An tUachtarán leis an ceathrú seimineár sa tsraith “Machnamh 100” a óstáil

Machnamh 100: Seminar IV ‘The 1920s’ – Of the Experience ‘from Below’

Áras an Uachtaráin, 25th November, 2021

Introduction: History ‘from below’

In my contribution to Machnamh IV, and having heard a fine introductory paper, and responses of an equally fine order, I seek to look at the period ‘from below’, as it were, from the perspective of the varying circumstances of the enlisting volunteer, the fellow family member, with whom the efforts for the achievement of independence were shared; the same family member who might become later the opponent in the Civil War, the circumstances that would lead to one serving the new State through the National Army, and for the other experiencing incarceration in Tintown in the Curragh.

Minorities

One cannot help wondering if the great flaw in the political discussion of the period is the absence of a discourse as to how minorities are to be catered for in the context of majority rule, be it North or South. There were good grounds for the defence of conscience that a diverse Protestant set of peoples might rightly have held, one that consisted of a resistance to what might be discerned as a strengthening clerical authoritarianism and absolutism of belief in what was to be the Free State.

There was much more than this, however, to what became in Northern Ireland a project of establishment and consolidation of a sectarian state, one with exclusions directed at the minority in terms of the very essentials of life – housing, employment, education and participation itself in the changes in the basic right to vote.

The World War was over, and empires were in flux. Member peoples from various forms of dominion had fought together, including Irish people, under the flag of empire. The majority of those who fought from Ulster now located the defence of all their interests, and indeed privileges, within a victorious empire.

South of this was a state that was, and had become, more clericalist and conservative by the day since 1829, and the achievement of Catholic Emancipation that by the 1930s would have a profile that could be evaluated as indeed contradicting the individual principles of conscience, not only as might be perceived in the North but by any citizen dreaming of the values of a republic.

The forming of the Volunteers in the North, the import of arms, and British Government acquiescence to it suggested that a legitimation for a specific form of separation was available. Volunteers were in response organised in the South on a wide basis.

Class

What was the class composition of the Volunteers, and how did it differ North and South? When I look at those historical photographs, such as those which appear on the cover of Padraig Yeates’s book, A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4, Lorcan Collins’s Ireland’s War of Independence 1919-21, or those other books which depict ‘the fighting column’, I am struck by their youth but also by their dress. The gap between their form of dress with their shirts and braces-supported trousers, the occasional cap, and the later photographs of those hatted representatives sent to London, or delegated later to Dublin, to debate the Treaty, is striking. Then, too, there was some self-selection in those who went to Dublin. Back down in the rural areas, among the ranks of the Volunteers or the Flying Columns, it is doubtful if the nuance of all the distinction in forms of separation from empire, or independence, was being discussed by those in such pictures.  

As I look, I cannot help asking how many among them are likely to become proprietors of a farm. How will they, as siblings or neighbours in the future, react to their having being divided, not only by sides taken, but in terms of prospects for the future? In the moment of the photo of the Flying Column they are united, both in circumstance and purpose as well as dress. This bonding will not last, however, and when their stories are recovered, when the War of Independence and Civil War are over, they will tell of more than a great scattering. They will give evidence of the consequences of an inheritance pattern as to land that required not only a scattering, but of lives with different roles. Life as a “relative assisting” would be a lesser life than proprietorship.  

After the War of Independence and the succeeding Civil War, new class divisions will be created, old ones reinforced. Some will go home to make something of their meagre acres. Others will have no choice but to emigrate. Others again will seek some form of employment in the town or with large farmers. Others will sink into poverty.

Some will go on to prosper in the following decades, secure in land, having status acquired more and reputation, become pillars of society, guardians of respectability, not only for themselves, but as a necessary imposition on others seen as feeble in moral fibre terms, or suspect as to class, and thus deficient in relation to the values the qualifying orthodoxy demanded, sought to impose.

Land

A powerful element that remains as part of the context of the period is land. There is a huge proportion of land from estates yet to be divided. There are those who have identified parts of estates for which they have aspirations of ownership, an ownership not needed quite the same as before for survival, as a previous ancestor might have sought, through a plot for potatoes.

This is hardly surprising. After the Land Acts, proprietors have moved beyond the securing of the plot for survival. It is now about having the means of making a living, of being secure within the confines of respectable status, of aspiration, to have even greater respect in the next generations, even perhaps to advance to a position in the diocesan clergy, take advantage of the openings in the civil service, make a breakthrough to the rank of the native gentry in the professional classes, get to bring one’s horse to the hunt – at the basis of it all was land.

Ownership of the farm, having been given to one family member, one female released by an incoming dowry, meant the surplus family members had to become ‘relatives assisting’ or find employment away from home, or indeed emigrate. This was the experience of those such as my father, like so many others from large families. Siblings are united, however, in the War of Independence, sharing a reaction and abhorrence to acts such as those of the Black-and-Tans[1], and sharing, too, the long memory of the exclusions and humiliations recalled through the generations.

Many would have to go, at a distance, from where they were born. In the 120 years since the Act of Union in 1800, 8 million Irish people had emigrated. In 1901, of those born on the island of Ireland, a majority lived abroad.

In the decade under review, the 1920s, acts of violence, when they occur in relation to land agitation, will be consistently condemned, but the responsibility for them after the Civil War will be frequently attributed to, among others, the newly released detainees after the Civil War, to such an extent that they will be forced to leave their home parishes. This, too, was an experience my father shared.

Through 1924, the numbers seeking to find work abroad chose to opt for the United States, some with permits from the IRA, others without. Emigrating was seen by the IRA as ‘unpatriotic’ and, as Gavin Foster’s work shows, among others, Eamon De Valera was urging Clan na Gael in the United States that non-permit-holders not be allowed membership of such emigrant organisations as itself, with all the ensuing hardship and loss of friendships, and networks of employment, that this involved for such non-IRA-permitted emigrants.[2] This was despite the entreaties of Sean Moylan in 1923, to whom my father would later be writing as to the endless bureaucracy of the pensions system.  

A new Ireland is emerging in the 1920s, and the shape of what will be the 1930s and its extreme authoritarian excesses are what are already discernible. The reformative, inclusive agenda of the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil might indeed be invoked later by Eamon De Valera as one of the five campaigning principles for later elections, but that will be a different time, with emigration having become established as an undeniable fact.

Missed opportunities

There had been a clear mandate given for independence in the 1918 Election, one that was not respected. That Election reflected the public response to the executions, the attempt at introducing conscription, the perceived neglect in terms of health, the poverty of life.

Reflecting on the Truce declared between the British government and the insurgent Irish Republic on the 11th of July 1921, senior civil servant Warren Fisher remarked, “better late than never, but I can’t get out of my mind the unnecessary number of graves.”[3]

Indeed, there were many missed opportunities on the road to the Treaty. Perhaps chief amongst them, war having broken out, was the intervention to mediate by Bishop Joseph Clune, of Perth, Australia, in November and December 1920, which almost led to a ceasefire. The Bishop had extensive talks with senior civil servants and had met Michael Collins in secret. However, the talks stalled, not so much on the political questions, as on the manner in which violence would be ended before real negotiations could begin. An agreement was almost reached for a ceasefire in December 1920, but foundered on Lloyd George’s insistence that IRA arms be surrendered before any negotiations could start, prisoners would not be released, and existing sentences were to stay in place.

The effective rejection of the Clune proposals was based, too, on the advice of General Macready in Dublin Castle insisting that intelligence suggested that a military victory was possible.

The result was six more bloody months, carnage, in which well over a thousand more people would die in the midst of the violence in Ireland. At least half of all casualties in the War of Independence between January 1919 and July 1921 were suffered in those first months of 1921. Weary from war, and the effect of the misnamed ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1920, from the house burnings, shootings, beatings, in particular the rampage of the Black-and-Tans, undisciplined as they were, and the Auxiliaries who were ‘professional’ officers, there can be no doubt that most Irish people were worn out and wanted peace.[4] Yet in families, great risks were being taken to support those in dug-outs, in flying columns, or on the run.

Towards Truce

The decisive intervention on the road to truce is perhaps that from South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who was approached by the Irish to mediate in May. Urging negotiation on both the sides of the Irish Republicans and on the British, it was he and Lloyd George who jointly drafted the widely quoted ‘conciliatory’ speech made by King George V at the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament, which expressed the hope that “today may prove to be the first step towards an end of strife”. This opened the door to the final negotiations for an end to hostilities.

Smuts, along with southern unionist leader, Lord Middleton, brokered the formal truce, agreed following negotiations between General Macready, Eamon De Valera, Cathal Brugha, Robert Barton and Eamon Duggan in Dublin’s Mansion House on the 8th of July. Both sides agreed to an end to armed attacks, arrests, destruction of property and ‘provocative displays’, to come into effect on midday on the 11th of July. There was, however, to be no release of prisoners, nor evacuation of Crown forces.

As historian John Dorney has pointed out, the Truce did not end violence overnight:

“Indeed in the North, where loyalists feared a sell-out of their position,  as Belfast IRA officer Roger McCorley acidly remarked, ‘the Truce lasted six hours only’. In fact, the day before the Truce came into effect was nicknamed ‘Belfast’s Bloody Sunday’ such was the violence there.”[5]

Seventeen people were killed or fatally wounded in Belfast on the 10th of July, and a further three were killed or fatally wounded before the truce began at noon on the following day.

However, in most of Ireland, fighting did cease, and the way was cleared for negotiations. The Truce between the IRA and the British was, in many ways, a long-delayed arrival at a destination mapped out well beforehand.

Smuts proposed that the speech to be given by King George V in Belfast to open the Northern Ireland Parliament on the 22nd of June should be used to send a message to Sinn Féin, be an act of conciliation. The King readily agreed, and the delivered speech demonstrated a shift in language from the Crown that could be described as little less than a volte face. For almost exactly six months earlier, in a speech in the Westminster House of Commons, the same King had used strong words to attack, what he termed, “the campaign of violence and outrage by which a small section of my subjects seek to sever Ireland from the Empire.”[6] This reflects the importance of the concept of ‘The Empire’ and indeed the symbolism of its Head, something which would later be perhaps under-estimated by De Valera.

Perhaps the most notable words from the King George V’s 22nd of June speech are as follows:

“I speak from a full heart when I pray that my coming to Ireland today may prove to be the first step towards the end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race or creed. In that hope I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill.”[7]

This, however well meant, ignored all of the structural realities that were very real – be it land, religious divisions well exploited, issues of equality in participation, unemployment, housing, education and health.

The ceasefire that was brokered on the 9th of July, and came into effect on the 11th, was of course widely welcomed. Yet, the Truce was not three weeks’ old before the IRA was warning units to keep amassing ammunition supplies; IRA Commander-in-Chief Richard Mulcahy addressed men in the training camps, warning them that the shooting war would recommence should the talks fail.

Yet, the Truce did hold, and August-September saw the Truce summer give way to the Treaty autumn.

The Treaty debates when they came were difficult, but also impressive in that they comprised a wider and robust stock-taking of the position by the contending parties, through which their differing views of the efforts of the past, parliamentary and otherwise, were laid bare and their hopes for the future were made public.

The focus was placed on the possibilities and limitations of the constitutional options available, but little mention was made of the economy, nor of society in terms of how life would now be impacted, for either the majorities or the political minorities of the population North and South. It would be much later, too, while he was preparing for entry to the Dáil, that Eamon De Valera would make reference to the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, indeed perhaps to outflank the Labour Party rather than any indication of a conversion to social radicalism. The fate of southern unionists, too, was essentially ignored in the Treaty negotiations.

Though Sinn Féin had also campaigned to preserve the Irish language, relatively little use was made of this issue in the Treaty debates. The majority of the female TDs – aware of, or anticipating the fact that what they would now be conceded would be a less than equal role – included strongly in favour of continuing the war until a 32-county Republic was established.

