back. In Kerry their use unleashed the most hellish atrocities of the war in March 1923 when in reprisal for the killing of five soldiers in a booby trap bomb at Knocknagoshel, 8 IRA prisoners were tied to mine at Ballyseedy and blown up by vengeful National Army soldiers, the first of three such massacres by Free State troops in Kerry.[24]

By the end of the war Frank Aiken, by now IRA Chief of Staff (after the death of Liam Lynch), was reporting that they needed to rethink their whole way of guerrilla warfare for the future, in which explosives (the ‘mine’) and other heavy weapons would be key rather than small arms.

In a letter to Ernie O’Malley in June 1923 (after the ceasefire), he wrote, ‘if we have to fight another war against the [Free] Staters it will have to be short and sweet and our men will have to be trained in taking the offensive in large bodies… I believe the rifle and revolver is out of date as an offensive weapon and that the rifle should only be on protection for special corps of engineers. The use of explosives, gas and fire, may be concentrated on, also trench mortars’.[25]

National Army Intelligence similarly reported that by the end of the Civil War they were contemplating ‘a general mining campaign’, ‘to blow up businesses of government sympathisers’ and (in Dublin) to carry out selected assassinations in the streets.[26]

Indeed many anti-Treaty IRA operations in the Civil War involved no combat at all, whether they were assassinations of lone troops or politicians, or burning of houses or destroying of infrastructure.

In caricaturing the anti-Treaty campaign, pro-Treaty Minister Ernest Blythe said

‘It was almost magnifying it to call it a war at all. Except in one or two cases in Kerry, the Irregulars never put up a decent fight. They got behind a hedge and shot a man and came in the dead of the night burned a house. They weren’t around to fight the Black and Tans but suddenly they were great heroes… ‘Any fellow who went out with the gun and the petrol tin [for arson attacks] deserved the firing squad and none got it except who deserved it’. [27]

Did arms decide the Irish Civil War? To an extent, yes. The Free State was armed and funded by Britain and this, for better or for worse meant that the anti-Treatyites could not win a conventional military victory. However the republicans’ guerrilla campaign, which targeted the infant state’s infrastructure and economy as much as its military forces could conceivably have brought down the Treaty settlement.

That it did not was, the members of the government such as Ernest Blythe argued, down to the Cabinet’s steely use of executions and counter-terror.  More widely though, as many guerrillas ruefully noted, their campaign was never as effective as the one against the British had been because it lacked the same degree of popular support.

In this sense the Free State’s superior weapons only created the necessary conditions for the republicans’ military defeat. As Eamon de Valera and the anti-Treaty leadership realised in the wake of the Civil War, it was through politics, not guerrilla warfare that republican objectives would be advanced in the future.

Conclusions

The Irish Revolution was very far from being bloodiest internal conflict or nationalist revolution to take place in the wake of the First World War. Nevertheless, weapons did matter, both symbolically and in how they were used.

Combat, of relatively restrained sort though it admittedly was, also mattered. The ability to impose one’s will on a political adversary ultimately depended on it. Political violence and sabotage by itself was not enough.

But in conclusion it would not be right to present the Irish Revolution as a time of manly heroism and epic battles. It was undoubtedly at its opening driven along by the same militaristic enthusiasm that was sweeping all of Europe. But by its close most people were sick of guerrilla war and political violence.

Local candidates for respectively the Farmers’ Party and the Labour Party in the election of August 1923 made the point that most had simply had enough of armed revolution by that time. One Farmers’ Party candidate thought that it was ‘high time for the parties to this miserable dispute to settle the bloody conflict…no more jail and bullet…the people have been ground down long enough with militarism’. A Labour man thought, ‘the revolver has taken the place  of the shamrock as the national emblem’, while another declared, ‘ the spade produces, the gun does not, muzzle the guns!’[28]

Frank Aiken’s decision to order the IRA to ‘dump arms’ in May 1923 marked the welcome end for most people, of the decade of the gun.

References

[1] Testimony of Pax Whelan, Waterford IRA in Uinsean MacEoin, Survivors, 1980, p114

[2] The Thompson Gun in Ireland http://thompsongunireland.com/Michael%20Collins%20TSMG.htm

[3] John Borgonovo, The Battle for Cork, July-August 1922, p21

[4] Cited in Matthew Lewis, Frank Aiken’s War, p136-137

[5] Joseph Campbell As I was Among the Captives, Joseph Campbell’s Prison Diary 1922-1923, Cork 2001

[6] Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green, p126

[7] Hopkinson, Green Against Green p127

[8] Hopkinson, Green Against Green p236

[9] Tom Doyle, the The Civil War in Kerry p251-252, Ernie O’Malley’s interview with Tom McEllistrim in ‘The Men Will Talk to Me’ Kerry Interviews by Ernie O’Malley, p209. One Free state solider was killedin the action however. Volunteer Ferguson.

[10] Kathleen Hegarty, They Put the Flag A-Flyin’ The Roscommon Volunteers, 1916-1923, p317

[11]Niall Harrington, Kerry Landings, p130-131

[12] Anglo Celt February 18, 1922

[13] Andrews, Dublin made Me, p261-265

[14] For the IRA report on the action see Twomey papers UCD p69/77 OC IRA Dublin 1 Bde to CS and p69/29 OC Dublin 1 Bde to Ernie O’Malley. For the National Army report see Military Archive, Cathal Brugha Barracks, cw/op/07/01 The National Army thought the IRA had used a Lewis gun too and told the press there were up to 40 attackers armed with rifles and machine guns for this version see here http://www.theirishstory.com/2010/06/09/wellington-barracks-dublin-1922-a-microcosm-of-the-irish-civil-war/ But in fact the IRA reports show that their squad had only eleven men, broken up into 4 parties and only two of these did any firing (90 rounds with the Thompson and 15 with a ‘Peter’ automatic.

[15] See here http://www.theirishstory.com/2015/01/08/a-damn-good-clean-fight-the-last-stand-of-the-leixlip-flying-column/#.VRiGTfzF_To

[16] The number of anti-Treaty IRA fighters killed n the Civil War has yet to be definitely determined. The Last Post, The Republicans’ roll of honour lists about 400 names for 1922-1924. Its seems likely that this is something of an underestimate it is not clear by how much.

[17] For Dundalk attack see here http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/08/14/today-in-irish-history-august-14-1922-the-anti-treaty-ira-attack-on-dundalk/#.VV0lvblVhHw, Ernie O’Malley reported to Liam Lynch that Aiken had taken over 100,000 rounds but Aiken reported less than half that, see Twomey papers p69/29 for Kenmare, see Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green p206-207

[18] Dublin 2 Brigade (South County) reported its inventory in May 1923 after the dump arms order. Twomey papers P69/22 Dublin 1, (city)’s inventory was reported by National Army intelligence on May 2 1923. National Army archive cw/ops/07/16. Dublin 2 was slightly better off for ammunition with 1,000 .303 rounds and around 1000 different caliber handgun rounds, while Dublin 1 (the more active Brigade) had only about 300 .303 rounds and a limited quantity of ammunition for either the handguns or the Thompsons, which both took .45 rounds but of different types.

[19] See here http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/06/19/casualties-of-the-irish-civil-war-in-dublin/#.VV0umLlVhHw

[20] National Army Civil War archive, Cathal Brugha Barracks (CW/OPS/07/03).

[21] Anglo Celt November 18 1922. Of the ten wounded soldiers the local paper reported that one, Conlon died of his wounds the day after but it seems likely there were more.

[22] Twomey papers p69/77 AG to all Brigade OCs 11/12/22

[23] See here http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/06/21/the-big-house-and-the-irish-revolution/#.VV0teLlVhHw  and here http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/10/10/let-it-be-under-our-thumb-the-history-of-the-seanad/#.VV0tn7lVhHw .

[24] See here http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/03/14/march-1923-the-terror-month/ Ultimately 24 prisoners were killed in revenge fro the mine attack at Knocknagoshel, some in more ‘mine’ atrocities, others summarily shot.

[25] Anne Dolan, Cormac O’Malley Eds , No Surrender Here, Ernie O’Malley’s civil war papers p378

[26] National Army Intelligence Reports, Dublin Command 1923, CW/07/16

[27] Anglo Celt August 4 1923.

[28] As reported in the Anglo Celt May 12, 1923 and August 18 1923

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn on life in ‘Illies’ area of north Donegal in the 19th century.

The Illies is a rural area in Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula. Located north of Derry city, Inishowen is almost the most northerly tip of Ireland. By the 19th century it was a society sharply divided between landlords and their tenants.

Early descriptions

English military commander Henry Dowcra’s description of Inishowen at the beginning of the 17^th century shows the peninsula to have been well populated along the coastal lowlands in contrast to the interior which was stated to be “all high and waste mountain, good for feeding cows in summer only but all waste, desolate and uninhabited”.(1)

The predominant settlement pattern was of small villages of farm houses (clachans) whose people farmed the surrounding land in partnership on an openfield system and grew mainly oats, barley and flax. As fields were not enclosed transhumance was practiced whereby livestock, which was the main wealth of the people, was driven to mountain pastures during the growing season.

Inland mountain pastures often belonged to coastal townlands and hence we have the Mintiaghs known as the “Barr of Inch”, Meendacalliagh as the “Barr of Luddan” and Meenyanly as the Barr of Muff (“Barr” being the Irish for “top”).

The Illies at this period was such a summer pasture and was totally uninhabited. Both Pender´s Census of 1659 and The Hearth Money Roll of 1665 show that the Crana Valley was inhabited only up to Connagh-Kinnagoe. The situation had not changed very much by 1770 when Crowe´s maps of the Chichester estate show that there were no roads nor houses apart from a herd´s enclosure where Kelly´s house at the “Head of the River” now stands.(2)

There were only a few tracks crossing the area as most transport was by pack-horse. However by the time the Tithes Roll(1829) and the first Ordnance Survey maps were produced in the 1830´s things had changed dramatically. A road had by then been driven through the Illies and the ladder farms established similar to what they were at the beginning of the 20th century although the field patterns were not as yet fully developed.

It would seem that the Illies along with Evishabreedy was summer mountain grazing for the Mac Lochlainn, whose territory lay along the Foyle around Redcastle and Whitecastle, and as such at the plantation of Inishowen was confiscated and granted to Chichester who then leased them to George Carey along with the other townlands of the territory.(3) The dispossessed families from the more fertile Foyleside townlands had to move to less fertile lands and pay a rent to the planters.

Landlords and tenants

Always strapped for cash to fuel their lifestyle the Chichester custom of demanding an initial heavy down-payment and a relatively low yearly rent for lease of properties prevented smaller farmers from bidding for those leases so that middlemen (often Derry business people) who were able to pay the sums demanded got control of the land and then sublet the small farms at ever higher rents.(4) In some places there was a second layer of middlemen and resulting rack renting caused great hardship for many farmers.

Even when smaller holders could afford the leases a difference was made between Catholics whose leases ran to 31 years and Protestants who got 61 year leases. The tenants had no encouragement to make improvements on their farms as such would only lead to a rise in rent. Bog reclamation did not take place because the landlord kept for himself the right to rent out moor for turf cutting. (5)     By 1800 most small farmers were tenants-at-will and rents rose steeply, often doubling, in the next 15 years, due to the high prices being offered for barley to supply the demands of illicit distillation.

The descendents of George Carey lived isolated from their Irish tenants, the fruits of whose labours they enjoyed to the full, socialising and marrying within the small circle of English-descended families.

They were no less fond of the good life than their overlords, the Chichesters, and so by the end of the 18^th century their expenditures far outstripped their income with the result that they were obliged to mortgage parts of their estate and eventually put the whole up for sale in the Court of Chancery. (6)   The Illies and Evishabreedy remained in possession of the Careys until at least 1819 when they are mentioned in an indenture of sale to Simon Rose of that year. (7) By the time of Griffith’s Valuation (1857) they had both passed into the possession of George Harvey.

The Batesons

The Batesons were a Lancaster family who came to northern Ireland in the 18^th century.   Richard Bateson settled in Derry where he married his second wife, Elizabeth Harvey. Her brother, David, was a linen merchant involved in transatlantic trade who operated from Cheapside, London, catering for linen producers in the Derry area. (8)

The Irish Society was able to proclaim in 1748, based on the affidavits of this David and two others reared in Derry but now working in London, that not one papist lived within the Derry city walls after they were ordered to leave by the corporation before the 1^st May 1745. (9)

Richard´s son Robert probably worked with his uncle David as he lived just round the corner from him and when the latter died in 1788 he left a large fortune to Robert on condition that he take the extra surname “Harvey” (a not uncommon practice where a testator would die without a male heir and wished his family name to continue).   This he did in September of the same year by royal licence. (10)

The now Robert Bateson Harvey, with his new found wealth, bought a title (Baronet of Killoquin) and several estates in England, including Langley Park, Buckinghamshire, which would become the family home. (11) He also began to buy up leases in Inishowen so that by the time of his death in 1825 he had acquired lands in Clonca, Muff, Desertegny, Clonmany and Lr.Fahan (Evishabreedy and The Illies by indenture of 1819 modified in 1830 fronted by Dublin law firms of Rose and later Hyndman (7).(11)

Although he never married Robert had at least four sons and three daughters.   When he died his title passed to his nephew by his half brother as all his own children were illegitimate but they did however inherit his properties.   Curiously although the eldest son, Robert, and descendents who inherited Langley Park continued to use the double barrelled name, though often reducing Bateson to its initial, the others styled themselves simply as “Harvey”.

The second son, William Henry, had entered the church and after serving as curate in various parishes was in 1821 appointed rector of Crowcombe, Somerset, where the family had a large estate. (12)   After his father’s death he inherited the Inishowen property and so in 1827 he resigned his rectorship (13) and moved to Desertegny where he built a large residence known as Linsfort House at a cost of £3000 (forty years later a house in the Illies with its accompanying outhouses could be built for under £30).

He also had a school built in Linsfort (14) while his cousin, Robert Bateson, 1^st Baronet of Belvoir and Conservative MP for Derry, who strongly disapproved of Catholic Emancipation, crossed swords with the O’Connells (Daniel and son) on the question of education of Catholics which he thought should be in the hands of Protestants through the Kildare Street Society.(15)

This family was forever swimming against the tide of history. His son, an ultra conservative MP was absolutely opposed to electoral reform saying it would lead to “emasculation of the aristocracy” and thundered in Parliament “This new born sympathy for the workingman had been begotten by a lust for power, suckled by the unctuous pap of peripatetic stump orators, and dry-nursed by the insolent threats and swaggering bluster of domineering agitators” (16)

In the same year (1831) the Rev. William applied on two occasions to have Cornelius and Denis Kelly along with six others evicted from some lands but both times it was not decreed. (17)   In 1810 his father had bought the 6 coastal townlands of Clonmany(18)   so that Harvey held all the land, with the exception of Desertegny Glebe, on the eastern shore of Lough Swilly from Porthaw Glen, beside Buncrana, to Tullagh Bay and the salmon fishing of this whole coast was let in 1834 to a Mr. Halliday, a Scotsman resident in Derry, for the sum of £30 annually.(14)

However not long afterwards William became ill and moved back to England into the care of his younger brother at whose residence in Cheltenham he died in 1840 after a prolonged illness.(19)

Brother George who now inherited the property had no intention of living in Ireland. In 1844 his cousin, Thomas Douglas, brother of Sir Robert Bateson, 2^nd Baronet of Killoquin who had inherited his father’s title, was acting as estate agent and living in Linsfort House. He was one of the witnesses who gave evidence to the Devon Commission on the state of agriculture in the Buncrana area.

Shortly afterwards he took up employment as agent for the Templetown Estate in Castleblayney where his harshness led to his murder in 1851. He had earlier evicted 34 families leaving 222 people sitting without shelter on the roadside. This was not the first time that he had run foul of his tenants because 10 years previously a plot to kill him had been uncovered in Co. Donegal.(20)   He admitted in his evidence to the Devon Commission that the tenants complained of exorbitant rents.

After his departure from Inishowen George handed over the management of his properties to the ruthless estate agent, John Millar, who took up residence in Linsfort House. This man carried out George’s bidding with the utmost cruelty and an example of his work appeared in the Derry papers of 1849 when Nancy Mc Laughlin was evicted from her home in Leophin.

Evictions

Evictions were commonplace but the fact that Millar backed his bailiffs in their obviously outrageous treatment of the family and went so far as to haul them before the courts considering the trauma they already suffered says much about the character of the man. He would brook no resistance to his will and through this court case made that fact public.(21)

George held 25593 acres in Inishowen, making him the largest landholder in the peninsula and it is he who appears in Griffith´s Valuation as the immediate lessor of many of the townlands of the Crana valley including the Illies. He died in 1881 leaving his property to his nephew, another Robert Bateson Harvey, Baronet of Langley Park.(22)

The new landholder would be another absentee landlord but just as demanding of his tenants as his predecessors. In 1882 before the circuit court sitting in Carndonagh he presented applications for the eviction of 12 tenants and in 1887 he set John Millar to work, reported by The Irish News as follows:- (23)

“On January 14 several evictions were carried out on the estate of R.B. Harvey by the under sheriff of Donegal accompanying whom were 7 cars of police under the direction of Mr. Harvey R.M. and M. Winder D.I.  

These evictions were quite unexpected as but the previous week the tenants waited on the agent seeking an abatement and though they got no great encouragement they expected he would communicate with the landlord, who is credited with being a fair man, and thus secure for them reasonable terms.

The sheriff and party were in the village of Clonmany at an early hour and ready to begin operations shortly after 9 o´clock a.m.   The first house visited was that of widow Ellen Doherty, Tullagh.   The occupants of the house consist of her and daughter, her only son having gone to America about a year ago, being unable to live on the farm which is exceptionally high rented.   The second person who was fated to go through the trying ordeal of being turned out of the home of his forefathers was George Mc Laughlin, Urrismenagh.   The family numbers 7 persons and though the poor man offered to pay 3 half year´s rent it was rejected by the agent.  

The bailiffs, who met no resistance, soon cleared out the house and it was a sad sight to see the poor fellow sitting by the roadside with his family around him, the big tears rolling down his cheeks, whilst he looked at the agent nailing up the door with his own hands.   The third family visited consisted of 2 unmarried girls, one of whom is extremely delicate.   These tried to make a settlement offering the agent all they had in the world, as they said, but to no effect; the bailiffs were ordered to do their work which did not delay them long.   Harry Mc Daid’s turn came next.

This man ought to be quite familiar with the sheriff and party having received a visit from them on 2 previous occasions.   He has a wife and 6 young children and they all lived in a little house of about 10 feet square right up at the foot of Baughter.   The operation of clearing out the house was more unpleasant than laborious.   Small and uncomfortable, however, as the place was the poor fellow would not be allowed to remain there though having paid twice over in rent the value of the rood of stony ground which he had made out of the mountain side; not a man in the world would give the law expenses for the holding.  

The fifth case was perhaps the most heartrending of all. Widow Grace Gibbons is the tenant before whose house the word of command is given to the little army to halt.   The particulars of this woman’s case furnish an instance of the unfortunate occurrences that have made it impossible for landlord and tenant to live in harmony in this country.   This woman lost her husband by his efforts to pay the rent.   Returning home from a mission of this nature a most tempestuous evening came on and the poor man was blown off the road into a large pool from which he was extricated with difficulty but died soon afterwards from the effects of exposure.   The woman has 5 little children, all girls, and is most destitute.  

So apparent were the hardships of her case that one of the officers in command of the police, moved by pity, gave her all the money he had about him.   Mr. Millar has been exceptionally sharp with this unfortunate woman.   He attempted on a former occasion to evict her without a decree and the sheriff was actually about to throw out the effects when he discovered his error.   Philip Mc Laughlin was next evicted.   The man lives by himself and eviction won’t press so heavy on him.   This finished the day’s work.   All passed over quietly though the evictions were witnessed by fully 500 people filled with indignation at seeing their neighbours so heartlessly cast out of their homes.”

When I was a small boy I used to spend all the time that I was allowed in the Illies and I remember one evening on the street in front of the house trying to squeeze the last drops of sunlight out of an autumn day my grandmother saying to me “ a heskey, look yer al wetshod. Come in out a the caul afore John Millar gets ye”. Of course I had no idea who John Millar was nor do I think had she but it shows how terror of the man lingered on in the minds of the people long after he had departed the scene.

Robert died later that year (1887) and his second son Major Charles Bateson Harvey now inherited the Inishowen property. He married Catherine Maria Lascelles in 1891 but he was killed in 1900 in the Boer War. Three years later the Irish Land Act was passed and the Harvey estate was sold in her married name although individual farms were being sold off at least 6 years earlier.

Ribbonmen

It should come as no surprise that the people of Inishowen, as in the rest of Ireland, took measures to protect themselves from the abuses of these landlords and so secret societies were formed to fight back known as Ribbonmen or Molly Maguires.

However as often happens with such organizations control falls into the hands of local thugs who prey on tenants rather than protect them and such was the case with the group in this area known as the Cleenagh Men because as the local doggerel says they held their meetings “behind a ditch in Cleenagh”.   Many stories of their exploits are recounted and it was said that if a man brought a young heifer worth £5 to a fair in Buncrana and was offered £3 by one of these thugs he would be well advised to accept it for fear of what might happen to himself or his family otherwise.

In 1896 the position of work mistress in Kinnego School became vacant.   Cassie Blieu from Ballymagan applied and was appointed over the daughter of one of the gang members. Obviously this did not go down well and a campaign of terror was organised against parents of the pupils with the aim of getting them to boycott the school.

When this did not succeed four masked ruffians broke into the Blieu home one dark night and unmercifully beat the family with stout sticks causing serious injury to the father and sons and then before leaving smashed the windows and doors.   The eldest son, Charlie, never recovered and suffered a total mental breakdown.   He had recurring panic attacks when he showed signs of extreme terror and on occasions became violent.

The family sought to have him committed to an asylum but out of pity did not proceed with their intent.   On Sunday 14th. March 1897 while his two sisters were at Mass Charlie was seized with a fit of terror and in his insanity attacked with a beetle the members of the family in the house at that time killing his father, Robert, and rendering unconscious his mother, his brother Willie, who had been sick in bed for some time past, and a little niece, Rose Callaghan, who was eight years old.   As he struck his victims Charlie uttered the words “God bless you”. He then tried to cut his own throat. Later when restrained but still in a dazed state, he declared “that’s the rear of the Cleenagh men”.

Charlie was committed to Derry Goal and at the Donegal Assizes held on Friday 16 July 1897 the medical officer for that institution declared that “the prisoner was admitted on the 15 March. He was labouring under acute mania. He remained in gaol and under my notice for two months. On the 12 May he was transferred to the Lunatic Asylum. During that time he continued in the same condition. I saw the prisoner that morning and he was still in the same state – quite unfit to plead or know what was going on.” The jury found that the prisoner was not of sound mind or capable of pleading. He would be detained in strict custody for the rest of his life. (24)

The Foyle Disaster

This was not the only tragedy to befall the Crana area in the 19^th century. In 1865 news of the Foyle Disaster stunned the whole area.     The disaster occurred on Saturday 16th September 1865 at 3:25 P.M. on Lough Foyle between Whitecastle and Quigley’s Point, as a result of the collision between the steamers Garland and Falcon. The former left Derry at about 2:00 P.M. with a cargo of livestock and some 50 passengers on her way to Glasgow. It was a clear day with calm water.

There was plenty of sea room and yet she struck the Falcon on the port bow with subsequent loss of life. The latter was on her way to Derry crowded with Irish reapers returning from the Scotch harvest. After the crash the two vessels separated and it was observed that a number of reapers were in the water. It seems that in their panic many of them rushed for the lifeboats fearing that the Falcon was about to sink.

Such was the number that scrambled aboard that the ropes holding the lifeboats broke throwing the men into the water. Although some were rescued many drowned and by Saturday 23rd September 17 bodies had been recovered, among whom were the following five men from the Buncrana area:- 1) John Mc Daid from Tirk, who went to Scotland a week earlier to buy sheep. 2) James O’Donnell from Tonduff. 3) Patrick Doherty from Tullydish. 4) Bernard Bradley from the Illies. 5) James Mc Laughlin from the Illies. (25)

‘Very great injustice’

As the 19^th century progressed the whole appearance of the Crana valley changed as it did elsewhere.   The Irish villages were gradually broken up by the landlords through evictions and the houses splattered over the countryside to create the landscape that is now considered typically Irish.

As the Rev. E. Mc Ginn (later bishop Mc Ginn) explained to the Devon Commission “I know from the very great injustice done to many individuals in the district by those persons not understanding sufficiently how to cut up the land.  They cut up the land and gave the best of it to two or three individuals, and banished the rest up the mountain.”

Thomas Douglas Bateson, in his submission to the Commission says “The whole barony was in rundale not long ago.  I subdivided the estate which fell out of lease into farms proportioned to the rent which the rundale tenants formerly paid, locating the stronger families up towards the hills”.

Socially the changes were deep also. The Irish language disappeared.   In the 1901 census only 19 people in the Illies Electoral Division stated that they could speak Irish.   At least three of my great grandfathers could speak Irish and socialised with neighbours and friends of their own age group in that language yet none of them registered that ability in the census. At the time of the plantation Gaelic Intellectuals recognised that what was intended was the creation of a “Sacsa nua darb ainm Éire” [‘a new England called Ireland’] and at the end of the 19^th century this had finally been achieved.(26)

Notes.

1   Calendar of State Papers – Sir Henry Dockwra to Sir Robert Cecil 19^th Dec. 1600 section 85 P.94

2 PRONI – Crowe´s maps of Chichester estate 1767-70 Upper Illies – D.835/1/1/103; Evisbreed – D835/1/2/104;  Middle and Lower Illies – D835/1/1/93

3   List of those holding land under Sir Arthur Chichester in 1622 as it appears in “That Audacious Traitor” by Brian  Bonner. P. 221

4   Harvey town lands of Clonmany sublet first to Mrs. Merrick ( O. S. Memoirs) and later to Minchin Lloyd (Griffith’s Valuation)

5   Information extracted: a)from the Devon Commission April 1844 submissions by Rev. E Mc Ginn No. 166 and Mr Samuel Alexander No. 167; and b)the Ordnance Survey Memoirs for parishes of Clonmany, Desestegney, Donagh and Mintiaghs.

6   Joyce Cary Remembered: in letters and interviews by his family and others. PP 6 and 7.

7   PRONI The Cary Papers.   D2649/5/3.

8   Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Oversees in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries by David Dickson, Jan Parmentier and Jane H Ohlmeyer. PP 276 -279.

9   The Hillhouse family of Irvine, Scotland and Dunboe/Aghanloo c.1600-1750. P 9, note 63.

10 Peerage & baronetage of Great Britain & Ireland. P 70

11 The National Archives (England) Langley Park estate and other estates of the Harvey Family. D31/F/1

12 New Monthly Magazine 1821, vol. 3, Ecclesiastical Promotions, P 365.

13 On line: “View Career Model Record for Harvey, William Henry.

14 Ordnance Survey Memoirs. Parish of Desertegney.

15 The Parliamentary Debates July 14^th. 1831

16 New York Times, 21^st June 1866, Web Site “Eviction in Ireland” www.maggieblanck.com

17 Enquiry into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland (Civil Bill ejectments P256 Nos. 560 and 583.

18   1814 Statistical Account – Parish of Clonmany.   By Rev. F.L. Molloy

19   National Archives (England) Harvey Documents. Personal Letters to Robert Harvey from George Harvey and others about his brother’s Illness, 1838-40. D140/90

20   ‘The Murder of Thomas Douglas Bateson’ by Michael Mc Mahon

21   The Derry Journal – Buncrana Petty Sessions, Thursday July 5 1849

22   The London Gazette, 11^th February 1881

23   Internet> Papers Past – New Zealand Tablet- 1887 Irish News> Evictions in Donegal.

24   The Derry papers (Journal and Standard) 15^th and 17^th March and 19^th July 1897.

25   The Derry papers (Journal and Standard) 20^th and 23^rd September 1865.

26 “Sacsa nua darb ainm Éire” (A new England called Éire) is taken from Fearflatha Ó Gnimh´s 17^th century poem “Mo Thruaighe mar táid Gaoidhil” (Pitiful the Plight of the Gael) in Measgra Dánta, Miscellaneous Irish Poems, Part 1, T.F. O´Rahilly, editor, Cork University Press/Educational Company of Ireland, 1927.

