Ninety years since the shelling of the Four Courts
Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the
shelling of the Four Courts with borrowed British artillery by Free State
forces so I thought it was timely to post this lecture I gave in 2002:
A nation sundered: Ireland's
counter-revolution
The title I have chosen for my lecture
tonight is ‘A Nation Sundered’, for this in effect was the consequence of the bitter Civil War, or more correctly
Counter-Revolution into which Ireland was plunged 80 years ago. The sundering of Ireland not only
geographically but politically, the sundering of the wonderful sense of
national unity which had galvanised a Nation during some of the most momentous
years in its history between 1916 and 1921.To fully understand the past 33 years
of conflict in Ireland, indeed to have any understanding of political
development in Ireland North or South an understanding of 1922-23 period is
essential. The signing of the ‘Stormont Agreement’ in April 1998 was but the
latest in a series of attempts by Britain to consolidate the political
structures which it imposed on Ireland by means of the Westminster ‘Government
of Ireland Act’ in 1920 and the ‘Anglo-Irish Treaty’ of 1921, and its effect
was similar in yet further dividing Republican\Nationalist opposition to
British Rule in Ireland.
During the 1916-21 period Ireland enjoyed an
unprecedented unity of purpose, particularly following the executions of the
leaders of the 1916 Rising.
The mass of the people for the first time
since the Land War of the 1880s or more particularly since 1798 threw their
weight behind the forces of revolution, transforming Sinn Fein from a fringe
organisation with the limited of aim securing self-government within the
British Empire, into a nationally organised revolutionary body, adopting at
it’s Ard Fheis of October 1917 the aim of: “Securing of International
recognition of Ireland as an Independent Irish Republic”, Sinn Fein had, as the
historian Brian Murphy put it, “a new Republican reality” . Likewise the months and years, which followed 1916, saw the rapid
development and growth of the Irish Republican Army and other national
organizations such as Cumann Na mBan , Na Fianna Éireann etc. All of this
culminated in the historic 1918 General Election, which must be pointed out was
the last All-Ireland Election, and which was in effect a plebiscite on Irish
National Self –Determination, which saw Sinn Fein sweep to a dramatic and
overwhelming victory, something which had been signposted in a series of
by-elections during 1917, banishing the old so-called ‘Constitutional
Nationalist’ Irish Party to the annals of history.
Armed with this mandate the newly invigorated
forces of Irish Republicanism set about
giving substance to and making a reality of the Republic proclaimed in 1916. On
January 21 1919 24 of the 73 Sinn Féin Deputies elected in December 1918 came
together in Dublin’s Mansion House, formally convening the first meeting of an
independent All-Ireland Parliament, Dáil Éireann, the 26 Unionist and six
‘Irish Party’ deputies refused to take their seats.
Those assembled issued a ‘Declaration of
Independence’ adopted a ‘Democratic Programme’ which declared that the:” The
Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but
to all its material possessions; the Nation’s soil and all its resources.” An “Address to the Free Nations of the World”
was also read. What all of this meant was summed up by Cathal Brugha, who had just
been elected acting President in place of the imprisoned Eamon De Valera, when
following the reading of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ he declared: “
Deputies, you understand that from what is asserted in this Declaration that we
are done with England. Let the world know it and those who are concerned bear
it in mind.” Britain’s answer to this manifestation of the democratic will of
the Irish people for national self-determination was even more coercion as they
attempted to militarily suppress the newly declared ‘Republic’.
Over the next two and a half years Ireland
was locked in a life and death struggle with what was then the world’s leading
power .In fact on the same day that the Dail met for the first time, a small
band of IRA volunteers led by Dan Breen and Sean Treacy, at Soloheadbeg, Co
Tipperary fired what were for all practical purposes the first shots of the
‘War of Independence’ or ‘Tan War’.
