1916
On Easter Monday 1916 1200 men and a few women — 200 of them members of the trade union militia set up in the 1913 strike, the Citizen’s Army — seized the main buildings in the centre of Dublin. Patrick Pearse read out a the Declaration of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office. Fighting lasted a week. The British government sent gun-boats up the Liffey to shell the Republican positions. On the Saturday they surrendered. In the next 10 days 15 men were court martialled and shot.
The rising was a catalyst. It first evoked much Irish hostility. Then the cold blooded killings of prisoners of war began to turn sympathy in their favour. More than that, though, the policy of peaceful pressure on England pursued for a generation had been discredited by the success of the Orange revolt. Then when Britain tried to introduce conscription in Ireland there was a mass turn to the “Sinn Fein” movement. With 48% of the vote (but with 25 seats in the south going to Sinn Fein unopposed) 73 of Ireland’s 105 Parliamentary seats were won for a policy of seceding from Westminister and setting up Dail Eireann in Dublin. The War of Independence was about to begin.
War of Independence
In 1919 there were two states in Ireland: the powerful British state with its armed gendarmerie, the Royal Irish Constabulary, its army, and its mass Orange support in the north east; and a state coming into being at the call of Dail Eireann. Dail Eireann set up its own police and courts and took control of local and county councils. War between the two forces was inevitable when the British refused to withdraw. Beginning with the shooting of two policemen by the IRA at Soloheadbeg early in 1919 — without the authority of Dail Eireann — war escalated until in 1920 the British set up a special terrorist force, the “Black and Tans”. They went around the country shooting and burning, utterly lawless. They burned the centre of Cork City, and also various small towns such as Milltown Malbay in Clare. In reprisal for the shooting of British police agents by the IRA they mounted a machine gun in Croke Park, Dublin, during a sports match and fired on the crowd. They made a special target of rural factories — ‘creameries’ — where the workers were militant, and these blows had, by 1920, a crippling effect on the labour movement.
The war ended in a truce in July 1921. The British were now willing to offer the Irish “Dominion status”.
Civil War
Ireland’s Civil War was a war without clear goals on the Republican side. Britain faced Dail Eireann’s representatives — Collins, Griffith, Barton and others — with an ultimatum: accept Britain’s terms or face a resumption of “immediate and terrible war” (Lloyd George). We know now that Britain had contingency plans to intern a large part of the population of the south, as Britain had interned the civilians in the first so-called “concentration camps” during the Boer War two decades earlier. Collins and Griffith accepted. Dail Eireann split; a seven-vote majority went with Collins (who was the head of the secret Fenian organisation, the IRB, which backed him), the minority with De Valera, who opposed the treaty.
There were two central issues: should Ireland continue as the Republic proclaimed in 1916 and again in 1919, or join the British Empire, accepting the English king as King of Ireland? Should Dail Eireann accept the exclusion of the Six Counties of north-east Ulster, which already had a functioning parliament in Belfast? The Dail debate on the treaty only touched on ‘Ulster’ once or twice: everyone know that there was little they could do about it. Even the hard core Republicans ruled out attempting to conquer the Protestant areas. All of them hoped that partition would be short-lived (see box).
The main point of debate centred on the proposed oath to the English king. They had sworn allegiance to the Republic; many would have died — and did die — before they would break that oath. Many of them — Liam Mellows for example — did not want to make a separate Irish peace because that meant scabbing on the Indians and others seeking freedom from the British Empire.
After the vote, everything was still unclear: Sinn Fein was split, but efforts would be made for months yet to repair the split. The majority, backed and armed by the British, formed a government and a state. The Republican minority were armed, and held key parts “for the Republic”. There was a sort of dual power.
In June 1922 the British gave Collins an ultimatum to disarm the Republic’s army or see Britain abrogate the Treaty. The Free State went to war on the Republicas, bombarding the Four Courts in Dublin with borrowed British cannons! They would soon control Dublin, but hostilities in the south went on for a year. The Free State government would kill nearly two times as many prisoners of war as the British had killed during the War of Independence. In parts of the Republican south, the government had to land troops from ships like a foreign invader.
Yet the political objectives of the war were unclear and the main consequence of the war was that it greatly weakened the south in face of London and Belfast, and led to the south abandoning the Six County Catholics.
Liam Mellows
In the debates in Dail Eireann on the Treaty with Britain — which offered Dominion status like that of Canada — Liam Mellows made a passionate appeal to the deputies not to abandon India and other peoples fighting British control, not to opt for “the fleshpots of Empire”. Captured at the outbreak of the Civil War and jailed, he set to pondering why ‘The Republic’ had lost the support of the people to such an extent that the compromisers were winning elections and battles. Influenced perhaps by “The Workers’ Republic”, the organ of the tiny Communist Party of Ireland, Mellows concluded that the rich “the stake in the country people”, had betrayed the Republic and that, therefore, Republicans were — he employed words by Wolfe Tone a century and a quarter earlier — back to relying on “the men of no property”. He recalled the words of another ’98 man: “The rich always betray the poor.” For Mellows the turn to the workers was to serve nationalism. He was therefore a populist.
For this strain of Republicanism, however, the labour movement is assessed and prized for what it can bring to the nationalist cause. For Marxists it must be the other way around.Letters in which he communicated these ideas were captured and published by the Free Staters. In December 1922, after 6 months in Mountjoy Jail, Mellows and three others — O’Connor, Barrett and McKelvie — were woken up at midnight and told that they would be shot at dawn in response to IRA attacks Free-State Dail deputies. Mellows and his comrades were devout Catholics, but the Catholic Church had outlawed their cause and Republicans could not receive the Sacraments unless they formally agreed to abandon their cause. Mellows spent the few hours left to him writing letters and haggling with political priests for — as he believed — his soul. With a courage difficult for those who do not believe what he believed to appreciate, he refused to bow to the authority of his church and went out to meet his God in a state — so his church said — of mortal sin, the probability that he would be condemned to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.
Republican prisoners afterwards discussed setting up a breakaway Irish National Catholic Church. They did not.
The Boundary Commission
How did the British Government in 1921 get the Sinn Fein movement to accept the partition of Irelan - and a partition which left an excluded area with a one-third Catholic population? (Catholics are now 40% of the population of Northern Ireland).
The Sinn Fein leaders were tricked and cheated. Three possible areas for exclusion were discussed after 1914: four counties, where there would be a massive Protestant-Unionist majority; nine counties, the whole of the province of Ulster, where Protestant-Unionists would be only half the population; and six counties, where the ratio would be two-to-one in favour of the Protestants.
Lloyd George “sold” partition to Michael Collins with the following argument: ‘Realistically, we cannot coerce the Protestants into a united Ireland. Neither can you. Give them six counties for now, but we will set up a Boundary Commission. That will lop off the Catholic-majority areas, make Northern Ireland unviable, and so force the Protestants to come into a united Ireland of some sort’. He used other arguments with the Unionists.
When the Boundary Commission met in 1925, a Free State weakened by civil war faced London and Belfast prepared to make no concessions at all. What they had, they held. The last 25 years show how short-sighted that was for the Unionists.
The Commission report proposed to take territory (a small piece of it) only from the South! The Dublin government settled for a cash sum in compensation, proclaiming that they had got a “good bargain”.