By Stephen McGarry. See also, Irish Brigades Abroad 1690-1815.

The large Irish contingent in the British Army at Waterloo has been widely written about, but less so the involvement of the Franco-Irish in the battle. Several years prior to Waterloo in 1803, Napoleon formed a new Irish light-infantry unit called La Legion Irlandaise to spearhead an anticipated invasion of Ireland.

This new unit was officered by many former United Irishmen who had fled to France following the 1798 and 1803 Rebellions together with former Irish Brigade officers under the ancien regime.

Napoleon’s Irish Legion was initially commanded by Dubliner Bernard McSheedy and was at this time one under-strength battalion and was mainly an officer’s unit with few rank-and-file, as they were expected to be swelled by a local raised cadre when landing in Ireland but it was later raised to a four battalion regiment with a regimental depot of around 2,000 men.

The Irish light infantrymen were kitted out in emerald green uniforms with parchment yellow facings and were presented with their new Colour of green with four gold harps in the cantons inscribed with ‘Liberté des Conscience /Independence d’Irlande’ (‘Freedom of Conscience/Independence to Ireland’) and received their prized possession – Napoleon’s bronze-cast Eagle. The Imperial Eagle symbolised the very soul of the regiment, pledged to defend it to the death its loss brought dishonour and consequently it became a prized enemy trophy on the battlefield.

The Irish Legion served widely in the Low Countries, Germany and in Eastern Europe including a four year tour of duty in Spain and Portugal during The Peninsular War (1807-14) but was under-strength and consequently not battle-ready at the time of Waterloo.

However, among two French units present at the battle were three battalions of the 92eme numbering 1322 men and two of the 88eme Régiments d’Infanterie of 1068 men formerly Walsh’s and Berwick’s regiments of the ancien regime Irish Brigade of France.

The Irish Brigade of France was disbanded by the new French Revolutionary Government who in 1791 decreed the abolition of all the foreign regiments in France. Accordingly the three remaining regiments of the Irish Brigade –Dillon’s, Walsh’s and Berwick’s – lost their distinctive red uniforms and higher pay and were absorbed into the regular French army on an equal footing.

Dillon’s was re-designated the 87e; Walsh’s the 92e and Berwick’s the 88e Régiment d’Infanterie, although for many years after they were still regarded as ‘Irish regiments’. Incidentally these three infantry regiments continue to serve in the French Army today, and the 88e Régiment, still maintains the motto; In Hoc Signo Vinces (In This Sign We Conquer) on their regimental insignia which were used by the Irish Brigade on their flags, and were flown at the Boyne and at Aughrim during The Jacobite War (1688-91) to restore the Catholic King James II to the throne.

It is difficult to establish the size of the Irish contingent in the former regiments of Walsh’s and Berwick’s who were present at Waterloo, (the 87e Régiment, formerly Dillon’s, was not present at the battle) but according to the Memoirs of Miles Byrne (1867) who documented his time in the Irish Legion, ‘many of the officers of those regiments [formerly Walsh’s and Berwick’s] were Irishmen, some born in France, and others in Ireland.’

The 92nd, formerly Berwick’s, was heavily engaged in the actions at the strategic Hougoumont Farm, the fighting there was close and viscous, the dead were piled up two and three deep in and around the farm and orchard and the 92e too suffered such high losses that it was a spent force.

There were doubtless other Irishmen spread out in a wide array of regiments on the French side, as they tended to join different units whenever vacancies or opportunities arose, this was borne out by a number of British encounters with Irishmen in various French regiments throughout The Napoleonic Wars.

According to Peter Molloy’s excellent M.A. thesis on Ireland and Waterloo, there was a British account of a sword fight between an Irish heavy cavalryman serving in a Cuirassier regiment at Waterloo and a possibly apocryphal story of two brothers meeting each other at the battle, one in the British, the other in the French army, and flipping a coin to decide which side to join.

There were around a score of Irish generals in the French army during the period, and many focused their energies on the liberation of Ireland.

One of them was Marshal of France Henry Clarke who was on horseback beside Napoleon on the auspicious occasion at Waterloo. Clarke was Napoleon’s right-hand man and served as his Minister of War and was one of the most influential and charismatic Franco-Irish generals during the Napoleonic period. He was a former officer in Dillon’s, born in France to Irish parents, and was central to the creation of the Grand Armée – although Napoleon unfairly partly blamed him for debacle of his Russian Campaign – and played a leading role in the formation Napoleon’s Irish Legion.

He may have looked on sadly through the fog of war at Waterloo as he saw through his telescope how an Irish regiment in the British Army, the 27th (Inniskilling’s) Foot, ordered to hold a strategic cross-roads, held their ground with stubborn bravery against sustained French cavalry and artillery fire. Their dead were later found heaped in the square formation they had held. Wellington later credited them for saving his centre-line in the battle.

The June 2015-issue of History Ireland magazine claims some Irish historians see Waterloo as an Irish victory, citing the fact that the Duke of Wellington came from Meath and so many Irishmen served under him, but the vast majority joined the British Army more for reasons of poverty than principle.

The Irish gained very little, if anything, for their travails. The Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) (or Catholic Emancipation’), conceded after a campaign of mass protest by Daniel O’Connell, was passed with the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington’s support.

Wellington acknowledged when the Bill was before the House of Lords that it was; ‘mainly to the Irish Catholic that we [the British] owe our pre-eminence in our military career.’ Of course, just thirty years later occurred the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) which was criminally mismanaged by the British Government causing the death of over a million Irish lives.

Irishmen serving in the British army and navy from the Seven Years War in 1756 right up to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 only maintained British bondage back home in Ireland by scuppering Franco-Irish designs for her liberation.

Napoleon would have liked to have tapped into this resource himself and had written in his memoirs in Saint Helena that had he invaded Ireland rather than Egypt in 1798, which ended in disaster, he would have ruled the world. One wonders whether, if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, he would have made another attempt to strike at Ireland.

Who knows how things could have panned out, Ireland may have gained independence from Britain one-hundred years earlier, and so avoided the calamitous events which occurred mid-century.

Stephen McGarry is the author of Irish Brigades Abroad (2013). He has written widely on the Irish military diaspora in Europe in the period and has been researching the subject over many years both in Ireland and across Europe.

John Dorney reports on the public talk on June 6, 2015, ‘Establishing the Free State in conflict’ by Irish military archives at Rathmines Library, Dublin.

The Irish Story devotes more attention than most Irish history resources to the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. The main reason for this is that until recently very little had been written about the conflict and many of the most elementary questions about the intra-nationalist bloodletting were unanswered.

One of the main points at issue remains the number of casualties. I had a go putting a figure on the civil war dead in Dublin and came up with a figure  of around 220 killed in the city and a tentative estimate of 1,500 dead overall. You can read that article here.

However both the available sources and the scholarship on the bloody, dismal end of the Irish revolution are expanding all the time. At this talk, Robert McEvoy of University College Dublin, who has worked with the Military Archives on the Military Pensions files, used the applications from the relatives of those killed in the conflict to establish a rough figure for fatal casualties.

The Military Pension files, which have recently been released to the public and partly digitised here, contain some 300,000 files on about 80,000 people. The files at issue here (1D, 5D DP) relate to payment to dependents of those who ‘died on active service in the national [Free State] forces’ ‘following lawful orders’ and ‘not due to negligence or misconduct’. Dependents left without a source of income were entitled to a payment of 10 pounds and 26 weeks’ pay. If ‘destitute’ thereafter wives might get a widow’s pension.

These files according to McEvoy show about 900 fatalities in the National Army up to the end of 1924. This is a larger figure than the previously highest figure, quoted by WT Cosgrave in the Dail in May 1924, who stated;

Approximately 600 officers and men of the Volunteers lost their lives from Easter Monday, 1916, to the 6th December, 1921, and about 800 officers and men of the Army lost their lives from the 10th January, 1922, to the 1st April, 1924. Up to date a sum of £3,909 18s. 10d. has been awarded as compensation to the relatives of deceased officers and men for the period from Easter Monday, 1916, to the 6th December, 1921, and £1,790 0s. 8d. has been awarded for the period from the 10th January, 1922, to the 1st April, 1924.

The Pension awards give us some idea of who died serving in the National Army. Many had previously served in the British Armed forces, such as Jer Mahoney a British Army solider up to 1919, killed in action in Millstreet Cork on January 5, 1923, or Eugene McQuaid (a cousin of the later Archbishop of Dublin John Charles), killed in a gun battle at Newport County Mayo in February 1923, who had previously served in the Royal Air Force in the Great War.

McEvoy stressed however that not all of these casualties were ‘killed in action’. At least 97 died in accidental shootings -whether through careless weapons handling or through nervous comrades. Many others died of sicknesses, such as pneumonia or tuberculosis brought on by garrisoning drafty, unheated posts, and other died in road accidents, drownings or other mishaps.

Robert McEvoy cited the case of two Privates, Moose and Kenny, who drowned near Mallow trying to swim back to their barracks after a night’s drinking (due to the men’s ‘negligence’ their relatives were not awarded a pension). So the total of non-combat related deaths may be as high as 2-300.

This would leave 6-700 who did die in action -a surprisingly large total in some ways considering the low-intensity character of the civil war after the autumn of 1922. Moreover McEvoy stressed that these are minimum figures since some families may never have applied for pensions.

On the other side, relatives of anti-Treaty IRA combatants were also entitled to claim for compensation for the death of family members after 1934. When asked, Patrick Brennan of the Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks, replied that this data still has to be fully analysed but that there are about 500 such claims – confirming incidentally, what local studies have been showing, which is that the pro-Treaty forces suffered more casualties than their ‘Irregular’ opponents.

This gives us a rough total of 1,400 combatant deaths, meaning that once civilian deaths are added – my estimate is roughly 2-300 – the final death toll still hovers somewhat below 2,000. Although these are minimum figures and even allowing for many more as yet undiscovered casualties it still seems as if the civil War was in fact slightly less bloody than the preceding War of Independence, whose death toll was counted as 2,100 by the Dead of the Irish Revolution project.

A final note; Robert McEvoy also showed how the Pension files can be used a historical source. The atrocities of the Civil War, for example at Ballyseedy in Kerry and in South Wexford (see here) in March 1923 for instance, are only fully detailed in the pension files, where relatives had to disclose the manner of death of their kin and their statements were checked and cross-checked for accuracy.

Overall this was a very informative talk and the Pension Files will certainly advance our knowledge of this dark and often forgotten period.

Pro-Treaty activists and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1922-24. By Daniel Murray. See also his previous articles on the IRB here and here.

Future Plans

By January 1923, with the Irish Civil War still ongoing, Séan Ó Muirthile was a busy man as Quartermaster General of the Free State’s  National Army. Not too busy, however, to turn his thoughts towards an issue that he believed needed serious consideration: the state of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

Some prominent army officers had been wondering amongst themselves about the future of the Brotherhood to which they had previously belonged. In theory they still did, but the Supreme Council of the IRB had not met since the January of the previous year, and neither had there been meetings of the local branches throughout Ireland. The policy had been to await events and then set about re-uniting the Organisation, as insiders were supposed to refer to it. If the time for this was not now, then when?

It was entirely natural that these officers would bring such concerns to Ó Muirthile. He was, after all, one of the few remaining members of the Supreme Council still around, not to mention a former confidant of the late Michael Collins.

Commander-in-Chief of the Army as well as President of the IRB, Collins had exemplified the dual role of soldier and operative that many in the Army were eager to emulate. Certainly, Ó Muirthile had little doubt that Collins, had he lived, would have continued using the Organisation in the pursuit of achieving further freedom for Ireland.[1]

 First Steps

With these questions in mind, Ó Muirthile consulted the other Supreme Council members who were also serving in the Army. The basic points that were agreed upon in their January meeting were that:

• The proud tradition of the IRB should be preserved and passed onto those loyal to the Free State government.
• This effort would fall upon the previous members of the Supreme Council.
• The Free State government must not be prejudiced or subverted in any way even if any members of its Executive Council were also in the IRB.

The seriousness of this last point is an open question. The past record of the IRB did not indicate an unwillingness to wield its underground influence on the other bodies it had infiltrated, whether they were the Irish Volunteers, the Gaelic League, Sinn Féin or others. Whether the Free State Army would be the exception, however, would remain to be seen, as there was still plenty of work to be done on the first two points.

This was begun in earnest a few weeks later. The matter of a revived IRB was put to a number of army officers stationed in Dublin who had also been IRB Centres, or junior officers (each Centre being in charge of a Circle, the basic unit of the IRB, consisting of no more than 10 members). The feedback was positive, with the consensus of opinion being that these proposals could be put into effect.

The only caveat was that a new constitution should be written to accommodate IRB men serving in the Army. After an existence on the outskirts of power, the fraternity would have to adjust to being on the inside.[2]

 A New Constitution

A copy of such a constitution gives an idea as to how this accommodation could have been managed. Titled ‘I.R.B. Constitution – 1923 (Provisional?)’, it can be found in the papers of Florence O’Donoghue. Once a prominent IRB/IRA officer, he had dropped out of both, disillusioned by the fratricide of the Civil War.

The document had been sent to O’Donoghue by a “D. Lynch”, possibly Diarmuid Lynch, another former IRB man. Whoever the sender, he had noted at the top of the document: “This copy was made by me of the new official draft (which I was not supposed to have seen).”

Another annotation in the margins identified Ó Muirthile and General Richard Mulcahy as the ones who had presented this proposed constitution to the Army. Truly, this revived IRB was moving in elevated circles.

The successor to Michael Collins as the Commander-in-Chief, Mulcahy had also sat on the IRB Supreme Council with Ó Muirthile before the Civil War. It was a sign that the new IRB would be continuing with the old leadership.

Much of the document is a rehash of material from past IRB constitutions. This is unsurprising, given that it was supposed to be building on an already established society, but there are some noteworthy, not to say disturbing, innovations.

One such is the Clause 13(b): in addition to the Divisions for different Irish counties (15 and a 16^th for Great Britain) as before, there were to be eleven parallel Divisions for the Army, each based on a different command post. The 1^st Division encompassed G.H.Q., the second was for the Dublin Command, the third for the Curragh Command, and so on.

To no other institution in the Free State did the Constitution pay such particular attention; as far as the new IRB was concerned, the Army was very much its territory, to be managed accordingly.

While the groupings of the rest of the Organisation consisted of ‘Circles’, those within the Army would be ‘Clubs’ but otherwise would follow the same arrangements, with the Clubs not exceeding ten members unless authorised by the Supreme Council, and each to be headed by a Centre who would report up the IRB chain of command. The new additions were intended to work seamlessly with the old, an exception being that a Club member could not also be in a civilian Circle.

 Every Power and Movement in the Nation

The Supreme Council was to be expanded accordingly. There would be twenty-eight members, as opposed to the fifteen in the 1920 Constitution: one from each of the sixteen Divisions covering the country, and eight out of the eleven Army Divisions. The remaining four would be co-opted by the remainder.

Thus constituted, the Supreme Council would be ready to pursue its stated aims:

Objects 1. The objects of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (hereinafter sometimes called “The Organisation”) shall be: – To establish and maintain a free and independent Republican Government in Ireland.

Policy 2(a) Whereas National Sovereignty is inherent and inalienable and, while acknowledging that political authority is exercised through instruments legitimately expressed, the Irish Republican Brotherhood pledges itself the custodies of the Republican Ideal – the traditional expression of National Independence.

(b) The policy of the IRB shall be to utilise every power and movement in the Nation, it shall influence them in their activities so as to secure that the maximum organised strength of the Nation – armed, economic, political, social and otherwise shall be at all times available for the achievement of its objects.[3]

It is hard to say how much of a finished product this document was intended to be: a rough draft or the final instructions. But it is not the proclamation of an organisation that was planning on going away anytime soon.

Instead, it showed a leadership that was thinking in the long term. It was prepared to be innovative, with its expanded Supreme Council and the formation of ‘Clubs’ to fulfil the role of Circles’. But in its assurance of itself as the only true keeper of the Republican flame and the willingness to use others in the pursuit of that self-appointed mission, it had revealed itself as very much the IRB of old.

 Tom Barry’s Plea

Ó Muirthile and his Army colleagues were not the only ones considering what a resuscitated IRB could bring. Four months after agreeing to revive the Organisation, Ó Muirthile had an appointment in his office with Sean O’Hegarty in May 1923. The former O/C of the Cork 1^st Brigade, O’Hegarty had remained neutral during the Civil War, though he remained in close contact with many of his former comrades.

It was on behalf of one of these compatriots, Tom Barry, the famed leader of the West Cork Flying Column, that O’Hegarty had asked for the meeting.

O’Hegarty delivered to Ó Muirthile a letter written by Barry. Announcing himself as “an officer in the Organisation in County Cork,” Barry appealed to the pro-Treaty IRB to use its influence towards stopping the manhunt of the embattled Anti-Treatyites, many of whom, like Barry, considered themselves as much a part of the Brotherhood as their Free State counterparts.

The Brotherhood, Barry argued, should come together again as one body in order to not lose sight of its ideals, particularly as there was still work to be done for the Republic.

Beneath the stirring rhetoric, Barry was counting on the IRB to facilitate an honourable climb-down for both sides. As far as Ó Muirthile was concerned, that horse had well and truly left the stable.

Another prominent Anti-Treatyite, Liam Deasy, had already signed a public document while imprisoned, urging his partisans to surrender themselves and their arms to the Free State. Ó Muirthile curtly declined to pass on Barry’s message to the rest of the Army Council, and told O’Hegarty that if the Anti-Treatyites had any interest in stopping the fight, they should consider Deasy’s example.

For Ó Muirthile, the only value of the meeting was how it revealed the depths of the despair among the Anti-Treatyites. If a fighter like Barry was close to breaking point, then there was little hope for the rest. Contrary to what he told O’Hegarty, he did discuss the matter with Mulcahy and the rest of the Army Council. They likewise were indifferent, and nothing was passed onto the government.

Barry’s hopes for the Brotherhood as a bridge between the two sides had been mired in sentimentality and wishful thinking. Ó Muirthile’s dismissal was pitiless but clear-headed. From then on, any new incarnation of the IRB would be formed on the Army’s terms.[4]

 Roads Not Taken

While a failure, Barry’s letter did provide a convenient excuse when the re-emergence of the IRB became public knowledge in the wake of the Army Mutiny of 1924. Speaking to the Dáil on the 26^th June 1924, Richard Mulcahy quoted a note he had made shortly after learning of the offer from Ó Muirthile, with the following points:

The Anti-Treatyites had tried to form their own IRB to strengthen their grip on their members.

1. That Barry’s letter was addressed to the Supreme Council showed his recognition of its authority.
2. That the letter came from Barry was particularly important given his reputation as a fighter.
3. The IRB might be utilised as a body for which the Anti-Treatyites could acquiesce in terms of them disbanding without humiliation.
4. That there was no group other than the IRB in such a position made the situation a delicate one.[5]

The first point is a peculiar one as there had been nothing in Barry’s letter about attempts among the Anti-Treatyites at forming a counter-IRB. It is possible that Mulcahy had heard about the musings of Liam Lynch, the IRA Chief of Staff, about reforming the IRB Supreme Council, and the Brotherhood in general, along Anti-Treatyite lines.[6]

Although nothing came of such plans, they showed that the IRB was still indeed considered a valid institution by many on the Anti-Treaty side, and that Mulcahy’s hopes were not entirely without substance.

Mulcahy made a second note a few days later, expanding on his original thoughts:

1. The Anti-Treatyite IRA was at a dead end as a body and should disband, with only the IRB able to provide a pivotal point to arrange this.
2. The IRB was fully controlled by the Army Council. It was possible that within a couple of years, the IRB could evolve into an open political society, much like the Irish Volunteers had done.
3. While the Government might not want to associate with a secret society like the IRB, it was essential that the state control the moulding of the Organisation, both as a constructive entity and as a means for penitent Anti-Treatyites to withdraw from the Civil War with honour.[7]

The problem with these noble-sounding, if wistful, ambitions is that there is no evidence of any attempts to put them into practice. Ó Muirthile’s later account made it clear that the reaction of the Army Council, including Mulcahy, towards the letter was an imperious, if not contemptuous one – hardly the best basis for an IRB outreach programme.

Whether the IRB could become an open society and not a secret one, using the Irish Volunteers as its template, is a question that would never be answered. However, there is nothing in the 1923 Constitution to suggest any such leanings. If anything, the old oath to keep the secrets of the Brotherhood and the right of the Supreme Council to punish any errant members remained on paper.

As for the notion of the state being allowed to guide the IRB, that would again contrast to the list of goals in the 1923 Constitution which made it plain that the new role of the Organisation was to be the other way around. Far from being given the keys to the Brotherhood, state ministers were kept in the dark for long as they could be.

Suspicious of rumours he was hearing about Army officers being summoned from all over the country to sit in secret sessions, the Minister of Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, confronted Mulcahy in February 1923. With no small amount of chutzpah, the general blandly denied that there was anything behind such reports.

Mucahy’s statements to the Dáil must thus be seen as excuses and rationalisations after the fact, for all the evidence points to the IRB being for the IRB first and foremost.

 Kevin O’Higgins Concerns

This revived IRB was to be very much an elitist affair. The informal meetings that Ó Muirthile had characterised the IRB revival had been between those with previous experience in the administrative roles for the Organisation. Ó Muirthile took care to consult former Supreme Council members and IRB officers but made no effort to reach out to ordinary initiates.

This was more than mere thoughtless but part of a glass-ceiling policy. As he described later in his memoirs, Ó Muirthile did not think it wise to be indiscriminate in the shaping of the new Brotherhood. This cartel within a cabal soon led to resentment among those on the outside, a simmering discontent that would have ruinous consequences for all concerned.[8]

But before that, Ó Muirthile had more immediate worries. Shortly after seeing O’Hegarty, Ó Muirthile heard that Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs, had found out about the efforts within the Army to revive the IRB. Wishing to head off any future problems, Ó Muirthile discussed the matter with Mulcahy, and they agreed to invite O’Higgins to a meeting where they could soothe his fears.

As O’Higgins later recalled, Mulcahy came to him “in a purely personal way” which the minister found distasteful. Another bit of overfamiliarity was how the general referred to Séan Ó Muirthile by name rather than by his rank of Lieutenant-General. O’Higgins made his displeasure plain at the subject of the IRB. He may also have been a member in the pre-Truce days but now, secret societies could only be detrimental to the state of the Army, not to mention the country. Mulcahy accepted this but asked O’Higgins to come along to the meeting all the same.[9]

It was on this unpromising start that the meeting was held on the 10^th July in the office of President W.T. Cosgrave. Cosgrave was present along with O’Higgins and the Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeill. Representing the IRB were Ó Muirthile and Mulcahy. Ó Muirthile began by bringing up the subject of Tom Barry’s letter, which was discussed in a general way by those present but resulted in nothing definite.

The talk then turned to the IRB. Ó Muirthile was happy to outline to his audience the activities of the society before and after the Treaty. He was to leave the meeting confident that the ministers had understood his position and accepted the IRB as part of the new state of affairs.

On that score, however, Ó Muirthile was to be very, very much so mistaken.[10]

 A Conspiracy against the Conspiracy

Another erroneous assumption on Ó Muirthile’s part was that the junior IRB members who found themselves disenfranchised would passively acquiesce. A rival faction was formed out of these frustrations: the IRA Organisation (IRAO), also called the Old IRA or the Tobin Gang after Liam Tobin, one of its ringleaders and former Intelligence Officer for in Michael Collins’ Squad.

Tobin added the foreword to The Truth about the Army Crisis, the document disseminated by the IRAO to explain its motives and grievances. The impact The Truth had on a wider audience is doubtful, and there no evidence that it rallied any segment of the Irish public to its cause, but it does reveal much about the conflict between the IRAO and the IRB, how they differed and, more importantly, where the groups overlapped.

The main difference between The Truth’s and Ó Muirthile’s version of events is which group came first: the IRB or the IRAO. According to the former, the IRB had never gone away to begin with, and was keen to stress the continuity between the ideals of the IRB of old and the aspirations of the new:

The big majority of the (IRB) members…accepted the Treaty as a means towards complete independence, and felt, when they joined the Free State Army, that they were acting in accordance with the spirit and tradition of the Brotherhood, and, of course, they all had the continuity of the Organisation in mind.[11]

The appearance of the IRAO seems almost incidental in Ó Muirthile’s account. He went so far as to deny that the two factions were even rivals.[12] This seems highly disingenuous in light of the IRAO’s insistence that their insubordination against the Army Council was fuelled by the hostility of the IRB, which they clearly equated with the Council.

In The Truth, the new IRB was not created until after the IRAO had already been set up. Alarmed by the banding together of those soldiers who were dissatisfied with the direction the Army was taking, the Army Council set up what it called the IRB in order to counteract the IRAO’s counteractions. These efforts culminated in an ultimatum from one of the Army Council to the new group: “Drop your organisation and we will drop ours.”[13]

The Truth drips with contempt that the new so-called Irish Republican Brotherhood could ever call itself such. If it was truly the IRB of old, the reader is asked, why were the IRAO members not advised on its re-organisation, considering how they had been IRB members from before. Clearly, the disgruntled soldiers saw nothing wrong with the reappearance of the IRB, just that they had not been invited to the party.

Also revealing is the language in The Truth. With its talk of the “national ideal” and what should be done for “the Nation”, not to mention the liberal invoking of Michael Collins’ name, the self-righteous, self-assured tone of the IRAO were more than a little reminiscent of that used in the 1923 IRB Constitution. Whatever their differences, the two societies were reading from the same hymn sheet.[14]

 A Continuity IRB?

While neither is unpartisan in their accounts, Ó Muirthile’s and the IRAO’s were truthful enough in how both groups discussed a merger as a way of resolving the conflict. According to Ó Muirthile, this never got beyond the talking stage due to the same prejudice the IRB showed towards any prospective members who had not held a senior role from before.[15]

The Truth was more detailed about the series of talks and meetings which the IRAO came to believe were merely stalling tactics on the part of the IRB. Mulcahy at one point promised the IRAO places on the IRB Supreme Council. This was not kept. Another meeting between the IRAO and the IRB, the former in the persons of Mulcahy and Ó Muirthile, saw the same promise of representation on the Supreme Council made. When pressed, however, Ó Muirthile admitted that this would only amount to one placement. Once again, even this meagre promise fell through.[16]

It was not until the IRAO saw that the IRB had no intention of releasing even a finger of its grip on Army policy that it concluded that further negotiations were futile and took steps towards what would become the Army Mutiny of 1924. In this, The Truth is almost certainly reliable. For all its self-aggrandising, the IRAO would most likely have been content with a relaxation of the monopoly held by the IRB on the upper echelons of the Army.

This would not have meant the end of the monopoly, however, merely more stakeholders in it. Neither the IRB nor the IRAO disagreed with the issue of control, just who should have the rights to it.

In the resulting inquiry into the Mutiny and the discussions in the Dáil, the IRB was characterised as having been revived or re-organised as if this IRB was a new incarnation of the old. However, there are grounds to believe that this IRB was in fact a continuation of the same. That men like Ó Muirthile and Mulcahy, who had sat on the Supreme Council during the Treaty talks, remained on as senior members of the IRB within the Army to the point of writing the new constitution, suggests that nothing had intended to change.

While there is no reason to disbelieve Ó Muirthile when he said that there had been no meetings of the IRB between January 1922 and the start of 1923, this is more likely due to a lack of opportunity and the confusion brought about the split from the Civil War than the death of the old IRB. That the IRAO mutineers had been IRB members from before the Treaty and had expected the new IRB to continue treating them as insiders suggests that while the pecking order had changed, the mindset of Organisation members had not.