All the while the newly established Dail
Eireann set about constructing what the historian Arthur Mitchell has described
as a”counter-state”. During the ‘Treaty Debates’ and subsequently it was the
contention of those who supported the ‘Treaty’ that the ‘Republic’ never really
existed. In fact the ‘Republic’ established its own functioning Government
departments, covering all areas of the nation’s life, such as ‘Finance’,
Justice or ‘Home Affairs’, Foreign or ‘External Affairs’, which had accredited
representatives in a number of countries throughout the world. Its law courts and
police had supplanted the British legal system in the people’s eyes by the time
of the Truce in July 1921.The Dail also created a propaganda Department and
established a committee assigned with the task of formulating “a general scheme
of National Education.” Whilst also enjoying the support of the vast majority
of local government bodies in the country.
What is clear is that the ‘Irish Republic’
was not merely aspirational but a living and functional reality, leading
Dorothy MacArdle to write in her history of the 1916-23 period The Irish Republic: “Whether the Irish
Republic ever existed has been disputed not only by jurists and not only with
words. For the Irish people the Republic was, for a few tense years, a living
reality, which dominated every aspect of their lives. Its existence was a fact
of human history, if not of logic or of law.”
Britain reacted not only militarily to this
ever growing demand for Irish Nationhood but also introduced its ‘Government of
Ireland Act’ in 1920 which partitioned Ireland, establishing Northern and
Southern Parliaments with jurisdictition over the Six North Eastern Counties of
Ulster and the remaining 26 Counties respectively, under a form of Dominion
Home Rule. All of this was simply ignored by the Dail as it set about its task
of supplanting the British system of Government in Ireland. By the early summer
of 1921 the British Government had come to the realisation that it was not
possible to pacify Ireland militarily without alienating world opinion,
particularly the United States.
And so on July 11 a truce was finally agreed
as a prelude to negotiations.
The complex series of talks and negotiations
which led ultimately to the signing of the ‘Anglo-Irish Treaty’ or ‘Treaty of
Surrender’ on December 6 1921 would be the subject of a lecture in themselves
and so I do not intend to deal with them tonight.
From a British perspective the ‘Treaty’ was a
masterstroke, as the historian Michael Hopkinson points out in his history of
the Civil war or Counter-revolution:” The Treaty’s signing was the decisive
event which led to the Civil War. No document could have more effectively
brought out into the open divisions in the philosophy and leadership of the
Sinn Fein Movement. If it had offered a little more or a little less, it may
well have unified opinion for or against it.” As I pointed out at the beginning
the effect was to sunder the nation, driving a wedge through the forces of
revolution behind which the people had united since 1916, divisions which
remain with us to this day.
Immediately following the Dail’s narrow
ratification of the ‘Treaty’ by seven votes in January 1922 a situation was
created which was in the words of Dorothy MacArdle: “Intricate and ambiguous.”
She goes on: “To do more than approve the Treaty and thus recommend its
acceptance to the Electorate was not within the competence of the Dáil. No
mandate had even been given to Dáil Éireann by the Irish people to abdicate or
to transfer its functions or to organise any other governmental authority on Irish
soil. It was obligatory upon Dáil Éireann to continue as far as possible, to
function in accordance with its mandate, its oath and its Constitution, as the
Government of the Republic, unless and until people should disestablish the
Republic by their vote. No other government could have any democratic sanction
in Ireland until a general election had been held.
“The Treaty, however made no allowance for an
appeal to the electorate before the Governmental change, no acknowledgment of
the democratic position of the Government of the Irish Republic: on the
contrary, its terms regarded that Government as non-existent, Article 18
requiring that the Treaty should be submitted forthwith to a ‘meeting summoned
for the purpose of the members elected to sit in the House of Commons of
Southern Ireland.’ That assembly was, under Article 17, to elect the
‘Provisional Government’ to which the British Government should transfer
certain powers and machinery. Dáil Éireann was ignored.
“In consequence of its vote, Dáil Éireann had
placed itself in an impossible position; whilst continuing to function as the
Government of the Republic and to safeguard the Republican position until an
election could be held, it had to countenance the summoning of a rival assembly
(which would mainly, in personnel, be a portion of itself); countenance the
recognising of one government in the North and the setting up of another
government in Dublin, both with the subversion of the Republic and the
supplanting of Dáil Éireann as their immediate aim.”