Personal bitterness also developed at times during the debates, with Arthur Griffith remarking of Erskine Childers: “I will not reply to any damned Englishman in this Assembly”[8], and Cathal Brugha reminding everyone that the position of Michael Collins in the IRA was technically inferior to his.

The main dispute was centred on the implications of the status that would be attached to ‘dominion’ (as represented by the Oath of Allegiance and Fidelity), rather than existence as an independent republic, but partition, too, was a significant matter for dissent. Ulstermen like Seán MacEntee spoke strongly against the partition clause. The Dáil voted to approve the treaty, but the objectors, including MacEntee, refused to accept it, resulting eventually in a civil war, behind which stood the shadow of a threatening, non-departed and very proximate Empire.

The Treaty itself, for some few observers who had been interested in the general international independence movements, was described as having been procured by coercion and duress. It was, they agreed, being proposed with a view to bringing peace to Ireland, but as we know now, it did not bring peace. Shapurji Saklatvala, MP for the Labour Party and Communist Party, had been the only British MP to speak in The House of Commons against the Treaty. Speaking as an anti-imperialist, he defined the Treaty as an act of British imperialist coercion.

On the King’s Address to Parliament, on the 23rd of November 1922, Saklatvala remarked:

“Either we are actuated by the motive of restoring thorough peace in Ireland or we are doing it as partial conquerors in Ireland. Everyone knows that the Treaty has unfortunately gone forth as the only alternative to a new invasion of Ireland by British troops. As long as that element exists, the people of Ireland have a right to say that the very narrow majority which in Ireland accepted the Treaty at the time, accepted it also on this understanding: that if they did not accept it, the alternative was an invasion by the Black-and-Tans of this country. The Irish Treaty all along continues to suffer in Ireland from the fact that it is not a Treaty acceptable to the people as a whole.”[9]

Republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell was another of those who opposed the Treaty on such structural grounds as the unfinished and unequal nature of land distribution. He remarked how a great many of those opposed to the Treaty had their differing reasons for their stance. Perhaps this diversity of motives is an important factor that has not been sufficiently stressed in the historical accounts dealing with the resistance to the Treaty.

It is striking how there has been, in the early historiography, such little space given for structural analysis, change or its debate. North and South, there seemed to be more traction from a politics of fear. In the 1930s, the politics of fear would come to full assertion with the threat of Communism becoming a shared tactic of Church and constitutional politics 

O’Donnell believed that the IRA should have adopted the people’s cause and supported land re-distribution and workers’ rights. He blamed the anti-Treaty republicans’ lack of support among the Irish public in the Civil War on their lack of a social programme. This was indeed a view supported by some republicans, notably Liam Mellows.

It is striking, however, how the structural forces of land, commercial and professional prosperity, respectability of status, belief and behaviour, bears none of the inclusiveness of Wolfe Tone’s or the Young Irelanders’ vision of what a Republic in the French sense, in terms of values, might constitute. The authoritarian tendencies of the projects North and South had similarities, but were moving in the composition of their fundamentalisms ever further from each other – to give space to the excesses of each, as it were.

If there was a utopian tendency at all, it was defined by land, property, status – certainly it did not have an egalitarian purpose. Church and State co-operated to ensure that any rights would have to exist within the absolutism of property.

Legacies

As to the legacies of the fighting, with all of the peace options having been lost, the War of Independence had resulted in the deaths of approximately 2,300, and the succeeding and devastating Civil War resulted in perhaps as many as another 2,000 casualties, with a legacy on all sides of some appalling violence on civilians as well as combatants.[10]

Those who left the army on both sides were left in a perilous pecuniary state, often deeply disenfranchised, with some returning into farming small and often poor plots of land, others returning to the trades, where it was allowed for them to return.

When consideration of pensions for service in the War of Independence commenced, the State set about devising ways in which to define what we might call ‘deservingness’, a concept John Whelan has developed in his book, Welfare, Deservingness and the Logic of Poverty: Who Deserves?.[11] Pensions were denied to many of those who had fought, often on the grounds of gender, class or political allegiances. This ‘deservingness’ may have been a Poor Law legacy, but it could also now be a mask for clientelist and discriminatory practices.

As to gender, for example, women, who had played an important, perhaps even decisive, part in the War of Independence, were pushed aside after the independence struggle in which they participated. The large majority of Cumann na mBan members who were against the Treaty is perhaps to some extent a reflection of this, or perhaps their radicalism is like that of the women of the Land League who knew what form of inclusive independence was meaningful for families.

Inequality widened in all the decades that followed. Some did well, finding employment within the State, where advancement could be clientelist, including also those in the professions, governed by networks of access and class. For others, the employment might be in the trades, or working for larger farmers who were now organising and who were given the support of the IRA on occasion to oppose the demands made by trade unions on behalf of agricultural workers for better conditions. Trade unions were leading opposition to the wage cuts being demanded by some organised large farmers in places such as Waterford.

Others less fortunate had stark choices: emigration or enforced poverty. Patterns of land inheritance and distribution, now enforceable by title, resulted in, as Professor Joe Lee put it, “families giving way to fields”. Pat McNabb in the Limerick Rural Society[12] has given details of how the non-inheriting males resented this system and discussed among themselves the consequences of their inferior status, even in martial prospects, to the sons of labourers. Emigration was, thus, now widely seen as an alternative to a lower status existence on land with which they may have had a familiarity, but could never be their own. It would be several decades more before Church and State would define their views on the acceptability of emigration.

Personal reflection

The Civil War divided my father’s family, all of whom served in the War of Independence in Counties Clare and Cork. My uncle Peter went on to serve in the National Army from 1922 to 1925, taking part in the handover of Renmore Barracks, Galway. My father would spend most of the year 1923 as an internee in what was known to the prisoners as Tintown, in the Curragh camp. The Pension files record his long and exhausting battle for a small pension, which was eventually granted in 1956, eight years before his death and almost 22 years after his first application, in 1935.

Yes, families were united in wanting Ireland to be free, but they sought to live as best they could. I recognise all this complexity, which must be respected, within my own family. My father, the youngest of 10 children, had a sister who had emigrated to Australia, a brother gone to Australia  working on the railways, a sister who was a nurse serving in the British Forces in Egypt and Palestine. They, no more than we can now, did not live lives of a single identity. They lived lives of several identities.

All of the family in two generations had sought to make a living, with some of them entering the trades, as did my own father which is worth bearing in mind.

They all shared an aspiration for an Ireland which would be free, where people might live with basic security as to necessities of life. That is what they wrote and spoke about to each other.

Lived experience

For those for whom it was achieved or accepted as a necessity the return to the land was welcome. For some there was the goal of the prospect of even further acquisition of neighbouring fields, but for those in the trades away from the fields, they knew as much as those who would come to farm, stay and till those fields, but what was there to do?  In the evening of their lives they might talk of comrades, drink perhaps too much, be an audience or serve as evidence, exhibits, for raconteurs of heroism, property-less many of them. They were important too as citizens with a past who, when called upon, could be called on to cheer the new holders of power, or those who contested with them at election times.

What were the choices of those who were not allowed to return to the practice of their trade? There was always the option of the boat, or if you could get a previously indentured rental space, you could use those skills acquired on an indentured apprenticeship to bar, grocery or retail trade to attempt to become a publican, open a shop, and maybe find a way out of poverty.

In the new circumstance it would seem to be important to recognise the distance that now prevailed between those perceived as being the reasonable beneficiaries of the new arrangements, and those regarded as ‘the wild ones’, in whom conservatives would suggest defects of character should have been recognised so much earlier when they were being identified as ‘irregulars’.

It was easy to marginalise those now divided, who were previously brothers, and in families there were those who would have to survive, now in the new circumstances, that meant they could never again be brothers in the way that they had been as youngsters, sharing those memories of recounted humiliations, borne through the generations, transmitted to them, and those times too when together they shared the hopes of a time to come, of shared joy, music, dancing and marriage perhaps, and the requirements of achieving independence. It would be future generations that would be given such opportunities, together with new challenges, disappointments and hopes. Yet their lives, and their efforts, were the ones that led to an independence that was neither gifted nor conceded easily.

Conclusion

Yes, we must continually revise our history, continually, endlessly, taking on board new facts and perspectives. However, we must not abuse the process in any way such as would allow either evasion or misuse of history. We must accept the challenges of our time, exercise our freedom to make an inclusive present and sustainable future, unburdened we must be of any distortions or abuses of versions of the past.

Respecting the past in its full complexity and diversity of interpretation, the allowing of respect where it has been earned at a cost, is a necessary preparation for a shared, ethical, inclusive future for us all. We have to take responsibility for our own present and its enabled future in our present complexity.

They were of their time and circumstances. We are of ours. Recognising such a complex context is not to judge, but rather to emphasise, in contrast to such times now when, for all of us on this island, far fewer obstacles to creating together a totally different future actually exist, how many challenges we must share, how hope must be turned into opportunities.

As we continue to remember this period in our nation’s history, and seek to do so ethically, and with moral purpose, let us do our recall in a manner that allows for an inclusive reflection, open to all sides, including those who left our shores, those left below, and those who were left in a minority status, North or South, to suffer discrimination in any aspects of life.

Beir beannacht

Settlements, Schisms and Civil Strife - Professor Diarmaid Ferriter

25th November, 2021

In August 1921, Jan Smuts, prime minister of the South African Union, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, was in London on imperial business. Part of his mission was to try and persuade Eamon de Valera, President of Sinn Féin, to accept dominion status for Ireland within the British Empire rather than insist on an Irish Republic. De Valera claimed such a question was for the Irish people to decide, and Smuts tellingly responded: ‘The British people will never give you this choice. You are next door to them.’ Writing from the Savoy Hotel, Smuts also noted, ‘To you, the Republic is the true expression of national self-determination. But it is not the only expression.’[1]

The issues raised by Smuts returned to haunt de Valera and his colleagues in subsequent months, underlining one of the great divisions of 1921 and 1922; the gulf between those who could find flexibility in defining national self-determination and those who struggled to, or resolutely refused to, abandon unqualified republicanism. The settlement represented by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 forced a degree of introspection many were unused to; a requirement to reflect on what the label ‘Irish Republic’ meant. For all its robustness as a rallying call, it was not deeply interrogated during the war of independence; as historian Charles Townshend noted, those who propelled the war were more focused on the idea of separation from Britain ‘rather than implementing any concrete political programme’. Ideology does not feature strongly in most accounts of the war and ‘the new nationalist leaders did not see it as necessary to analyse the ‘self’ that was to exercise self-determination’.[2]

When he was interviewed in 1920 by the US journalist and British spy Carl Ackerman, Michael Collins admitted ‘no one has ever defined a republic’.[3] By the summer of 1921, in view of the possibility of dialogue, deliberate vagueness was also tactical; prior to the Treaty negotiations, on 16 August, Eamon de Valera told the second Dáil that the inauguration of the first Dáil in 1919 had been a vote for freedom and independence rather than for a particular form of government ‘because we are not republican doctrinaires.’[4]

So what precisely were they?  De Valera was afforded the title President of the Irish Republic in late August by the Dáil, which was partly a defensive reaction to the assertion of British prime minister David Lloyd George that an Irish republic would not be countenanced by his government. Was de Valera, as he characterised Erskine Childers, ‘an intellectual republican’? Or as he put it in September when defending his decision not to be part of the delegation to negotiate the Treaty, ‘the symbol of the Republic’ (desiring to be left apart from the negotiators to be ‘the symbol untouched’?[5]). When de Valera corresponded with Frank Pakenham about this period in 1963 and referred to his ‘external association’ proposals, by which Ireland would be an independent country within the Commonwealth, associating with it for defence purposes, and recognising the crown as ‘external’ head, he observed that he knew such proposals would probably be ‘unacceptable to those whose political upbringing had been based on ‘separatism’. Was this de Valera distinguishing between himself and ‘separatists’?[6]