 The End

The results of the Mutiny were the ending of the military careers of both the mutineers and the Army Council. Mulcahy was to endure the lambasting of the man he had attempted to deceive, Kevin O’Higgins, who was quick to levy blame on the Army heads who had tried playing at secret societies.

O’Higgins was to describe to the Dáil a very different interpretation to Ó Muirthile’s of the meeting in President Cosgrave’s office on the 10^th July 1923. Ó Muirthile was to insist that he had left the meeting confident that everyone was on board with the IRB. But according to O’Higgins, both Ó Muirthile and Mulcahy had at no point specified the IRB as actually in existence. They had instead opaquely described it only as an option. O’Higgins had used the meeting to denounce any revived IRB, option or not, likening it to a Tammany Hall that would make puppets of all in the Dáil.[17]

Or so O’Higgins told the Dáil. It is possible that, like any good public speaker, O’Higgins was tailoring his message to the audience. The revived IRB seems to have made no effort to reconnect with its members in the Dáil, being content to keep itself a military franchise. Perhaps Ó Muirthile had been sincere after all when he said that the intention when reviving the IRB was not to subvert the government.

Whether out of myopia or principle, this attitude would cost the Brotherhood dear. Having entwined itself so tightly with the Army, the IRB was unable to survive when expelled from it. There would be no further efforts to resuscitate the Organisation after 1924. Whatever dreams or ambitions it had had for itself, in the new Ireland they would wither on the vine.

 Post Brotherhood

Whichever was the more accurate account of that meeting in the President’s office, O’Higgins was to have the last word. Ó Muirthile lost his rank as Quartermaster General. A business venture in Dublin failed, and he returned to his home village in Leap, Work Cork. There, he resumed his previous job as an Irish language teacher, and set to work writing a book. Part memoir, part history and part apologia, it was never published and remains largely forgotten in UCD Archives other than the occasional appearance in a footnote of a more successful book.[18]

Mulcahy was also to lose his position as Commander-in-Chief. He continued in politics but, as late as 1932, the embarrassment of his past associations was used against him. Mulcahy attempted to make additions to the Army Pensions’ Bill by Fianna Fáil that would have debarred members of certain illegal organisations. By this, Mulcahy meant the IRA, which was then in an informal alliance with the new ruling party. Frank Aiken as Minister for Defence retorted by reminding Mulcahy of the time he had helped to facilitate another certain illegal organisation. Mulcahy’s motion was lost by 65 to 45.[19]

Bibliography

University College Dublin – Richard Mulcahy Papers

P7a/209

National Library of Ireland – Florence O’Donoghue Papers

MS 31,233

MS 31,236

MS 31,240

Publications

The Truth About the Army Crisis (Official), with a foreword by Major-General Liam Tobin (Dublin, issued by the Irish Republican Army Organisation [1924])

Dáil Report

Volume 7, 26 June 1924

Newspaper

Irish Independent, 28/10/1932

Southern Star, 15/11/1997

[1] P7a/209, University College Dublin – Richard Mulcahy Papers, p.177

[2] Ibid, p.229

[3] National Library of Ireland – Florence O’Donoghue Papers, MS 31,236 ; the 1920 Constitution at MS 31,233

[4] P7a/209, pp.220-223

[5] Dáil Report, Volume 7, Columns 3121-3122 (23 June 1924)

[6] National Library of Ireland (NLI), MS 31,240

[7] Dáil Report, Volume 7, Columns 3123-3124 (23 June 1924)

[8] P7a/209, p.253

[9] Dáil Report, Volume 7, Columns 3157-3158 (23 June 1924)

[10] P7a/209, p.229

[11] Ibid, p.177

[12] Ibid, p.253

[13] The Truth About the Army Crisis (Official), with a foreword by Major-General Liam Tobin (Dublin, issued by the Irish Republican Army Organisation [1924]), p.4

[14] Ibid, p.6

[15] P7a/209, p.275

[16] The Truth About the Army Crisis, p.6

[17] Dáil Report, Volume 7, Columns 3158-3159

[18] Southern Star, 15/11/1997

[19] Irish Independent, 28/10/1932

In Irish history, “Bloody Sunday” generally refers to events in Dublin in November 1920 or Derry in January 1972. But there were in fact Four ‘Bloody Sundays’ in 20^th century Ireland. One of them took place in Belfast in 1921. Here, Kieran Glennon, author of “From Pogrom to Civil War – Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA”, describes what happened.

On Sunday, 10^th July 1921, west Belfast erupted. Bullets raked the city’s trams. Rival nationalist and loyalist snipers traded shots from rooftops. Mobs burned rows of houses, especially along the unofficial frontier between catholic and protestant neighbourhoods.

Belfast had always been volatile in July – owing to the parades of the Orange Order on 12^th July – but this was violence intensified and militarised on a scale not seen before. Why, on the day before the Truce that formally ended the Irish War of Independence, did the city see one of the bloodiest days in its history?

Answering this question requires taking a look at the preceding year of violence in the city.

Background – the “Belfast pogrom”

The War of Independence came late to Belfast, but when it did arrive in mid-1920, it did so amid bitter sectarian violence.

On the morning of 21^st July 1920, loyalist mobs expelled thousands of catholics, as well as protestant trade unionists, from their workplaces in the Belfast shipyards and elsewhere in the city. Sectarian rioting ensued that evening, with the British Army called into action to separate the rival factions.

This marked the start of what became known as the “Belfast pogrom”. The situation was exacerbated the following month, when the IRA killed an RIC District Inspector in Lisburn; by the end of August, almost fifty people had been killed in communal violence in Belfast.

A siege mentality among the nationalists of the Lower Falls and Clonard districts of west Belfast was almost inevitable. They were tightly policed, ringed by four RIC barracks at Springfield Road, Cullingtree Road, Divis Street and College Square.

Unlike elsewhere in Ireland, the nationalist community from which the Belfast IRA was drawn was in a small minority among its unionist neighbours, so the IRA was soon pressed into service to defend nationalist areas from attack by both the police and loyalists.

One of its commanders, Roger McCorley, explained that they favoured, “an elastic system of defence” of Catholic neighbourhoods. There was “a central position in each area [with] a picket armed with rifles.” These men were alerted by signallers equipped with flashlights with different coloured bulbs, who could warn of incursions by hostile forces, allowing the picket to be rushed to defend the area if needed. A red flash meant imminent danger.¹

In the autumn, the Belfast IRA, severely short of weapons, adopted the same tactics used by their southern colleagues to acquire arms – seizing the guns of RIC men on patrol. The first such incident on 25^th September led to the death of a policeman, Constable Thomas Leonard.

That night, a group of Leonard’s colleagues, based in Springfield Road barracks and under the leadership of District Inspector John Nixon, broke into the homes of three republicans in the Clonard area, killing them.

Similar reprisal killings followed IRA attacks on the RIC and Auxiliaries in Belfast during the spring and early summer of 1921 – in each case the homes of nationalists were broken into by the police and they were either killed on the spot or abducted to be killed elsewhere. Nixon and his group of rogue RIC men soon became known to nationalists as the “murder gang.”

A more official response to the ongoing campaign of the IRA came in October 1920, with the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary. This new force was organised into three classes: A Specials were full-time and paid and worked alongside the regular RIC; B Specials were part-time and unpaid, but had a separate command structure to that of the RIC, which meant that they operated according to their own orders; finally, C Specials were part-time, unpaid and non-uniformed – they were usually more elderly and generally used for guard duties on public buildings.

The Raglan Street ambush

On Saturday 9^th July 1921, following negotiations between the British and Sinn Féin, a Truce was announced which would come into effect throughout Ireland at midday on Monday 11^th.

Both sides were to halt all offensive operations and police raids were also to end. The timing, coming just before the annual “Twelfth” commemorations in the north, could not have been worse – to loyalists, it seemed that the IRA was reaping benefits from its violence of the previous eighteen months.

According to Sean Montgomery, a member of the IRA, the police decided to mount one last raid on the night the Truce was announced:

“…Tommy Flynn and I were told to report to Brigade I.O. The late Frank Crummy [sic], school master, who lived next door to the school in Raglan Street, told us that the Parish Priest of St. Paul’s had the new D.I. of Springfield Barracks in with him and that if anything happened that night it wasn’t his fault as he was not in charge. D.I. Nixon was taking over for a short time, so when Nixon was there we could guess what for’. ²

The targets of this raid would appear to have been either Frank Crumney, Intelligence Officer of the IRA’s 3^rd Northern Division, who lived at 59 Raglan Street, or Tommy Flynn himself, Captain of D Company, 1^st Battalion, who lived at number 3 in the same street. The police may equally have been seeking both.

Forearmed with the priest’s warning, and fearing that Nixon’s involvement pointed to a “murder gang” attack, a defensive picket of fourteen men was put on standby, of which Montgomery was one:

“We were on alert about 11:20p.m. when we heard the alarm from the Loney – bins, whistles, etc. Down we moved, seven men on each side of the street. When we got as far as Nail Street we met the O.C. of the district. He told us it was a false alarm so back we went to Raglan Street.” ³

But the danger was real. Montgomery recalled:

“When we entered Raglan Street a lamp was flashing red [the signal of a hostile incursion] so we moved up to Peel Street. Captain Flynn gave orders that no man was to fire until he gave the order. Then J. Burns one of the scouts came running, he told us they were drunk with their faces blackened – that was a murder gang. The tender came slowly, when it got about 10 feet from Peel Street [the] Captain opened fire.” ⁴

Montgomery described some wild firing by the IRA:

“I was about 15 or 16 feet off it when 14 guns roared. A second volley was fired into it. The Captain got round behind. I and three men made the move through one house, over the wall and into the next street and came up to the tender. The men were still firing when we came to the corner. Jack Donaghy shouted for us to look out as our own bullets were hitting where we were.” ⁵

But it was one man armed with a handgun who did the most damage:

“We turned a corner then a shout in a Southern Brogue, ‘Halt, hands up!’ Jack Donaghy was using a Peter Painter 12 rounder [Mauser C96 automatic pistol]. He opened fire, three Policemen fell, one killed and two wounded.” ⁶

The dead policeman was Constable Thomas Conlon, based in Springfield Road barracks; the two wounded were Constable Edward Hogan and the driver of the Crossley tender, Special Constable Charles Dunne. Conlon, a catholic policeman originally from Roscommon, was viewed by the IRA as being sympathetic – according to Montgomery, “he was good at giving tips of police raids.”

The most immediate response to the ambush was that a GAA club hall was burned down in Raglan Street that night, where it was stated that “a German rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition” were found by police during a follow-up search. As no loyalists could have penetrated so deep into the Lower Falls, the hall must have been burned by the police. This was merely a foretaste of what was to come.

Bloody Sunday

The next day saw a ferocious reaction to the ambush. The nationalist Irish News reported that, owing to concerted attack by both loyalist and the police;

“The entire Nationalist district from Grosvenor Road on the one side right up to the borders of the Unionist quarter on the Shankill Road was practically in a state of siege from the early morning until late in the evening … While the trouble was in progress in these areas the sound of rifle and revolver shots rang out almost continuously … armoured lorries patrolled the streets, firing indiscriminately as they went.^{” 7}

Passengers in trams travelling along the Falls Road into town had to take cover from the gunfire by lying on the floor; the trams were diverted, first down the Grosvenor Road, but eventually, as the violence spread, down the Donegall Road. As if the situation was not already tense enough, “It was rendered infinitely worse by the actions of the Crown forces in careering along the streets, firing in all directions.” ⁸

Sixteen people were killed on what became known as “Bloody Sunday” – apart from Constable Conlon, ten of the dead were catholic and five protestant.

One of the first fatalities was Alexander Hamilton, who “…merely glanced round the corner of Conway Street when a Unionist sniper at the Shankill end of that thoroughfare sent a bullet through his head.” ⁹

One woman witnessed the death of her husband, an ex-serviceman named Daniel Hughes of Durham Street:

“…he was walking along Pound Street, which leads from Durham Street to Divis Street, looking for his three boys, who happened to be out. She was standing at her own door at the time and when her husband was in the act of going round the corner of the street she declares that she saw members of the Crown forces fire point blank at him and almost blow his head off. She said to the man who fired the fatal shot ‘You have killed my husband!’ but he would not look her in the eye.” ¹⁰

Amid the mayhem, even children were deliberately targeted: twelve-year-old William Baxter was killed by a nationalist sniper that afternoon as he went to Sunday School in Ashmore Street; the same sniper may also have been responsible for the death of sixteen-year-old Ernest Park, who was also shot in Ashmore Street, as he carried a kitten to a friend’s house.

While the nationalist press attributed the entire blame for the violence to the police and loyalists, the unionist papers exclusively blamed “Sinn Fein snipers” and were more supportive of the authorities, stating that “…the police were very plucky in returning the attacks in the disturbed districts, having regard to the advantage the disturbers possessed in being quickly able to conceal themselves.” ¹¹

There was no attempt to claim that Bernard Monaghan was a concealed sniper: he was aged seventy when killed on his doorstep in Dunville Street. William Tierney was killed while sitting in his own kitchen in Osman Street, a location that made it impossible for the fatal shot to have been fired by anyone other than a passing police patrol.

As well as those killed, scores of people were wounded – over forty were brought into the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Falls Road and more than sixty others were admitted to the Mater Hospital in the north of the city; one of these finally succumbed to his wounds the following April, bringing the final death toll for Bloody Sunday to seventeen.

In Belfast’s Unholy War, author Alan Parkinson makes an interesting observation that four of the nationalist fatalities were ex-servicemen. ¹² In its reporting of the events, the Irish News stressed that ex-servicemen living in Cupar Street, which ran between the Falls and Shankill districts, had also made up a disproportionate number of the victims of another facet of the violence – the destruction of houses:

“A pub was looted and burned, after which the mob, made up of men and women, saturated with drink, completed their job by setting fire simultaneously to twenty houses of Catholics.” ¹³

Altogether, a hundred and sixty one houses were burned that day, twenty-eight of them in Cupar Street alone.

Defence of nationalists

The IRA found itself stretched to the limit in trying to repel the attacks. According to Roger McCorley:

“There was very heavy fighting all over the city, even the city centre itself was swept by rifle and machine gun fire. Every weapon which we had in our possession was in action that day. The British, especially the Special Constabulary, seemed to be completely out of hand and were bent on massacre. Armoured cars passed all through our areas and kept up a continuous fire into the houses. Anything moving, man, woman or child, was fired on. A heavy concentration of snipers kept up a continuous fire into the nationalist areas.” ¹⁴

One curious incident suggests that the IRA may not have been alone in defending nationalists: an off-duty policeman in plain clothes was relieved of his revolver by a picket of men in Pound Street in the Lower Falls but when it was later discovered that the gun was a police weapon, it was returned to the RIC barracks on Cullingtree Road.

Given that the IRA had previously shown no compunction in killing RIC officers to get their weapons, it seems highly unlikely that they were responsible in this case – which implies that other nationalists had also organised a defence of the area.

The most likely candidates in such a case would have been the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a sectarian secret society led by the Nationalist MP for Belfast Falls, Joe Devlin. If the story had been reported by the Irish News, it might justifiably be viewed as stretching the boundaries of nationalist innocence beyond credibility, but it was actually reported by the unionist Belfast Telegraph. ¹⁵

Joe Devlin was quick to raise protests over the violence at Westminster the next day, pointing out that “…in not a single instance had anything been done to protect these innocent victims from miscreants in uniform.” ¹⁶

The authorities’ response

The terms of the Truce throughout Ireland (which came into force on July 11^th) created hesitation among the authorities about how to respond to the rioting that had erupted. A measure of their confusion can be seen from two proclamations that appeared in the press, both issued by Colonel Commandant Carter-Campbell, the commanding officer of the British Army’s 15^th Infantry Brigade.

The first, dated 9^th July (the day on which the Truce was originally agreed), rescinded the curfews then in place for Belfast, Derry and Newry; the second, immediately below it and dated 11^th July, reinstated the curfew for Belfast. ¹⁷

Assistant Under-Secretary for Ireland Alfred Cope was adamant that sending the Specials into the disturbed areas “would be the equivalent of pouring petrol on the fire.” ¹⁸

Evidently, Chief Secretary Hamar Greenwood took heed of both Cope’s advice and Devlin’s protests, for he announced that “…it had been decided to remove armed semi-civilians known as ‘B’ Specials from the streets altogether and to disarm the ‘A’ Specials who wear uniforms and are paid as policemen.” ¹⁹

Since the initial outbreak of the pogrom the previous year, it had largely been the role of the British Army to quell outbreaks of violence – given the deep-seated hostility between the RIC and Specials on the one hand, and both armed and unarmed nationalists on the other, only the military could be relied on to act impartially.

However, the Truce specified that neither side was to put armed men on the streets and Dawson Bates, Northern Ireland Minister for Home Affairs, told Prime Minister James Craig: “At the same time, my instructions to Col. Commandant 15^th Brigade are that…troops will be guided by the spirit of the agreement entered for the cessation of hostilities.” ²⁰

Confused, Carter-Campbell did not order his troops to leave their barracks and impose order on the streets as they would normally have done. This left the security response in the hands of the RIC.

The police returned to their barracks late on the night of Sunday 10^th / Monday 11^th, after a ceasefire had been agreed by phone between a senior RIC officer and the O/C of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, Roger McCorley. However, McCorley later observed “The pogrom lasted 2 years…the Truce itself lasted six hours only.” ²¹

The following days

The Truce was due to begin from midday on Monday 11^th July, but rioting resumed that morning:

“… huge crowds of Unionists surged in by back ways from the Shankill Road district and proceeded to attack the streets … They rushed up the streets yelling and cursing and using the most violent threats … Men armed with sledges and other heavy weapons went ahead of the main body and smashed in the doors and windows, while others of them went into the houses and threw or carried out everything that was portable. Groups of women seized upon the articles and carried them away.” ²²

The mother of thirteen-year-old Mary McGowan saw her daughter shot dead from a police armoured car in Derby Street off Divis Street – she was wounded by the same burst of gunfire that killed her girl. Two adults also died that day – one of them was an IRA Volunteer, Seamus Ledlie, who was shot by a sniper in Norfolk Street just ten minutes before the Truce officially came into effect. ²³

At the same time as they were trying to protect against the attacks of the police and loyalists, the IRA were also faced with an additional challenge from within the nationalist community in the form of the Devlinite Ancient Order of Hibernians. Joe McKelvey, O/C of the 3^rd Northern Division, reported to GHQ in Dublin that:

“The rioting had practically ceased by noon on Monday when a new difficulty arose. The Catholic mob, infuriated by the burnings of their homes, set fire to a large establishment in the Catholic area owned by Wordie & co., carting agents, and before we became aware of what was happening the fire had taken a hold on the building.

One of our men, who happened to be passing at the time, was actually beaten by the mob for his attempting to frustrate their design. On receipt of the information a party was immediately despatched to the scene and it was only with great difficulty they succeeded in preventing the mob from cutting the hose pipes of the Fire Brigade in its attempt to extinguish the flames.

The Belfast Brigade Commandant informs me that he is experiencing great difficulty in maintaining order as the Catholic mob is beyond control.” ²⁴

However, McCorley made no bones about how the IRA dealt with the issue:

“That same evening [11^th July] a most unexpected state of affairs came about. An element of the Nationalists, under the control of the Hibernians, started to loot the unionist business premises in the Falls Road area…It was obvious that this was due to pique at the fact that our people were now accepted by the British as the official representatives of the Irish people.

On several occasions during the day our men had to turn out and fire on this mob. They fired over their heads but later on in the evening I gave instructions that if the mob gave any further trouble they were to fire into it. We also sent our patrols with orders to arrest the ring-leaders of this group and bring them to Brigade headquarters. This was done and we ordered several of the ring-leaders to leave the city within twenty-four hours, otherwise they would be shot at sight. This action ended the Hibernian attempt to break the Truce.” ²⁵

Tuesday saw the annual “Twelfth” Orange parades pass off peacefully and there were no serious disturbances in the city.

On Wednesday 13th, one woman was killed in the Lower Falls and rioting spread to York Street in the north of the city and Ballymacarrett (Short Strand) in the east, but it was less intense than on previous days.

In west Belfast, that day was most notable for the series of funerals for the victims of Sunday’s violence, which were followed by hundreds of mourners along the Falls Road to Milltown Cemetery; Seamus Ledlie (the IRA man killed in Norfolk Street) was given a full paramilitary funeral, with a tricolour draped over his coffin, a pipe band leading the cortege and what the Irish News described as “Irish Volunteers marching four abreast” following behind. ²⁶

By the end of the week, twenty-three people had been killed in Belfast, hundreds more wounded, two hundred homes destroyed and a thousand people made homeless. ²⁷

The city experienced a month of relative calm thereafter, with only one death before – almost inevitably – widespread violence broke out again in late August.

Aftermath

Raglan Street no longer exists – the Lower Falls was redeveloped during the Troubles and as well as the old, two-up-two-down, redbrick terraced houses being modernised, the layout of the area was substantially changed, with many of the old streets being built over. Raglan Street was one of them but the ambush that took place there had already long since become the subject of a song:

Oh I’ll tell you a tale of a row in the town

When a lorry went up and it never came down

It was the neatest oul’ sweetest row you’d ever meet

When the boys caught the Specials down Raglan Street ²⁸

However, the lyrics merely illustrate the ability of some republicans to turn calamities into ballads, as the events surrounding the ambush were by no means a triumph for the IRA. While successful in thwarting an attempt to capture or kill two of their senior officers, the killing of a policeman subsequently cost them the life of one of their volunteers.

More importantly, the nationalist population of west Belfast, who the IRA was supposed to defend, paid a terrible price for the ambush. Over the entire twenty-seven months of the pogrom, a total of thirty-five catholic civilians died in the Lower Falls and Clonard areas; a quarter of all these deaths occurred in just four days – Bloody Sunday and the three days afterwards.

I have argued elsewhere that in west Belfast between July 1920 and October 1922, for the most part “…a combination of the military, IRA and other nationalists were at least able to keep the loyalists at bay to some extent.” ²⁹ However, the confinement of the British army to barracks, in order to avoid breaching the Truce, meant that the main burden of defending nationalist areas in mid-July 1921 fell on the IRA. Events that week proved that, unaided by the military, they were not equal to the task.

While the IRA may be deemed culpable for failing to prevent the reprisals that followed the Raglan Street ambush, the primary responsibility for the savagery that ensued lay with the police – in particular, with the Specials.

This was borne out at the inquest into the death of young Mary McGowan, shot in Derby Street on Monday 11^th. At the time, Belfast inquest juries tended to be broadly sympathetic to the authorities – “Dr. Graham (coroner) said the police had been doing their duty very well” was a typical observation. ³⁰

However, in this case, the jury made a remarkable change to its own verdict. It heard from an eyewitness that the Special Constabulary “…engaged in wild and indiscriminate firing. He went on to say that there was no need for the firing and added that everything was quiet until the police arrived.” ³¹

The jury found that the girl was shot by Crown forces. District Inspector Duignan asked that the particular section should be specified, so the jury then altered the words “Crown forces” to “Special Constabulary”. D.I. Duignan disputed the finding and asked for an adjournment of a week so that members of the Special Constabulary could testify. ³²

A week later, the re-convened inquest heard a denial of police responsibility from RIC Head Constable Pakenham, who had been in command of the armoured car in question (and who was named as a suspected member of the Nixon “murder gang” in an IRA intelligence document ³³).

But not alone did the jury re-iterate its finding of the previous week – namely, that the Specials had deliberately killed the girl – but it also added a most unusual rider to the verdict: “In the interests of peace, Special Constabulary should not be allowed into localities of people of opposite denominations.” ³⁴

The violence that erupted around the time of the Truce was the most vicious that Belfast had seen since the initial outbreak of the pogrom – July 1921 saw the highest number of killings in a single month since the twenty-seven deaths of the previous August. However, that figure would soon be surpassed the following November – and even worse horrors lay ahead in 1922.

Notes

1. Roger McCorley statement, BMH, Military Archives, WS0389
2. Sean Montgomery statement, O’Mahony papers, National Library of Ireland, Ms 44,061/6
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Irish News, 11^th July 1921
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Irish News, 13^th July 1921
11. Northern Whig, 11^th July 1921
12. Alan Parkinson, Belfast’s Unholy War (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2004), p154
13. Irish News, 11^th July 1921
14. Roger McCorley statement, BMH, Military Archives, WS0389
15. Belfast Telegraph, 13^th July 1921
16. Irish News, 12^th July 1921
17. Northern Whig, 12^th July 1921
18. Quoted in Patrick Buckland, The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921 – 1939 (Dublin, Gill & McMillan, 1979), p189
19. Irish News, 12^th July 1921
20. Buckland, The Factory of Grievances, p186
21. Roger McCorley statement, BMH, Military Archives, WS0389
22. Irish News, 12^th July 1921
23. Roger McCorley statement, BMH, Military Archives, WS0389
24. Operations Report, 3^rd Northern Division, 12^th July 1921, Mulcahy papers, UCD Archives Dept., P7/A/22
25. Roger McCorley statement, BMH, Military Archives, WS0389
26. Irish News, 14^th July 1921
27. Parkinson, Belfast’s Unholy War, p153
28. Ibid
29. Kieran Glennon, From Pogrom to Civil War – Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA (Cork, Mercier Press, 2013), p271
30. Belfast Telegraph, 18^th August 1921
31. Belfast Telegraph, 11^th August 1921
32. Ibid
33. File on District Inspector John Nixon, Blythe papers, UCD Archives Dept., P24/176
34. Belfast Telegraph, 18^th August 1921

by James Quinn

Publisher: UCD Press, Dublin 2015

Reviewer:Daniel Murray

James Quinn’s Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History is a fascinating look at a group of ideological intellectuals who sought to make the rest of 19^th century Ireland as interested in the country’s history as they were.

The purpose of this mission was not for the sake of history itself; indeed, the Young Irelanders, as these men became known, were as contemptuous of overly dry works of impartial scholarship as they were of textbooks aiming to make the Irish into better Britons.

History, as far as they were concerned, was there to excite, to arouse passion and, ultimately, to inspire its audience into becoming better patriots. Orwell had yet to say: “He who controls the past controls the future,” but the Young Irelanders had already come to that conclusion.

With that purpose in mind, the Young Irelanders founded the Nation newspaper in 1842 to publish heroic tales of derring-do, the more battles the merrier, and with an emphasis on ‘great men’ such as Owen Roe O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill and Patrick Sarsfield.

In this, they were drawing much of their inspiration from contemporary Romantic writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Jules Michelet and Augustin Thierry, as the Young Irelanders were the first to admit (though the anti-Irish snobbery in Carlyle was best ignored), and the Romantic movement in general, which celebrated the past as a source of inspiration, as opposed to the more forward-thinking and self-consciously progressive thinking behind the Enlightenment a generation before.

A strength of this book is Quinn’s skill at providing the intellectual context in which the Young Irelanders thought and wrote, both within Ireland (the Young Irelanders were happy to take advantage of works by more apolitical Irish antiquarians to buttress their own research) and on the Continent, where nationalists were similarly eager to uncover the true soul and essence of their countries through history and folk culture. However, Quinn is careful to avoid cluttering his narrative with excessive detail on side subjects, with the focus remaining on the Irish scene.

Besides the Nation, the other great literary project of the Young Irelanders was the Library of Ireland book series, beginning in 1845 with the publication of History of the Volunteers of 1782, and followed by other books on subjects such as the Nine Years War, the Plantation of Ulster and the Confederation of Kilkenny. Envisioned as a collection of interlocking chapters on Irish history, the Library of Ireland went on to exceed all sales expectations, with several of its titles appearing on R. Barry O’Brien’s ‘100 Best Irish books’ in 1866.

For all its success, the Young Irelanders’ mission of education was overtaken by events (“events, dear boy”), firstly by the straining of their alliance with Daniel O’Connell over issues such as that of political violence (O’Connell solidly against it, the Young Irelanders studiedly ambivalent), and then by the Famine, which rendered the high-minded talk of historical heroes meaningless when people were dying in the fields. It was a shift in priorities which the Nation had no choice but to recognise: “What man with a heart would sit to write Ballad History while his country perishes?”

