The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918

Introduction: Up the Republic! Republicanism in Ireland

‘MILLIONS OF IRISHMEN WERE AND ARE SEPARATISTS IN CONVICTION’

On 21 January 1919 an independent Irish Republic was unilaterally declared by an assembly of Sinn Féin MPs, elected to the United Kingdom parliament in the general election of December 1918 on a platform of refusing to take their seats at Westminster. Ten years earlier, such an event would have seemed all but fantastic. Before the First World War, republicanism in Ireland was a marginal political movement. The political mainstream was dominated by the ‘Irish party’, a parliamentary nationalist group aiming to secure Home Rule, devolved government within the United Kingdom, rather than an independent Irish republic. At the peak of its power, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell in the mid-1880s, it had sent eighty-six MPs to Westminster, where they briefly held the balance of political power. With Parnell also heading the Land League, an anti-landlord movement which effectively controlled much of the country, the party represented a formidable challenge to British rule. Two Irish Home Rule bills were introduced by their Liberal allies, in 1886 and 1893. By the time the second was voted down by the House of Lords after passing the Commons, Parnell’s public career had been wrecked by his private life, and his party was split by bitter internal divisions. ‘Parnellites’ railed against the clerical forces that had helped English hypocrisy destroy their leader. The rift lasted nearly a decade, but in 1901 the party reunited as the United Irish League (UIL) under the leadership of the Parnellite John Redmond. Home Rule was back on track when the Liberals won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election. The UIL, commonly known as the nationalist, or Irish, party, with eighty-four seats, almost matched Parnell’s 1886 total. Even though the unionists won seventeen seats, and the British political landscape was itself changing – with Labour taking forty-two seats – the party seemed beyond doubt to represent the voice of Irish nationalism.

By contrast, the voices of republicans seemed muted. The longest-established republican organization was a small oathbound secret society which rejected constitutional politics, and was committed to securing Irish independence by physical force. Its founder, James Stephens, never intended that it should have a title: it was to be an invisible presence, known merely as ‘the organization’. Like the European secret societies Stephens studied, it was modelled on Freemasonry, and it was to be invisible not just to the authorities but to most of its own members. Its branches – ‘Circles’ – were headed by ‘Centres’ whose identity was known only to the higher District and County ‘Head Centres’, who in turn were known only to the Supreme Council. The organization’s anonymity did not last. The title ‘Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’ appeared early on, and when the organization adopted a formal constitution in 1873 it became the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its members were popularly known as Fenians, and ‘Fenianism’ indicated an attitude of defiance as much as an organization.¹

Though it never managed to launch its war against England, the IRB proved highly resilient. Its dynamic was well described by a Cork man who joined it in 1917. ‘It was a close-knit, practical, hard-headed body, and it evoked an extraordinary spirit of loyalty and brotherhood amongst its members. It was not propagandist; it sought rather to find and bind together men of good character who had reached the conclusion that there was no solution to the problem of achieving national freedom except through the use of physical force.’² But after the failure of their one attempted insurrection, in 1867, Fenians were aware that the use of force was not as straightforward as they would have liked. Their greatest political impact was achieved, in fact, by accidental terrorism, when London tenements were destroyed during an attempted prison rescue in 1867 – bringing Ireland fleetingly to the top of the English political agenda. The Irish-American Fenian organization, Clan na Gael, went on to adopt terrorist methods, but the IRB held fast to its belief in open insurrection. Its 1873 constitution seemed to recognize, though, that insurrection could not succeed unless the mass of the people were ready to join it. How a small secret society could mobilize the masses and credibly challenge the military power of the state was a problem that the Fenians never resolved. Though IRB propaganda was marked by a populist spirit, the Fenian relationship with public opinion remained ambivalent. What if the people never supported military action, or if they voted for something less than independence? Would democracy prevail, and how?

By the time Stephens created his revolutionary organization, republican ideas had been etched in Irish political thought for over half a century. Every June republicans made a pilgrimage to the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown in Kildare, to assert their descent from the United Irish movement of the 1790s, allies of the first French Republic. Tone had believed that, by establishing a republic on the French model, Ireland’s denominational or sectarian divisions could be transcended. The ‘common name of Irishman’ would replace the labels Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. Fenians held on unswervingly to Tone’s conviction that only through ‘breaking the connection’ with England, ‘the never-failing source of all our political evils’, could Ireland prosper. They were less sure, perhaps, how Tone’s republic was actually to be constituted. Shortly after the foundation of the IRB a Fenian writer had published a republican constitution, but its details (such as a two-chamber assembly, with a life presidency elected by an upper house) do not seem to have preoccupied later republicans. The idea of a French-republican-style administrative reorganization, replacing the old counties and provinces with departments, for instance, did not make much impression.³ ‘Fenian propagandist work’, as the celebrated IRB veteran John O’Leary recalled, ‘was entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism.’