De Valera’s decision to stay in Dublin led to another of the most significant divides of 100 years ago - that between the Sinn Féin negotiators in London and those who remained behind. While Robert Barton, one of the negotiating team, accepted de Valera’s argument  that he needed to be in a position, uncontaminated by negotiations, to reopen dialogue in case of a breakdown in talks; or to rally the people in the event of resistance; or to act as a kind of ‘final court of appeal to avert whatever Britain might attempt to pull over’[7]- Barton thought his decision ‘should have been reversed by the time we reached the final stage.’ [8]

Reaching that final stage was of course tortuous. Conferences, subconferences, prime ministerial skulduggery, exhaustion, theatrics, bluff, the scaring and soothing of Ulster unionists and genuine effort at compromise all played their part. The stakes were high, as was the likelihood of failure. The chairman of the Irish delegation, Arthur Griffith, was under exceptional strain due to the oppressiveness of what de Valera referred to as the ‘London atmosphere’. Griffith was ultimately to become impaled on the Ulster cross, and perhaps hammered more nails into it than were necessary, but given the danger of offering hostages to fortune, the fault for the absence of a vigilant enough wordsmith surely lies with de Valera, and the archive of his excuses for not attending does not vindicate his assertion that the reasons for him staying away were ‘overwhelming’.[9] He maintained ‘my intention was to be as close almost as If I were in London’, but consider also his parallel observation: ‘There was to my mind, always the danger that those involved in the discussions would give to the words and phrases used in any document arising out of them, such special and limited meaning as might not have occurred or been attached to those words and phrases in the discussions themselves.’[10]

Given de Valera’s fastidious care with words and phrases, it is clear this was the kind of experience needed in London, rather than just what de Valera referred to as ‘Griffith’s political experience and his republican aims’.[11] In any case, returning to an earlier question, to what extent did Griffith really have ‘republican aims’? Didn’t Valera also insist it was important to have Griffith there because ‘he would have the confidence of the moderates’?[12] Griffith was no republican ideologue and in the words of his biographer Owen McGee, ‘took umbrage at any attempt to place labels upon him’; he was largely driven by the need to challenge British economic manipulations and wanted Ireland to look outside the UK to understand its place and potential in the world.[13] In tandem, de Valera made the assertion that while the negotiations were held, at home waited ‘a determined people, ready to accept a renewal of the war.’[14] This was a dubious contention; of 2,344 people who died in Ireland due to political violence between January 1917 and December 1921, 919 or 39% were civilians.[15]

The arrogance of de Valera in wanting to stay at home yet fully participate in the negotiations led to growing frustration, as was apparent in correspondence in October and November, including in relation to the powers of the delegates. In late October, Griffith made it clear to the British side he had no authority to accept the Crown but that if they could reach accommodation on the “essential unity” of Ireland, he could recommend some form of association with the crown. De Valera responded, ‘we are all here at one that there can be no question’ of allegiance to Crown and that ‘If War is the alternative, we can only face it, and I think the sooner the other side is made to realise that the better’. That prompted a thunderous reply from the delegates: ‘Obviously any form of association necessitates discussion of recognition in some form or other of the head of the association’ The instructions to the delegates ‘conferred this power of discussion but required, before a decision was made, reference to the members of the Cabinet in Dublin. The powers were given by the Cabinet as a whole and can only be withdrawn or varied by the Cabinet as a whole…We strongly resent, in the position in which we are placed, the interference with our powers. The responsibility, if this interference breaks the very slight possibility there is of settlement, will not and must not rest on the plenipotentiaries.[16]

Ultimately, it was British rather than Irish draft papers that drove the negotiations. The determination to only break off the negotiations if the Ulster question was unresolved was not maintained, as instead the link with the Crown became the focus. Lloyd George’s secretary Tom Jones suggested the response of the Irish delegates to a draft Treaty, including proposed new wording about the link with the Crown was ‘so worded as to leave the position far too ambiguous and uncertain’[17] Lloyd George decided, ‘this is of no use’. The irony, however, was that when it came to the clauses relating to the proposed boundary commission to review the border, they too were deliberately vague. Jones had previously spoken to Griffith alone and suggested that if Sinn Féin co-operated with Lloyd George’s boundary commission strategy, ‘we might have Ulster in before many months had passed’.[18] The impression created of such a commission during the talks, as also recorded by Jones, was that it would involve ‘so cutting down Ulster that she would be forced in from economic necessity’.[19]

Craig, meanwhile, spoke of the betrayal of unionists because of the inclusion of the Boundary Commission clause and wrote to Lloyd George after the Treaty was signed reminding him that he had promised on 25 November that ‘the rights of Ulster will be in no way sacrificed or compromised’ and that ‘at our meeting on December 9 you complained that it was only intended to make a slight readjustment of our boundary line, so as to bring in to Northern Ireland loyalists who are now just outside our area and to transfer correspondingly an equivalent number of those having Sinn Féin sympathies to the area of the Irish Free State’. But since then, members of the British government had ‘given encouragement to those endeavouring to read into it a different interpretation’[20]. The contention of Griffith that the promised boundary commission amounted to a commitment to plebiscites was naïve and delusional, but it was deliberate ambiguity that allowed for settlement.

Lloyd George, as he remarked mid negotiations, was ‘after a settlement’ and he got one, but it was a wild exaggeration to maintain, as AJP Taylor later did, that ‘a terrible chapter in British history was closed…the Irish question had baffled and ruined the greatest statesmen. Lloyd George conjured it out of existence’. Taylor was correct that ‘of course times favoured him. Men were bored with the Irish question’[21] But Lloyd George had not conjured it out of existence; or as he put it himself ‘got rid of it.’[22] It had just been kicked down the road, or down a long, 300-mile border.

During the Treaty debates, over the course of 15 days between December 1921 and January 1922, TDs spoke of sovereignty, partition, social justice, legitimacy, betrayal, loyalty, honour, conscience, violence and Ireland’s international relations. They did not dwell too deeply on ideology.[23] There were few references to class issues and the TDs were ‘broadly representative of the upwardly mobile Catholic middle class’.[24]

The text of the Treaty debates runs to 440,000 words and these words matter in seeking to understand the political mindsets of a century ago, the depth of convictions, the nature of the schisms and the rationale behind settlements. Mary Mac Swiney pointedly stated, in contrast to de Valera’s assertion in August, that she was a ‘doctrinaire republican’, while Galway TD Frank Fahy asked ‘have we just been playing at republicanism?’[25] The divisions between MacSwiney and de Valera also played out in exasperated, sometimes fond and often emotive personal correspondence. De Valera could not, unlike MacSwiney ‘keep on the plane of Faith and Unreason and maintain that position consciously’.[26] He clearly struggled to make common cause with some of those on the same side of the Treaty divide as him, a reminder that the divisions of 1922 were not just between those who voted for and against the Treaty, but within those two blocs.

Writer George Russell (AE) was later to maintain both sides embraced ‘the one-dimensional mind . . . beaten by the hammer of Thor into some mould or shape when they cling to one idea’.[27] Likewise, Historians and political scientists in subsequent decades sought to make much of the chasm: at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty, Leland Lyons warned of ‘the perils that lie in wait when men fall under the sway of ideology’, in contrast to those who, he suggested, in the midst of exhaustion and having won relatively good terms, arguably ‘had a moral duty to sign’, his analysis clearly coloured by the outbreak of the Troubles, or the extent to which ‘the dire past’ was still overhanging ‘the dire present’.[28] Decades later, Tom Garvin’s reflections as the 75th anniversary of the Treaty approached were more strident. Pinpointing 1922 as the ‘Birth of Irish Democracy’, Garvin argued that ‘moderate and realistic’ nation-builders had triumphed over militant republicans contemptuous of ‘democratic principles of legitimacy’. The pro-Treaty leaders were ‘unconditional democrats and they killed people for the nascent Irish democracy that they saw menaced by the anti-Treatyites’ who saw the Republic as a ‘transcendental, moral entity.’[29]

Such a hero and villain school of interpretation is inadequate, a point forcefully underlined by David Fitzpatrick in 2011when he wisely advised those commemorating the revolutionary period to ‘avoid the use of simplistic and exclusive dichotomies or facile attributions of motive’.[30]  His stance, I suspect, was strongly influenced by his sustained engagement with the life of Harry Boland who he characterised as ‘at once a dictator, an elitist, a populist and a democrat . . . whether we consider that he was driven by a laudable conviction in the inalienable rights of nations or a grotesque delusion, the sincerity of his struggle cannot be impugned.’[31]

Are we too prone to characterising those on opposite sides of the Treaty debates as entrenched in their certainty and righteousness? And what of those who wavered in between or opted out of the subsequent civil war? In 2015 Jimmy Wren traced the political progression of some veterans of the 1916 Rising; of 572 people identified as active with the General Post Office garrison, the largest single portion, 41 per cent, were neutral during the civil war.[32]

Others grew tired of dogmatism and began to feel detached; writer Frank O’Connor, for example, initially resolute (saying of himself ‘I rarely thought, I felt’) came to decry those who insisted ‘the Irish Republic was still in existence and would remain so, despite what its citizens might think’. Out of the fray, he went into himself deeply and took advantage of enforced solitude to listen to his ‘interior voices’. He did not want martyrdom as too many mythical abstractions reduced life to ‘a tedious morality’.[33]

Patriotism was both an expensive currency and a contested, confused concept in Ireland in 1922, and no side of the Treaty divide or the civil war had a monopoly of it. But O’Connor’s reference to what the people ‘might think’ also raises the question of the extent to which many TDs were ‘unrepresentative of the country at large and some of the republicans came under intense pressure from angry constituents’. Seán MacEntee admitted ‘the unanimous wish of Monaghan was that I should vote for the Treaty’[34] But he did not. Likewise, Harry Boland referred to the ‘chorus of approval’ for the Treaty from his constituents in Roscommon, but this only heightened, as he saw it, the contrast between his own reliance on ‘conscience’ and the hypocrisy of his opponents who signed the Treaty ‘with a mental reservation that it is not a final settlement’. Mental reservation, however, was also employed by the anti-Treatyites a few years later when entering the Free State Dáil.[35]

Deep emotion was on display because friendships were fraying. Boland, according to Fitzpatrick, ‘never abandoned the dream of negotiating the growing political and military split through the restoration of fraternal unity’[36] Even for those who turned away in disgust, 1922 marked them. Liam Ó Briain, incarcerated for much of the second half of the war of independence, supported the Treaty and took no part in the civil war but 1922 left him, in his own words, ‘a permanently disappointed man’. We also, I think, need to consider quieter reflections alongside the grandiose rhetoric; Ó Briain was very much under the spell of Arthur Griffith, but as saw it, ‘the unremitting intensity of his patriotism had to be felt in quiet social intercourse to be believed rather than on big public occasions’.[37] Those caught up in the emotion of the Treaty divide did not necessarily do justice to their own complexity and one of the consequences of the propaganda that hardened was that the questions - and answers-  became  too conveniently short and polarised.