Nonetheless, the Young Irelanders held a moderate line, repudiating proposals like a national rent strike. This angered the more radical members such as John Mitchel who proceeded to set up his own newspaper: United Irishman. As the title would suggest, Mitchel had no problem with the notion of armed insurrection, with the United Irishman helpfully giving tips on the best way to construct a barricade or drill with a pike.

The government’s severe response to this increased militancy (such as the sentence of fourteen years of transportation for Mitchel) prompted the ramshackle Rebellion of 1848 though, as Quinn argues, the hero-worship of past revolutionaries such as Robert Emmet (true to form, Mitchel chose Emmet’s brother-in-law as his defence counsel at his trial) made the decision to follow in their idols’ revolutionary footsteps an inevitable one.

Despite the end of the Young Irelanders post-Rebellion as a coherent group, many of their leading members continued on with their mission to present and propagate an acceptably pugnacious view of Irish history.

Additionally, having propelled themselves into a role of their own onto the historical stage via the 1848 Rebellion, they were keen to defend it, depicting the uprising as essential, O’Connell as an untrustworthy opportunist, the Famine as a British plot, and each other as either uncontestably virtuous (if they were still friends) or as miserable rogues (if they were not).

It was at this post-mortem stage that the Young Irelanders achieved their greatest success, for in many ways the subsequent generations were to follow their lead in writing history. Mitchel’s Jail Journal was to provide the template for the prison memoirs of the likes of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Michael Davitt and Thomas Clarke. O’Connell’s reputation struggled to recover from the polemics against him (the centenary of his death in 1947 was to be a muted affair), and the idea of the Famine as a plot as much as a natural disaster has been passed down through historical works as recent as Tim Pat Coogan’s 2012 book.

The turn of the 20^th century was to find an Ireland which readily responded to Young Ireland’s telling of history as a call to arms: an officer in the Mayo IRA during the War of Independence remembered his father reciting Mitchel’s History of Ireland “off by heart.” The first history book Éamon de Valera ever read was Alexander Martin Sullivan’s Story of Ireland, while Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman owed inspiration for its title as much to Mitchell’s original newspaper as to the 1798 participants.

This is a short book at only 147 pages, not including the extensive bibliographic notes, but Quinn keeps his narrative a tight one, making every page and paragraph count. This is a story of ideas, not of events (the 1848 Rebellion is told in barely a paragraph) nor of people (though there is a list of biographies at the end to help the reader keep track of who’s who), and Quinn is well able to explain them, and the motivations of the men (they were overwhelmingly men, no Countess Markieviczs here) who nurtured them, spread them as best they could and, in the case of those exiled or imprisoned, suffered for them.

Quinn is very much not a writer of the Young Ireland school, keeping as he does his tone admirably impartial as befits the Managing Director of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. But towards the end, he lets slip a glimmer of admiration at the Young Irelanders’ achievements. It is hard for even a cynical reader to not feel likewise. For better or for worse, 20^th century Ireland was as much a product of the Young Ireland movement as anything. This book should do much in making this team of intellectuals, pedagogues and would-be revolutionaries better known.

By Sean Boyne,

Published by Merrion Press, 2014.

Reviewer: John Dorney

Emmet Dalton’s career is so unlikely it seems amazing that no one has written a book on his life before. Like a character in the films Dalton was later to produce, he seems to have popped up as a player in all the main events of early 20th century Ireland.

Born in New York to Irish parents in 1898, he grew up in Dublin at a time of war and national revolution. Like his close neighbour in Glasnevin, Ernie O’Malley, he attended O’Connell’s Schools and just like O’Malley and his brothers was caught up in this age of militarism. First he joined the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist militia set up to force the passage of Home Rule in 1913.

Then, following the urging of Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, and much to his nationalist father’s disapproval, he joined the British Army in the First World War, where he served on the Somme and in the Middle East. For the first but not the last time he witnessed the violent death of one of his personal heroes – nationalist politician Tom Kettle who died serving in the British Army at the battle of the Somme.

Returning to Ireland in 1919 he found a land in turmoil – the politics of Home Rule having been overtaken by armed republicanism. His brother Charlie had already taken up the gun – he was by 1920 a member of Michael Collins IRA Intelligence Department – and it only took a a few raids by heavy handed Black and Tans for Emmet to offer his services to the IRA against his former comrades in British uniforms.

Dalton’s most famous exploit was participation in an attempt to spring Longford IRA leader Sean MacEoin from Mounjoy prison using a hijacked armoured car. More importantly though, Emmet Dalton’s undoubted bravery and ability soon drew him into Collins inner circle. After the truce of July 1921 that ended fighting between the IRA and Crown forces, the 23 year old Dalton was given the job of liason officer with British Commander in Chief Neville Macready. This was a thankless task in many ways as breaches of the truce were many and often.

So close did Dalton become to Collins that he accompanied ‘the Big Fellow’ to London for the Treaty negotiations as his personal bodyguard. And when, in late June 1922, Civil War broke out between those Irish nationalists who supported the Treaty and those who rejected it, Dalton became one of the National (pro-Treaty) Army’s most senior commanders. Dalton commanded the troops who besieged and took the anti-Treatyite’s stronghold at the Four Courts in Dublin and then led the seaborne assault on Cork that smashed the republicans’ ‘Munster Republic’.

Dalton’s relationship with Collins – a relationship he did not hesitate to call ‘love’ – came to tragic end at Beal na mBlath, when their convoy was ambushed by the anti-Treaty IRA and Collins, shot through the head, died in Dalton’s arms.

Dalton hung on for a while as National Army Commander in Cork until December 1922, when he unexpectedly quit the Army and took up a job as clerk of the Senate. Thereafter he was by turns an entrepreneur, encyclopedia salesman, private detective, film distributor and finally maker of films, which he produced in Ireland at Ardmore Studios. He was also involved in some way as an intermediary for an American OSS agent in an attempt to get Ireland to hand over the Treaty Ports (naval bases occupied by the British from 1922-1938) to the US during the Second World War.

A number of the films Dalton had made in fact referenced the independence struggle and his own hero, Michael Collins. He died in 1978.

Interesting new insights

All the above the reader will learn from Sean Boyne’s exceptionally well researched and extremely readable biography.

To leave the review there, however would be to sell the book short. Boyne’s research, particularly on Dalton’s role in the Civil War, has uncovered a number of extremely interesting facts that will be new and surprising to historians of the period.

Starting with Dalton’s shift from British officer to IRA guerrilla, Boyne’s book shows us that the key moment was when Auxiliaries raided his family home and arrested and imprisoned Emmet himself and his blameless father. This is interesting as it shows how, far from the idea that all ex-servicemen were hostile to republicans and vice versa, loyalties could often be fluid in revolutionary Ireland.

Dalton always maintained that he did not regret either his service in British uniform or in the IRA  and indeed in the Civil War, we learn here, he defended recruiting ex British servicemen into the National Army where, he argued they were ‘the most disciplined and effective troops’.

After Dalton occupied Cork city on behalf of the Irish Free State in August 1922, it seems he was responsible for the first officially sanctioned execution of the war – having a National Army private named John Winsely shot in Cork Prison in September 1922 ‘for treachery’ – handing over ammunition to the ‘Irregulars’ (anti-Treaty IRA). This is significant for a number of reasons.

For one thing, this execution took place before the Public Safety Bill (September 27), which authorised executions. Nevertheless to the knowledge of this reviewer, Winsely is not commemorated in any republican roll of honour, nor has reference been made to him in the existing literature.

It appears Dalton also asked National Army Commander in Chief Richard Mulcahy for permission to shoot without trial anyone caught carrying arms without permission. Since this was exaclty what the Public Safety resolution later allowed for, it could be that Emmet Dalton was one of the drivers of the Free State policy of executions that marked the latter stages of the Civil War.

Another interesting nugget for students of the Civil War is that, also in September 1922, men attached to Dalton’s command who had previously been gunmen in Collins’ Squad, carried out a number of reprisal killings of anti-Treaty guerrillas in the Cork area. Dalton at first seemed to support their actions but later wrote to Mulcahy saying that he wanted the Squad men sent back to Dublin, complaining not of their ruthlessness but of their indiscipline.

They were duly shipped home, including their unofficial leader Liam Tobin, who went on to become National Army Director of Intelligence (until December 1922). Many of these ex Squad and Intelligence Department men rapidly became associated with what Dublin republicans referred to as ‘the murder gang‘ and following the civil war in the Army Mutiny of March 1924, became attempted mutineers and putschists.

Emmet’s brother Charlie (closely associated with the ‘Tobin crowd’) was only 17 when in 1920 he was asked to shoot down British agents in their beds on Bloody Sunday. Two years later he was accused of the killing of three teenage anti-Treatyites who he arrested in the Civil War. Whatever the truth (some maintain that although Dalton had the Fianna boys arrested he was not the one to have them killed) it is clear that Charlie Dalton never got over the horrors of the years of the gun. Boyne’s book confirms what many accounts have hinted at, that Charlie suffered not only from alcoholism and depression but also from a severe psychological breakdown later in life.

What was certainly new to this reviewer, however was that Emmet Dalton also came out of his wars a damaged man. By 1925 he was out of a job in the Senate, drinking heavily around Dublin and on occasion waving around a revolver in Dublin pubs – all clear symptoms of what then known as ‘shell shock’ and today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In was not until the birth of his third child in the mid 1930s that he managed to settle down.

A very accessible and well researched book

So to sum up this is not only a very accessible read – which one might expect given Boyne’s long experience as a journalist – but also a book from which historians and other interested readers can learn a lot.

No book is perfect of course and there are some areas in which the book is not as strong as others. Occasionally value judgement from the later 20th century kick in.

The reader for example is told of the Ulster crisis in 1913-14 (in which armed unionists blocked Home Rule) that ‘many nationalists were not yet ready to accept the idea that the Ulster Protestants might be regarded as a separate people entitled to self-determination’ – an argument which not only implies that nationalists should really have accepted such a thing, but also fails to take into account that Carson’s Volunteer initially wanted to block self-government for all of Ireland. Nineteen Thirteen was not 1998.

Similarly on the outbreak of the Civil War, Boyne appears to accept without question the narrative of pro-Treatyites upholding the ‘Will of the People’ against the undemocratic militarists who opposed the Treaty. This was certainly what the pro-Treatyites argued, not without some justification, but it was not a view shared by their opponents who never proposed an anti-democratic alternative to the Treaty.

Without wishing to re-hash this argument again (it is discussed here  and here on the Irish Story), the reality was good deal more nuanced in 1922 and adopting the partisan rhetoric of either side of the Civil War does not help us come to terms with the episode today.

If a thorough review obliges one to make some criticisms, this should not put off anyone interested in the Irish revolution, the First World War and early independent Ireland from picking up a copy of this excellent book.

From 1587 until well into the 19th century, Irish regiments existed in Spanish military service. Here William Marmion gives a brief overview of these units.

Since the days of the Desmond rebellion, Catholic Irishmen left Ireland to fight fro Spain. While some of these units -notably that of Owen Roe O’Neill are comparatively well known, others are not.

There were a number of Irish Regiments (or ‘tercios’) from the year 1587 which remain basically un-researched.  This paper will not pretend to do that job, but will try to outline what the area of study can be.

General histories of the period have outlined how Irish Catholics served Spain, both to fight their political and religious enemies in England, in the hope of winning back confiscated lands and also to advance careers blocked in Ireland by anti-Catholic laws.

Others of course, frequently the followers or tenants of the great families who led the Irish regiments, served merely to make a living – though even they do seem to have seen themselves as self-consciously Catholic Irish soldiers. Most served in the Army of Flanders, attempting to put down a Protestant revolt in the Spanish Netherlands.

In short, it is only within the overall European and Irish context that the Wild Geese service to Spain can be seen clearly.

But what is still missing is as said a detailed look at the men within the particular regiments, along with the study of each regiment’s battles, victories, and defeats.  Having said that we do have the recent wonderful source which did identify many of the Wild Geese in Spanish service, that is the IRISH IN EUROPE PROJECT.

That project was outlined in an article on General Michael (Miguel) Marmion which The Irish Story published on 11 March 2013.  As said in that article, the amount of detail on each person is sparse.  And with some exceptions (those mentioned in Jennings’ book for example) does not deal with Irish enlisted soldiers who served in Flanders or with any grouping of them into particular regiments.

And on that absence, it must also be said that the Spanish Military Archives in Spain does not have the service records of the Irish soldiers who served in the Regiments of Flanders. The Spanish basically left the head-counting and individual identifications to the Irish Commanding Officers of each Irish regiment in Flanders, with whom Spain had contracted.

Additional detail on  Flanders soldiers would exist mainly in the Belgian archives in Brussels, and it is there that the heavy lifting of research must take place at the end of the day.  Yes, those archives have been looked at and referenced in the books mentioned above, but not from the standpoint of writing individual regimental histories or even of listing many of the individual enlisted soldiers though many officers have been identified. A ‘regimental history’ approach would necessarily include much more on individual soldiers (and their families).  And that is what is recommended, thus this ‘outline’ which I hope will stimulate the further research necessary.

Regiments

Regiment of Stanley.

This was the very first Irish regiment in Spanish service.  It entered the service of Spain in 1587 by the whole regiment ‘going over’ from fighting with England’s allies, the Dutch, to rather serve Spain.  Sir William Stanley himself, an English Catholic, had been allowed to recruit Irish soldiers (1585) and then transport to Flanders.  The regiment lasted until 1600 in Spanish service, when the Spanish themselves became very anxious for new recruiting in Ireland for Flanders service, after the loss of O Neill at Kinsale in 1601.

A list of the officers in Stanley’s regiment has been printed but there is no general listing of any depth.  We do know that a number of soldiers from the disbanded Stanley Regiment did enter the O Neill Regiment.

Regiment of O Neill.

This regiment was the first formed after Stanley’s and made solid the practice of naming the regiment after its commander or founder.  The founder was the 2^nd son of Hugh Prince of Ulster (Earl of Tyrone his discarded English title), The O Neill.  That son was Henry.

It was formed in 1605 while his father was still alive and just before The Flight of the Earls in 1607.  On Henry’s early death in 1610 at age 23 the commander became John O Neill, his brother and the youngest son of Hugh. But being young (born Dungannon 1599, died in battle in Spain in 1641), it was in effect commanded by a cousin, the to-be-famous Owen Roe O Neill, who stayed in command until he himself went back to Ireland in 1642.

There he effectively lead Irish troops fighting in the uprising which had started in 1641, and which lasted until Cromwell came.  Owen Roe himself died in 1649 and that in itself was a turning point against the Catholic Confederation.

In 1623 the regiment in Flanders had a total complement of 1274 men, declining to 1095 by 1639.  The regiment from 1642 was then commanded by Patrick O Neill, a kinsman of Owen Roe, and had a complement of 614 in 1644 declining to only 200 by the summer of 1646 (all the figures mentioned herein are taken from the book by R.A. Stradling).

Regiment of Hugh O Donnell.

In 1636 this regiment along with that of Owen Roe O Neill above, and Thomas Preston and Patrick Fitzgerald following had a combined complement of about 7000, all coming to Flanders via an agreement of the Spanish with King Charles I of England.  O Donnell’s regiment was drafted into service in Spain itself in 1638 and thus out of service in Flanders.  It had a distinguished record in Spain.

Regiment of Thomas Preston.

This was formed by a former subordinate of Owen Roe O Neill, starting in 1632.  It is included in the overall complement of the four Irish Tercios of 7000 in 1636.  It should be stated that the 7000 figure declined to about 2500 by the end of 1639, due to losses in Spain’s renewed war with France and movement of some directly to Spain.

Regiment of Patrick Fitzgerald.

The complement of this regiment was also included in the overall figure of 7000 in 1636.  In 1640 the regiment was as Hugh O Donnell’s removed from Flanders to the Spanish mainland, and also had a distinguished record.

Regiment of John Murphy.

The 700 soldiers of this regiment were those remaining from that formed in 1644 by the Earl of Antrim to fight in Scotland.  That formation was approved by the Catholic Confederation which had royalist members supporting Charles I before he was beheaded. After winning several battles, the regiment (originally 1600 men) found itself isolated and surrounded.

Rescue was finally accomplished in late 1646 with Murphy and his men entering Spanish service.  Murphy was to be a fixture of the Irish continuing presence in Flanders, still commanding 700 men in 1654, and still with a regiment in his name as late as 1659 with a mention of a new colonelcy even in 1667 in Spain itself.  He had taken over the regiment of Patrick O Neill (the original Owen Roe regiment) which as stated was seriously depleted down to 200 by the summer of 1646.

Smaller regiments

Regiment of Costello.

1653-54 saw a great influx of Irish soldiers into Spain, as a result of losing the war back in Ireland to Cromwell.  About 14000 went to Spain itself, but about 2300 went to Flanders.  The regiment of D. Costello was one of these, with 732 men.

Regiment of Kannan.

Likewise entered into Flanders in 1653-54.  A small ‘tercio, only 274 men are shown as the complement.

Regiment of P. O Reilly. This body of men originally landed in Spain, but was sent to Flanders in August of 1654.  The complement was 649 men.  The commander, Philip MacHugh O Reilly had served continuously in Ireland from 1641.

It should be noted that there was also an unnamed regiment listed in 1653-54, with a complement of 600.  And in December 1654 Colonel Murphy’s regiment is shown with a strength of 700 and O Reilly’s with a strength of 1000.  And it should be said that Spanish needs declined in Flanders resulting from peace with France and partial Dutch independence, so that in 1657 there were only 1200 Irishmen in one remaining regiment (probably Murphy’s).

By July of 1665 an Irish presence was essentially gone from Flanders, as the ‘group’ headed by Thomas Nelson showed a complement of only 37.

The above are the major regiments which were in service.  There are references to there having been up to 26 regiments in total, but some of those were in name only and did not have the necessary manpower to be of full regimental size.

For example, we see in December of 1646 that men of the ‘Regiment of O Sullivan Mor’ were transferred out into other companies, including that of a Captain Dominick Marmion.  This O Sullivan Mor was also identified as being at Ostende (near Dunkirk) with 524 other Irish soldiers commanded by a Captain McDonnell, in 1631.  That group would ostensibly have been from the Regiment of O Neill.

Much amalgamation obviously took place, of small units and of individual soldiers or immigrants from Ireland.  B. Jennings mentions those units in 1947 and 1948 articles in the journal Studies.

This is obviously only a short sketch of the various units which made up the Irish presence in Flanders.  It is hoped that it will stimulate interest and will result in further research and eventually into detailed (as far as possible) regimental histories.  This sketch does not mention the much more numerous Irish presence in units which served completely on the Spanish mainland, particularly in the war of the Catalan uprising (1640 to 1659 resulting in Spanish victory) where the Catalans were supported by the French, or the service of Irish units in the war against the Portuguese (1640-1668 resulting in Spanish defeat and Portuguese independence once again).

REFERENCES

There are several excellent books which have been written about the ‘Wild Geese’ in Spanish Service.  They are a must as a starting point to do what has not been done.  And that is to dig deeper into the history of each regiment.  For it is that history which we are lacking, and with it any real detail about the service performed by particular Irishmen. The few works following are mentioned as the most appropriate for a start.  Each contains additional bibliography:

Henry, G., The Irish Military Community in Flanders, 1586-1621 (Dublin, 1921)

Jennings, B. (ed.), Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, 1582-1700 (Dublin, 1968)

Stradling, R.A., The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries: The Wild Geese in Spain, 1618-68

(Blackrock, County Dublin, 1994)

The books mentioned above in the text, and

the archive in now Belgium is Archives Generales

du Royaume de Belgique, Brussels, Secretairerie d’Etat

et de Guerre

For general reading on Ireland and the 1641 uprising, see

1. Gilbert (ed.), The History of the Irish Confederation and

the War in Ireland (7 vols., Dublin, 1882-91

by Chevalier William F.K. Marmion

(age 77, from home in Spain)

Dublin 1930-1950   by Joseph Brady.

(Four Courts Press)

 Reviewer: Rhona McCord

Published late last year this 448-page volume is the 5^th publication in The Making of Dublin City series edited by Joseph Brady, Anngret Simms and Ruth McManus.  This volume, penned by Professor Joseph Brady, a geographer at UCD, is a substantial investigation into the physical and economic development of the city spanning two decades.

Brady’s timeframe overlaps in places with a previous work in this series by Ruth McManus, who dealt with the development of Dublin’s suburbs from 1910 to 1940.  This new tome deals with themes that move from the expansion of Dublin into the residential suburbs of Dublin back to the development at the city core.  Examining shopping, infrastructure, parking, transport, entertainment and consumer prices, Brady squeezes information from every source and paints a layered picture of the city and its complex development.

Dublin 1930-1950 The Emergence of the Modern City begins with a profile of the city in the 1930s.  Brady uses available census data to paint a broad picture of the city, its industry, built environment and its population.  Brady’s use of sources is thorough and sometimes heavy going but well worth reading for anyone interested in the history of Dublin city.

Population patterns and migration to the urban and suburban areas of Dublin are explained with great attention to detail.   Having established the tendency for migration to Dublin the question of housing becomes the focus of several chapters. Brady describes the housing issue as the physical manifestation of inequality and his description and comparisons of the wealthy suburbs to those of the corporation social housing estates emphasise the point.

The growth of suburbs away from the city core necessitated changing of Local Government boundaries.  Here Brady uses the examples of Pembroke and Rathmines to the south and Howth to the north to explore the ramifications of those changes.  By delving into the political issues and debates surrounding town planning the author reveals a conservative attitude and reluctance to embrace planning ideals, which were often seen as an expensive luxury.

Following on from Ruth McManus book on the growth of Dublin’s suburbs Brady here picks up the story of some of the social housing developments that shaped the city.  Public Utility Societies, Philanthropy and Local Government were all involved in the development of working class housing during the period under investigation.  Here Brady specifically deals with Cabra and Donnycarney.

He also examines the development of the middle class garden suburb. By concentrating his research on specific areas like Mount Merrion, Brady is able to focus in on the builders, the building types and rising costs of home ownership. By looking at things like furniture, gardens and space for cars, this kind of investigation reveals a lot about the expectations of Dublin’s middle class and their acceptance of a suburban lifestyle.

After Independence a desire for civic improvement was embraced by the cities elite, represented by business leaders, clergy and politicians.  The issue of a new Catholic Cathedral for Dublin became the source of much discussion and wrangling, as Brady comments ‘it is interesting to see how the concept was central to so many plans.’

Many locations were suggested for a new cathedral including Capel Street and on the Quays opposite the Four Courts.  Eventually the government agreed to allocate Merrion Square, a site that had previously been touted as the location of a war memorial, as a site for a new Cathedral.  Brady delves into this twenty-year saga, the details of which are fluently investigated, the result was a lot of discussion, bureaucracy and rumour and obviously, no new Cathedral.

Other chapters in this book deal with infrastructure, shopping and entertainment.  An in depth discussion of the development of Dublin’s on infrastructure, dealing with roads, bridges and public transport, may not seem an inviting read at first but here it proves to be a very enlightening and innovative method of explaining the development of the city. The development of Dublin airport and the decision to locate it at Collinstown, north Dublin, will be of interest to many Dubliners.

Shopping and entertainment are explored in wonderful detail giving insight mainly into the experience of the cities middle classes as well as historical insight into familiar stores such as Arnotts and Brown Thomas.  It is an interesting period as Ireland was emerging from the rationing and shortages, which was a feature of World War II, into an era of growing consumerism.

Here Brady admits that the focus is on the wealthier sections of Dublin’s middle class, he does not explore the lower end of the market or areas like Thomas Street and Moore Street Markets, which would have provided us with some insight into how the poor of the city coped in this period.  However the information he does provide gives us an insight into the development of the main shopping areas and explains the origins of some of the modern day quirks of the city.

Finally Brady examines some tourist brochures and personal accounts of the city. This gives an indication of what visitors to the city were being directed towards.  What were the highlights in post war Dublin, Nelson’s Pillar, Phoenix Park, the cities hotels and restaurants among other attractions are discussed here.

Overall Brady’s work is thorough and while it cannot be described as light reading it is exemplary research worthy of the high standard of The Making of Dublin series.

An important milestone on the road to the Rising of 1916. By John Dorney.

In August 1915, a volley of rifle shots rang out across a north Dublin graveyard. Mourners at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa – a veteran Fenian bomber of the 1880s – were struck by the militancy of Irish Volunteers – the militia set up in 1913 to ensure the passing of Home Rule and by the fiery rhetoric of one of their leaders, Patrick Pearse.

It was an occasion, carefully staged-managed by the separatist movement, that would strike many as a symbol of the open rejection of the legitimacy of the British state in Ireland and with hindsight, a prelude to the armed insurrection of the following year.

Context

A year before in 1914 Ireland had appeared to be on the verge of civil war. Rival Volunteer movements – Irish and Ulster had sprung up, in the case of the latter to oppose Home Rule or Irish self-government and in the former to make sure it went through. Arms had been imported by the unionists at Larne and by the nationalist at Howth.

John Redmond the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who at first nervously endorsed the Irish Volunteers, later split the movement by pledging support for Britian in the Great War, which broke out in August of 1914. His followers, the large majority, formed the National Volunteers, many of whom subsequently joined the British Army.

The remainder, keeping the name Irish Volunteers, were heavily infiltrated by the separatist Irish Republican Brotherhood and, a militant faction within them resolved to launch an armed insurrection against British rule before the War was over.

The O’Donovan Rossa funeral was therefore a chance for the militant minority to make their presence felt in public and to portray themselves as keepers of the militant nationalist tradition.

O’Donovan Rossa himself was almost peripheral to the event, Pearse for one found his methods – he had led a campaign of dynamite attacks in British cities in the 1880s – distasteful.[1] But laying the old Fenian, who had spent most of his post-prison life in the United States,  to rest was a great opportunity to stage a show of strength in the Irish capital.

Sean T O’Kelly a leading separatist recalled;

The remains of O’Donovan Rosas were brought to Ireland sometime at the end of July 1915. Previously it had been decided by the I.R.B that a public funeral of the most impressive character should be organised for the burial of O’Donovan Rosas’s remains in Glasnevin Cemetery. I was instructed to select a spot. somewhere near the O’Connell circle in Glasnevin Cemetery and to have grave opened there, the money to be paid for the grave being given to me by Tom Clarke. [2]

Frank Thornton an IRB member and Volunteer remembered that the IRB and its sister organisation in America Clan na Gaedheal did not even want O’Donovan Rossa to touch English soil on his way back to Ireland.

Fifty Volunteers in Liverpool (where his body arrived from New York) carried his coffin on their backs for 2 miles along the docks before he was loaded on a ship to Dublin. At Dublin’s North Wall the coffin was met by another party of Volunteers and taken to City Hall where he lay in state.[3]

The standard narrative of the pre-Rising Irish mood is that the separatists were a tiny minority, disliked by most moderate citizens. And certainly in the insurrection of the following year there is no doubt that the insurgents faced a considerable degree of hostility from the Dublin public. However, this may have been a reaction to the sudden outbreak of violence rather than the politics of the separatists. In August 1915 many participants in the O’Donovan Rossa funeral recalled huge crowds coming out to support it. As Frank Robbin of the Citizen Army put it,

While the remains were in the City Hall there was a continuous stream of Irish men and women, young and old, seeking to pay their last respects to the great old Fenian.[4]

The Day of the Funeral

The funeral itself, the following day was, according to Sean T O’Kelly

‘one of the biggest public funerals that I have ever seen. It was probably the biggest that ever took place in Ireland with the exception possibly of the funeral of Charles Stewart Parnell in October 1891. As well all the branches of the I.R.B. the whole Irish Volunteer organisation was mustered to take part in the funeral and the occasion was used by the Volunteers as an opportunity for showing their strength. As far as I remember the Volunteers marched in uniform, as many of them had uniforms. The funeral procession on that day was certainly most impressive.