Republicanism, for most of its adherents, was about achieving separation – sovereign independence – rather than implementing any concrete political programme. Michael Collins, who became president of the IRB Supreme Council in 1919, was at one with previous republican thinking in publicly insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ – ‘our real want was … liberation from English occupation.’⁴ Subsequent writing about republicanism has likewise resisted the temptation to discuss the concept of the republic in any detail. Fenians became effectively defined not by their ends but by their means: they were ‘physical-force men’. This virtual elevation of a method into an end in itself was attacked by a republican grouping more ideologically sophisticated than the IRB, the Irish Socialist Republican party founded by James Connolly in 1896. Connolly’s newspaper the Workers’ Republic insisted that sovereign independence by itself was an empty concept. National freedom must bring social change: an independent Ireland run by capitalists would be no improvement for the people.

The IRB preferred not to explore the social content of independence, but early in the twentieth century the organization began to be revitalized. One of the prime movers in this, Bulmer Hobson, was from the same Protestant republican background as Wolfe Tone and several of the outstanding United Irish and Young Ireland leaders of the nineteenth century. The Protestant republican tradition had withered in face of the Home Rule threat, though Hobson hoped it could be revived. He predicted in 1905 that ‘Protestant Ulster is awakening to the fact that its grandfathers dreamed a dream, and its fathers tried to forget it – but the call of it is in their ears.’ As a seer he was proved wrong: the call would go unanswered. But as an organizer his achievements were real. The Dungannon Club, founded in Belfast late in 1905 and carrying a title designed to appeal to Protestant memories, launched a movement that quickly spread – even if its appeal to Protestants remained limited. The title of its newspaper, the Republic, nailed its colours firmly to the mast.

Hobson’s republicanism drew on many sources – European revolutionary activists like Giuseppe Mazzini as well as Tone and the Young Ireland writer John Mitchel. Within the IRB he always stressed the constitution’s emphasis on mobilizing the mass of the people. His most fertile concept, ‘moral insurrection’, originated with the Young Irelander James Fintan Lalor. Hobson saw that this could offer a kind of third way between constitutionalism (which conceded the legitimacy of the Union) and open rebellion (which was doomed to failure). In his 1909 pamphlet Defensive Warfare he adapted Lalor’s recipe for the twentieth century. It provided a complete programme of passive resistance – economic boycott, tax strikes, civil disobedience – designed to paralyse the working of the modern state without exposing the resisters to violent repression.

Hobson’s pathbreaking pamphlet was published under the banner of Sinn Féin, an umbrella group of separatists committed to electoral politics (unlike the IRB), but also (unlike the Irish party) to abstention from Westminster. The Dungannon Clubs merged with it in 1907, and Hobson himself might have challenged the man often seen as Sinn Féin’s founder, Arthur Griffith, for the leadership of the party. Griffith, a natural polemicist rather than an organizer like Hobson, puzzled some separatists by arguing that Ireland should follow the example of Hungary. After the defeat of their armed rebellion in 1848–9, Hungarian nationalists had altered their strategy and secured equality with Austria by unilaterally seceding from the Austrian state. In the ‘dual monarchy’ that followed, two autonomous states shared a monarch, an army and a foreign policy. Though Griffith was an IRB man, his republicanism resembled that of the great Italian revolutionary leader Garibaldi, who accepted constitutional monarchy as essentially republican. (Garibaldi regarded Britain as a republic because its monarch was popular.) Like that of the great ‘Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell, who had led the mass movement for Catholic emancipation in the 1820s, Griffith’s primary aim was the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union that had created the United Kingdom. The British parliament might conceivably be impelled to reverse what it had then done, whereas – he believed – it could not realistically be brought to recognize an Irish republic.