And what of the divisions between soldiers and politicians? Cathal Brugha pointedly referred during the Treaty debates to ‘the men who count’.[38] Calton Younger’s history of the civil war in 1968 argued ‘the Irish civil war ought to have been fought with words on the floor of the Dáil and it could have been’.[39] Perhaps it could have been in a fantasy post-Treaty Ireland, where the Dáil was the prime national and final arbiter, but that regard did not exist in 1922. As Liam Lynch, soon to be chief of staff of the anti-Treaty IRA characterised it, up to 75 per cent of IRA members opposed the Treaty, though not all of them would take up arms against it. They had not been adequately prepared for compromise. In any case, some IRA members regarded politics as moribund or irrelevant and saw themselves as ‘in charge’. In Peter Hart’s words, ‘the guerrillas thought of themselves as sovereign . . . they had brought the republic into being . . . nobody else had the right to give it away.’[40] If the Dáil was going to jettison that declared republic, the IRA was not required to be answerable to it and, as Lynch stated emphatically, ‘the army had to hew the way to freedom for politics to follow’.[41]

Let us understand rather than dismiss that contention; it was violence that had got the British to negotiate, and the 1916 rebels had not waited for endorsement from the public.[42] And let us return to the Smuts letter in July and his words about ‘choice’. Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for the Colonies, told the provisional government seeking to implement the Treaty in April 1922 that it ‘must assert itself or perish and be replaced by some other form of control’[43]. It was a typical Churchillian bullying flourish and a reminder of the British shadow and threat that hung over Ireland in 1922; that the civil war was not just an internal Irish matter. With the British-assisted attack on anti-Treaty IRA members in Dublin in June 1922 that began the civil war, was it Churchill’s policy rather than an Irish policy that ‘had effectively triumphed’?[44] And could the Irish general election that same month, during which pro-Treaty candidates prevailed, be seen as fully free, given the lingering British pressure?

Many northern nationalists felt abandoned, and the division between south and north was a heavy burden for them to carry as was the scale of the violence that caused 557 deaths there between July 1920 and July 1922. Arguably, the mental partition predated the physical one; indeed, Charles Townshend’s recent history of partition contends ‘the Dáil’s attitude to Ulster oddly resembled the baffled indifference to Ireland so long evident at Westminster’.[45] As de valera put it in a private session on 15 December in the Dáil, in offering his alternative to the Treaty, ‘the difficulty is not the Ulster question…as far as we are concerned this is a fight between Ireland and England…I want to eliminate the Ulster question out of it…we will take the same things as agreed on there’.[46]

Leading Ulster Sinn Féiner Cahir Healy came to share the belief that the proposed boundary commission would deliver, but he was also conscious that this rested on thin ice and complained of ‘no light or leading’ from Dublin and that none of the Sinn Féin leaders understood ‘the Northern situation or the Northern mind’[47]  Within six months he found himself interned on the prison ship Argenta in Belfast, feeling tormented and betrayed. Derry’s Joseph O’Doherty, active in the IRA there and in Donegal, and SF TD for North Donegal, had warned the Sinn Féin executive before the Treaty not to allow unionist control over ‘things affecting life, liberty and civil rights’ or ‘our grievance will be against Ireland generally for her desertion of her highlanders.’[48]

And yet James Craig, while determined to make the north impregnable, was perhaps less sure privately than his public rhetoric would suggest. Craig met Collins in January 1922 at his own initiative ‘to discover his future intentions towards Ulster. For three hours he was alone with Mr Collins and made it clear to him that for the present an all-Ireland Parliament was out of the question. Possibly in years to come – ten, twenty or fifty years, Ulster might be tempted to join with the South.’ Collins said ‘he had so many troubles in Southern Ireland that he was prepared to establish cordial relations with NI . . . hoping to coax her into a union later’.[49] From the inception of the Government of Ireland Act to its passage by parliament in late 1920, ‘the official line was always that its essential principle was not division but union’, but the Council of Ireland to aid that ‘never cast off its air of forlorn hope’.[50] Ulster unionism hardened and failed to adapt or mature, while British governments of different hues deliberately turned blind eyes to the reality of  sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland. The British Labour party bogusly insisted in 1925 that the Irish question was one that was ‘practically settled.’[51]

The Civil war had further dissipated hope and enfeebled Ulster republicans; as one of them put it about the prioritisation of southern objectives in 1922: ‘we were sadly disappointed . . . we had started something which we could not hope to carry out successfully alone’. Antrim Volunteers during the civil war ‘filtered back to be arrested or allowed to resume their ordinary lives under stringent enemy conditions’[52] Some were ‘able to return to their homes later. But the majority were forced to find employment in other parts of Ireland or abroad’. Clearly, the civil war had compounded their isolation, captured in the stinging assertion ‘We never knew if our position was clearly understood in Dublin.’[53]

Leland Lyons was accurate in maintaining in 1972 that ‘most people, I suspect, do not live by the hard, clear light of abstract dogmas, explicitly stated’[54] But some who did were unfairly pilloried, none more so than the women who were militantly anti-Treaty. What was it that prompted Cork Sinn Fein TD Liam de Róiste to record in his diary in late 1922 of Mary MacSwiney: ‘I do not regard her or some of the other women engaged in public affairs as normal beings, with normal human mentality. They are monomaniacs…there is a moral sore in the soul of Ireland’[55] Sheila Humphreys, one of the civil war prisoners released after a thirty-one-day hunger strike, left us with this image: ‘we were flattened. We felt the Irish public had forgotten us. The tinted trappings of our fight were hanging like rags about us.’[56]

Lyons also approvingly quoted Kevin O’Higgins’s assertion during the Treaty debates that the welfare of the people ‘must take precedence of political creed and theories.’[57] But did it? For academic Liam Ó Briain there was some comfort to be found in ‘42 years of peaceful professorship’.[58] He was one of the fortunate ones, and here is where one of the great divisions occurs; for those without a stake and on the losers’ side, a bleakness calcified and for far too many the civil war’s afterlife was brutally disordered and fractured at a time when‘an insecure and inexperienced elite found itself presiding over a population that wanted unheroic things’.[59]

This is where the voluminous archive of the Military Service Pension archive becomes so illuminating about both a well-meaning effort to compensate those bereft but also the cruel lotteries in operation. A government memorandum in 1957 revealed that 82,000 people applied for pensions under the main 1924 and 1934 pensions acts; of these, 15,700 were successful and 66,300 were rejected. How to define active service remained contested and contentious. Consider, too, the fate of those bereaved and the gulf they felt existed between the cause that had been died for and the reality of their post 1922 existence.

Women faced additional barriers. Nora Martin, a leading light in Cumann na mBan in Cork, castigated the all male overseers club of the pensions process for failing to do justice to the claims of Cumann na mBan veterans: ‘They risked their jobs, their homes and their lives . . .. in justice to them, one woman at least should be on that advisory board . . . lawyers and civil servants, no matter how sympathetic, can never visualise the feelings of these women during the period 1920 to 1924’[60]

Martin was writing on behalf of Ellen Carroll, active with Cumann na mBan in Cork during the civil war through intelligence and dispatch work which compromised her health due to regular soakings; she was diagnosed with TB in 1924 and spent three months in a sanatorium. She was described, by end of the war, as ‘a complete wreck’.[61] She was turned down for a disability pension and eventually after appeal received a paltry Grade E service pension in 1943. Working in a sorting office in Shepherd’s Bush as London endured the Blitz, her letters to Nora Martin, under whose direction she had served in Cumann na mBan, depicted her mental demise: ‘From hour to hour you are only waiting for death, it is just hell on earth. I must say I am very unlucky and think I am stuck over here for this, but I may thank the Irish government for that. I could be home now if they granted me that service pension’.[62]

In 1942, the list of the contemporary positions of John O’Neill’s fellow 1922 anti-Treaty IRA Cork column members made for stark reading:

‘Dead’

‘Dead’

‘Dead’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘USA’

‘Dead.’[63]

O’Neill was awarded a Grade D military pension for almost eight years’ active service (£79.11s.8d. p.a.) after an appeal, and eventually a disability pension of £150 p.a. In 1935 he reminded fellow civil war veteran Tom Hales, elected a Fianna Fáil TD for West Cork in 1933, that ‘From 1916 on I was never able to sleep one night in my own home until 1923.’ Ten years after the end of the civil war and only seven years after his marriage, now a father of three children, John was suffering ‘breathlessness on exertion, weakness, spitting of blood and inability to do work of any kind’ and had ‘severe heart disease’. But he still had to engage in protracted correspondence with the minister for defence: ‘I am a complete wreck, living with 3 children in 10 acres of ground . . . I ask you in the name of honour, in fair play and as far as charity’s sake.’[64] Fourteen months after a medical examination that had established 100 per cent disability, a decision had still not been reached and he wondered ‘How in God’s name can I pay my doctor?’ John O’Neill died of ‘chronic endocarditis, cirrhosis of liver. Disease attributable to service in IRA’ at the age of forty-nine[65].

The shadow cast by the death of Edward Stapleton, a National Army soldier killed at Knocknagoshel in 1923 was also distressing. From Lower Gloucester Street in Dublin, he was a foreman at Eason’s bookseller. His mother, Julia, aged 66, in poor health and having lost two other children to illness, was trying to survive on her daughter-in-law Mary’s allowance and living with her and her two infant grandsons. In May 1924 Julia got a weekly allowance of £1 while Mary was awarded £90 per annum with a yearly allowance of £24 for each child until they reached eighteen. There was yet further tragedy in 1926 when Edward and Mary’s youngest son died aged five. The Army Finance Office made sure to recoup the overpayment of £1.17s.5d. that had been made for the month after the child’s death.[66]

As he faced death in the 1950s, IRA veteran Ernie O’Malley recorded that the British were no longer his enemies: ‘each man finds his enemy within himself’.[67] He was able to explore and write about that personal interior deeply, helped by an annual military service pension of £258 from 1934 and an annual disability pension of £120 which was hard earned. The National army soldier killed during O’Malley’s capture in Dublin in 1922 was Peter McCartney, the eldest of nine children aged from ten to twenty-three at the time of his death, from a farm comprising thirty acres of poor land in Leitrim. In 1923 his father Patrick was awarded a £40 gratuity for Peter’s death; as a ‘poor man’ he pleaded in 1925, 1926 and 1927 for more when he had ‘no employment . . . people having plenty of money seldom think of the poor . . . my son left his employment for the freedom of the state.[68] As an 86 year-old in 1955 Patrick was still corresponding with the pension authorities to be told the £40 from 1923 ‘was in full and final settlement of your claim’.[69]

We need to appreciate and understand the depth of conviction that drove people in Ireland in the early 1920s, but also how, for many, the idealism became so cruelly compromised.

 

Ireland’s Global Revolution by Professor Fearghal McGarry

25th November, 2021

Prof Ferriter began by raising two questions central to understanding the settlements and conflicts of 1921-22. Why were many Irish revolutionaries committed to a republic rather than some lesser form of independence? And what did they understand the ‘Republic’ to mean?

Thinking about international post-war change provides useful insights into both questions. I want to develop three arguments here. First, the global context is central to understanding the rhetoric and strategies of Irish republicans during the revolution. Second, international developments shaped the settlements imposed on Ireland in important ways. Third, these global influences, particularly the evolution of ideas about sovereignty and empire after the First World War, have contemporary relevance as we commemorate these centenaries.

The impact of Easter 1916 was central to the embrace of the Republic. The legacy of the rebellion, as much emotional as ideological, saw the cause of the republic unite almost every faction of advanced nationalism by 1917 when Sinn Féin formally adopted the republic as its goal. Despite a long tradition of republican thought among Irish insurrectionaries, the decision to proclaim a republic in 1916 probably owed more to the contemporary political context, and the example of the United States (which five of the Proclamation’s seven signatories had visited). When Min Ryan asked Tom Clarke in the GPO why the Rising had proceeded in such unfavourable circumstances, Clarke told her that ‘a rebellion was necessary to make Ireland’s position felt at the Peace Conference so that its relation to the British Empire would strike the world’. When she asked him, ‘Why a republic’? Clarke explained: ‘You must have something striking in order to appeal to the imagination of the world’.