As well as the Volunteers public bodies of all kinds sent strong delegations from all parts of Ireland to take part in the funeral. Public bodies like County Councils and Urban Councils Corporations and other bodies of that kind officially took part in the funeral procession. Luckily the weather particularly was kind with the result that many thousands of people stood on the sidewalk to watch the funeral procession pass.[5]

Similarly Frank Robbins remembered,

The funeral procession through the city was very impressive. The inspiring message at this funeral was not that we were lamenting the death of O’Donovan Rossa, but that we were celebrating his triumph in the cause of Ireland and honouring this man who was going to his last resting place. The streets of the city along the route of the procession were thronged, and all the way from the starting point at the City Hall until the funeral reached Glasnevin Cemetery, many, many thousands of people paid their last respects to Rossa.

But this was not all public pageant. This was a military display and defiant rejection of the existing state forces in the capital. Volunteer Paul Galligan, an IRB member and by this time adjutant to Volunteer head of training, Thomas MacDonagh, had orders were to keep a clear passage and right-of-way for the Volunteers marching from the city centre to Glasnevin cemetery, from Grattan Bridge over the river Liffey to City Hall. A company of Volunteers were put at his disposal to keep the street clear. ‘A superintendant of the DMP [Dublin Metropolitan Police] approached me in a furious temper”, Galligan recalled.

“He wanted to know under what authority I had stopped the thoroughfare. I informed him I was acting on the orders of my commanding officer.’ The Superintendent accompanied Galligan to see MacDonagh and after an argument, MacDonagh ordered Galligan to put the policeman under arrest. The Volunteers were armed and the Dublin Metropolitan Police were not, so there was little the Superintendant could do about it. The humiliated policeman was detained until after the funeral.

The superintendant was still in Galligan’s custody when the main body of Volunteers marched past in their dark green uniforms, wearing their distinctive Boer-style wide-brimmed hats and carrying rifles and bandoliers of ammunition. When the funeral procession passed, Galligan’s Volunteers formed part of the rearguard and the column proceeded to Glasnevin.[6]

It seems hard to credit at this juncture that the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the British Army stood by and allowed the militant separatists to effectively control the city for an afternoon, but, on the orders of the Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell who considered that more would be lost by heavy handed treatment of Irish nationalists, stand by they did.

Pearse’s oration

Being towards the rear of the procession, Galligan probably did not hear Patrick Pearse’s graveside oration;

“Life springs from death and from the graves of patriot  men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of the Realm have worked well in secrecy and in the open. They think that they have pacified half of us and intimidated the other half…but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

Sean T  O‘Kelly records;

Pearse was asked, presumably by [key IRB figure] Tom Clarke to deliver the funeral oration and, as will be remembered, he made one of the great speeches of his life. I very well remember the profound impression that Pearse’s speech made on that day I was standing alongside him when he spoke and we all felt very proud of his impressive oratorical achievement.

He evidently had his speech, which was not too long, well memorised for he used no notes on the occasion. ‘

The oration later became a classic summation of the Republicans’ defiant attitude to British rule. More impressive still, to many onlookers, was the volley of rifle shots that crashed out over the grave when Pearse had finished speaking. A watching priest, Father Curran, thought, “it was more than a farewell to an old Fenian. It was a defiance to England by a new generation in Ireland”.[7]

According to Citizen Army member Frank Robbins, ‘The reaction to all this was a further re-awakening amongst many of the younger generation. It gave a great fillip by way of new recruits into both the Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers.’[8]

Similarly for O’Kelly,

This must have been one of the first if not the very first occasion on which this military demonstration took place in our lifetime and this too in its way made a deep impression not alone on all who were present but on all who read the report afterwards. The I.R.B. and the Irish Volunteers were very proud of having been able to accomplish this military demonstration despite the orders of the British against the carrying of arms.[9]

These arms would be used for real just eight months later in the Easter Rising of 1916.

References

[1] Pearse said privately he was, ‘a rather unattractive figure’, Fearghal McGarry, The Rising Ireland Easter 1916, 92

[2] Sean T O’Kelly BMH ws 1765

[3] Frank Thorton BMH ws 510

[4] Frank Robbins BMH ws 585

[5] Sean T O’Kelly BMH

[6] Peter Paul Galligan Witness Statement 170, BMH

[7] Fearghal McGarry, The Rising, Ireland Easter 1916. p92.

[8] Robbin BMH

[9] O’Kelly BMH

Aidan Beatty on Frederick Engels’ evolving views on Ireland and the Irish in the 19th century.

Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen

and I could overthrow the entire British monarchy

Frederick Engels and the Conditions of the Irish Working Class

 

In May 1856, an unassuming German industrialist and his common-law Irish wife arrived in Ireland for a tour of the country.  Writing to an old friend in London, another ex-patriot German, the wealthy tourist described his trip, from Dublin to Galway and down along the west coast, the landscape, and the people he met along the way.

Post-Famine Ireland was an island of ruins, some dating back to the early middle-ages, some more recent: “The land is an utter desert which nobody wants.”

The level of policing was intrusive and shocking in “England’s first colony” and “I have never seen so many gendarmes in any country… armed with carbines, bayonets and handcuffs.”  Additionally, the locals, “for all their Irish fanaticism”, were being made to feel increasingly unwelcome: “By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation and now, as everyone knows, fulfil the function of supplying England, America, Australia, etc., with prostitutes, casual labourers, pimps, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other rabble.”

The German industrialist traveller was Friedrich Engels.  His common law wife was Mary Burns (older sister of Lizzy Burns, who would later be Engels’ second wife).  And his German correspondent in London was, of course, Karl Marx.  Indeed, Engels ended his letter with a desire to write a History of Ireland and an admonitory request that his old comrade should visit Ireland: “Concerning the ways and means by which England rules this country – repression and corruption – long before Bonaparte attempted this, I shall write shortly if you won’t come over soon. How about it?”[1]

‘Almost without civilization’

In fact, Engels had long had a fascination with the Irish (not least with regards to his two Irish wives).  Echoing his observations about Irish migrant labour in his 1856 letter to Marx, his famous 1844 work on The Condition of the Working Class in England features a detailed excursus on the Irish population in Manchester’s “Little Ireland” slum district.

Engels described how Irish immigrants, with “nothing to lose at home”, were flocking to cities like Manchester in search of “good pay for strong arms”.  At his time of writing, there were 40,000 Irish in Manchester, with similar numbers in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Liverpool.  London had 120,000.

Yet Engels looked askance at a people who had “grown up almost without civilization” and were now importing their “rough, intemperate, and improvident” ways and “all their brutal habits” into Britain’s already overcrowded cities.  The Irish arrived “like cattle” and “insinuate themselves everywhere.”  In quasi-ethnographic terms, Engels claimed that “Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises as different from the Saxon physiognomy.”

Focusing on “filth and drunkenness” and a “lack of cleanliness… which is the Irishman’s second nature”, Engels moved into a more racialised key, perhaps revealing his own biases along the way.

“The Irishman”, Engels wrote in the singular, “loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill.”  Bearing in mind that “Arab” in the nineteenth century referred to Bedouins, rather than any Arabic-speaking person, it is clear where Engels was placing the Irish in a broader racial hierarchy.

They were a people with “a southern facile character” and “For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.”

They were too different, and too backward, to ever be properly assimilated into British life: “even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilized, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish.”[2]

In many ways, he presented Irish immigrants to industrial Britain as exhibiting what he and Marx would later call “the idiocy of rural life”, a backward people who would soon be submerged by the dynamics of industrial capitalism.[3]

Yet his moralizing tone and his racial determinism could also accommodate a certain envy about Irish political power.  Writing in June 1843 for Der Schweizerische Republikaner [The Swiss Republican], Engels eyed up Daniel O’Connell’s famous monster meetings with leftist jealousy:

 The wily old fox gets around from town to town always surrounded by two hundred thousand men, a bodyguard such as no king can boast of.  How much could be achieved if a sensible man possessed O’Connell’s popularity, or if O’Connell had a little more sense and a little less egoism and vanity! Two thousand men, and what kind of men!  Men who have nothing to lose, two-thirds of them not having a shirt to their backs, they are real proletarians and sansculottes, and moreover Irishmen – wild, headstrong, fanatical Gaels.  If one has not seen the Irish, one does not know them.  Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I could overthrow the entire British monarchy.[4]

‘Revolutionary Ireland?

As Engels gained in philosophical sophistication, his use of such overtly racialized language tailed off.  His earliest writings on Ireland date from only a few months after his first meeting with Marx; they had met at the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung [Rhinelander Newspaper] in November 1842, shortly after which Engels’ stern father dispatched his troublesome twenty-two year-old son to the family’s cotton mills in Manchester.[5]

First by correspondence, later in person, Marx and Engels developed their materialist understanding of history and social change.  Increasingly, Engels explained people’s behaviours not in terms of inborn racial tendencies but in terms of material conditions under industrial capitalism.  Nonetheless, the Irish continued to occupy a curious status for Engels.  They were now the living exemplars of a pre-capitalist social formation, and visiting contemporary Ireland provided a front-row seat to the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

In the notes for his sadly unfinished History of Ireland – begun around 1870 – Engels traced Irish economic development back to their “ancient origins”.  Engels even flirted with self-taught Irish language classes for his study of Irish history, only to admit his frustration with this “philological nonsense” to Marx.[6]  It was Ireland’s “obvious… misfortune”, Engels said, to be so geographically close to England, which retarded the country’s trajectory out of feudalism and into capitalism: “the English assisted nature by crushing every seed of Irish industry as soon as it appeared.”[7]

Whilst preparing for this work, Engels had come to feel that “communal ownership of land was Anno 1600 still in full force in Ireland.”[8]  Pre-capitalist forms of social organisation and property-ownership lingered on in Ireland long after they had disappeared in Britain.  In a letter to Marx in early 1870, Engels confessed that “The more I study the subject, the clearer it is to me that Ireland has been stunted in her development by the English invasion and thrown centuries back”.[9]

Marx had similar views. Writing in the New York Daily Tribune in 1853, he placed the restructuring of land-ownership in post-Famine Ireland in a longer history of land enclosures in early modern England and the Highland Clearances in post-1745 Scotland. In his florid journalistic prose, Marx spoke of how “the pauperised inhabits of Green Erin” were being “swept away by agricultural improvements” and by the “breaking down of the antiquated system of society.”[10]  For Marx, as for Engels, Ireland still displayed traits of feudal property-ownership but was now being violently dragged into capitalist modernity.    Yet, this traumatic transformation also held out a revolutionary possibility.

In contrast to the “solid, but slow” conservatism of “the Anglo-Saxon Worker”, Irish immigrant labourers had a “revolutionary fire”.[11]  Not fully schooled in the rules of private-property, they carried their essentially non-capitalist consciousness to the very heart of capitalist Britain.  This was a contradiction that needed to be exploited politically.  Just as he had written in Der Schweizerische Republikaner in 1843, Engels continued to feel that the Irish could be the ones to bring down the British state.  Marx similarly saw Ireland as the “weakest point”[12] in the British Empire, and looked forward to a social revolution that would be “Ireland’s Revenge” upon England.[13]

Indeed, Engels and Marx were of one mind in their view that Fenianism, a product of this contradiction, could be a revolutionary force on both sides of the Irish Sea:

What the English do not yet know is that since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political aim of English domination in Ireland have entered into an entirely new phase, and that precisely because of this, Fenianism is characterised by a socialistic tendency (in a negative sense, directed against the appropriation of the soil) and by being a lower orders movement.[14]

Which is to say, by Marx and Engels’ lights, Fenians were unconscious socialists.  Giving voice to the resentments of dispossessed Irish peasants, they stood in unwitting opposition to the transformation of rural Ireland into a capitalist economy.  Not that this detracted from Engels’ perception (at the time of the 1867 trial of the “Manchester Martyrs”) that the leaders of Fenianism were “mostly asses”.[15]

 ‘From peasant to bourgois’

Engels’ later writings, though, were less hopeful for the revolutionary future of Ireland.  Visiting Ireland again in September 1869, with Lizzy Burns and Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, he saw some important changes.  Dublin was now “unrecognisable”.  Trade was at a high level at the port and the city had acquired a newly cosmopolitan air: “On Queenstown Quay I heard a lot of Italian, also Serbian, French and Danish or Norwegian spoken.”

All of this portended a regrettable conclusion: “The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois.  True, that is the case with most peasant nations.  But in Ireland it is particularly bad.” [16]  It would appear that Ireland had made the leap from feudalism to capitalism before Engels or Marx could finish theorizing the transformation.

Indeed, in an 1888 interview with the New Yorker Volkszeitung [New Yorker People’s Newspaper], Engels confessed that “A purely socialist movement cannot be expected in Ireland for a considerable time.  People there want first of all to become peasants owning a plot of land, and after they have achieved that mortgages will appear on the scene and they will be ruined once more.”[17]

Looking to a bleak future, Engels made the intriguing prophesy that for socialist revolution to take root, Ireland would have to wait for a mortgage-backed financial crisis to ruin the country – a prediction that in recent years looked strangely prescient!

References

[1] Letter from Engels to Marx, 23 May, 1856.  Reprinted in full in L.I. Golman, V.E. Kunina, eds.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971) 83-85.

[2] All quotes are taken from the chapter on “Irish Immigration”, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Oxford World Classics, 1999) 101-105.

[3] The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 1985) 84.

[4] ‘Letters from London’ (1843).  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 33-36.

[5] Tristram Hunt.  Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Henry Holt, 2009) 63-64.

[6] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 January, 1870.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 286.

[7] Friedrich Engels, ‘History of Ireland’. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 171-209

[8] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 November, 1869.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 279-280.

[9] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 January, 1870.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 286.

[10] ‘New York Daily Tribune, 9 February 1853, 22 March, 1853.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 53-58.

[11] Karl Marx, ‘Confidential Communications’.  Die Neue Zeit, 28 March, 1870.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 160-163.

[12] Letter from Karl Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue, 5 March, 1870. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 290.

[13] Karl Marx. ‘Ireland’s Revenge’.  Neue Oder-Zeitung, 16 March, 1855.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 74-76.

[14] Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 30 November , 1867.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 147.

[15] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 November, 1867.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 145.

[16] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 27 September, 1869.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 273-274

[17] 20 September, 1888.  In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 343.

By Sean Byers

Published by Irish Academic Press, 2015.

Reviewer: Martin Flynn

In the breadth of Irish historical study, at least that which leeches into the public psyche, the usual figures are paramount when Republican Socialism is in view.

James Connolly, Jim Larkin and Frank Ryan are usually as far as it goes, as the socialist story in Ireland is generally masked in popular memory by the struggle around the national question.

Historically, this is often framed by the Irish Labour Party’s decision in 1918 to stand aside in that year’s General Election campaign, a decision which, some have argued,elevated the national question above the social one for decades to come and paved the way for armed action to remove the British presence in Ireland.

Occasionally, TG4 will commission a show on someone like Peadar O’Donnell  and it took 40 years after her election to Westminster for a major film to be commissioned on People’s Democracy’s most famous production, Bernadette Devlin/McAliskey.  Little if any attention is paid to socialist republican history generally or to people like George Gilmore, Seamus Costello or even James Connolly’s son Roddy or daughter Nora.

Belfast based author Sean Byers has decided to wade into the flotsam of the Irish Left to rescue from obscurity one of its key components, a County Antrim man who was active during the Tan War and who would lead the Russian-inspired Communist Party of Ireland in the wake of civil war.

The party’s former leader, Michael O’Riordan, is fairly well known to the Irish public and became more-so in recent years when, after Nelson Mandela’s death,it was revealed he was a key link in the 1980’s between the African National Congress’s military wing MK and the IRA (in the form of Gerry Adams) in organising training for the black South African guerrillas.

In fact, many historically and politically minded people regard O’Riordan as the founder of this marginal political party, when in fact he didn’t join until two years after its birth.

Byers correctly elevates Sean Murray, from the Gaeltacht community in Cushendall, as the man who was most key in the nascence and development of the Community Party of Ireland and the man who formulated and published its manifesto – Ireland’s Path to Freedom.

IRA Volunteer

Born in 1898, Byers reveals that a chance, childhood meeting with Roger Casement, sponsor of Feisan an Ghleanna (The Glens Irish Festival), sparked Sean Murray’s interest in Irish national sovereignty.

Enrolling in the IRA’s 2nd (Antrim) Brigade, 3rd Northern Division, as a teenager, Murray was active in military, political and cultural circles, combining his role as a Volunteer with membership of Sinn Fein and Chairing his local branch of Conradh Na Gaelige (The Gaelic League).

Even at this early stage, Murray showed Socialist tendencies by, in his own words, becoming ‘acquainted with Marxian literature’ by reading the works of Connolly and participating in the 1918 general strike.

During the 1917-21 period, Antrim ranked behind only Cork and Dublin in terms of bloodshed and as an active IRA Volunteer, Murray participated in the conflict in the north of the county, which reached a bloody crescendo, after the signing of the Treaty, with an attack on his native village by B Special Constabulary men in the summer of 1922, which left three men dead and many wounded in the tiny town.

Murray found himself in command of the 150 strong IRA unit in the area in the wake of this atrocity, which lives on vividly in local folk memory, but the attentions of the Unionist authorities soon meant a temporary flit to Scotland became permanent as Murray pitched up on ‘Red Clydeside’.

Communist education

It was a time of increased socialist action there – indeed, Winston Churchill had recently sent tanks to Glasgow to quell dissent and Murray would  soon become acquainted with figures like Roddy Connolly who were also ploughing the Scottish Socialist furrow.

From Glasgow, he would head to London, where his Marxist education began in earnest and where links to The ‘Comintern’, the international outreach arm of the recently formed Soviet Union, would be cemented, culminating in Murray’s attendance at the ‘Lenin School’ of Marxism in Moscow, where Stalin’s influence was already being felt and where Murray would see the reality of the ‘Socialist Utopia’ on study visits to places like Dagestan.

Once back in Ireland, Murray found himself as ‘Stalin’s Man’ tasked with building the socialist vanguard.  Instead, he increasingly found a frazzled Irish Left, whose particular circumstances were shown little understanding by Murray’s dogmatic, polemicist Comintern handlers and who were plagued with interference from English Communists – who seemed to be preferred by Mother Moscow.

In the previous years, there had already been abortive attempts to establish a communist party, with Roddy Connolly trying (with help from the Comintern) in 1921, while a rival Irish Workers League was formed by Jim Larkin in 1923, on his return from the USA. Both groups soon imploded.

Byers studiously recounts this vista of split and schism and Larkin’s ‘extraordinarily troubled relationship’ with the Comintern soon had him dubbed with persona non grata status – so much so that, unbelievably, his own son was made to renounce him by his Soviet betters.

Reflecting on the state of the Irish Left over the last 100 years, this type of ridiculous schism really seems the norm.  In 1987, current Sinn Fein National Chairperson Declan Kearney, in his study of Socialist Republicanism in Ireland, contended that people could be; “…forgiven for making a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for success of Republican Socialist ideology.”

Given what the intervening 28 years has produced, it’s hard to argue with that pessimism – it’s also telling that in an examination aimed at resurrecting lost figures of the Irish left, Murray’s name is completely absent from Kearney’s analysis.

Murray and the Irish left

Reading Byers’ sketch of Sean Murray, one wonders how he maintained his sanity. While numerically outnumbered by those following the new ‘Big Two’ political parties, Irish Socialism was still on the agenda through significant developments like Republican Congress and figures like Ryan, O’Donnell and Gilmore, while a fully functioning Irish Labour Party watched as its clothes were stolen by deValera’s Fianna Fail, who attracted strong support among the small farmer class.

And herein lies the strength of this book.  It’s not really in the focus of Murray as chief protagonist – it’s much more in giving a full examination of the Irish left in a time that in recent years has been reduced in modern discourse to Christy Moore ballads.

The section on the Spanish Civil War is highly enlightening, as is the inspection of the Republican movement and the key aspects of analysis around World War II, both north and south of the border, as this book spans decades which are usually tightly compartmentalised in study.

It’s astounding, for example, to learn that a delegation of Belfast IRA men approached Fascist leader Eoin O’Duffy to lead the organisation in the wake of the Spanish conflict.

Unfolding also, the tensions between Communists, north and south, straining under the weight of partition and oddball activists like Harry Midgely.

By this stage, Murray had found himself increasingly more marginalised, or ‘Pushed Upstairs’ as one chapter marks – much to the anger of contemporaries such as Peadar O’Donnell.  As the 50’s rolled on, he remained in an isolated, inert, paternalistic role, usurped by younger voices from places like ‘Red’ east Belfast.

It really is hard to fathom why he bothered – particularly as the 1940’s were marked with bouts of real poverty, heavy drinking and the, presumably, soul destroying relegation to selling communist badges in Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast;  comrades had squared him off with a labourers job after he was unceremoniously dumped by the Comintern.

On his death in 1961, the cutting of ties between north and south in all real senses was complete, with separate manifestos dealing the death blow to the vision of a united Communist project across Ireland.

A committed Soviet Communist until the end, his last visit to Moscow taking place a year before his death, he remained popular with international comrades, even if he was a peripheral figure, in a real sense, at home.

Despite this, his seemingly excellent writing has been frozen in history in pages of famed Irish periodical The Bell, alongside Flann O’Brien, Jack B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, as it was compiled and edited by his constant admirer Peadar O’Donnell.

As a time-served IRA Volunteer, Murray never relinquished his hatred of the Irish border but he maintained a fundamentally Marxist interpretation of its creation and maintenance – calling out bourgeois nationalists in the south who were happy to profit from its implementation to cement their positions in the backwash it created.

Much to ponder also when reflecting on the position of the modern Republican movement and its journey over 40 years, where Gerry Adams, who was once plastered on the front page of Living Marxism, now leads a party campaigning for reductions in corporation tax.

Murray is well worth the study, but without question, he will sink back into the mists of Republican Socialism with the rest of the incorrigible left in Ireland’s Socialist story. That said, I doubt this will stop Byers in his revelatory investigations – as some stories really need to be told – and I look forward to other books in a similar vein from the author.

By R.M. Douglas

Published by Manchester Univrsity Press, 2009.

Reviewer, Daniel Murray

Fascists these days are a mealy-mouthed lot. Not racist but racialist. Not hating another race but loving your own. So it is almost refreshing to encounter some who were upfront about what they were about. Formed in 1942 while their fellow fascists on the Continent were in the ascendant, Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (“Architects of the Resurrection”) had a set of policies that were as grandiose as its name:

• Irish democracy to be replaced by a one-party totalitarian state (said party being itself, of course).
• The use of English to be criminalised in favour of Irish.
• A united Ireland to be achieved by the raising of a massive conscript army that would swamp Northern Ireland into submission.
• The encouragement of women to swell the Irish race with as many progeny as they could manage, the earlier the better (how else is that massive conscript army going to be formed?).

Too bad if none of this strikes the reader as appealing, as emigration would also be banned. One has to give Ailtirí credit at least for not resorting to the usual Irish solution to social problems.

Despite its avowedly fascist worldview, Ailtirí did not see itself as simply a potato-eating version of those found in Germany and Italy. Instead, it held a far grander ambition: by remaining aloof from the War until the belligerents had worn themselves out, Ireland would be in the prime position to re-spiritualise a materialistic Europe and assume the mantle of leadership over a Christian world order.

The study of a political party can read like a biography: it will have its beginning and often an end, a distinct character that stands it out from the rest, likes and dislikes, and sometimes a rise and a fall.

Ailtirí had a promising start before spluttering into oblivion but then, political failures can be as interesting as the successes, especially if the reader is of a morbid disposition. Parties on the far-right spectrum, in particular, can have the appeal of a car-wreck: grisly but you slow down to gawp all the same.

Perhaps it is the type of personality they attract. Not that left-wing groups do not feature their own sort of deviant – Ken Livingstone’s 2012 memoir records the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of the various Trotskyite factions he was part of with a little too much relish – but the fascistic ones do seem to draw more than their fair share of ambitions and egos inflated to levels that are almost Shakespearean. That is, if Shakespeare was a fruitcake.

The opening chapter explores the uneasy position democracy had within post-Treaty Ireland with its legacy of civil war and executions, Blueshirts battling against Republicans, and the widespread idea that an autocratic system like those used so successfully on the Continent might be preferable to godless Marxism. The reviewer is not completely convinced by the direction of this chapter – seen in another light, Irish democracy could appear to have been impressively robust – but it is, as with the rest of the book, an impressively researched piece.

Douglas next explores the pro-German sympathies prominent in Ireland on the eve of the Second World War that only grew with the strings of victories by the Nazi state that seemed about to consign democracy to the dustbin of history. The author then narrows his focus onto the political evolution of the party founder, Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, the closest the book has to a recurring character besides the party itself.

Born Gerald Cunningham in Belfast, 1910, he worked as a tax clerk in the Irish Department of Finance before resigning when refused leave to improve his Irish. Having immersed himself in a Gaeltacht and emerging as a committed Gaelic revivalist, the newly renamed Ó Cuinneagáin worked first as an editorial writer and then as a tax consultant before taking his first step into political thought.

After flirting with first an underground pro-German group and then with the Gaelic League – where he excelled as an organiser before his outspoken politics proved a mite strong for the League’s genteel elders – Ó Cuinneagáin felt confident enough to form his own party, one that he could have to himself and play the role of leader, or Ceannaire as the budding fuhrer was styled. All that was left was to make a lot of speeches, and then sit back and wait for the inevitable bestowment of supreme power.

Ailtirí was not to be another mere party but a vanguard for a Christian revival. Still, it had to abide by the nuts-and-bolts realities that every political group must go through, such as the management of its regional branches (many of whom would withhold knowledge of their full strength to avoid the extortionate 75% tithe on their membership fees by the Dublin HQ), the maintenance of self-imposed standards (the rule against holding party meetings in public houses being commonly ignored as the local pub in some rural areas was often the only place large enough), and time commitments on the part of activists (senior ones often travelling considerable distances to speak at branch events).

While Douglas’ book hardly invites admiration for its subject, it is still incredible that Ailtirí worked at all, let alone as well as it did. Enthusiasm among members for the party ideals remained high enough not to be deterred by their inept performance in the 1943 general election. It was the repeated failure in the 1944 one, however, that led party activists to wonder if they would be better off under a different ceannaire.

Ó Cuinneagáin was, as Douglas describes, the party’s best asset and worst liability. While an effective organiser, his inability to delegate responsibility – and power – meant that the future of Ailtirí was always going to be held hostage to the Ceannaire’s increasingly obvious flaws.

Ó Cuinneagáin appears to have been of that breed of ambitious politicians who either enter a small political scene or, upon failing to find one, create their own. Their competency level is at a reasonable but unexceptional level, allowing them the success that would otherwise have eluded them in a more mainstream party but leaving them vulnerable to themselves when it comes to competing on a national stage. Nick Griffin’s meltdown on BBC’s Question Time in 2009 is the most notable example of this political Peter Principle at work.

While Ó Cuinneagáin avoided anything quite so public, his inflexible and dogmatic approach to leadership led to the 1945 resignations of some of Ailtirí’s ablest members and what Brendan Behan described as the first item on the agenda of any Irish committee: the split. In disarray and with the recently formed Clann na Poblachta encroaching on its share of the protest vote, Ailtirí made the lightest of impacts on the 1948 general election.

Even then, Ó Cuinneagáin did not give up: on the morning of 14^th May 1949, the inhabitants of Dublin and other large towns awoke to find Ailtirí posters exhorting them to “Arm Now to Take the North.” The heavy-handed response by the Gardaí in tearing down the posters provided Ailtirí with a propaganda boon, and the whole affair seems to have partly convinced the British Cabinet of an imminent invasion of Northern Ireland.

But the lack of follow-up by Ailtirí proved to many that the party was all talk and no action. Even an attempt later in the year to upstage the annual Armistice Day dance in Dublin with a riot failed to stem the haemorrhaging of members.

One of the stalwarts remaining was Liam Creagh who, when not a drinking companion to Brendan Behan, helped sell the Ailtirí newspaper and occasionally drink the proceeds away. The relationship between Creagh and Ó Cuinneagáin came to resemble, as Douglas describes with his keen eye for human folly, a “dysfunctional marriage”, though Creagh was not the most damaged individual in Ailtirí, that dubious distinction being held by Raymond Moulton Sean O’Brien, a self-proclaimed ‘Prince of Thormond’ and compulsive child molester. The best that can be said for many far-right groups is that all human life is there.

