The Irish Civil War ended 100 years ago on 24 May 1923, with the victory of the Irish Free State over its republican opponents.
The Civil War erupted on 26 June 1922 but had its roots six month earlier, when a section of Sinn Féin concluded the Anglo-Irish Treaty with Britain, cementing partition and settling for dominion status within the British Empire.
The Treaty, which narrowly passed in the Dail by 64 votes to 57, was denounced by a majority in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Cumman na mBan (the Irish republican women’s organisation) and the republican youth movement na Fianna Éireann.
In April 1922, around 200 Anti-Treaty IRA militants led by Rory O’Connor seized the Four Courts building in Dublin, aiming to spark a renewed conflict with the British.
However, buoyed by a victory in the June 1922 elections, Free State leader Michael Collins came under pressure from Winston Churchill and the British Government to use his newly-created National Army to crush the IRA.
The assassination of Field Marshall Henry Wilson in London on 22 June – which recent research suggests may have been linked to pro-Collins elements of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) – almost provoked the British to clear the Four Courts themselves. However, the kidnapping of a National Army general led Collins to give the Anti-Treaty IRA an ultimatum, before bombarding the building with British heavy artillery.
Though it would be an over-simplification to describe the Civil War as a class struggle at root, there was nevertheless a strong social divide on the respective sides.
Big business, including large farmers, the Catholic Church and the professional classes largely rallied to the side of the Free State, presenting itself as a party of Order against anti-IRA “irregularism”.
Historian Gavin Foster has written that “based on the results of the 1923 election…a rough social geography of the political split in the Civil War can be discerned: the highest percentage of first preference anti-Treaty votes were concentrated in the poorest, highest emigration, and heavily subsistence farming regions of the south and west, whereas pro-government support predominated in the comparatively more prosperous east and midlands.”
One anti-Treaty leader, Liam Mellows, inaugurated a variety of populist left-republicanism when he denounced these “stake in the country” people and called on the anti-Treaty forces to adopt a social programme to raise the urban and rural working-class and small peasantry behind its banner.
Mellows had been influenced by efforts of the young Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), who met with the Comintern’s Mikhail Borodin in July 1922 in London. David Convery recounts that Borodin said of the anti-Treaty forces that it was “really laughable to fight the Free State on a sentimental plea.” He asked of the anti-Treaty IRA: “What the hell do they want a Republic for?”
Though its thinking was reflected in Mellows’s “Notes from Mountjoy”, the Irish communists failed to persuade the IRA chief of staff, Liam Lynch, to adopt a social programme based on land redistribution and state ownership.
Despite a potentially promising backdrop of land disputes, labour conflicts and forms of “social banditry” in 1922 and 1923, the anti-Treaty IRA instead fought a more narrowly military campaign, for the socially nebulous goal of “the Republic”. It soon succumbed to the superior numbers and better arms of the newly-formed National Army in the towns, and its rear-guard guerrilla campaign of attacks and sabotage was defeated by spring 1923.
The conflict was a brutal one, pitting former comrades against one another and ripping families apart. It left a legacy of bitterness in Ireland which remains to this day. The most dramatised example of former comrades at war is, of course, the assassination of Michael Collins in County Cork in August 1922. It was not the most brutal.
In reprisal for the shooting of TD Seán Hales on 7 December 1922, the Free State executed four prominent Republican prisoners, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey. The grisliest episode of the War was the summary execution of 9 anti-Treaty fighters in Ballyseedy, County Kerry, who were tied to a landmine which was then detonated. Only one survived.
In the middle, so to speak, was the official Irish Labour Party. It implicitly backed the Treaty and called a general strike against "militarism" in April 1922. Taking its seats, Labour became the opposition to the Free State wing of Sinn Féin, rebranded as Cumann na nGaedheal.
Cumann na nGaedheal would prove to be a reactionary political force in power. One of its earliest acts was to break a postal strike its economic policies were fiscally conservative, designed to ‘balance the books’ even if it meant, in the words of its Minister for Industry and Commerce, “people may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation.”
Labour proved to be a toothless opposition, meaning that when a section of the Anti-Treaty republicans led by Eamon De Valera rebranded as Fianna Fáil in 1926, the new party was able to harness widespread discontent with the Free State government.
Fianna Fáil rode to victory in 1932, cementing its hold on power the following year. It based itself initially on a populist programme of economic self-sufficiency and nationalism, appealing to small farmers and urban workers, and established itself as the main governing party in twentieth century Ireland.
Cumann na nGaedheal increasingly aligned itself with the Army Comrades Association, better known as the quasi-fascist Blueshirts, led by sacked Garda commissioner Eoin O’Duffy. An alliance of farmers and demobilised National Army soldiers, fearing social agitation and retribution from republicans and “communists”, the Blueshirts merged with Cumann na nGaedheal and the Centre Party in 1933 to form Fine Gael.
The IRA experimented, again, with social agitation in the early 1930s, forming a short-lived political party, Saor Éire, in 1931, which was soon banned. In 1934, the left of the IRA tried again to form a party, and walked out when the proposal was narrowly defeated.
The resultant Republican Congress was hobbled by a split from its very inception, with delegates dividing between Peadar O'Donnell, Frank Ryan and George Gilmore’s proposal for a populist cross-class “front” to form a “republic” and Roddy Connolly and Michael Price’s proposal for a political party to fight for a “workers’ republic.”
The mainstream IRA continued on its plodding campaign of apolitical militarism, declining in number and influence. Meanwhile, the Free State – renamed Éire in 1937 – was consolidated under its erstwhile opponents in Fianna Fáil.