Although it seemed quixotic to many in 1916, the Republic was an idea whose time had come by 1919 when, following the collapse of the great empires, republics become the norm across much of Europe. Sinn Féin, as Diarmaid has noted, did not outline a clear sense of what the Republic might entail but it did propose a remarkably clear strategy of how it would be achieved. The party identified four means to secure a republic in its 1918 election manifesto: abstention from Westminster; political agitation; the establishment of an Irish parliament; and an appeal for recognition to the Peace Conference.

Sinn Féin’s appeal to a Peace Conference that had declared its intention to settle ‘the future of the Nations of the world . . . on the principle of government by consent of the governed’ was astute. Both republicans and imperialists understood the potentially incendiary implications of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech which seemed to herald a new world order based on national self-determination and the rule of international law rather than military might. Britain and France even felt it necessary to affirm, insincerely, that governments should derive ‘their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous population’. In demanding a republic, Irish revolutionaries believed the tide of history was on their side. In the weeks prior to the general election, republics were proclaimed in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Sinn Féin’s election leaflets highlighted how its demands had already been achieved by other peoples: ‘Poland free! An object lesson for Ireland. Poland is now Sinn Féin’.

Declaring independence, as republicans did when the Dáil first met in January 1919 was one thing: achieving it another. Whereas the Irish Party’s efforts to win self-government had centred on Westminster, Irish republicans saw international recognition as the key to attaining independence. The Irish Declaration of Independence, intended for a global as much as an Irish audience, demanded ‘the recognition and support of every free nation in the world’. The Dáil’s Message to the Free Nations of the World similarly called ‘upon every free nation to support the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland’s national status and her rights to its vindication at the Peace Congress’.

In retrospect, what is striking about early 1919 – the period we now recall as the start of the War of Independence – was the extent to which propaganda and politics rather than violence – were central to republican strategy. For many in Sinn Féin, the shootings at Soloheadbeg on the same day as the Dáil first met came as an unwelcome distraction from the carefully-orchestrated performance at the Mansion House in front of an audience of international correspondents.

But in practical (as opposed to propaganda) terms, the Peace Conference strategy was flawed. The ‘Big Four’ which determined its outcome were never likely to side – against Britain – with a movement that had identified itself with its ‘gallant’ German allies in 1916. Self-determination, moreover, was intended for the oppressed nations of the defeated empires rather than those of its victors.

So, rather than the Poles or Czechs, the position of Irish republicans was in some respects more analogous to the anti-colonial nationalists who were similarly excluded from the Peace Conference. With their hopes initially raised – and then dashed – by what Erez Manela has described as the ‘Wilsonian moment’, Indian and Egyptian revolutionaries (the countries with which Ireland was most frequently compared) embarked on similar campaigns. They rejected offers of limited self-government, agitated at home and abroad, and drew on Wilsonian rhetoric to articulate longstanding grievances in drawn-out campaigns that eventually led to partial independence.

Surveying Irish efforts within this context, what is perhaps most striking is the extent to which similar anti-imperial strategies were common to diverse revolutionary movements. For example, declarations of Independence; the establishment of provisional republican governments; appeals to the Peace Conference, followed by the transfer of revolutionary diplomatic efforts to Washington DC; the mobilisation of diasporic support; presidential tours across the United States; and the floating of national loans were deployed by Korean as well as Irish republicans in 1920.

What most marked out the Irish among these revolutionary movements was the relative size and influence of its diaspora, a product of the post-Famine migration that had scattered almost two million people across the globe, but was concentrated in the new global superpower that was the US. Consequently, the Irish were perhaps the most politically influential of the global revolutionary movement’s disappointed by the failure to secure recognition at Paris. Not for nothing did President Wilson blame the Irish for wrecking his presidency when he failed to win domestic political support for League of Nations membership.

How did international factors shape the settlements that brought the Irish conflict to an end? Arguably, popular memory and State commemoration of the independence struggle places more emphasis than is warranted on the domestic and military dimensions of a campaign that prioritised political struggle, revolutionary diplomacy, and international propaganda. As Michael Collins advised the Dáil’s representative in Rome, ‘Real progress is much more to be estimated by what is thought abroad than by what is thought at home.’ The commander-in-chief in Ireland, General Neville Macready, similarly acknowledged, ‘This propaganda business is the strongest weapon [Sinn Féin] has.’

Even military events within Ireland, such as the sacking of Balbriggan and Cork by the Black and Tans, were as significant for their international reverberations as their impact at home. British actions in Ireland provoked dismay and outrage (including within Britain), while international press coverage had a devastating impact on Britain’s global reputation.

The mobilization of the Irish diaspora ensured that events at home resonated across the world, ensuring that ‘the Irish question’ transcended narrow ethnic politics. One striking example was the impact of the hunger strike by Terence MacSwiney who became a global icon whose cause prompted protests and strikes involving anti-imperial, anti-colonial, socialist, and trade-union movements. Despite Irish-American racism, and the tendency of some Irish republicans to base their claim to self-government in part on ‘whiteness’, such displays of solidarity included prominent black-rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey (as explored recently by David Brundage and Miriam Nyhan Grey).

Imperialists similarly perceived the Irish question as rooted in broader struggles. Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, linked the challenge from Irish republicans with labor unrest in Britain, Bolshevism, and global anti-colonial agitation. Britain, he noted in his diary, ‘is fighting New York & Cairo & Calcutta & Moscow who are only using Ireland as a tool & lever against England, & nothing but determined shooting on our part is any use.’ Imagined or real, these connections shaped British decision-making as to how the Irish war should be conducted and concluded, with the implications for imperial rule in Egypt and India frequently cited by figures such as Wilson who declared, ‘If we lose Ireland we have lost the Empire.’

For British politicians, as Maurice Walsh has noted, among ‘the most discomfiting feature of events in Ireland was that tactics of imperial repression usually concealed were now being documented and described in the daily press’. The condemnation of reprisals by conservative as well as liberal newspapers in Britain (and America) prompted concerns about the morality and efficacy of David Lloyd George’s Irish policy, undermining his government’s resolve to sustain its counter-insurrectionary campaign despite increasing military success in the final months of the conflict. An awareness that it was losing the propaganda war, not least in the United States, explains the British government’s humiliating decision to negotiate with a movement it had recently condemned as a ‘murder gang’.

The settlements that followed were similarly shaped by international pressures and imperial calculations. The fateful decision to devolve power to a Unionist-controlled northern state (rather than merely excluding Ulster from an Irish settlement) resulted, in part, from a desire to be seen to conform to the gospel of self-determination.

Like the Treaty settlement to follow, partition was shaped by concerns about other troublesome parts of the empire such as Palestine and Egypt where a new terminology of mandates, Free States, and dominions was coined to facilitate the containing of nationalist aspirations for independence within reconfigured imperial frameworks.

Wider shifts in liberal political thought, as Arie Dubnov has observed, shaped the appeal of partition as a means for resolving national differences within imperial structures. The ‘un-mixing of peoples’ through the creation of national self-governing states was regarded positively by the international community, as was demonstrated by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne where the redrawing of borders was accompanied by mass population transfers. Irish partition influenced partition plans in Palestine and India. Only after the Second World War was it widely conceded that partition was a violent process that intensified conflict over national identities and minorities within partitioned states.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was similarly shaped by international factors and imperial considerations. Pressure from the US and British Empire contributed to London’s decision to concede an Irish dominion, a form of statehood defined in the Treaty’s first article of agreement as having ‘the same constitutional status’ as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. As Diarmaid has noted, imperial figures such as the South African statesman J.A. Smuts, through his influence on the King, helped to facilitate the Treaty settlement.

Through its diaspora, Irish republicans wielded considerable influence on Britain’s Irish policy. Explaining to British MPs the necessity for the unpopular concession of Dominion status, Winston Churchill noted how Britain’s ‘great interests in India and in Egypt’, the Dominions, and the United States had been damaged ‘by the loud insistent outcry raised by the Irish race all over the world’. In his influential Caird Hall speech advocating a Treaty that extended his government ‘to the utmost limit possible’, Churchill argued that it would ‘not only be a blessing in itself estimable, but with it would be removed the greatest obstacle which has ever existed to Anglo-American unity, and that far across the Atlantic Ocean we should reap a harvest sown in the Emerald Isle.’

As Heather Jones has argued in an important essay in The Irish Revolution: A Global History, both the king’s speech at the opening of the Northern Irish parliament and British debates on the oath of allegiance during the Treaty negotiations demonstrated the shift in British imperial ideas that was occurring in – but also through – Ireland. As George V noted during his visit to Belfast: ‘everything which touches Ireland finds an echo in the remotest parts of the Empire.’

The Irish were negotiating their terms of self-government at a time of rapid change for the British Empire. For many Irish revolutionaries, political developments since Easter 1916 made the notion of an oath of allegiance to a British monarch unthinkable because a particular form of state, the republic, had become synonymous with independence. Conversely, for many British politicians, the role of the monarch as the crucial element that would bind together a political community of nations transitioning from a London-governed Empire to a less hierarchical Commonwealth of Nations (a term first used in the Anglo-Irish Treaty) was too important to allow for compromise on the oath. These transnational developments help to explain the difficulty of fashioning a Treaty settlement acceptable to both Irish republicans and British imperialists, and the drift to Civil War that resulted.

Ultimately, Britain’s insistence on the role of the monarch and Empire in the Treaty proved a pyrrhic victory, delegitimising for many Irish nationalists the Irish Free State established in 1922. By 1937, both Treaty settlement and Free State had been scrapped: ironically, in part because of the success with which the Irish Free State worked with other ‘restless dominions’ to assert its legislative independence. There is a tragic dimension to these developments given that the Treaty debates centred on whether the settlement would forever lock Ireland into imperial subjugation or permit a gradual evolution to full independence.

What relevance does consideration of Ireland’s global revolution have for commemoration? Exploring Ireland’s revolution beyond the island draws our attention to the importance of political ideas in shaping the revolution, something that is not always evident from historiographical and commemorative focus on domestic and military dimensions of the conflict. It reminds us how the Irish question, for a brief period, galvanized international attention, symbolising as it did broader transformations as an imperial and colonial world order slowly gave way to more egalitarian forms of statehood.

Finally, consideration of the importance of ideas such as self-determination and empire should complicate commemoration given that the legacy of these conflicts, in the form of a partitioned island with a contested border, continues to shape our present rather than constituting a past that can be safely consigned to history. Underlying the commemorative strategy of the Irish state is the idea of the Decade of Centenaries as marking a tragic period of ‘shared history’, shaped by people from ‘multiple identities and traditions’, requiring egalitarian remembrance. Although well-meaning, commemorations that prioritise the needs of present-day reconciliation over interrogation of the ideas and agency that shaped the struggles and enmities of the revolutionary era may end up contributing little to either reconciliation or historical understanding.

Map images and hard-headed pragmatism: the Roman Catholic Church and the two Irish states - Dr Daithí Ó Corráin;

25th November, 2021

Repudiation of political violence but not the goal of Irish independence, obeisance to the legally constituted government, advocacy of majority rule, hostility towards partition, and a desire for order and social stability characterized the stance of the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy between 1918 and 1923. This required considerable political and theological dexterity. While the political influence of Catholic bishops and clergy during this traumatic period should not be overstated, the church was sensitive to the shifting political landscape and determined not to alienate the laity. Three aspects touched on by Professor Ferriter were of particular significance to the Catholic Church: democratic principles and the national will, the Ulster question, and the ultimately misplaced hopes in the boundary commission.

The bishops and clergy were nationalist and supported Irish self-government but as revealed by the scholarship of Dermot Keogh, Mary Harris and Patrick Murray, among others, there was a variety of political stances among them.[1] Some retained their loyalty to the Irish Parliamentary Party, whereas others travelled at different speeds towards Sinn Féin. In their statements in 1920 and 1921, the hierarchy continuously instanced the right of Irish people to self-determination and how the national will was trampled by failed British policy. But the hierarchy stopped stop of formally recognizing the Dáil. Once the truce was declared, the bishops bestowed moral sanction on Sinn Féin as the Irish government in waiting. This was a pragmatic move ahead of peace negotiations.