What this all meant in effect was a reversal
of what had occurred between 1919-21,the creation of a rival state to that of
the All-Ireland Republic. Despite frantic efforts by some on both sides of the
‘Treaty’ divide to preserve some semblance of unity both politically and within
the Army of the Republic, the IRA, the insistence of the British to strict
adherence to the terms of the ‘Treaty’ most pointedly in the drafting of a
constitution for the new 26 County State made armed conflict almost inevitable.
The reluctance to face this inevitability of armed conflict was most evident
with those who remained loyal to the All-Ireland Republic, writing of this
period Ernie O’Malley had this to say:” there was no attempt to define a clear
cut policy. Words ran into phrases, sentences followed sentences… A drifting
policy discussed endlessly in a shipwrecked way.” The result of this was to
allow the emerging Free State to consolidate itself, with the active assistance
of the British Government, both politically and militarily. As with the
‘Stormont Agreement’ all the forces of the of the establishment from Church
Hierarchy to the national and provincial media, rallied in support of the
‘Treaty’. Support for the ‘Treaty’ was most evident in the more prosperous
eastern half of the country, whilst in contrast opposition to it was most
marked in the West and South West. This is reflected in the strong support for
the ‘Treaty’ amongst the moneyed and propertied classes. The “stake in the
country people” as Liam Mellows described them. Indeed Mellows was to the fore
in the Republican leadership in seizing on the importance of this. Peadar O
Donnell in his book There Will Be Another
Day alludes to this: “For a little while on the morning of the attack on
IRA Headquarters, Four Courts, Dublin, 28th June 1922, Liam Mellows
and I shared vigil at one of the barricaded, upper windows and watched the city
bestir itself, within our arc of vision, to the noise of rifle and light
artillery fire. We thought our thoughts. Two men, obviously workmen making
their way along the quays to their jobs, started us speculating on what role
the trade unions would have been guided into were James Connolly alive and the
Republic under attack. It was the first time I heard Mellows on the play of
social forces in the crisis of the Treaty.
I was present at the Dáil Éireann session when he made his speech
against the Treaty, but while what he said impressed me greatly it gave no
indication of the pattern of ideas he uncovered now.” In his ‘Notes from
Mountjoy’ written in the weeks leading up to his execution in December 1922,
Mellows was to more fully develop these ideas.
“In our efforts now to win back public
support to the Republic we are forced to recognise – whether we like it or not
– that the commercial interest, so called, money and gombeen men are on the
side of the Treaty, because the Treaty means imperialism and England. We are
back to Tone – and it is just as well – relying on that great body ‘the men of
no property’. The ‘stake in the country’ people were never with the Republic.
They are not with it now – and they will always be against it – until it wins.
We should recognise that definitely now and base our appeals upon the
understanding and needs of those who have always borne Ireland’s fight.”
The slide into war was accelerated when
Collins at the insistence of the British broke the ‘Pact’ or voting arrangement
which had been agreed with De Valera in the lead up to the election called for
June 16, between a panel of candidates put forward by the Pro and Anti – Treaty
wings of Sinn Fein. And so on June 28 the opening shots of what was to be a
savage and brutal war of brothers were fired from artillery borrowed by the
Free State from the British Army, on the Four Courts in Dublin, which had been
occupied and used as their Headquarters by the Forces of the Republic since the
previous April. It was a war that would prove costly to Ireland on a number of
levels, materially the damage caused would amount to £30 million, and on a
deeper level it would rob Ireland of the brightest and best of a unique
revolutionary generation.
Men such as Liam Mellows, Rory O’ Connor,
Liam Lynch, Erskine Childers, Cathal Brugha and Harry Boland. On the Pro –
Treaty side Michael Collins. All of them left an indelible mark on Ireland and
still had so much more to contribute.