Though republican organizations might look marginal, separatist attitudes were certainly widespread in Ireland. The Land League founder and lapsed IRB man Michael Davitt argued in his 1904 tract on the land war, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, that ‘the numerical strength of the strongest revolutionary organisation by no means measured the strength of the feeling for complete independence. Millions of Irishmen were and are separatists in conviction and aspiration who would on no account become members of a secret society.’ The separatist urge was intensified by the ‘Irish-Ireland’ movement that blossomed from the 1890s on – embracing literature, language and sport, as well as the production and consumption of goods. The movement to revive the Irish language was in theory unpolitical: the founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde, could call for the ‘de-Anglicization’ of Ireland even while remaining a political unionist. He simply wanted to change the ‘most anomalous position’ of Ireland – ‘imitating England and yet apparently hating it’ – by minimizing the imitation. The movement to revive, or reinvent, Irish sports, led by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), was more directly confrontational, and, as time passed, the inherent separatism of the whole cultural-nationalist project became ever clearer.⁵

The third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1911, seemed to be the final triumph of constitutionalism. But as it passed slowly through parliament under the terms of the new Parliament Act, it triggered a crisis that would set Irish republicanism on a new course. As the bill rolled forward, resistance to Home Rule – previously focused in the House of Lords – became much more widespread. Its leader, the high-profile lawyer Sir Edward Carson, was ready to push it to the brink of open defiance of government, and had the charisma to make the threat credible. There had been sporadic instances of quasi-military activity – drilling and shooting – in Ulster during the Home Rule crises of 1886 and 1893, but the unionist mobilization that began in 1911 was on an entirely different scale. In 1912, as the Ulster Covenant, pledging resistance to the ‘conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament’ by ‘all means which may be found necessary’, was signed by almost half a million people, it took increasingly military shape. A craze for public drilling – which turned out to be not quite so illegal as most people had assumed – swept the province.⁶ In 1913 a formally organized citizen militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force, approached a strength of 100,000.

When nationalists in turn mobilized to support Home Rule, forming the Irish Volunteers in December 1913, republican activists could move from the sidelines to the centre of events. Though it was less well funded and supported than the UVF, the IV organization also grew dramatically, with its membership touching a six-figure total in 1914. Most of the rank and file were probably home rulers rather than separatists, and certainly never imagined really going into battle, but a command structure developed with very different ideas. The Volunteer Executive was dominated by IRB men, who were also plentiful among IV officers generally. For the first time since 1867, the Fenians had their hands on something like an army. The socialist republicans also began to march down the path of military action, when in the wake of industrial conflict in Dublin in 1913 Connolly formed the Irish Citizen Army. This was ostensibly a small force set up to protect strikers from the police and the employers’ paid strikebreakers, but once the First World War began Connolly – following the Bolshevik rather than the Menshevik line – aimed to give history a push by initiating direct armed action.

If there was any doubt about the seriousness of the Ulster crisis, it was removed by the action of British army officers at the Curragh in March 1914, declaring that they would resign their commissions rather than confront the UVF. When the UVF ran some 20,000 rifles into Larne in April, it doubled its armament. By July, with two (or three) armed militias aiming to put pressure on the government for and against Home Rule, and the army’s reliability in question, there were real fears of imminent civil war. One of these militias was at least partially controlled by republicans. The rank and file of the Irish Volunteers might have joined to support Home Rule, but many of their leaders were separatists. When European war broke out in August, the physical-force men were at last in a position to act on the old Fenian belief that ‘England’s difficulty’ would be ‘Ireland’s opportunity’. The old and new guards of the IRB, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott, were pushed on towards insurrection by a visionary and charismatic figure, Patrick Pearse. Probably the most influential republican after Wolfe Tone, Pearse did not actually join the IRB until long after he had already secured national significance as a Gaelic League leader and writer. Like many, he ‘came to nationalism through the Gaelic League’;⁷ his belief that the loss of language was fatal made him a dedicated educator. He was probably sworn into the IRB shortly after he became director of organization of the newly formed Irish Volunteers: within months he had been co-opted on to the Supreme Council. Pearse’s rhetoric made a crucial connection between Fenian insurrectionism and the new, culturally defined sense of Irish national identity.