Ailtirí shrank away until its newsletter was the only part of it left, a party broadsheet without a party. The newspaper enjoyed surprisingly healthy sales throughout the 1950s and 1960s – Ó Cuinneagáin appears to have been far more skilled as a publisher than as a politician or thinker – but by the next decade, its publishing costs proved too much even for the indefatigable Ó Cuinneagáin, and it was wrapped up in 1975. The one-time Ceannaire died in 1990, still insisting that Ailtirí’s day might yet come.

While destined to go down in history as a footnote, and a peculiar one at that, Douglas is at pains to stress how Ailtirí’s ideology was not all that incompatible with popular opinion in Ireland at the time, with its pro-Axis sympathies even after the full extent of Nazi atrocities had been exposed, and the latent anti-Semitism in public life (it is unsurprising to learn that the Jew-baiting blowhard Oliver J. Flanagan was happy to field questions on behalf of Ailtirí in the Daíl).

However, unlike Martin Pugh’s study on fascism in Britain at the same time, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! (2005), in which half the chapters seemed to be dedicated to peripheral subjects, Douglas is able to provide the necessary cultural context while keeping the attention on the main subject. That Douglas is an entertaining writer who knows how to bring his subject to life makes for an absorbing as well as informative read.

Ireland’s role in the inglorious end of Phillip of Spain’s attempt to invade England. By John Dorney

On September 16, 1588 seven Spanish ships appeared off Liscannor, sighted by Nicholas Cahane, an agent of Boetius Clancy, the High Sherriff of County Clare. They were the miserable remnants of a once mighty Spanish fleet.

They anchored off Kilrush, where the starving sailors attempted to trade with the locals for food and water. Six ships sailed away unscathed, but another,  the Annunciada sank off Scattery Island, was set alight by crew and looted by locals. Two other ships were also lost: the San Estaban and San Marcos, with the loss of around 800 lives.

Crawling ashore, half drowned, malnourished and in no fit state to resist the survivors, about 300 men, were massacred at Spanish Point by both Irish forces raised by the O’Briens and English soldiers led by the Sherriff, Boetius Clancy. [1]

Introduction-The Invincible Armada

The Spanish Armada, also known as the ‘Invincible Armada’ (La Armada Invencible), was an attempt by the Spanish King Phillip II at a seaborne invasion of the Kingdom of England. The Armada was the culmination of long running rivalry between England and Spain over strategic, trade and religious issues.

The ‘Armada’ itself refers to the Spanish fleet assembled for the operation, which was intended to escort the Spanish Army of Flanders across the English channel, past the English fleet. Although Ireland had featured in previous drafts of Spanish invasion plans, it did not form a part of Spanish strategy in 1588.

Nevertheless, Ireland was, in the end, central to the defeat of the Armada. The Spanish fleet was blown north and west around the western Irish coast. As many as 27 ships and perhaps up to 9,000 Spanish soldiers and sailors lost their lives off the Atlantic coast of Ireland, either through drowning or were killed by English troops or Irish chieftains after they were washed ashore.

At the same time some Irish who were sympathetic to the Spaniards sheltered them and some kept them on as soldiers.

The European Context

Spain was the leading power in Europe and arguably the world. Phillip II of the house of Habsburg inherited European possessions including not only the Spanish kingdoms of Castille and Aragon, but also the Kingdom of Naples in southern Italy, the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily, several principalities in northern Italy and what was then known as the Spanish Netherlands.

In 1580-81 when the King of Portugal died without an heir, Phillip managed to make himself head of that kingdom too, together with its Atlantic fleet and overseas possessions.

Additionally the Spanish crown controlled vast swathes of central and South America, including modern Mexico (‘New Spain’), and most of what is now Spanish-speaking South America (the Vice-Royalty of Peru). From  there the Spaniards shipped back huge quantities of gold and other precious metals, which funded further conquests. Phillip’s empire also included the modern Philippines, and since the union with Portugal, the coast of modern Brazil and outposts in India and Africa as well.

England by contrast, was not yet a major European power. It had no permanent standing army and though it controlled (as yet shakily) the Kingdom of Ireland, it foreign possessions paled in comparison with those of the Spanish monarchy – including only some outposts in north America and in modern Bangladesh.

The Anglo Spanish War broke out against the background of religious turmoil in Europe. The Protestant ‘Reformation’ aimed initially at Reforming the Catholic Church had by the late 16^th century, hardened into a number of breakaway Christian faiths.  At a time when the monarch was generally taken to be ‘God’s anointed’,  where the subjects and the monarch differed over religion it almost inevitably led to civil war, as it did in France, the German states and, since the 1560s, between the Catholic Spanish rulers of the Netherlands (modern Netherlands and Belgium) and their predominantly Calvinist Dutch subjects.

Between England and Spain and between their monarchs Phillip II and Elizabeth I there was personal religious animosity. Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII had broken with the papacy but his daughter Mary I, product of Henry’s marriage to a Spanish princess had reversed Henry’s policy and restored Catholicism as state religion. Mary married Phillip II of Spain who was thus (joint) King of England and Ireland with Mary between 1553 and Mary’s death, without children, in 1558.

When Elizabeth Tudor, who had been imprisoned under her sister Mary, took over as queen she reversed the counter-reformation and founded an enduring Protestant monarchy with a state Church of England.

This was a blow to Phillip’s pride, his religious scruples and represented a loss of a strategic ally, but was not enough in itself to spark war between England and Spain.

The Anglo Spanish War

Starting in 1562, Elizabeth authorized English ‘privateers’ that is freelance naval captains, to raid Spanish shipping crossing the Atlantic. As so much of Spanish wealth depended on the importation of American gold this was a very serious potential risk to Spanish interests.

The stakes were further raised with the outbreak of rebellion against the Elizabethan English state in both northern England and southern Ireland (the First Desmond Rebellion, which last until 1573) in 1569. Both revolts had an aspect of Catholic crusade. The Pope Pius V formally excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570. This was a very serious matter as it meant that any Catholic monarch could legitimately overthrow her and that rebellions against her now had religious sanction.[2]

Both the Spaniards and the Papacy gave military aid to Irish Catholic Geraldine rebels 1579-80 in the Second Desmond rebellion and a 600 strong Papal force of both Italian and Spanish soldiers landed at Smerwick, in Kerry in 1580 to aid the uprising, only to be captured and massacred by English forces.[3]

Furthermore in 1584, Spain committed itself to fight the spread of Protestantism in France.

By way of reprisal, England began aid to aid Protestant Dutch rebels against Spain with troops and money 1585. So by the mid 1580s, England and Spain were locked in mutually antagonistic rivalry, both aiding what would now be called proxy forces in their respective domains.

However the final straw for Phillip II did not come until in 1586 in response to English attacks on shipping off Galicia, the Canaries and the Caribbean, which caused significant losses in ships and cargo. Losses on this scale could not be allowed to continue and it was only now that Phillip II directed his ministers to prepare for an invasion of England to force a change of regime.[4]

The Irish Context

Where did Ireland fit in to this conflict?

Ireland prior to 1542 had been a ‘Lordship’ of the monarch of England. It was only in that year that that Henry VIII declared the Kingdom of Ireland and himself as King of Ireland. It was one thing however to proclaim himself thus and a very different thing to actually control the whole island.

At that date English Crown control extended no further than the Pale, a small fortified area based around Dublin on the east coast and a handful of coastal towns such as Waterford and Cork. Outside of that were dozens of what amounted to small kingdoms, some of which were controlled by lords of mixed Irish and English ancestry such as the Fitzgeralds of Kildare and Desmond and the Butlers of Ormonde and others by indigenous Gaelic Irish chieftains.

Henry’s plan was that Irish lords would ‘surrender’ their lands to him, be re-granted them under English law and become, over generations ‘civilised’  English aristocrats. They would abandon their private armies and also abandon Irish language and customs and also adopt the Protestant state religion. The English, throughout the century spoke of a religious and civil ‘reformation’ in Ireland.

It would not be true to say that the Irish lords en masse rejected the advance of the English state in Ireland. Many did accommodate themselves to it and adopt English titles. But for a complex mixture of reasons, some because they did not want any intrusion into their territory by anyone, some because succession disputes or rivalry between Irish lordships dragged in English forces and also by resistance to the imposition of an alien culture and religion, the English ‘civilizing mission’ in Ireland was marked by bouts of ferocious military conquest.

The Desmond Rebellions, in 1569-73 and 1579-83, were a combination of all of these factors and ended in the destruction of the Fitzgerald Earldom of Desmond and the Plantation of Munster with English settlers in the 1580s. Historians disagree over the level of Catholic Counter Reformation penetration of Ireland in this period but it is undeniable that the rebels declared themselves to be fighting for the One True Faith against ‘heresy’ and actively sought military aid from Catholic Europe. Refugees from the Desmond wars ended up in Spain and to a lesser extent France.

The first Irish regiment in Spanish service was born in 1587 when an Irish unit raised under an English Catholic, William Stanley and sent to the Netherlands, defected to the Spanish side. [5]

As a result Ireland appeared to the Spanish to be an obvious weak point for England, with a restive Catholic population that could be mobilized in their favour.

As the reception of the Armada off Ireland’s west coast in 1588 would show, however, the reality of Irish politics was far more complex and fragmented.

The Composition of Connacht

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the western province of Connacht, where much of the Spanish fleet would end up in September 1588.

In an effort to establish military control over the province, the English created the ‘Presidency of Connacht’ in 1569. The President was an English Military Governor, based in Athlone, whose job it was to enforce English authority, taxes and culture in return for recognising the English titles of designated Irish lords. In return, the local chieftains were supposed to give up their private armed forces, except for a small band of personal retainers. This was known as the ‘Composition of Connacht’. In 1588 the Lord President was Richard Bingham. [6]

The ‘Presidency’ was often brutal and generally unpopular, but was not universally resisted.

The Presidency worked to the advantage of the two biggest Lords in Connacht – O’Brien of Thomond (in modern Clare, then considered part of Connacht) and Burke of Clanricard (in modern south and east Galway), whose leading families kept a firm grip on succession and who consolidated their power over their dependent clans with English backing.

Elsewhere though, the English presence provoked serious violence. The  MacWilliam Burkes of north Mayo, for instance revolted after the English attempted to back an unpopular candidate for chieftain in 1585. In the same year, in a scheme known as the Composition of Connacht, Irish titles were abolished and English settlers were introduced into the province, mainly on confiscated monastic land introduced.

The MacWilliams, joined by other discontented chieftains such as Brian O’Rourke in Leitrim fought English forces led by President Richard Bingham throughout 1586. Only after the slaughter of 800 Scottish Gallowglass they had brought in did they, for the time being, submit. [7]

So in 1588, when the Spaniards ended up off the coast of Ireland, they may have expected to find a sympathetic Catholic population ready to help them. What actually existed however was a highly fragmented political scene, in which the loyalties of individual lords depended not so much on ideology as on their immediate relationship to English power.

Spanish Plans

The Spaniards of course never expected to arrive on Ireland’s west coast in 1588.

Spain was no stranger to naval warfare or to seaborne invasions. Sixteen years before the attack on England, at the battle of Lepanto 1571, a Spanish-led Catholic fleet –the ‘Holy League’ – had crushed the fleet of the Ottoman Turks, hitherto the dominant naval power in the eastern Mediterranean. And just six years previously in 1582, Phillip’s forces had successfully mounted an amphibious invasion of the  Azores islands, the only Portuguese possession to resist the ‘Union of Crowns’ with Spain by force. [8]

While the invasion of England – an Atlantic power with formidable maritime expertise – was a challenge of a different order, it was clear that the Spanish threat to England was real.

Initially, Spanish strategists came up with a plan for a three pronged attack on England in 1586-87. Interestingly, this included a landing at Waterford, in south eastern Ireland in order to draw off English resources from the main assault over the English Channel. The Spanish fleet was to draw off its English counterpart as it went to deal with the Irish landing, and meanwhile the Spanish Army of Flanders was to cross the English Chanel unopposed.[9]

All had to be postponed however after the English naval commander Francis Drake launched a devastating attack on the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1587, destroying many ships and much of their stores.

The following year the Spaniards came up with a simpler plan. The ‘Invincible Armada’ – a fleet of 130 warships and supply ships, led by Duke Medina Sidonia – was to sail from Lisbon via Corunna, link up with the Army of Flanders, led by Allessando Farnese, the Duke of Parma. This force, 37,000 soldiers strong, was waiting at Calais to be escorted in a further 260 transport barges across the Channel onto the English coast. [10]

There is little doubt that, had the Army of Flanders crossed into England, the veteran Spanish troops would have swept aside the raw English militias that Elizabeth could put into the field. In that event, Elizabeth was to be deposed and Parma was to act as interim military ruler until the Pope and Phillip II  named a new, Catholic monarch. [11]

Elizabeth herself created a legend by addressing her troops at Tilbury in Essex, assembled (incidentally nowhere near the where the Spaniards intended to land) with the immortal words,

I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma[12] or Spain[13], or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.[14]

Stirring words no doubt, but in reality everything, for the English depended on stopping the Spaniards from crossing the channel.

In this they had some advantages. Their fleet may have been smaller than the Armada, but in terms of well armed warships, suitable for northern seas the English may even have had the edge. The operation was at the very limits of what the Spanish Empire was able to accomplish. Some ships had had to be hijacked in Spanish ports and pressed into service for the invasion. Many others were Mediterranean vessels, unsuited for the wild seas of the Atlantic. Some cannon had been hurriedly cast and burst when fired.

Most importantly of all, Spanish logistics were insufficient. Not enough food or water was supplied and some of it was begin to spoil by the time the great Armada set sail from Corunna. Many sailors got sick and supplies were perilously low by the time they reached English waters. [15]

Sea Battle

Sea battle was joined from July to late August 1588 as the Aramda fought its way towards the coast of Flanders. It culminated in fierce encounter off the Gravellines, or the coast of the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium), with the English attempting desperately to break up the Armada and to prevent it from reaching its rendezvous with the Army of Flanders.

The English under Admiral Howard succeeded in breaking up the Spanish formation by use of ‘fire-ships’, vessels set alight with pitch and tar and sent towards the Spanish fleet.  In the fighting that followed, superior English gunnery managed to bloody the Spaniards somewhat and to keep them away from the Duke of Parma’s army at the disembarkation point at Calais.

However, this was a tactical defeat for the Armada, not a catastrophe – only 5 ships were lost, though many others were damaged. Medina Sidonia, in command of the Armada had other problems however. Logistics had always been insufficient and now food and water supplies were beginning to run out altogether. Moreover,  a ‘Protestant Wind (southerly and westerly), in early September forced the Spanish to head for home, north around the coast of Scotland and Ireland back to Corunna.

This turned out to be a far more costly enterprise than the battle itself.

The Armada in Ireland

As the Armada rounded the northern Irish coast, it was in dire need of re-provision of both food and water. For this reason the fleet had to approach the unfamiliar coast of Ireland. There it was hit by westerly gales and crashed into the rocky Atlantic coast. In all 24 ships and c.5-7000 men lost off Ireland, mostly by drowning. All sailing ships were, to a degree, at the mercy of the weather, the Armada, many of whose vessels were built for the much calmer Mediterranean as more vulnerable than most.

The Annals of the Four Masters recorded;

Great numbers of the Spaniards were drowned, and their ships were totally wrecked in those places. The smaller part of them returned to Spain; and some say that nine thousand of them were lost on this occasion. [16]

Those who made it ashore generally fared little better than those lost at sea.

The English Lord Deputy of Ireland, Fitzwilliam, issued a proclamation whereby ‘Harbouring Castaways’ was punishable by death. To his own officers he wrote;

‘Whereas the distressed fleet of the Spaniards by tempest and contrary winds, though the providence of God have been driven on the coast… where it is thought, great treasure and also ordinance, munitions [and] armour hath been cast. We authorize you to… to haul all hulls and to apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there of any quality soever. Torture May be used in prosecuting this inquiry.’[17]

This chilling order, not to spare prisoners ‘of any quality [i.e. rank or social status] whatsoever’ was startling ruthless. Accordingly Richard Bingham, the President of Connacht, and his brother George Bingham, executed up to 1,100 Spanish survivors of the wrecks who made it ashore in the western province. For instance, at Galway city, 300 Spanish prisoners including 40 aristocrats were beheaded on Fitzwilliam’s orders – though Bingham apparently regretted the loss of ransom money. Only a handful such as Don Luis de Cordoba, managed to secretly buy their way to safety.[18]

Native Irish treatment of the Spanish survivors was extremely varied.

In Connacht, most Irish lords cooperated with Bingham, particularly the largest lords O’Brien, Earl of Thomond, and Burke, Earl of Clanricarde. Other clans such as the O’Flahertys also handed over Spanish prisoners.  Others, seem simply to have seen the Armada as an opportunity for personal gain. Dubhdarach O’Malley Roe, on Clare Island, for instance killed the Spanish survivors and kept their gold for himself.

Elsewhere, at Streedagh in modern County Sligo for instance, where four ships were lost, the locals robbed the Spaniards of any valuables they could find, but did not kill them.

However, in modern north Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim, areas which had very recently been in armed revolt against the English Crown – chieftains such as MacWilliam Burke, and Brian O’Rourke harboured Spaniards. [19]

A rather ungrateful captain, Francisco de Cuellar, who was taken in by O’Rourke, wrote of ‘passing seven months among mountains and woods with savages’. Cuellar was shipwrecked on Streedagh beach, Sligo, spoke first of the ‘savages’ stripping and looting his ship, and the ‘English Lutherans’ hanging or cutting off the heads of his comrades wherever they captured them.

O’Rourke, whom he described as ‘a savage but a very good Christian and an enemy of the heretics, always carrying on war with them’, sent him through the territory of several other friendly clans including the McClancys and the O’Cahans to Derry, from where he secretly took ship back to the Spanish Netherlands. [20]

Although Cuellar reported that the Catholic Irish, with whom he conversed in Latin, repeatedly asked for a Spanish invasion, the Irish Annals were clear that, apart from O’Rourke and his allies, most of the Irish had sided with the Crown;

A great army was mustered by the Lord Justice of Ireland, Sir William Fitzwilliam; Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of the province of Connaught; and Sir Thomas Norris, Governor of the two provinces of Munster; together with the most of the men of Ireland… except the people of Ulster, the O’Rourke and Mac Sweeny-na-dTuath, who had formed friendship and alliance with some of the Spanish fleet which we have before mentioned. These forces spoiled every thing to which they came in their course, not belonging to the Queen’s people, from the Suck to the Drowes, and from the Drowes to the Finn. [21]

In Ulster, which was still largely outside of English control, the Spaniards seem to have fared somewhat better, at least if they survived shipwreck. In Antrim he Scottish/Irish MacDonnell clan led by Sorley Boy (Somhairle Buidh) helped up to 500 Spaniards escape to Scotland. [22].

The position of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the most powerful northern leader, at this point still proclaiming himself a loyal subject to Elizabeth I, was hard to pin down. He sheltered and kept on a number of Spanish commanders to train his own forces, whom he was soon to lead in a war against the Elizabethan state. [23] Nevertheless, he also reported to Fitzwilliam the Lord Deputy that he had ‘put a large number of Spaniards to the sword’ in Inishowen (modern Donegal).[24]

Ironically enough, those Spaniards lucky enough to be shipwrecked in England itself were generally treated much more leniently. Most were taken prisoner and eventually repatriated.

Ireland, where English authority was tenuous enough for them feel that extreme ruthlessness was a necessity, was the real grave of the ‘Invincible Armada’.

Aftermath

The defeat of the Armada, as much by bad weather, poor planning and bad luck as by battle seemed a providential escape to English Protestants – literally gift sent by God. Nevertheless, war between England and Spain continued indecisively until 1604 – an ‘English Armada’, sent to destroy the port at Corruna 1589 was itself defeated with 40 ships sunk and 10,000 men lost.

In Ireland itself the immediate effects of the Armada are hard to gauge. The frantic military activity all over the west destabilized the always fragile political situation there. North Connacht rose in rebellion again in 1589, though again, mainly over local grievances. Brian O’Rourke who had harboured many Spaniards fled to Scotland but was handed over the English and hanged.

Certainly however, those areas, principally in the north, who had helped the wrecked Spaniards in 1588, helped to forge an enduring connection between Catholic Ireland and Catholic Spain.

During Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell’s Nine Years War (1595-1603) against the English Crown, both lords were in constant communication with Phillip II, who aided them with weapons, money and finally a landing of Spanish troops at Kinsale in 1601-2.

None of this should obscure the reality however that in the year of the Armada, the Irish weather and probably the majority of the Irish concerned helped to seal the fate of Spanish Armada.

This article is a version of a talk given at Kilrush, County Clare, on August 14, 2015 for the Office of Public Works (OPW). By My thanks to Padraig Og O Ruairc for inviting me.

References 

[1] John O’Brien, The Other Clare, Vol 3, 1979, http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/spanish_armada.htm

[2] See the Bull here http://tudorhistory.org/primary/papalbull.html

[3] Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland, The Incomplete Conquest, Gill & MacMillan, Dublin 1994, p226

[4] Geoffrey Parker ,Empire War and Faith in Early Modern Europe, p50

[5] William Marmion, Irish regiments in the Spanish Army of Flanders http://www.theirishstory.com/2015/07/28/irish-regiments-in-the-spanish-army-of-flanders/#.VdNqkbJVhHw

[6] Lennon, Sixteenth century Ireland, p240-248

[7] Lennon, p249-255, Gallowglass refers to Gall Oglaigh, ‘foreign warriors’ traditional Scottish Gaelic soldiers for hire.

[8] Parker, Empire War and Faith p23-24

[9] Parker, Empire, War and Faith, p50

[10] Ibid. p55-57

[11] Ibid, p55-56

[12] Alessando Farnese Duke of Parma, an Italian who commanded the Spanish Army

[13] King Phillip II of Spain

[14] Online here http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item102878.html

[15] Geoffrey Parker, Colin Martin, The Spanish Aramda, (1999), p140

[16] Annals of the Four Masters 1588, parts 10

[17] Calendar of Carew Manuscripts 1575-1588, online here.

[18] Parker, Martin The Spanish Armada, p224, see also this blog article http://ronangearoid.blogspot.ie/2011/01/1588-dark-year-for-galway.html

[19] Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland p237

[20] Captain Cuellar’s letters are online here http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T108200.html

[21] Annals of the Four Masters 1588, part 14, online here http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/T100005E/text009.html

[22] Parker, martin The Spanish Armada, p225

[23] Ibid. P228

[24] Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion p106

On August 15 2015, John Dorney of the Irish Story met up with Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc in his native County Clare for a tour of the physical reminders erected to the War of Independence there in 1919-21. Pádraig himself has been to the fore in erecting memorials to victims of all sides in the conflict.

Our first stop was at the site of the Rineen ambush of September 1920, in which 6 RIC officers were killed.

Here we talk about the reprisals Crown forces carried out in retaliation.

Our next stop was deep in the hills and bogs to the lonely grave of Private Robertson, a British Army deserter, killed by the IRA in 1921.

A small area of east County Clare saw many deaths and injuries in the War of Independence. Here Padraig talks about the Cratloe ambush and nearby Cratloe bridge ambush of 1921. In the First two RIC officers lost their lives and in the second two IRA Volunteers.

Finally we end up near the outskirts of Limerick city, where there is a poignant memorial to  two innocent teenage victims of the conflict.

 Protestant women missionaries on Achill island in the 19th century. By Patricia Byrne. (A version of this article was presented at the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, Achill on 2 May 2015)

Graves Apart

If you travel to Dugort on the northern coast of Achill Island as far as St Thomas’ Church and follow the signs for the Sean Reilig up on to the slopes of Slievemore Mountain, you will arrive at what survives of an old cemetery.

In a place where you can look out on to the waters of Blacksod Bay, you will come upon two flat boulders on which the inscriptions are barely legible. One of these marks the resting place of Eliza Nangle – wife of Edward Nangle, initiator and main driver of the nineteenth-century Achill Mission Colony.

The burial spot also holds the remains of six of the Nangle children: an adult daughter, Tilly, who died suddenly in 1852, two years after her mother, and five infants who died in Achill at birth or soon afterwards.

Across the breadth of Ireland, in Row J, South Section of Deansgrange Cemetery, Monskstown, County Dublin, a gravestone has toppled to the ground at the resting spot of Edward Nangle and his second wife, Sarah. Edward had suffered a severe health breakdown as a young man and endured bouts of physical and mental ill-health throughout his life, particularly at times of stress and over-exertion.

However, he outlived his first wife by three decades. It’s possible that his frequent speaking and fundraising trips abroad, alongside his frenetic writing, acted in a therapeutic way for him while his wife had no release from the unrelenting harsh Achill conditions.

Eliza Nangle died at the age of 46. She left behind six children: three adult daughters and three sons, the youngest, a delicate boy George, just six years of age. Most of her previous sixteen years had been spent in Dugort, Achill, until poor health forced her to relocate to Dublin. From an early stage of the couple’s life in Achill, it appears that Eliza Nangle was a broken woman.

Tempestuous Years

The Nangles and their three small daughters, together with Eliza’s younger sister Grace Warner, arrived in Achill in the summer of 1834. Edward had a vision – modelled in part on the Second Reformation efforts of Lord Farnham in Cavan with ‘moral agency’ and moral reformation at its core – to convert the poverty-stricken peasants of the island through a combination of scriptural education, land reformation, employment and moral reform.

The early years of the infant Mission were tempestuous. John MacHale, Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, responded to the establishment of Mission schools by setting up competing establishments with the assistance of the new National Board of Education and the island schools became a sectarian battle ground.

Physical conditions in Achill were harsh, the winter storms severe, hostility toward the Colony explosive, and Edward Nangle was absent from his Dugort home for long periods on fundraising and speaking trips. On 19 April, 1835, almost a year after the family took up residence in one of the Colony’s new slated houses on the slopes of Slievemore, Eliza gave birth to a son. He lived just two days.

Soon afterwards, Dr Neason Adams – a friend of the Nangles who ran a medical practice in St Stephens Green, Dublin – relocated to Dugort with his wife Isabella at a time when the couple might have been looking forward to retirement. The Adams couple and Grace Warner would provide the main support network for Eliza for the remainder of her life.

On 11 July 1836, Eliza gave birth to a second son, Edward Neason, who survived just six weeks. A third son, George Neason, born in October 1837, died the following month. The cumulative effect of these infant deaths, alongside the growing hostility to the Colony and the vicious community conflict appear to have had a devastating effect on Eliza. Three years into the family’s life in Achill she was a shattered woman, as revealed in a letter to her sister Grace in late 1837. She would never recover her full health.

Eliza Nangle letter to her sister, Grace Warner, dated 4 December 1837.

I have so given up letter writing that to lay a letter aside, and then forget to reply to it all together, is quite an ordinary event…

I often find my heart swelling with sorrow, and my eyes filling with tears that I cannot restrain….

I trust I may become purified and made more meek for the kingdom of Christ, with whom our three dear infants abide for ever and ever.

Edward has been much spared in this owing to his absence from home. The burden rested on our affectionate friend Dr Adams. I am becoming very absent, much unfitted for the affairs of this life. My children often say to me – ‘Now Mama, do you know what you are saying; and will you remember to-morrow?’

I cannot write more now than to say, that I love you.

Your very affectionate sister,

Eliza Nangle

Achill Herald, March 1865

Protestant Evangelical Women

The women associated directly with the Achill Mission Colony – Eliza Nangle, her sister Grace Warner, Isabella Neason, and the Nangle daughters – exhibited characteristics of the nineteenth-century Protestant woman supporting and following a strong evangelical male figure. They were part of a development which saw women move out of the purely private and domestic sphere into philanthropic roles in areas such as education, orphanages, and moral improvement activities.