The beginning of the Treaty negotiations on 11 October 1921 coincided with the hierarchy’s annual general meeting. The bishops issued a resolution welcoming the peace conference, hoping for ‘permanent friendship between the two countries’ and calling for ‘a great act of national freedom untrammelled by limitations, and free from the hateful spirit of partition, which could never be anything but a perennial source of discord and fratricidal strife’.[2] The references to partition and fratricidal strife are significant. The hierarchy in general and the influential Bishop Joseph MacRory of Down and Connor in particular were greatly perturbed by the conditions endured by beleaguered northern nationalists. Between July 1920 and July 1922, communal violence and disorder claimed over 450 lives in Belfast, its epicentre, two-thirds of whom were Catholic. In addition, thousands of nationalists lost their jobs and homes, and hundreds of nationalist-owned businesses were destroyed.[3] MacRory played a leading role in organizing relief efforts. In late 1921 the archbishop of Dublin stated that £3,000 a week was sent to Belfast through the Irish White Cross, a relief body for all of Ireland.[4] In June 1921 the hierarchy delivered a scathing condemnation of the Government of Ireland Act – the British government’s ‘sham settlement’ – which had facilitated a ‘campaign of extermination’ and left the Catholic minority ‘at the mercy of Ulster’s special constables’.[5] Many more condemnations of the northern government followed in 1922 but during the Treaty talks the hierarchy refrained from such pronouncements.

The London negotiations were welcomed by Pope Benedict XV in a telegram to King George V. The monarch’s reply that he joined the pontiff’s prayer that the conference ‘may achieve a permanent settlement of the troubles in Ireland’ prompted de Valera to send a message to the pope. In another example of the fastidiousness with words referred to by Professor Ferriter, de Valera challenged the use of the preposition ‘in’ and insisted that the trouble was between Ireland and Britain as Irish liberty had been denied by force.[6] John Hagan, the republican rector of the Irish College in Rome, played an important role in keeping the pope informed about Ireland and preventing any condemnatory statement by the Holy See. Episcopal policy toward the Vatican was strongly influenced by the memory of Rome’s ill-judged condemnation of the Plan of Campaign in 1888 which soured relations between the church and the laity. There was also a perception, more exaggerated than real but firmly held by Hagan, that the Vatican was ‘vulnerable to British lobbying’.[7] In fact, the Holy See under Benedict was keen not to involve itself in contemporaneous political questions, whether in Ireland, Poland or Yugoslavia.  A papal letter was issued in May 1921 with Hagan and Archbishop Daniel Mannix playing the role of ghost authors. It called for a negotiated settlement but displeased the Foreign Office for appearing to take sides.[8]

            Whereas the hierarchy had been regularly consulted by the Irish Parliamentary Party on home rule, the same facility was not enjoyed by the church ahead of the Treaty negotiations. An exception was the involvement of five bishops and eight senior clergy in the Committee of Information on the Case of Ulster established in September 1921 to assemble information for the Irish delegation.[9] They were Bishops MacRory, Mulhern of Dromore, McHugh of Derry, McKenna of Clogher and O’Donnell of Raphoe and from January 1922 coadjutor in Armagh. This reflected Sinn Féin’s lack of knowledge of conditions (most of its northern political representatives were southerners like Michael Collins) as much as the predominance of the church in northern nationalist political life.

Unsurprisingly, the bishops welcomed the Treaty and favoured its ratification because it offered a means of preventing the resumption of violence. Privately, Cardinal Michael Logue, the archbishop of Armagh and primate of All Ireland, revealed his utter surprise ‘that such favourable terms could be squeezed out of the British government’.[10] On 13 December the hierarchy issued a careful statement that praised the ‘patriotism’ and ‘honesty of purpose’ of the Irish negotiating team and hoped that when Dáil Éireann began its deliberations, the following day, its members would ‘have before their minds the best interests of the country’.[11] As opposition to the settlement intensified during increasingly bitter parliamentary debates, the bishops exerted political and moral pressure on TDs to uphold majority opinion by supporting the Treaty. Edward Byrne, who succeeded William Walsh as archbishop and shared his predecessor diplomatic touch, wrote to de Valera on 3 January 1922 to suggest a means whereby de Valera and others could register their protest but avoid ‘being placed in the undesirable position of acting against the declared will of the people’ and creating ‘a miserable split in the national forces when all should act in consolidating what has been gained’ even if not perfect.[12] This was unsuccessful. In an address on New Year’s Day, Logue suggested that the settlement gave everything necessary for the progress of the country and prayed that God would preserve them from ‘the disaster that rejection of the Treaty would bring’.[13]

Enthusiasm for the settlement among Logue’s fellow northern bishops was tempered by anxiety about partition – ‘the big blot on the Treaty’ – as Bishop McKenna of Clogher put it.[14] In December 1921 Bishops McHugh of Derry and O’Dea of Galway were assured by Arthur Griffith that safeguards for education and Catholic patronage in the North would be inserted in the Treaty as a precaution should the Northern government not incorporate with the Free State under Article 12. Whereas Seán MacEntee, TD for South Monaghan and the only Belfast man in the Dáil, attacked the Treaty because it perpetuated partition, the northern bishops reluctantly concluded that the Treaty offered the best hope of all Ireland unity.[15] This was not as absurd as it might appear in hindsight. It was rooted in the expectation, encouraged by Griffith and Collins, that Northern Ireland would be forced to accept inclusion into the Free State. At a meeting of the provisional government on 30 January 1922, MacRory urged that James Craig ‘be urged to come into the Irish Free State at once’ as well as outlining his fears for Catholic education and that were a policy of non-recognition adopted ‘the people in the North would have to fight alone’.[16] Non-recognition was championed by Collins as a crucial bargaining tool. He mollified the bishop by undertaking to pay the salaries of teachers who refused to recognize the northern ministry of education. In a further gesture, a North-Eastern Advisory Committee was established in March which included ten clerics along with Bishops MacRory, Mulhern and McKenna.

Against a deteriorating political and military situation, and acutely aware of the political opportunities at stake, many bishops used their Lenten pastorals in February 1922 to bolster support for the Treaty. For Archbishop John Harty of Cashel, the benefits of the Treaty far overweighed its limitations, none more so than ‘England’s renunciation of its claim to govern Ireland’. Likewise, Archbishop Byrne emphasised that ‘the unsympathetic, wasteful and unintelligent rule of men alien to us in blood and traditions’ would be replaced by a native one with ‘knowledge of our people’s needs’. Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam prayed for deliverance from the curse of disunion, a theme put more forcefully by Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe: ‘Ireland is now the sovereign mistress of her own life. The rusty chains of bondage are scrapped for ever – unless, indeed, by our own folly we put them on again.’[17]

In word and deed the hierarchy attempted to avert the disaster of civil war. Following the occupation of the Four Courts the bishops issued a statement on 26 April. This made clear their view that the Treaty was a national question that could only be settled by the national will at an election. Any claim by the army to independence was ‘a claim to military despotism and … an immoral usurpation and confiscation of the people’s rights’.[18] A second statement on the north-east offered a bitter reflection on the northern government which was ranked ‘more nearly with the government of the Turk in his worst days than with anything to be found anywhere in a Christian state’ and where Catholics were subjected to ‘a savage persecution which is hardly paralleled by the bitterest suffering of the Armenians. Every kind of persecution, arson, destruction of property, systematic terrorism, deliberate assassination, and indiscriminate murder reign supreme’.[19] This was a reference to a number of gruesome atrocities such as the killing of six children on Weaver Street in February and the murder of the McMahon family in March. Archbishop Byrne was a notable absentee from this meeting. With the lord mayor of Dublin, he had invited pro- and anti-Treaty representatives to a conference in the Mansion House that ended in failure.[20] 

            Nationalist divisions and the outbreak of civil war in the south dismayed northern nationalists and their clerical leaders. It was perceived as a betrayal in their hour of gravest danger. As early as January 1922 Logue had to be talked out of publicly condemning the stance of de Valera. The death of Collins ended the policy of non-recognition. In fact, Ernest Blythe, the Antrim born Protestant minister for local government and a member of a government committee on northern policy, wanted to reverse Collins’s approach by rejecting as counterproductive any coercion of the northern government.[21] Nationalist grievances were augmented by the abolition in September 1922 of PR in local government elections, the redrawing of electoral boundaries, and the imposition of a declaration of allegiance and service to the monarch and his government in Northern Ireland. Predictably, any vague hopes of an all Ireland settlement were extinguished on 7 December 1922 when Craig excluded Northern Ireland from the jurisdiction of the Free State which legally came into being the day before.

            Fearing anarchy, the hierarchy unequivocally upheld the authority of the Provisional government on the outbreak of civil war and was committed to the survival of the Treaty settlement. Throughout the summer individual bishops repeatedly decried violations of moral law. This was easier in 1922 than during the War of Independence because, in Murray’s phrase, the church was ‘sustaining’ and reinforcing the authority of an Irish state.[22] This extended to producing a partisan pastoral on 10 October 1922 to coincide with an amnesty offer to republicans by the government before the imposition of a draconian public safety act. The pastoral rejected the legitimacy of the republican campaign because ‘no one is justified in rebelling against the legitimate Government … set up by the nation and acting within its rights’, an argument reinforced by the overwhelming endorsement of the Treaty at the June election.[23] The hierarchy threatened to deprive those engaged in unlawful rebellion of the sacraments of eucharist and confession, and to suspend priests who gave spiritual aid to the anti-Treaty IRA (in the event neither was stringently applied). Lastly, the pastoral enjoined republicans to pursue grievances through constitutional action.

            Outraged by the attempt to use religious sanctions to enforce a political standpoint on a constitutional matter, republicans petitioned Pope Pius XI who despatched Monsignor Salvatore Luzio to report on the Irish situation. Cold-shouldered by church and state authorities, the government petitioned the Vatican to recall the envoy for endeavouring ‘to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country’.[24] The effectiveness of the October pastoral was uncertain. It may have emboldened the government in its ruthless prosecution of the civil war. The bishops were privately aghast at the policy of summary executions, which Edward Byrne considered ‘not only unwise but entirely unjustifiable from the moral point of view’.[25] Episcopal appeals for clemency, such as for Erskine Childers, were ignored. However dismayed the bishops were in private at the excesses of the Irish government or the National army during the Civil War, no public condemnation was issued. In this there was an element of pragmatic self-interest. The unpalatable reality of a Northern unionist government hostile to Catholic interests increased the hierarchy’s determination to secure the Irish Free State and the opportunities that it promised, not least for the Church.