Easter Week 1916 projected the republic to the political centre stage. The Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army came out to fight together as the Army of the Irish Republic. Pearse’s historic proclamation asserting the Irish people’s inalienable right to ‘national freedom and sovereignty’ was issued under the heading ‘Poblacht na hEireann, Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’. The Gaelic title was a new coinage – literally ‘Republic of Ireland’ – because there was no Gaelic adjective for ‘Irish’. So a republic was nominally established, but while Pearse’s proclamation spelt out its social aspirations more clearly than Fenian thinking had, its political form was still left to the imagination. The fact that its members expected to come under overwhelming military assault within hours may explain this. As the days passed they might possibly have set out some kind of programme for the intended political structure of the ‘sovereign independent Irish state’, had they seen it as an important issue. But even Connolly seems to have shared the view of the famous insurrectionist Auguste Blanqui that the important thing was to get across the river, not discuss what might be on the other side. Subsequent republican writers have mostly agreed, and though the 1916 Republic has been claimed as a pioneering ‘People’s Republic’, it remains a shadowy entity – a gesture not a blueprint.⁸ The Provisional Government’s members who were in the GPO (five of the seven signatories of the proclamation) do not seem to have met or tried to act as an executive. Pearse took a joint civil–military post as president of the Provisional Government and commander-in-chief of the Army of the Republic, but the term ‘President of the Irish Republic’ seems to have rested – by IRB tradition – with Tom Clarke as president of the Supreme Council. This IRB tradition would continue after the suppression of the 1916 rebellion. Beyond that, not much happened to suggest that the Republic was seen as anything other than a symbol. Only one of the leaders adopted the French revolutionary style of dating his diary entries and memoranda.⁹ Pearse dated his surrender order 29 April, not ‘day 6 of the Republic’.

In the repressive backwash following the Easter rebellion, republicanism appeared to have been condemned by yet another failure. But the British reaction, above all the execution of the republican leaders, ensured that it would survive. Ironically, General Sir John Maxwell, the military commander responsible for the executions, saw their effect more quickly than most politicians. He had spent several years commanding in Egypt, and that experience had certainly alerted him to the threat of nationalism. Just a fortnight after Pearse’s surrender, he warned the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, that ‘the younger generation is likely to be more revolutionary than their predecessors,’ and that ‘though the rebellion was condemned, it is now being used as a lever to bring on Home Rule,’ or even ‘an Irish Republic’. A month later he told Asquith that it was ‘becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a Nationalist and a Sinn Feiner’. In the event of a general election, ‘very few, if any, of existing Nationalist MPs would be re-elected’.¹⁰ He no doubt had little liking for the Home Rulers, but could see that they were preferable to any group that was likely to replace them.

Whether Asquith could have responded to this unexpectedly perceptive advice we cannot know: at the end of the year he was forced out of office and replaced by David Lloyd George. After the rebellion, Lloyd George had led a further round of Home Rule negotiations, which merely forced the nationalist party to acknowledge that some form of partition was inevitable, and accelerated its loss of prestige. The brief flurry of interest in Ireland that the British government had been forced to take was soon replaced by its traditional inattentiveness. The war that had justified Britain’s crushing reaction to the rebellion remained to be won. Only then might Home Rule, pushed through by the Liberals under the party truce after the outbreak of the world war, but suspended for the duration, finally come into force.

ADRIC	Auxiliary Division, RIC
ASU	active service unit
CDB	Congested Districts Board
CI	County Inspector (RIC)
C-in-C	Commander-in-Chief
DI	District Inspector
DMP	Dublin Metropolitan Police
DORA	Defence of the Realm Act
GAA	Gaelic Athletic Association
GHQ	General Headquarters
GOC	General Officer Commanding
IG	Inspector General (RIC)
IRA	Irish Republican Army
IRB	Irish Republican Brotherhood
ILP/TUC	Irish Labour party and Trades Union Congress
ITGWU	Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union
IV	Irish Volunteers
LGB	Local Government Board (UK)
MLA	Martial Law Area
OC	Officer Commanding
PR	proportional representation
RIC	Royal Irish Constabulary
ROIA	Restoration of Order in Ireland Act
SF	Sinn Féin
TD	Teachta Dála (deputy, Dáil Éireann)
UIL	United Irish League
USC	Ulster Special Constabulary
UVF	Ulster Volunteer Force

Charles Townshend

THE REPUBLIC

The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918–1923

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

List of Abbreviations

IN TEXT

Maps

THE REPUBLIC

Introduction: Up the Republic! Republicanism in Ireland

‘MILLIONS OF IRISHMEN WERE AND ARE SEPARATISTS IN CONVICTION’

Part One

THE IMAGINED STATE: 1918–1919