This enabled Protestant women of the period to move beyond the strictly domestic arena, but in a manner which did not threaten the prevalent ideals of womanhood in a patriarchal society.  It was a process which had some parallels in the growth of the Catholic female religious orders in mid-nineteenth century Ireland.

The ‘moral agency’ template which Lord Farnham applied at his Cavan estate in the 1820s at the height of the Second Reformation, influenced the young curate, Edward Nangle, then resident in the nearby Arva, when he came to establish the Achill Mission.

One could say that the women at the Dugort Colony, alongside Dr Neason Adams, carried on the ‘moral agency’ function of the Mission: Isabella Neason was active in the infant school, as well as supporting her husband in his medical work; Tilly Nangle and her sisters worked in the orphanage; Eliza Nangle, in addition to carrying out book-keeping duties, also taught the skills of sewing, knitting and housekeeping/cleanliness.

It is clear that the Nangle daughters were reared in Achill in the strict traditions of a middle-class Protestant family, and the prevalent norms for Victorian women as seen in an 1838 advertisement for a Governess for the girls.

WANTED

For a Clergyman Family in Achill

A governess of active and industrious habits, experienced in tuition and attached to the Church of England, to instruct Three Children in English, French, Music, Drawing and Needlework; qualified to train them up in habits of order, and in the ways of true religion. She will also be required to cut out their Dresses, to assist in needlework, and to take charge of their wardrobe – the oldest child being under nine years of age. Salary, £25 per year.

Applications, stating references, to be made to the Rev Edward Nangle, Mission House, Achill.

Conditions for Native Achill Women

Achill in the mid-nineteenth century presented a remote, isolated, economically-deprived location. Since the Achill Sound bridge had not yet been built, travel to Newport and Westport was often undertaken by boat.

Housing in Achill was categorised as ‘fourth-class’, a classification which indicated one of the main symbols of poverty in pre-famine Ireland. The island being predominately mountain and bog with little, arable land, life was difficult and harsh.

There was no administrative or commercial centre on the island and no middle class apart from the coastguard families. Economic survival depended on seasonal migration to the harvest fields of Scotland and England to obtain cash to pay the landlord.

The most significant indicator of the position of Achill women in the mid-nineteenth century comes from the National School data for the 1830s and 1840s. It shows that only 20-25% of those enrolled in the new schooling system were female, reflecting a society attitude to women which survived into the next century. The lives of Achill women were also negatively affected by the growing authoritarian presence of the Catholic clergy in the years following Catholic Emancipation, and in the aggressive response by John MacHale and his clergy to the Achill Mission.

While Achill life for Eliza Nangle – from a sheltered, middle-class, Protestant background in County Meath – was undoubtedly grim, the contrast with the living conditions of the local island women was glaring. For one, the middle class Victorian home was her realm; for the other, the island’s land, mountains and seashores were her domain.

The Achill woman footed and saved turf and carried it from the bog on her back. She hauled seaweed from the shore, baited and gutted fish, planted and weeded potatoes, sheaved and stacked oats. In the summer months she would take over the main responsibility for farm work when many of the island man left for migrant harvesting work in Scotland and England. In the post-famine years, Achill women would themselves join the annual harvest exodus of tattie-hokers (potatoe pickers) from Achill.

Women Caught in Sectarian Crossfire

Given their subservient position, particularly in relation to literacy and linguistic skills, it is not surprising that women were caught up in the ecclesiastical crossfire between the male clerical protagonist led by Archbishop John MacHale, Edward Nangle and their clergies in Achill in the 1830s. A young island woman, Bridget Lavelle, became a servant in the Nangle household in early 1835 and, over several months, openly declared herself a Protestant.

One evening, Bridget Lavelle’s mother arrived at the Nangle house in Dugort to announce that Bridget’s eldest sister was seriously ill and wished to see Bridget before she died. When Bridget returned home, she found her sister by the fire in perfect health, and the tall figure of the new Achill Parish Priest, Father Martin Connolly, waiting. Bridget was forcibly restrained from returning to the Colony. Later, she was assisted by Edward Nangle to move secretly to Dublin where Dr Neason helped her to obtain employment.

The case of Margaret Reynolds, wife of the Chief Coastguard Francis Reynolds, was even more dramatic. Captain Francis Reynolds, Chief Coastguard in Achill, was a close ally of Edward Nangle with a fierce aversion to Catholicism. His wife, Margaret, mother of their seven children, was Roman Catholic and a native of Malin, County Donegal. Her position could not have been more uncomfortable as she attended mass on Sundays while her husband openly challenged the local clergy and denounced their teachings.

In December 1838, as a result of a violent altercation in Keel over access to a shipwrecked vessel, Captain Reynolds was assaulted and died two weeks later from his injuries. On 2 January 1839, his body was interred on Slievemore in a burial spot next to the graves of the Nangle infants. His widow was pregnant with their eight child.

Four days later, on the afternoon of 6^th January, his body was exhumed from its grave to allow for a coroner’s inquest, and then reinterred. Within hours, a violent storm – the most severe to reach Ireland in several hundred years – swept across the country leaving hundreds dead and devastation in its wake. It was The Night of the Great Wind – Oíche na Gaoithe Móire. Margaret Reynolds gave birth to her eight child after her husband’s death. Six of their children afterwards emigrated to Reynolds’ relatives in Canada and Margaret ended her days back in Malin where she died in 1876.

Achill Famine

Eliza Nangle gave birth to two children during the famine years: a daughter, born in Achill on 10 March 1846, died at birth, as famine was taking a grip on the island. A son was still-born in December 1847 and Eliza’s health problems were by then acute.

In Dugort, Eliza Nangle and her family witnessed the calamitous consequences of the famine in its early years. We get some insight into what this experience was from the observations of Dr Neason Adams who took a leadership role in famine relief at the Achill Mission. In the Achill Herald of May 1847, Dr Adams described the crowds who gathered at the Colony seeking assistance: ‘The sick, aged, and infirm are not the only applicants for support…The cry for food is almost universal…The mournful cry of “Give me a [food] ticket – give me a [food] ticket – myself and family are starving – dying of the hunger” from morning to night never ceases round our doors and windows.’

On 14 January 1846, The Telegraph carried a report that a young girl, Bridget Niland from Tyrawley, north-east Mayo, had applied for admittance to Castlebar Workhouse. According to her story, her father had taken the family to Achill where he changed his religion in return for work and food. When she refused to become a Protestant, she was beaten by her father and ran away. This incident highlights the charges of ‘souperism’ against the Achill Mission and accusations of linking famine relief to conversion and the rescinding of their Catholic faith by relief recipients.

The whole rationale of the Mission – like that of the Second Reformation efforts by Lord Farnham in Cavan – was an unbroken link between the Colony activities i.e. education, moral reform, temporal improvements, employment, and scriptural education. However, in the Great Famine period, the success of Edward Nangle’s fund-raising activities and the increase in the number of conversions heightened awareness and criticism of the linking of relief to proselytising activity.  Criticism of the Colony’s orphan asylum, where Catholic children were raised as Protestants, was particularly criticised as a base method of trading in souls.

At the close of 1847, when the Famine was at its height, Eliza Nangle moved to Dublin where she spent the remaining three years of her life as her physical and mental health deteriorated. Her life in Achill was over.

‘She never was a woman of many words’

After Eliza’s death in 1850, her husband’s obituary in The Achill Herald gives us an insight, not just into Eliza’s character, but also into the prevalent views about the appropriate role of an evangelical woman of the period.

Edward described his wife’s singular skills in account keeping, which saved the Mission the expense of paying for a book-keeper over many years. He also made the unusual comment that Eliza was, ‘in every respect a woman of masculine understanding’ who devoted all her energies to the Mission, while at the same time ‘shrinking from notoriety under the shadow of her husband’s name’.

While Edward Nangle was prolific and fluent in speech and writing, his wife, he wrote, was ‘never a woman of many words’. It was as if a toughness and endurance was expected of her, alongside a demureness and meekness in keeping with the prevailing ideal of womanly virtue.

Two years after her mother’s death, the Nangles’ third daughter, Tilly, died suddenly in Killiney, County Dublin while caring for her delicate brother. She was nineteen and her remains were also brought back to Achill and buried next to her mother on the slopes of Slievemore. By this stage the Nangles’ direct involvement with the Colony had come to an end as Edward had been appointed Rector of Skreen, Co Sligo. The family would continue to return to the Dugort each summer.

Isabella Adams and her husband remained on in Achill. Following a stroke, Isabella had been speechless and paralyzed for a number of years. She died on December 1855, exactly twenty years since she and her husband had relocated to the Colony.

Grace Warner did not marry and appears to have taken on a caring role, after the death of Eliza and Tilly Nangle, for Edward and Eliza’s youngest child George, who suffered from mental illness and spent much of his adult life in the North Wales Lunatic Asylum. Grace returned to Achill in her later years and died in Sheridan’s Hotel, Dugort, in 1891, four decades after the death of her only sister, and a half-century after she had landed on Dugort Strand with her brother-in-law Edward Nangle at the start of the Achill Mission.

A few years after Grace Warner’s death, in the summer of 1894, thirty-two Achill islanders drowned when the Victory hooker capsized in Clew Bay while taking migrant tattie-hokers to Westport to catch the steamer to Scotland. The majority of those who drowned were female, the youngest just twelve years old. By the end of a tumultuous century, it appeared that little had changed in the living conditions of the Achill islanders, except that Achill women had now joined the men in the annual exodus of migrant harvesters essential for island survival.

Patricia Byrne’s narrative nonfiction book The Veiled Woman of Achill – Island Outrage & A Playboy Drama is published by The Collins Press.

Further reading:

Mealla Ní Ghiobúin, Dugort, Achill Island 1831-1861: The Rise and Fall of a Missionary Community (Dublin, 2001).

Irene Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland (Wisconsin, 2005)

Daniel Murray looks at how a combination of political pressure, resignations and armed attacks by the IRA undermined the Royal Irish Constabulary in Westmeath in 1920.

A Challenge to the People?

In Mullingar police barracks, on 4^th August 1920, concerns, both personal and political, came to a head. When Constable Roarke was detailed to the four-man patrol for night duty through the town of Mullingar, Westmeath, he declined to carry a gun, saying that it was not necessary.

This refusal was in breach of recent regulations whereby two of the men in a patrol were to carry revolvers while the other pair took rifles. When the matter was reported to his senior officer, Roarke again abstained, explaining that for him to bear arms while on duty would be tantamount to a challenge to the people.

Roarke had had eight and a half years of service in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), a respectable length of time which would suggest he was not known to be of an insubordinate nature. But faced with Roarke’s obstinacy, the County Inspector told him he would be dismissed instantly unless he resigned first. Roarke responded by handing in his resignation before throwing off his police uniform.

Roarke was accompanied by a second policeman in Mullingar barracks, Constable McGovern. Being of the same view as Roarke and knowing he was detailed to the night patrol on the following night where he would be faced with the same choice, McGovern decided to cut to the chase and also resigned.

“It is also stated,” reported the Westmeath Guardian, “that further resignations are expected.”[1]

On the Outside

This exodus from the RIC prompted the Ballymore Council to pass a resolution at its monthly meeting on 19^th August 1920, congratulating the policemen who had resigned. Its following resolution was telling: an agreement to strike a rate of pay for the upkeep of the Irish Volunteers, or the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the organisation had renamed itself. After all, it was the IRA, not the RIC, who were now performing the policing duties in Ballymore as well as the rest of Westmeath.[2]

The Volunteers who later recounted their experiences in their Bureau of Military History (BMH) Statements were sure that the redundancy of the RIC as a police force was due to the people losing confidence in them. The Volunteers, however, were able to maintain the cooperation of the public who increasingly took their disputes, mostly over land or petty robberies, to the IRA, now partnered with the Sinn Féin courts. Most work by the Volunteers throughout 1919 and early 1920 were concerned with such duties and, while tedious, they helped maintain a sense of purpose and discipline amongst the fledgling militia.[3]

The RIC seemed to assist in its own replacement by withdrawing from public duties. On 20^th May, the Westmeath County Council read out a letter, received from the “Adjutant of the Westmeath Brigade of the Irish Republican Army”, offering the services of the Brigade in protecting the voting booths for the forthcoming local elections.

Most of the Council were in favour of accepting this offer. The only bone of contention was that the Council had already made arrangements with the men employed under the Direct Labour Scheme. As for the RIC, they had not been asked but as its members had refused to police the booths in other areas, there did not seem to be much point in asking. After some discussion, the Council agreed that the letter would be approved and the services of the Volunteers accepted.[4]

The election success of Sinn Féin in the June elections allowed its members to implement rebellion into policy through the local government boards that they now dominated. The newly-formed Westmeath County Council made its views clear when it passed a resolution recognising the authority of the Dáil Éireann.[5]

Other boards passed harsh measures against those who still upheld Crown legitimacy. The Mullingar Board of Directors decided at its fortnightly meeting on 24^th June to call on the District Hospital doctor to eject three RIC men at present in his hospital and to refuse admission under any circumstances to a member of that police force. The RIC was, after all, a “blue-coated army of occupation” which had “ceased to be a civil force, and they were now a military force.” RIC personnel needing treatment were to go to Mountjoy as “there was a military hospital where they could be treated.”[6]

Barrack Attacks

The war against the RIC in Westmeath was carried out with more than council resolutions and boycotts. The series of isolated shootings and arm-raids across Ireland snowballed into set-piece attacks and then finally a full-blown insurgency. Although never envisioned as such, this ‘gun and ballot’ approach was carried out with a success that later revolutionaries in Ireland could only dream of emulating.

Police barracks throughout the country were obvious targets for an increasingly confident and organised IRA, although the latter aspect should not be overstated at this stage given the numerous false starts that occurred.

Just after Christmas 1919, Seumas O’Meara, the O/C of the Athlone Brigade, attended a GHQ meeting in Dublin. Told by his superiors that it was time for the IRA to become more active, O’Meara agreed to arrange an attack on a police barrack by early 1920. Upon returning to Athlone, O’Meara called a meeting of the other Brigade officers. It was decided that the barracks at Ballymore and Castletown Geoghegan would be targeted at night on 20^th February.

Ballymore Barracks was in the territory of the Drumraney Battalion and so would be their responsibility. In this, they would be assisted by the Athlone Battalion under O’Meara’s direct command, while the Mullingar Battalion agreed to take on Castletown Geoghegan Barracks.

The Athlone Brigade

The Athlone Brigade encompassed a number of battalions: originally four before the Mullingar one was made a separate brigade, which took the Athlone battalions down to three. These in turn consisted of different companies. In theory, this gave O’Meara access to all the manpower involved. Making use of it, however, would prove to be a different matter.

Both operations withered on the vine. In preparation for the one against Ballymore Barracks, all rifles that were to be used by the Athlone battalion were forwarded to Drumraney where they would be collected at assembly points at a fixed time for the attack. The Volunteers were by now equipped with a number of shotguns and revolvers for close-up fighting but rifles were prized for the range they provided.

At the appointed date, O’Meara travelled with twenty selected men from the Athlone battalion to Drumraney and they were then guided by a local contact to their assembly point near the unsuspecting barracks. There they waited for the Drumraney battalion to arrive with the forwarded rifles at the agreed time of midnight.

No one came, however. By 6 am, the Athlone men had had enough and returned home. Without the rifles to keep the barracks’ garrison pinned down, their shotguns and revolvers would not have been enough.

Either confusion in the dark had been the cause for the no-show or, as O’Meara suspected, the Drumraney Volunteers had not wanted the trouble an attack on the barracks would bring on them.

The Mullingar men, for their part, had got drunk and managed to fell a tree to use as a road-block before calling off the mission.[7]

The Razing of the Barracks

It was not until mid-1920 that operations against RIC barracks by the Athlone Brigade were actually implemented. Even then, the majority of these were after their garrisons had been evacuated, making their destruction a relatively easy accomplishment.

One such set-piece was the razing of Brawney Barracks on 31^st July along with the adjacent building that had formerly been used as a Crown courthouse. The fifteen men involved had choreographed their arson to a fine degree.

Guards were placed on laneways and entrances to bar pedestrians from intruding. After entering the abandoned barracks through the back window, the Volunteers holed the roof on each side. The rafters and floor were saturated with fuel and then set ablaze. Their mission complete, the fifteen men dispersed in small groups, leaving Brawney Barracks to be thoroughly gutted by the fire.[8]

The majority of razed barracks in Westmeath and the rest of the country were accomplished on Easter Sunday night in accordance to GHQ instructions. On one hand, the whole affair was little more than a propaganda exercise as the military value was negligible; after all, any country house could be converted into a replacement barracks by the Crown authorities.

But the widespread success of their operations was gratifying all the same for the Volunteers to read about in the newspapers. In any case, with the RIC in retreat, the IRA was allowed a greater freedom of movement in the country, a necessity for any guerrilla force.[9]

Streamstown

One of the exceptional times when a barrack was assaulted with its garrison still inside was on 25^th July. Seumas O’Meara had announced at a Brigade staff meeting the need to take a more proactive approach and, after some discussion, Streamstown Barracks was decided upon as the one to attack.

A two-storey building of solid stone masonry, the barracks stood by itself beside a railway line and close to the Streamstown railway station. It had not been fortified with sandbags or barbed wire like some of the other remaining outposts but it had no windows at its rear or gable ends that could provide weak spots for an attacker and the windows at its front had recently been fitted with steel shutters.

Complete with a garrison of seven constables and a sergeant, Streamstown Barracks presented a formidable challenge.

O’Meara drew up an elaborate set of plans: ladders would be placed against the windowless rear wall, by which selected men would climb onto the roof, which would be holed to allow for petrol to be poured through and set alight. The rest of the attack party would be busy keeping the garrison pinned down.

Upon hearing this outline, Thomas Costello, the Vice O/C of the Athlone Brigade, dismissed it as convoluted. According to Costello in his BMH Statement, he proposed an alternative to O’Meara: a number of the garrison had been observed to be in the habit of leaving the barracks each Sunday for Mass. These churchgoers would be waylaid and divested of their uniforms which would be donned by members of the assault party. The rest of the party would lie in wait outside the barracks to rush the door when it would be opened for the disguised Volunteers.

O’Meara reluctantly agreed to go along with this substitute plan while keeping his original one as a backup; at least, according to Costello. Neither O’Meara nor any of the other BMH Statements that cover the assault on Streamstown Barracks mention any disagreement on strategy.

Men from the Athlone, Moate and Drumraney Companies were selected to assist the local Volunteers with the attack. A newspaper report numbered them as sixty, O’Meara said sixty, though there were only weapons for about twenty to twenty-five of them.

On Sunday morning as planned, members of the attack party mingled with people on their way to Mass and, when the three policemen came along from church, they were held up and robbed of their uniforms.

Plan A

Thomas Costello and a second man, James Tormey, put on the captured uniforms, leaving their former owners bound up in a farmhouse. When Costello and Tormey rejoined O’Meara, they found him drilling the rest of the team on the road in the open. As if this was not blatant enough, the Volunteers squandered time getting into position and, when they had done so, did a poor job of hiding by constantly peering over walls and so forth. Costello could see the steel shutters being put in place over the windows of the barracks, confirming his suspicion that O’Meara had squandered the element of surprise.

Determined to see things through to the end all the same, Costello and Tormey cycled to the door of the barracks. On finding it locked, they knocked and were answered by a voice on the other side, presumably the sergeant’s, asking who was there. Costello replied: “Police.”

When asked which barracks he was from, Costello said the Ballymore one and that his business in Streamstown was to deliver some dispatches. Asked for his name, Costello said it was ‘Curran’ as he knew there was a Constable Curran in Ballymore.

Before he could congratulate himself on his cleverness, he was pressed for his full name but here Costello had no ready reply. Immediately, there were sounds on the other side of the door of hurried footsteps, rifles being loaded and a staircase being climbed. The obviously spooked garrison were readying for a full-on assault.

Plan B

Tormey had the presence of mind to grab Costello by his uniform’s cape and drag him to cover on the railway track just in time to avoid the explosion of a grenade that had been pushed through the loophole in a steel shutter. They also narrowly avoided friendly fire when the Drumraney Volunteers, from their position on a hill overlooking the barracks, mistook the two runners for genuine policemen.

With the opening gambit blown, the Volunteers along the railway embankment reverted to their original plan and opened fire. Their shots were concentrated on the front of the barracks, where the windows were and from where any return fire would likely come.

Meanwhile, O’Meara led six or seven men to the building’s rear where the lack of windows allowed for a blind-spot. There they positioned a homemade bomb constructed out of fruit-tins filled with gelignite, hoping to blow in the wall. The bomb failed to go off, possibly due to a damp fuse.

Aftermath

The assault lasted between half to three quarters of an hour before Volunteers withdrew from fear of enemy reinforcements and recognition of the futility of any further attempt. The Westmeath Independent has it that the retreat was upon hearing the hum of an aeroplane, an explanation not mentioned in any of the BMH Statements and so it is probably mistaken.

Though Streamstown Barracks frustrated the attempts to break it, its position was decided as untenable and its garrison was withdrawn to Mullingar the next day. Streamstown suffered the fate of all other exposed barracks and was razed later that day by the local Volunteers.

There were no fatalities on either side, though a member of the garrison was wounded and the Volunteers rued the loss of valuable ammunition. Costello was sufficiently outraged by what he saw as poor planning on O’Meara’s part that he submitted a detailed report to GHQ, sparing his O/C no mercy. According to Costello, the report was enough to have O’Meara suspended and replaced as O/C of the Athlone Brigade by Costello.

However, other sources make it clear that O’Meara’s demotion did not occur until 1921 and from reasons unrelated to the Streamstown attack. It can only be concluded that Costello was confused on this particular point.[10]

Not another Mail Raid

On 2^nd August, the mail trains were raided at Fossagh Bridge on the Athlone-Moate line. In what was described as resembling a ‘Wild West stunt’, masked men loaded the mail onto motor cars and drove away. By itself, this was nothing new, the Westmeath Independent exuding an air of languid boredom in its coverage:

The raiding of mail trains and the confiscation of official correspondence has latterly become so common in Ireland as to excite nothing beyond a mere passing interest.[11]

What was a novelty, however, was how the hijackers had managed to raid not one but two trains. That there was only an interval of ten minutes between the trains as they passed in the opposite directions – the first from Dublin to Galway, the second being the Galway-Dublin one – allowed both to be robbed in quick succession.

The stolen mail was transferred to a safe location, after which it took a week to censor all the letters, each one being marked with ‘Passed by I.R.A. Censor’ before being dumped at Ballinahown Post Office.

There were two main points of interest uncovered. The first were the numerous letters to RIC members from their relatives, appealing to them to resign, which revealed the strain the force was now under.

The second was a dispatch from RIC Sergeant Thomas Martin Craddock, a mainstay of Athlone Barracks who was on temporary assignment to Mount Temple. Craddock had not been idle with his time. In his letter addressed to the head constable in Athlone, Craddock gave a survey of the whole position of the area, accompanied by a proposal on the best ways to combat the ongoing insurgency.[12]

Enemy Number One

Craddock was already known to the Westmeath IRA as a determined foe. To Seumas O’Meara, Craddock was a brute who would hold a gun to the heads of suspected Volunteers with the threat to shoot them if they did not talk. However, the one example we have of Craddock interrogating a suspect – a man attempting to smuggle a rifle under his coat for the IRA – was performed professionally enough.[13]

One incident which Craddock could not have been responsible for was the maiming of Joseph Cunningham. According to O’Meara, Cunningham and some other Volunteers had ejected a number of the RIC from a pub in Mount Temple as part of the policing duties the IRA had undertaken. O’Meara claimed that some nights later, Craddock led an RIC posse in the beating of Cunningham and his brother, reducing Joseph to a “wreck of a man for ever afterwards.”[14]

A newspaper account dates the incident to 27^th. For reasons that will become clear, Craddock could not have been party to it. In other ways, the newspaper confirms details of O’Meara’s version. Cunningham, identified as an officer in the local Volunteers, was supervising the area when he ordered four men out of a pub. Cunningham was about to make his way home by bicycle when the four evictees knocked him down and kicked him unconscious. O’Meara was correct about the brutality of the assault and the damage done to the victim, Cunningham being left in a critical condition with the fear he would never walk again.

But the newspaper made no mention of the assailants being RIC men; indeed, it is unlikely that a sole Volunteer (there is no mention of anyone else with Cunningham) would have been enough to overawe a group of RIC men, however demoralised the force. The group of men also attacked immediately after they were forced from the pub, indicating that they were acting on a spur-of-the-moment vindictiveness with no great length of time in between as in O’Meara’s version.

Cunningham’s story is a warning about the dangers of community policing, especially with inexperienced officers but it is perhaps also a testament to Craddock’s status as the number one menace that, years later, his enemies would confuse him with having a role in any ill that had befallen a Volunteer.[15]

Sergeant Craddock

Forty-seven years of age and unmarried, Craddock had practically been born in the RIC, being the son of a head constable, and had given twenty-five years of service in addition to being a veteran of the Boer War.

His return from Mount Temple to Athlone, and his transfer to the Crimes Special Headquarters there, was unsettling enough for O’Meara, in an interview with Michael Collins, to try talking his way out of an order to target the leading intelligence officer in the Athlone garrison by painting a grim picture of what Craddock would do in retaliation.

Collins’ characteristic suggestion was to shoot Craddock first and anyone else later. To hammer the point home, Collins appointed O’Meara the Competent Military Authority for Co Westmeath, enabling O’Meara to order anyone to be killed without needing permission from GHQ first.[16]

Thus empowered and under pressure to accomplish something, O’Meara assembled a hit-team consisting of five or six Volunteers, including himself and Thomas Costello, for Craddock. Things were complicated by police patrols having been strengthened from four to eight, and by how cautiously the sergeant moved around Athlone. O’Meara counted six occasions, and Costello four, when the hit-team waited to ambush Craddock, only to be left disappointed when the sergeant never came.

This was typical enough in the War of Independence, where the tedium of waiting and the disappointment of false starts were more the norm than the deeds of derring-do which would later fill the history books.

A Lucky Break

Another opening to catch Craddock on patrol on 21^st August seemed a dud as he was to be leading a squad of eight, the sort of numbers that the hit-team did not care to risk confrinting. As the team made their way back home, Craddock was spotted entering the Comrades of the Great War Club on King Street, Athlone, at 11:45 pm.

Thomas Costello was in the shop where he worked when another Volunteer dropped by to tell him where Craddock was. Costello immediately gathered the rest of the team except for O’Meara, and they lay in wait outside the Club, armed with revolvers.

Craddock indulged himself with a few drinks at the Club bar while he watched a billiard match. Half an hour after midnight, he decided to leave with a colleague, Constable Denis Mahon. Mahon was first through the door. The moment Craddock stepped out onto the street, a shot rang out in the dark, followed by several more. The two men rang up the street in the direction of the nearby military barracks, Craddock making a few paces before falling to the ground under the hail of bullets.

To the Bitter End

Though in great pain, the bloodied-but-unbowed sergeant drew his revolver from where he lay and fired at the retreating backs of his assailants as they made their escape up King Street. It was later estimated that Craddock had managed three shots as a bullet was found in the wall of a gable of a barber’s shop, another had passed through a window and a third had had the force to penetrate the door of another hairdressing establishment where it was found lodged in the woodwork of the interior.

Other bullet-marks found on the buildings in the street indicated that the assassins had fired back in reply while in flight. Other than a bullet through the trousers of one of the gunmen, the team got away unscathed.

Mahon went looking for help while others from the Club did all they could for the wounded man. Craddock was carried to the military barracks where he died half an hour later with Mahon by his side. The coroner found a number of wounds on the body: one from a bullet on the right side of the abdomen, superficial burns on the front of the abdomen from the same shot and two holes on either side of his shoulder from where a second bullet had passed cleanly through. The bullet that had entered the abdomen was found in the left side of the pelvis where it had fractured the bone and it was this that had caused Craddock’s death from shock and haemorrhaging.