            Until the failure of the Boundary Commission in November 1925 north nationalists and church figures continued to look to Dublin to protect their interests. They were committed to the Treaty settlement and the Boundary Commission as an instrument of salvation from the northern government. Lobbying by clergy in border areas led to the establishment of a North East Boundary Bureau in October 1922 to compile data in anticipation of the commission which was delayed until November 1924 by the civil war and political instability in Britain. For unionists the prospect of the Boundary Commission posed a threat to the territorial integrity of Northern Ireland. That Justice Feetham, the commission chairperson, favoured economic and geographic considerations over wishes of inhabitants shattered the hopes of northern nationalists. After the findings were leaked in the Tory Morning Post in November 1925, the report was suppressed, and the British, Free State and Northern governments signed an agreement on 3 December 1925 which ensured the boundary line remained unaltered.  The depth of disillusionment and bitterness towards the Free State government was captured by Cahir Healy’s description of the agreement as ‘a betrayal of the Nationalists of the North and a denial of every statement put forward by the Free State in their alleged support of our cause since 1921 … John Redmond was driven from public life for even suggesting partition for a period of five years. The new leaders agree to partition forever.’[26] There was a sense, as Oliver Rafferty argues, that northern nationalists and their clerical leaders felt alienated from both parts of the island.[27]

            The traumas and legacies of the early 1920s shaped church-state relations in significant ways. First, all the main Christian Churches continued to operate on an all-island basis despite contending with two political jurisdictions. Some bishops refused to accept partition. In his consecration address as bishop of Derry, almost a year after the Boundary Commission, Bernard O’Kane referred to the ‘anomaly and absurdity’ of having one part of his diocese ‘in one kingdom and the remainder in another state’ and pledged to work for a united Ireland.[28] There was never any question that the political border would compromise the religious unity of the Catholic Church whose map image remained an all-Ireland one. Second, partition proved deeply traumatic for the Catholic Church given the appalling civil strife between 1920 and 1922, the number of its adherents in Northern Ireland, its conviction that the unionist government was inimical to the nationalist community regarded as a security problem, and its overwhelming desire to safeguard Catholic education. Unsurprisingly, resentment and political aloofness lingered. The northern Catholic experience before the 1960s was marked by a sense of being in but not of the state, where, as Marianne Elliott suggests ‘their religion was their politics’.[29] After the Second World War the opportunities occasioned by the welfare state saw the northern Catholic bishops adopt a more pragmatic approach as they moved from highlighting the injustice of the state to injustices within in. Relatedly, whereas clerical involvement in politics declined throughout most of Ireland in the 1920s it remained significant in the north. Third, partition reinforced the association of political allegiance and religious affiliation on both sides of the border. It produced a remarkably homogenous population in the Irish Free State. In 1926 Catholics accounted for almost 93 per cent of the population. This had a significant bearing on the political and public culture and the status enjoyed by the church. Fourth, the Catholic Church was uniquely well placed to contribute to the state-building project in terms of enhancing national unity and self-definition, providing an unmatched institutional presence, and controlling policy areas, none more so than education. Fifth, Catholicism helped bind some of the wounds inflicted by the conflict in the south. There was remarkably little republican resentment towards the church, no anti-clerical party developed, and de Valera and his soldiers of destiny could demonstrate their devout Catholicism. This facilitated a remarkable level of continuity in harmonious church-state relations when Fianna Fáil took office in 1932. Lastly, as they had during the War of Independence and Civil War, the hierarchy, particularly the northern bishops, continued to renounce political violence.

[1] Dermot Keogh, The Vatican, the bishops and Irish politics, 1919-39 (Cambridge, 1986), Ireland and the Vatican: the politics and diplomacy of church-state relations, 1922-1960 (Cork, 1995); Mary Harris, The Catholic Church and the foundation of the Northern Ireland state (Cork, 1993); Patrick Murray, Oracles of God: the Roman Catholic Church and Irish politics, 1922-37 (Dublin, 2000).

Machnamh 100 - Margaret Kelleher

25th November, 2021

Settlements, Schisms and Civil Strife

We had fed the heart on fantasies,                  

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;                  

More substance in our enmities                  

Than in our love; O honey-bees,                  

Come build in the empty house of the stare.[i]

These famous lines by W.B. Yeats come from ‘The Stare’s Nest by the Window’, section VI of his long poem ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’. They were composed in Thoor Ballylee Galway in July 1922, during the first weeks of the civil war, a time when, to quote Yeats, there were no newspapers, no reliable news, we did not know who had won nor who had lost, and even after newspapers came, one never knew what was happening on the other side of the hill or of the line of trees. Ford cars passed the house from time to time with coffins standing upon end between the seats, and sometimes at night we heard an explosion, and once by day saw the smoke made by the burning of a great neighboring house. Men must have lived so through many tumultuous centuries. One felt an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature. A stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole beside my window and I made these verses out of the feeling of the moment.[ii]

On 15 July a Free State soldier was shot at Gort railway bridge, ‘a boy from Connemara’, according to Yeats;[iii] his death and other contemporary events shadow the following lines:

We are closed in, and the key is turned                  

On our uncertainty; somewhere                  

A man is killed, or a house burned,                  

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:                  

Come build in the empty house of the stare.  

A barricade of stone or of wood;                  

Some fourteen days of civil war;                  

Last night they trundled down the road                   

That dead young soldier in his blood:                  

Come build in the empty house of the stare.[iv]

**

In 1995, as part of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney invoked Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, speaking not only to the civil strife of 1920s Ireland but also to much more recent schisms: ‘I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the past twenty-five years, and no wonder … It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures.’[v] For Heaney, Yeats’s poem achieves a precious doubleness of being ‘tender-minded’ and ‘tough-minded’, telling hard truths and enabling the softness of empathy with another. To quote again from Heaney, ‘It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.’[vi]

**

Other creative writings composed during the early 1920s are now much less well known. In the early years of the Free State, Waterford-born Rosamond Jacob composed her second novel A House Divided, later entitled The Troubled House. Jacob, from a Quaker family, was a suffragist, republican, socialist and pacifist. In 1917 she was chosen as a delegate representing Waterford as a delegate at the Sinn Féin convention, where she won a commitment to women's suffrage. From1920 to 1927, she was secretary of the Irishwomen's International League, founded in 1916 as the Irish branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, she was delegate to a congress in Vienna in 1921 and to Prague in 1929, and was among the organisers of the congress held in Dublin in 1926.[vii] Her diaries of the period are housed in the National Library of Ireland and thanks to the valuable work of Leeann Lane, Gerardine Meaney, Maria Luddy and other scholars, the significance of her creative works have come to be more recognised in recent years.

Jacob’s novel The Troubled House explores the schisms within a family – the father a Dublin Castle official, one son a republican, one son a pacificist – from the point of view of Maggie Cullen, their mother and wife. What could seem an abstract conflict between ideological and political affiliations, and between generations, is given concrete life through the relationships of individuals and the fate of one family; and in turn the force and impact of political events can be more fully understood. For example, one scene in the novel vividly describes the impact of the Bloody Sunday murders of November 1920 – events whose traumatic and brutalising legacy has, as Anne Dolan has convincingly argued, only begun to be fully recognised. The last scenes of the novel are set just after the July 1921 truce, and record an optimism that we now know to be momentary but also worth recalling.

In spite of the novel’s power and quality, Jacob was unable to secure a publisher for many years. Over a decade later, in May 1936, as Gerardine Meaney’s research has uncovered, an editor at Duffy’s publisher dismissed the original title of ‘A House Divided’ as ‘too sad’, and said that he might consider publishing the novel later when he could ‘risk more’.[viii] When the novel was finally published by Browne and Nolan in 1938, it carried a defensive epigraph emphasising that ‘All the characters in this novel are figments of the author’s mind; they represent no actual persons’.[ix]  By now, 1938, another aspect of the novel’s optimistic ending – that post war independence would bring new freedoms and roles for women as artists and as mothers – had a deeply ironic tinge, given the gender discrimination against women enacted by legislative and economic measures in the 1920s and 1930s. Those measures, and the theological doctrines which they put into social practice, carried repercussions that carried through to the deeply divisive social schisms of the 1980s: a period well described by Anne Enright as a ‘moral civil war that was fought out in people’s homes’ with ‘unfathomable bitterness’.[x]

I refer to Jacob in this detail because important work is continuing by researchers and students to reclaim and revalue ‘quieter’ literary and cultural writings, artistic work that can offer us richer and more complex views of the historical and the contemporary. It is notable that the works thus returning to view can help us to expand the register of emotions which we employ in speaking of, or thinking of, or feeling about our historical past.  Professor Ferriter ended his paper by invoking ‘the depth of conviction’ as well as the cruel compromise of idealism; and in his recent book he also valuably underscores the importance of giving sufficient weight to the ‘emotional charge of 1922-1923’.[xi] How we can best do justice to past events involves also doing ‘emotion justice’,[xii] and here the literary and creative imagination plays a key role.  Writing of the importance of fiction in the understanding of history, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has observed: ‘Individuation by means of the horrible, to which we are particularly attentive, regardless of how elevated or how profound it might be, would be blind feeling without the quasi-intuitiveness of fiction. Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep.’[xiii]

**

The poetic voice in Irish literature, be it in English and in Irish and in those languages that newly enrich our national ‘riverrun’, is the means whereby some of (what we might term) the more ‘awkward’ emotions are made visible and audible, uncomfortably so. ‘An Fuath’, published in 1967, by Máire Mhac an tSaoi, begins:

Is é a dh’éilíonn an fuath fadfhulang

   agus fadaradhna,

Is é a dh’éilíonn an fuath neamhaithne

   agus daille na foighne,

Is é a dh’éilíonn an fuath méar shocair

   ar ghaiste an raidhfil

Is ná scaoil go bhfeicfir gealadh na súl

   mar ghealacán uibh id radhairc uait![xiv]

In the translation by Peter Sirr,

Hatred demands patience and deadened senses.

Hatred waits for its chance;

Hatred keeps a steady finger on the trigger

And won’t pull it till it sees the whites of the eyes

Like egg-whites in its sights![xv]

In mourning her recent passing, we are reminded not only of the links between generations to which her life testifies –  ‘the same age as the state’  – but also her fearless poetic interrogation of those links and fissures:

Inheritors of the event who never knew the smell

Of gunpowder, or of terror,

Who never fired a shot in anger,

Worse yet

Never stood up to one….

These lines, as translated by Louis de Paor, come from ‘Fód an imris’, or ‘Trouble Spot’ set in the General Post Office in 1986:

Oidhrí ar eachtra nár aithin bolaith an phúdair

Ná na heagla.

Nár chaith riamh ruchar feirge

Is is lú ná san

A sheas…..[xvi]

The implicit question is much more explicit in her early poem ‘Cam reilige’ (a poem which continued to trouble her own writing life):

Fear lár an tsúsa

Conas a thuigfeadh san

Oibriú an fhuachta

Ar bhráithre na n-imeallach?

In the translation by Louis de Paor (‘Birth Defect’):

How can the moderate man

In his comfortable bed

Understand how the cold

Afflicts his brothers on the edge?[xvii]

**

The literary representation of violence is never without challenge; it is perilously situated on the edge of that paradox so eloquently identified by Theodor Adorno: the paradox of art’s wrongness and rightness, impossibility and necessity. The intricacies of Adorno’s words deserve detailing; in his words,

The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it. The morality that forbids art to forget this for a second slides off into the abyss of its opposite.  The aesthetic stylistic principle …. makes the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed.  By this alone, an injustice is done the victims, yet no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice.[xviii]

Here is Heaney’s formulation on what he terms ‘the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit’ (from the closing lines of his Nobel lecture ‘Crediting Poetry’): ‘the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values’.[xix]

And my gathering finishes with quotations from two poems. The closing poem in Eavan Boland’s sequence ‘Writing in a Time of Violence’, published in 1994, and entitled ‘Beautiful Speech’, finishes with a powerful invocation of what may still await:

….the distances
we are stepping into where we never

imagine words such as hate
and territory and the like–unbanished still
as they always would be–wait
and are waiting under
beautiful speech. To strike.[xx]

And finally, quietly refusing the limits of commemorations and and memorably reshaping our practice, from Paula Meehan:

When we’ve licked the wounds of history, wounds of war,

we’ll salute the stretcher bearer, the nurse in white,
the ones who pick up the pieces, who endure,
who live at the edge, and die there and are known

by this archival footnote read by fading light;
fragile as a breathmark on the windowpane or the gesture
of commemorating heroes in bronze and stone.[xxi]

[i] W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran (Springer: New York, 1991), p. 205.