Following the surrender of the Four Courts
garrison and the end of the battle for O’Connell Street, in which most notably
Cathal Brugha was to lose his life, the fighting cantered on Connacht and
Munster. In Munster a line from Waterford to Limerick would mark the boundary
of the last bastion of Republican resistance to the Free State, the so – called
‘Munster Republic’. Following the deaths of Griffith and Collins in August 1922
the Free State under the leadership Cosgrave, Mulcahy and O’Higgins prosecuted
the war in new and more ruthless fashion. Dropping all pretence of operating as
a normal democratic government they set about using every and all means at
their disposal to crush resistance to
the Free State, including the torture and mutilation of prisoners, summary
executions, in many cases without even the semblance of a trial or court
martial as in the case of Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey and Dick
Barrett. Despite being prisoners of war for almost six months the four men were
executed on the orders of the Free State cabinet on December 8 1922, as a
reprisal for the killing of a Free State TD the previous day. By May of 1923
the Free State had executed 77 Republican prisoners, Brian O’Higgins in his
‘Wolfe Tone Annual’ of 1962 lists 113 “unauthorised murders” or executions carried out by the
Free State. In Kerry , at Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and Baghas , unarmed
prisoners were tied to mines and blown up. The prisons and internment camps
were swelled with 12000 Republican prisoners. Following the death in action on
the Knockmealdown Mountains of IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch on April 10 1923,
the remaining IRA Executive under its new Chief of Staff Frank Aiken decided further
military resistance under the prevailing conditions was impossible. And so on
May 24 the order to ‘Dump Arms’ was issued. In contrast to the decision of the
Provisionals to ‘Decommission Arms’ over the last number of months, the
decision of the Republican leadership in 1923 was guided purely by military
considerations and in no way constituted a political surrender.
The Counter – Revolution like all such wars
was marked by its sheer brutality, leading the Commander of British Forces in
Ireland General Neville Macready to
comment that Republican Resistance had been crushed “by means far more drastic
than any which the British Government dared to impose during the worst period
of the rebellion.”
Yet despite all of this in the 26 County
elections of August 1923, in the face of
censorship and coercion and despite the
fact that the majority of its candidates and election workers were imprisoned
or on the run, Sinn Fein had 44 candidates returned, polling a total of 286000
votes. As Michael Hopkinson observed : “The election results demonstrated the
continuity of Republican support which had been obscured by the war’s
unpopularity.”
The ‘Treaty of Surrender’ and the war of
Counter-revolution which it spawned has served to retard the normal social,
economic and political development of Ireland North and South. In the Six North
Eastern Counties, and due to the promises made in the ‘Treaty’ about the role
of a ‘Boundary Commission’ all of which
served to relegate regime and the question of partition in the ‘Treaty’
debates to a side issue, it put in
place a state, whose foundations were naked sectarianism, discrimination and
bigotry, all of which have only been further entrenched by the ‘Stormont Agreement’
, as evidenced in the streets of Belfast, Portadown and Lurgan. Meanwhile the
26 County State in its 80 years of existence has been characterised by its
endemic corruption, failing in its primary duty to provide for the mass of its
citizens, for many years using , just as the British had done before, the
emigrant boat and plane as its safety valve. It also fulfilled the prophecy
made by Liam Mellows during the Dail ‘Treaty’ debates when he forecast the the
Free State Government would become the “barrier government between the British
and the Irish people.” In decades which have followed it has continued to use
the gallows, the firing squad, the internment camp, political police and
censorship to suppress the Irish people’s legitimate demand for National - Self
Determination. Again as Mellows pointed out, the ‘State’, for those who have
supported it came to surpass Nation as the ultimate expression of Irish
identity, and its defence and preservation more important than Ireland’s
inalienable right to unfettered Nationhood. If Irish history teaches us
anything it is that a British withdrawal and the dismantling of both ‘Treaty’
states are essential stepsin the building of a New Ireland based on the
All-Ireland democracy as embodied in the All – Ireland Republic.
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