Mahon was unharmed from the fray. According to Costello, he had been left alone as the team had nothing against him. O’Meara, however, has it that one of the shooters had aimed three times at Mahon, only for the gun to jam. Either way, Costello was to regret that Mahon was untouched as the constable “turned out to be a right villain and excelled himself in ill-treating people by beating them up”. After the trauma of watching his companion die, this maliciousness on Mahon’s part is perhaps unsurprising.

Craddock’s murder made a total of seven RIC men killed over the weekend throughout Ireland. The fatalities came from all ranks: DI Oswald Swanzy (targeted for his suspected role in the slaying of Tomás Mac Curtain), two sergeants and four constables.

The jury at the inquest into Craddock’s death expressed their heartfelt sympathy to his relatives but otherwise delivered only a muted verdict of “death…by persons unknown.”[17]

The Changing of the Guard

Reflecting upon the rapidly changing situation in Ireland, the Westmeath Independent offered guarded praise for a police force whose time had come to an end even if the force itself had not:

Even the Irish police, where they can, have hurried out of the service. With all that may be said against it, up to now it was, anyway, an Irish service, manned by Irish men instinct with Irish feeling though often obliged to undertake work through mistaken loyalty that was painfully disagreeable. Still they managed up to now, not withstanding the violence of many agitations, to remain on fairly good terms with their countrymen.

 It is an Irish service no longer. It is being daily recruited from England. The Irishmen in the service feel the change. They remain only until they can get out.[18]

The new blood in the RIC alluded to were the influx of ex-soldiers that would become known as the Black-and-Tans and the Auxiliaries. While they succeeded in stiffening the spine of a beleaguered RIC, they also hastened its end as a community police force and its transformation into a nakedly militarised one. But while it removed any moral authority from the RIC, it was also to make life a lot harder for the Volunteers.

Under the renewed pressure, the policing by the Volunteers came to an end.[19] Survival became the priority. More Volunteers went on the run to avoid the round-ups and mass arrests as well as responding with an increased level of violence of their own.

It was not to be the end of the War in Westmeath. It was, however, the end of the RIC of old.

Bibliography

Bureau of Military History / Witness Statements

Costello, Thomas, WS 1296

Daly, David, WS 1337

Lennon, Patrick, WS 1336

McCormack, Anthony, WS 1500

McCormack, Michael, WS 1503

O’Connor, Frank, WS 1309

O’Meara, Seumas, WS 1504

Westmeath Examiner 22/05/1920

Westmeath Guardian

06/08/1920

Westmeath Independent

12/06/1920

6/06/1920

07/07/1920

31/07/1920

07/08/1920

21/08/1920

28/08/1920

[1] Westmeath Guardian, 06/08/1920

[2] Westmeath Independent, 21/08/1920

[3] Costello, Thomas (BMH / WS 1296), p. 7-8 ; Lennon, Patrick (BMH / WS 1336), p. 5 ; McCormack, Michael (BMH /  WS 1503), pp. 12-3

[4] Westmeath Examiner, 22/05/1920

[5] Westmeath Independent, 12/06/1920

[6] Ibid, 26/06/1920

[7] O’Meara, Seumas (BMH / WS 1504), pp. 19-20 ; McCormack, Michael, p. 14

[8] Westmeath Independent 07/07/1920

[9] O’Meara, pp. 20-1 ; Costello, p. 7

[10] O’Meara, p. 25-7 ; Costello, pp. 10-2 ; O’Connor, Frank (BMH / WS 1309), pp. 12-4 ; Daly, David (BMH /  WS 1337), pp. 13-5 ; McCormack, Anthony (BMH / WS 1500) ; McCormack, Michael, pp. 15-6 ; Westmeath Independent 31/07/1920

[11] Westmeath Independent, 07/08/1920

[12] Costello, pp. 12-3 ; O’Meara, p. 25 ; O’Connor, pp. 11-2

[13] O’Meara, p. 28 ; McCormack, Michael, pp. 13-4

[14] O’Meara, p. 28

[15] Westmeath Independent, 28/08/1920

[16] O’Meara, p. 29

[17] O’Meara, p. 30-31 ; Costello, p. 13 ; Westmeath Independent 28/08/1920

[18] Westmeath Independent, 31/07/1920

[19] Costello, p. 8

By Gavin Foster

Published by Palgrave MacMillan, London 2015

Reviewer: John Dorney

Irish history is often inward looking, almost navel gazing, obsessed with the same arguments and the same issues, to be debated time after time. It is as well therefore at times to get an outside viewpoint. One such is proved here by Gavin Foster, an American historian of the Irish Civil War working at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

This book is a very original look at the conflict that immediately followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, one which split open the hitherto united nationalist movement and which shaped the politics on independent (southern) Ireland for much of the twentieth century.

In eight chapters, each really a stand-alone essay, Foster reconsiders the society that shaped and was shaped by the intra-nationalist conflict. This means not so much the military aspect of the war, or the time worn questions of whether it was a war of pro-Treaty democrats against anti-Treaty militarists or of republicans against pro-Treaty ‘imperialists’. Rather it looks at  questions of whether it was a war caused by class or status-conflict within Irish society.

Class, youth and status

What Foster argues is that, first of all, one must set aside classical ideas of Marxist class conflict, where politics and history is driven by the clashing of rival economic interests, manifested in clearly defined rival classes. Rather, he argues, Ireland was a society of multiple social divisions, only some of which can be defined as purely economic. For instance, the older, mostly Protestant, upper middle class (often dubbed pejoratively ‘imperialist’ by republicans) tended to look down on the arriviste Catholic professionals, who in turn tried to ape their manners.

Republicans in the years after the Civil War, Foster reports, took great glee in hearing how the Free State nationalist establishment was scorned by the older upper classes, not knowing their conventions of dress and speech. Republicans for their part eschewed dinner suits top hats and the like in conscious rejection of such affectations and represented themselves as the champion of the ‘common people’. Despite this the top echelons of both pro and anti-Treaty factions tended to come from a similar lower middle class Catholic background.

Both sides seemed to agree that the Anti-Treatyites represented the lower orders. Although in truth there was no clear social distinction between pre-1922 republicans who accepted the Treaty and those who rejected it (not in the form of classical class conflict at any rate), both sides seemed to agree that the anti-Treatyites – ‘Irregulars’ in Free State terminology – were of a lower social class.

Foster reports that pro-Treatyites tended to refer to their opponents (in terms similar to how the British had referred to them all before the truce of 1921) as ‘corner boys’ ‘riff raff’ and other such labels. Their supporters were merely out for loot and material gain.

Alternatively, when they were not painting them as ‘looters’ and criminals, pro-Treaty accounts tended to speak of the ‘Irregulars’ as irresponsible young people, often ‘trucileers’ who had not fought the British, while the real national fighters supported the government.

Republicans on the other hand raged against the middle class, the Catholic Church, the press, and big business which had united  with former unionists and Free State traitors to bury the Republic of 1919. Todd Andrews in his memoir described the Civil War as a ‘White Terror’ while Liam Mellows famously wrote that ‘we are back to [Wolfe] Tone and the men of no property’.

Then there was the urban rural divide. Broadly speaking Dublin and its hinterland was pro-Treaty and the more remote, mountainous and poor a rural region was, the more likely it would be anti-Treaty. While this is of course a generalisation, there were for instance, plenty of republican guerrillas in Dublin and conversely, Donegal, the most remote and poorest county in the Free State, was majority pro-Treaty in sympathy. Nevertheless the urban-rural divide  did colour combatants perceptions of each other.

Foster conveys to us the sense of Dublin National Army troops being sent to places like Kerry or Connemara that their enemies were ‘culchies’, ‘padjoes’, or ‘bog trotters’ – all derogatory Dublin nicknames for supposedly uncivilised country people who lived on mountain or bog. Conversely in counties like Kerry the republican fighters saw the war to a large degree as defending their county from an invasion by a hostile Dublin government.

Class War?

What of actual class conflict, the clashing of rival economic interests? Foster argues that rural class conflict was an important aspect of the Civil War, those without land often seized it during the conflict, sometimes under the protection of the anti-Treaty IRA. On the other side government Ministers such as Kevin O’Higgins and Patrick Hogan worried that society itself was breaking down as a result.

To combat social disorder they formed the Special Infantry Corps, basically a gendarmerie charged with putting down disorder that was not part of the IRA campaign but too militant for the nascent Civic Guard police to deal with.

Their largest deployment was in helping to break a farm labourers’ strike in County Waterford, where they ended up in gun battles with the local IRA who were acting on behalf of the strikers.  Foster has useful figures for their deployment, numbers of arrests and so on. For the record Foster records that the 4,000 strong Special Infantry Corps arrested 371 people in the first nine months of 1923, seized over 1,500 animals and  60 gallons of poitin (illegal liquor). Not a chilling level of repression but nevertheless significant.

The Republicans never had a clear policy on either agrarian or class conflict but did stand over and defend the confiscation of farms from those they had judged to be spies or informers. They did however, discuss at various times adopting more radical policies of land confiscation or nationalization.

In short class and status was not irrelevant to the Civil War, but nor was it a straightforward cause or driver of events. Nevertheless, the perception that the Free State embraced the monied establishment and the republicans the lower classes was reinforced after the conflict when thousands of republicans, jobless after release from internment had to leave the country in search of work

An Uncivil Post-War

Ireland was far from the only country to experience internal conflict in inter-war Europe. Many of these civil wars ended in bitter and bloody repression of the vanquished. In Finland the ‘Whites’ oversaw the deaths in captivity of some 13,000 ‘Red’ prisoners, in 1918-9, while in Spain, after Franco’s victory over the Republicans in 1939  at least 50,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 of his opponents may have died either through execution or overwork in prison camps.

By comparison as Foster notes, the vengefulness of the pro-Treatyites in Ireland was rather muted. Nevertheless Republicans felt it keenly for all that and Foster argues here that the continuing imprisonment of anti-Treatyites after the IRA’s dump arms order of May 1923 contributed greatly to the bitterness the war engendered in subsequent years.

Many thousands were arrested in sweeps in the summer of 1923 and up to 12,000 were still held up to December 1923 (prompting a mass hunger strike) with the last prisoners not being released until the summer of 1924.

There were in addition, by Foster’s count, at least 18 killings of prisoners or unarmed republicans after the Civil War (alongside 80 official executions and about 150 ‘summary killings’ of anti-Treaty prisoners during the actual civil war). Rather vindictively also, the Free State granted an amnesty to any illegal acts carried out by its own forces in August 1923 but did not enact a similar amnesty for its opponents until November 1924. Anti-Treaty political activists complained all the way up to Fianna Fail’s accession to power in 1932 of police harassment.

However, Foster also argues that whereas republicans argued that they were systematically sacked from their jobs, and boycotted when they tried to get new ones after the Civil War, this is not borne out by a close look at the evidence. Many republicans, for instance, retained or recovered their position in the Civil Service throughout the period.

In short republican grievances about a vengeful Free State are not without some substance but should not be overstated either. There were also killings on the other side after the war, including the shooting of a Garda during a concerted series of raids on police stations in 1926 and of course the assassination of leading pro-Treaty politician Kevin O’Higgins in 1927.

Conclusions

This is an interesting, original and thought provoking book. But I do have some criticisms of Foster’s theses. ‘The Irish Civil War and Society’ almost totally avoids talking about the military aspects of the conflict and therefore misses out on some important points.

For instance, Foster on a number of occasions voices the rather strange opinion that the expansion of the National Army to over 55,000 men was a measure aimed at curbing social discontent by temporarily alleviating unemployment. Admittedly the slump in the world economy after 1921 hit Ireland hard and it probably did the Free State no harm to find temporary work for thousands of unemployed First World War veterans. But in fact the Free State cabinet were acutely aware that Army was creating major financial burden for the new state and tolerated it only because they thought it was a military necessity.

The reason for this was that although by late 1922 the anti-Treaty IRA had been largely broken as an offensive force, by this date the National Army’s control still did not extend far beyond barracks in large towns. It was unable to enforce things such as unimpeded transport, tax collection or law enforcement.

While this remained the case the basic functions of the state were inoperable and the only thing the pro-Treaty authorities could think of to do about it was to recruit thousands more men in early 1923. They distributed them in small garrisons throughout the countryside to secure it from anti-Treatyite raids and enable the Free State’s civilian administration to get up and running. By contrast, almost the entire IRA strategy by this time – destroying railway lines, blocking roads, burning income tax offices and Civic Guard barracks, intimidating tax collectors, and so on – was aimed at preventing the operating of civil government. This struggle and not any social concern, was what prompted the intensive recruitment to the National Army throughout the Civil War.

One other comment; a close look at the IRA files in the Twomey papers reveals that the IRA adopted agrarian agitation to a degree which may not have been appreciated yet, in this book or elsewhere. Correspondence from Liam Lynch to the Dublin Brigade in early 1923 for example orders raids on the houses of those who sold cattle seized from agrarian agitators. In the border counties Cavan and Leitrim the National Army reported that the IRA’s main support came from landless men to whom it gave land after evicting unionists or Free State supporters.

These caveats aside however, I can warmly recommend this book to all those interested in making sense of the bitter little war between former comrades in Ireland between 1922 and 1923.

See Also Making Sense of the Irish Civil War – A Conversation with Gavin Foster.

The first part of a two part article on the fall of the House of Desmond. BY John Dorney

Not far outside Tralee, in modern day County Kerry, lies a steep valley known as Glanagenty. Near Ballyseedy Cross, after a left turn off the main highway, the road rises steeply into hill country, snaking tightly around corners and through woods until one comes to the valley itself.

The sides of the valley, enclosed by hills on either side, are so steep that one can barely walk up them upright. In the past, a few men posted at either end of the valley could have kept out any attacking force. In the cleft of the valley once stood a Fitzgerald castle.

And it was here in 1583 that Gerald Fitzgerald the last real Earl of Desmond met his death, killed by a local clan, the O’Moriartys, in the pay of the Earl of Ormonde, himself acting on behalf of the English. Desmond was killed in bed and decapitated, his head sent to Queen Elizabeth I and his body displayed triumphantly by the English on the walls of Cork city.

It was a particularly ignoble fate for the head of the house of Desmond, whose ancestors had ruled much of the south of Ireland for over 300 years. His death marked the end of four brutal years of war and opened the way for the English colonisation of much of southern Ireland in the Munster Plantation.

The south of Ireland lay devastated, with an unknown number, but certainly tens of thousands dead. The Irish Annals of the Four Masters concluded; At this period it was commonly said, that the lowing of a cow, or the whistle of the ploughboy, could scarcely be heard from Dunquinn to Cashel in Munster”.[1] While for the English poet and colonist Edmund Spenser, a most populous and plentiful country was suddenly left void of man or beast”.[2]

What are known as the Desmond Rebellions were two bouts of warfare (1569-73 and 1579-83) as the Elizabethan English state attempted to spread its authority into Munster and collided with the existing power, the Earldom of Desmond, its allies and affiliates.

In equal parts the wars were an aristocratic revolt against central authority, a religious war of Catholic against Protestant and a resistance of various strands of Irish society to the imposition of an alien English social and political order.

Background 16^th century Ireland – Conquest or Civil Reformation?

We now speak, with some justification, of the Tudor ‘conquest’ of Ireland but for much of the 16^th century the English themselves described it as a ‘civil reformation’ in which law and order would be brought to lawless Ireland.

The Irish lords, both Irish and as in the case of the Fitzgeralds, ‘Old English’ (that is descendants of medieval Anglo-Norman families) would be assimilated into the law governed English state.

The 16^th century had begun with most of Ireland outside of English control, except for Dublin and a small area around it, known as the Pale. Beyond that, at best English presence was maintained by Irish lords of English ancestry such as the Butlers of Ormonde and Fitzgeralds of Kildare and of Desmond.

The conquest had begun with the crushing of a revolt by the Desmond’s cousins, the Fitzgeralds of Kildare in 1534, whose grievance was that their Earl Garret had been stripped of his title of Lord Deputy or governor of Ireland. However at a time when Henry VIII’s break with the Papacy had dangerously isolated England, the Kildare Fitzgerald’s intrigues with continental Catholic powers in France, Spain and Rome were too dangerous for the authorities in London to ignore.

Having put down the Kildare rebellion, in 1542 Henry VIII, determined to expand English control beyond the narrow band around Dublin, had declared the Kingdom of Ireland with himself as King, rather than as, hitherto Lord, of Ireland. He had succeeded in getting most Irish lords to swear allegiance to him via a process known as, ‘Surrender and Regrant’.

This meant that Irish lords would hold their position from now on under English titles such as, for instance, the Earl of Clancarty rather than as clan chieftain MacCarthy Mor. Initially most Gaelic lords were happy to accept Henry’s protection. Enforcing the actual authority of the state across Ireland  – especially establishing it as the only body with the right to make war and peace – was another matter entirely

In the case of the Fitzgeralds this initiative made little difference in theory as their presence in Ireland dated back to the Anglo-Norman conquest of the twelfth century and they already held the title of Earls of  Desmond. It was only when the English state in Ireland began to truly make itself felt as an armed force in the south of Ireland that problems would arise.

Throughout the 1540s and 50s but especially from the 1560s, the English were drawn into bloody little wars in Ulster Leinster and Connacht as they attempted to interfere in internal succession disputes and to enforce their preferred candidates and laterally as they attempted to impose Sheriffs and military governors or ‘Provincial Presidents’.[3]

Annexing one country posed many difficulties but what the English faced in Ireland, in effect was annexing dozens of tiny kingdoms, many of them unstable and wracked by internal feuding. As yet though, before the 1560s this had yet to directly impinge on Munster and the Earldom of Desmond.

Resistance to English authority in Ireland was not only a matter of power and faction however. After Henry’s English Reformation, but especially after the Elizabeth I’s accession to the English throne in 1558, it also assumed a religious dimension. There was no indigenous Protestant tradition in Ireland and those resisting the Crown, for whatever reason, often assumed the position of Catholic Crusaders against heresy.

The Tudor conquest was also to some extent a classic case of colonialism. The English expected that once shown the benefits of the superior English civilization the Irish would simply abandon their own language, customs and laws, in the words of one Palesman, the ‘Civil Reformation’  would ;.

“reduce them [the Irish] from rudeness to knowledge, from treachery to honesty, from savageness to civility, from idleness to labour, from wickedness to Godliness, whereby they may the sooner espy their blindness, acknowledge their looseness, amend their lives, frame themselves pliable to the laws and ordinances of his Majesty whom God with his gracious assistance preserve, as well to the prosperous government of the Realm of England as to the reformation of her realm of Ireland”. [4]

The Ormonde – Desmond rivalry

What set off the Desmond Rebellions, however, by far the worst bloodshed yet seen in 16^th century Ireland, was not initially any of these factors but rather competition between the two major powers in the south, the houses of Ormonde and Desmond.

The Earldom of Desmond was a sprawling lordship that stretched from modern day west Waterford through Tipperary right across to modern County Limerick, north Cork and Kerry, with its seat at Newcastle West.The Butlers of Ormonde, their great rivals had their seat at Kilkenny, where their main castle dominated the city, and dominated most what is now County Kilkenny and south Tipperary.

Neither were centralized polities, rather, they were pyramids, by which the ruling lineage collected tribute, both in terms of money and food and also in service, military and otherwise, from a host of vassal lords, who in turn extracted it from their tenants. The economic basis of such lordships was entirely military, it was in other words completely dependent on extraction by armed kin groups of resources from the producers of wealth, farmers and to a smaller degree merchants.

Economic expansion meant imposing taxation over a wider area. As a result there was constant friction over which lordship would collect taxes from which lord.

A move by the Desmonds to extract tribute from Maurice Fitzgerald, an Ormonde client in the Decies (modern County Waterford) caused the armed forces of the rival Earldoms to meet in battle at Affane in 1565. The Fitzgerald or Geraldine forces were beaten and Gerald the Earl of Desmond was made a prisoner of the Butlers.[5]

One hundred years earlier, the matter might have rested there. Gerald would have been ransomed back to the Desmonds, Maurice Fitzgerald would simply have continued to pay taxes to the Ormonde dynasty and peace would have been restored until the next time one of the lordships tried to chip away at their rival’s territory and income.

This, however was a new era. The rival land and tribute claims of the Desmond and Ormonde Earldoms had been under Crown adjudication. Only the Queen herself had the right to make war within her Realm. So both Earls were summoned first to Waterford city and then to London where they were harshly interrogated about their conduct.

Earl Gerald of Desmond was judged the guilty party in the matter and in 1567 was arrested for treason, held in the Tower of London and forced to pay a huge bond of £20,000 to keep the peace, while ‘Black Tom’ Butler, Earl of Ormonde was allowed to go free. In 1568, Ormonde also managed to pressure Henry Sidney the Lord Deputy to arrest the Earl’s brother and right hand man, John the following year. [6]

The Crown had taken sides in a private war; an action that was bound to cause a reaction.

James Fitzmaurice the ‘Captain General’ of the Desmond military was left in charge of the lordship. By 1569, with the Earl still imprisoned, he was determined to take up arms to reassert Geraldine authority.

Again, in previous times this might simply have been a limited aristocratic revolt that would have ended in compromise and negotiations. A familiar formula, not only in Ireland but across Europe, was one where those in rebellion claimed they were not in revolt against their sovereign (to whom they owed a duty of obedience) but against his or her ‘wicked ministers’. The offending ministers could be dismissed, grievances resolved and peace restored.

However in the context of the English expansion of state power throughout Ireland, with all its dimensions of religious and ethnic conflict and colonial settlement, the first Desmond rebellion took on a far more serious demeanor.

Fitzmaurice presented himself as the representative of the warrior class in Ireland, whose position in society would be made redundant under English rule. He was also a committed Catholic, opposed to innovations in religion and posed also a Gaelic Irish leader, refusing to speak English and dressing in the Irish manner. He himself had lost lands to an English family named St Leger.

That he was joined by several important Gaelic Irish lordships however, was less to do with cultural affinity and more to do with proposed English settlement in Munster, in particular the activities of an English adventurer named Peter Carew, who claimed extensive lands on the southern coast. As result, when Fitzmaurice raised the standard of rebellion, several powerful Irish clans rose up too;  notably MacCarthy Mor, O’Sullivan Beare and O’Keefe.[7]

Even some discontented Butlers, threatened by possible loss of lands initially joined the rebellion, until the Earl of Ormonde, who better understood the gravity of openly defying the Crown, ‘retrieved’ them.

James Fitzmaurice’s Rebellion

The Geraldine and allied forces opened their revolt with an attack on an English settlement at  Kerrycurrihy in north Cork, and very quickly expelled the small English garrisons from Desmond territory. Fitzmaurice and his allies, up to 4,500 strong, also briefly laid siege to the Ormonde seat of Kilkenny.

If Fitzmaurice was expecting his show of force to lead to negotiations, he was wrong. The English state reacted with unprecedented ferocity to the revolt.

Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy first took the strategic town of Kilmallock whereby he sealed off the rebels in the south. Meanwhile Humphrey Gilbert, an English commander, who the campaign would make notorious in Ireland, laid waste to a wide area, not only taking towns and castles, but also killing any and all civilians he found there.

Their heads he cut off and stuck on poles that lined the route into his camps. A contemporary wrote,

The heads of all those (of what sort soever they were) which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night, and should there be laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent so that none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a lane of heads which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends.[8]

‘Of whatever sort they were’. In other words Gilbert killed civilians without care for sex or class. The display of heads was also particularly shocking act, defiling the body, humiliating the dead and denying them a Christian burial.

It should not be imagined that Ireland had been a peaceful place before the Tudor conquest.

Irish lords were not above killing rivals and displaying their heads as terror tactics, but did not practice wholesale slaughter of non combatants. [9]

English forces and their Irish allies, including the Butlers and their confederates, also systematically destroyed foodstuffs and crops. It was a grim portent of the future

In the months that followed many of Fitzmaurice’s allies submitted to the English. There followed a  long drawn out guerrilla war until 1573 in which Fitzmaurice’s forces raided towns and settlements from the hills and mountains of north Kerry, though they also managed to defend a number of heavily fortified castles, the most important being at Castlemaine, near Tralee, Geraldine possession of which made it difficult for English force to penetrate into the hilly country to the north and west of the town.

In 1571 the rebel forces, having been bolster by Gallowglass hired fighters of the MacSheehy and MacSweeney clans, sacked Kilmallock. They looted the townspeople, according to the Annals,

to divide among themselves its gold, silver, various riches, [and] valuable jewels and were engaged for the space of three days and nights in carrying away the several kinds of riches and precious goods, as cups and ornamented goblets, upon their horses and steeds, to the woods and forests of Aherlow, and sending others of them privately to their friends and companions.

And they burned the town,

They then set fire to the town, and raised a dense, heavy cloud, and a black, thick, and gloomy shroud of smoke about it, after they had torn down and demolished its houses of stone and wood; so that Kilmallock became the receptacle and abode of wolves.[10]

We should be in no doubt that the sack of Kilmallock (done to deny it as a base to English forces) and other similar events were brutal. But there is a difference between such customary raiding and pillaging and the indiscriminate killing of civilians carried out by Crown forces.

Castlemaine castle finally fell after a protracted siege in late 1572 and the English scorched earth tactics reduced Fitzmaurice’s personal force down to perhaps as few as 100 men. A raid into Connacht in an effort to raise troops among the Burkes came to nothing and a Geraldine foray into Butler country in Kilkenny was bloodily repulsed by Ormonde’s forces.[11]

John Perrot the Lord President of Munster had at one point challenged Fitzmaurice to single combat to settle the war. Fitzmaurice refused but it was the same Perrot who was eventually to take his surrender. In 1573, with Henry Sidney the Lord Deputy removed, James Fitzmaurice submitted to John Perrot, who was now new Lord Deputy.

Fitzmaurice, having been offered mercy, submitted at Kilmallock and then fled to Catholic Europe, bringing the first Desmond rebellion to a close. His decision to launch the rebellion may have been unwise and his attacks on English colonists probably helped to provoke the ferocious English response. Nevertheless, his long resilience in the end produced a negotiated settlement.

The leading Fitzgeralds – Gerald the Earl and his brother John, were released from captivity – an implicit acceptance of the part of the Crown that the taking of the Butler’s side in their factional conflict with the Geraldines had been a mistake. It was convenient in the short term to blame James Fitzmaurice alone for the bloodshed of 1560-73

A New Order?

The peace though, as it turned out, proved only temporary. Very few of the underlying causes of the rebellion had been resolved.

The fundamental question was who was really to rule the south of Ireland the Earls with their private armies or the Queen and her officials?

On the ground in Munster, the Lord President, a title which was effectively a military governor, Drury, set about dismantling what he considered to be the objectionable aspects of the old order.

Drury’s policy included executing some 700 Irish soldiers – traditional mercenaries known as Gall Oglaigh or Gallowglass – in the years after the rebellion as a pool of future rebels. [12]

Sir John Perrot the Lord Deputy for his part outlawed the use of Brehon or traditional Irish law, Irish dress, keeping poets as well as maintaining private armies.[13] All of these polices ensured that there was, by the end of the 1570s a large constituency of potential rebels in the south of south of Irleand.

The religious stakes were also raised when the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I for heresy in 1570. In theory this now meant that her Catholic subjects no longer owed her obedience believed to be due to a lawful monarch.

And in 1579 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, now a fully fledged soldier of the counter reformation, returned to Ireland, landing at Smerwick in Kerry with a force of Irish, Italian and Spanish soldiers paid for by Pope Gregory XIII, papal letters and the Catholic Bishop of Dublin, Nicholas Sanders, preaching holy war. It was the start of the Second, far bloodier, Desmond Rebellion.

References

[1] Annals of the Four Masters. Online here.

[2] Spenser A View of the Present State of Ireland. Online here.

[3] Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland, the Incomplete Conquest, p179

[4] Richard Stanihurst, Hollished’s Irish Chronicle, p116

[5]Lennon p208-209

[6] Lennon, p 212

[7]Lennon p214

[8] Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, Colonialism in the British Atlantic p73

[9] See, David Edwards, ‘The Escalation of Violence in sixteenth century Ireland’, in The Age of Atrocity, p47

[10] Annals of the Four Masters

[11] Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p 111

[12] Lennon p 216-218

[13] Ibid.