Coming to Grips with Reality: The Treaty, Civil War, and the Irish Free State - Mary E. Daly

25th November, 2021

Before exploring the difficult and divisive issues relating to the 1921 Treaty and civil war, it may be helpful to reflect for a moment on the remarkable achievement of Dáil Éireann in securing a ceasefire and a treaty with Britain, which was at that time one of the most powerful nations in the world. The very limited devolution that was offered in the 1914 Home Rule Act would have left an Irish Home Rule parliament with significantly less power than the current Scottish Assembly. By contrast the 1921 Treaty gave the new Irish state Dominion Status, similar to that enjoyed by Canada, and at a time when the Dominions were in the process of demanding and securing much greater autonomy, culminating in the 1931 Statute of Westminster.[1] The Treaty also granted the Irish state full fiscal freedom: the freedom to set taxes, including protective tariff and import quotas. This concession was of immense importance for Arthur Griffith, the head of the Irish delegation because for decades he had argued that Ireland should have the power to develop its native industries by means of tariff protection. 

The 1914 Home Rule Act and the 1921 Treaty both evaded the thorniest issue in British-Irish relations: Ulster, leaving the long-term settlement in terms of borders or all-island governance arrangements to be determined later. But it can be argued that the remarkable success of the Irish campaign, both domestically and internationally – a topic covered in Fearghal McGarry’s contribution – may have led to hubris: a belief that anything was possible, including an Irish Republic, however that was defined. Alvin Jackson suggests that in the Treaty negotiations ‘The Irish to some extent became victims of their own aspirations’.[2]

All negotiations involve compromise. De Valera appears to have recognised that some compromise would be needed if a settlement was to be agreed with Britain. In an interview that he gave in February 1920, while in the United States, to the British Liberal newspaper, Westminster Gazette, he countered the fears expressed by some US Congressmen, that an independent Ireland would represent a threat to Britain’s security, by suggesting that Britain could apply a variant of the American Monroe Doctrine to Ireland, stating that any foreign intervention in Ireland would be regarded by Britain as a hostile act.[3] This would have required an independent Ireland to accept the status of permanent neutrality.[4] De Valera’s proposal of External Association: that an independent Irish Republic would freely associate with the British Commonwealth and recognise the Crown as head of the Commonwealth, was a further attempt to reconcile Irish aspirations for independence, with British demands that Ireland must continue to recognise the Crown as its Head of State, but de Valera sat on the side-lines during the Treaty negotiations, and it is not clear that the Irish delegation fully comprehended or accepted the External Association option. 

There is no indication that the members of Dáil Éireann or the rank and file of the IRA were aware that the negotiations would involve some compromises by the Irish delegation, and neither was there any detailed discussion among the Dáil ministry as to what form these compromises might take. Although Dáil Éireann had existed as a legislative assembly from January 1919, meetings were irregular, and poorly attended.[5] For much of its existence members were in prison, on the run, or the Dáil was proscribed, but it would have been possible to debate these topics after the Truce in the summer of 1921, and the Dáil did hold private sessions where this could have happened.[6] Such sessions might have injected a much-needed measure of realism into expectations for the forthcoming negotiations. There were many signals that Britain would not countenance a republic, and that it would insist on residual ties to the Crown and to the Empire. As Fearghal McGarry has explained, Britain regarded these ties as essential, not just for British-Irish relations but to protect the Empire.  There was also a need to recognise that the Irish delegates were facing a team of experienced statesmen, whose negotiating skills had been honed at the Paris Peace Talks.

Britain, unlike Ireland, had determined in advance, through extensive Cabinet discussions, what they were prepared to concede, and what issues were not negotiable.[7] Furthermore, while Dáil Éireann and the struggle for independence had secured widespread international attention and sympathy, Russia, at the time a pariah state, was the only country that had recognised the Irish Republic. The failure to have Irish independence placed on the agenda of the Paris Peace Conference indicated that there was little prospect of securing wider international recognition, let alone support, for an Irish Republic, established in defiance of Britain.

Symbols mattered to both sides. For Britain the Crown was paramount, though by this time, the precise nature of the monarch’s authority in political matters, was ill-defined, but the symbolism mattered. Likewise, the Republic – equally ill-defined – but a term that conjured up the sacrifices of the 1916 leaders – was non-negotiable for many Dáil deputies, and members of the IRA and Cumann na mBan. The committee charged with drafting a constitution for the Irish Free State tried to reconcile these conflicting principles by excluding references to the oath of allegiance and the Treaty from the constitution and by limiting the role of the monarchy to Ireland’s relationship with the British Commonwealth.[8] Article 3 stated that ‘All powers of government are derived from the people of Ireland. All persons who exercise the authority of Saorstát Éireann, whether legislative, executive or judicial do so by virtue of the power conferred on them by the people’.[9] When the Provisional Government submitted a draft of the proposed Constitution to the British authorities on 27 May 1922 the British Prime Minister Lloyd George described it as ‘purely republican in character and but thinly veiled’.[10] The negotiations between British and Irish delegations over the draft Constitution, which lasted for almost three weeks, reprised many of the arguments of the Treaty negotiations. The revised Constitution, which was published on 16 June 1922, included a reference to the oath of allegiance and other symbols of British authority, that Britain had insisted should be inserted. Cahillane claims that these insertions ‘essentially tainted the document in the eyes of the anti-Treaty side’.[11] The irony is that within a decade almost all the residual powers of the British government and the monarchy over the Irish Free State had vanished, with the enactment of the 1931 Statute of Westminster, and in the 1940s, an independent Indian Republic was established which remained a member of the Commonwealth – a case of External Association for Slow Learners, (to mirror the terminology of the late Seamus Mallon).

Leaving Ulster aside, the clause in the Treaty which had the greatest potential to constrain an independent Ireland, was Britain’s retention of three naval bases. These were returned to Ireland in 1938. If that had not happened, Irish neutrality in WWII would not have been feasible.[12] But the implications of these bases for an independent Irish foreign policy were not widely discussed during the Treaty debates – except by Erskine Childers. Only nine out of 338 pages of the Treaty debates related to Ulster, with the contributions coming from deputies with Ulster connections, like Seán MacEntee or Ernest Blythe. Townshend comments that both sides in the Treaty debates detested partition, ‘but both sides expected the existence of Northern Ireland to be short one’.[13]

The extensive Treaty debates and how individual deputies voted have been subjected to detailed analysis by many historians and social scientists, seeking to explain the reasons why deputies voted as they did. It is clear that these decisions were complex, and they cannot be explained by reference to geography, social class, age, or other variables. There was only one coherent voting bloc: – all six women deputies voted against the Treaty. Some of the male deputies who supported the Treaty, dismissed the women as merely ciphers for dead male heroes – a criticism that fails to acknowledge that, with the possible exception of Margaret Pearse, mother of Patrick and Willie, these were women with proven records of involvement in the campaign for independence. The views expressed by the six women deputies were shared by a much wider cohort of women who were active in Cumann na mBan. Seventy-seven women were interned in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising; and approximately 600 were imprisoned during 1922-23, which was roughly ten times the number imprisoned by the British authorities during the War of Independence.[14] These statistics suggest that the years after 1916 saw a dramatic increase in female activism, with a disproportionate concentration of women on the anti-Treaty side. Some of these women are well-known: - Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Mary MacSwiney, Constance Markievicz, Dorothy McArdle to name a few, but many have been forgotten, and their lives are only now being explored, with the release of the records of the Bureau of Military History and the Military Pensions Files. The strength and passion of women’s opposition to the Treaty suggests that for politically active women, the republic symbolised a break with the past and the promise of significant change.

The Treaty split and the ensuing civil war threatened the existence of the Irish Free State. The bitter divisions within Sinn Féin and the violence and destruction that followed, gave comfort to those who believed that the Irish people were incapable of self-government. In 1919 the editor of Notes from Ireland stated that ‘The cold truth is this: Ireland was not fit for self-government and was never less fit that it is to-day’.[15] Many commentaries, written from a unionist perspective, described the conflict as evidence of Irish barbarity and propensity to anarchy.[16] In the spring of 1922 the British authorities drew up contingency plans for a limited blockade of major Irish ports, cutting off essential fuel and other supplies, to be implemented if the anti-Treaty forces had prevailed.[17] It seems probable that Ireland’s business elite would have welcomed the collapse of the new state and a reversion to some form of subordinate status to Britain. In the years 1922-23, as Ronan Fanning showed, the Irish Free State received more practical support from the British Treasury when it was running out of money, than it did from Irish banks.[18]

            At issue also was the survival of a parliamentary democracy. The history of Ireland during the years 1912-23 is a dialectic between parliamentary democracy and physical force.  The tension between these two strands was evident in the years 1919-21 when an elected assembly, Dáil Éireann, co-existed with the IRA, but the Dáil did not exercise effective control over the military. There was also a secret organisation – the Irish Republican Brotherhood lurking in the background. The results of the 1922 election indicated that many voters wanted to return to some form of normality; it is estimated that over 78% of votes went to parties and candidates that supported the Treaty,[19] though as Diarmaid Ferriter noted, up to 75% of IRA volunteers were reported to have opposed the Treaty settlement.[20] 

For many young men who were active in the war of independence, and were perhaps feted as heroes, normality meant returning to life working on the family farm or family business – subject to the dictates of their parents, or working as urban labourers, perhaps facing unemployment, so it is perhaps not surprising that some were prepared to continue the fight. They were not unique. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, there were many demobilised soldiers scattered throughout Europe, seeking a new role and some new excitement. [21] The Black and Tans were recruited from ex-servicemen,[22] and the large numbers recruited into the Irish national army in 1922 following the outbreak of the civil war included many Irishmen who had fought in World War One.[23] Government victory in the civil war did not end the threat of violence from the IRA and its offshoots or from demobilised and disenchanted members of the national army; this remained a recurring prospect throughout the first decades of the new state. 

There were no real winners in this conflict, with the possible exception of Sir James Craig and the government of Northern Ireland, who were granted the time and space to consolidate unionist rule, including the abolition of proportional representation in local elections, and postponement of the Boundary Commission, while nationalist Ireland fought a bitter war. The emotional and physical consequences of this conflict were momentous, as evident in the stories that Diarmaid Ferriter has related. The cost of repairing the physical damage – on top of the destruction caused during the war of independence, was a crippling burden on the new state, and one that forced the government to adopt a policy of austerity with respect to spending on social and economic development. Mary Cullen noted that ‘one of the most striking features of post-treaty politics in the Irish Free State was the sudden disappearance from the public political arena of many of the women who had become prominent there’.[24] I believe that the intellectually-purist stance taken by so many talented and committed women – who stood by the republic, not just in 1922 but again in 1927 and later – reiterating their determination not to take their seats in Dáil Éireann, had serious long-term consequences for women’s place in Irish politics. Their abstention made it possible for male politicians to indulge in outbursts of misogyny, stereotyping women as incapable of participating in democratic politics. In 1924 P.S. O’Hegarty described republican women as ‘unlovely, destructive-minded, and begetters of violence, both physical violence and mental violence.  Historian Margaret Ward claims that his assessment ‘was shared by each member of Cosgrave’s Cabinet: “We know that with women in political power there will be no more peace”’. [25]

If I had to summarise the story of Ireland in the early 1920s in one word – it would be ‘disillusion’. The heady expectations that were associated with the Irish Revolution – the 1916 Proclamation; the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil; the promises of an end to the degradation of a British-style poor law, and the hopes of landless labourers and non-inheriting farmers sons that they would acquire land, faded away as the new state and its people struggled with the realities of unemployment, poverty, and emigration. One of the phrases that has been widely referenced in the commemorative events held over the past decade, is the emphasis on ‘shared histories’. The history of the Treaty and its bitter and violent aftermath was shared by those who supported the settlement and those who opposed it – evidence that shared histories are not always happy or harmonious. However, from the perspective of a century later, we should all express empathy for the passions that drove those who were involved in the Irish Revolution and their families, and the challenges that they faced when those heady days were over, in adjusting to the mundane and often grim realities of 1920s Ireland.