Encyclopedia
The
Irish War of Independence was a
guerrilla campaign mounted against the
British government in
Ireland by the
Irish Republican Army under the proclaimed legitimacy of the
First Dáil, the extra-legal Irish parliament created in 1918 by a majority of Irish MPs. It lasted from January 1919 until the truce in July 1921.
The Irish Republican Army which fought in this conflict is often referred to as the
Old IRA to distinguish it from later organisations that used the same name.
Origins
To purist Irish Republicans, the Irish War of Independence had begun with the Proclamation of the Irish Republic during the
Easter Rising of 1916. Republicans argued that the conflict of 1919-21 was the defence of this Republic against attempts to destroy it. More directly, it had its origins in the formation of an unilaterally declared independent Irish parliament, called
Dáil Éireann, formed by the majority of MPs elected in Irish constituencies in the Irish general election, 1918. This parliament, known as the
First Dáil, and its ministry, called the Aireacht, declared Irish independence. The IRA, as the 'army of the
Irish Republic', was perceived by members of Dáil Éireann to have a mandate to wage war on the
Dublin Castle British administration headed by the
Lord Lieutenant in Ireland.
On 21 January 1919, IRA volunteers under
Dan Breen, killed two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary when they refused to surrender a consignment of gelignite they were guarding, in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary.
This is widely regarded as the beginning of the War of Independence, although the men acted on their own initiative. Martial law was declared in South Tipperary three days later. On the same day as the shooting started, the First Dáil convened in the Mansion House in
Dublin where it ratified the 1916
Proclamation of Independence, issued a new Declaration of Independence, demanded the evacuation of the
British military garrison, and called on the "free nations of the world" to recognise Ireland's independence.
Violence Spreads
See Also Chronology of the Irish War of Independence.
Volunteers began to attack British government property, carried out raids for arms and funds and targeted and killed prominent members of the British administration. The first was Resident Magistrate John Milling, who was shot dead in Westport, County Mayo, for having sent Volunteers to prison for unlawful assembly and drilling. They mimicked the successful tactics of the Boers, fast violent raids without uniform. Although some republican leaders, notably
Éamon de Valera, favoured classic conventional warfare in order to legitimise the new republic in the eyes of the world, the more practically experienced Michael Collins and the broader IRA leadership opposed these tactics that had led to the military débacle of 1916. The violence used was at first deeply unpopular with the broader Irish population, but most were won around when faced with the terror of the British government's campaign of widespread brutality, destruction of property, random arrests and unprovoked shootings. Events began slowly, but by 1920 widespread violence was the rule.
In early 1920, Dublin dockers refused to handle any war matériel, and were soon joined by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, despite hundreds of sackings. Train drivers were brought over from
England after Irish drivers refused to carry British troops.
In March 1920 in West
Limerick, the IRA killed a man for spying for the first time. In early April, 400 abandoned RIC barracks were burned to the ground to prevent them being used again, along with almost one hundred income tax offices. Days later, prisoners in Mountjoy Jail begin a hunger strike for political status. The strikes led to large demonstrations in
Dublin in support, followed by a one-day general strike. Due to a mix-up, all of the men were released . A joint patrol of RIC and Highland Light Infantry fired into an unarmed crowd in Miltown Malbay who were celebrating the men's release, killing three Volunteers and wounding nine others. The County Coroner found nine soldiers and policemen guilty of murder and served warrants on them, but no disciplinary action was taken.
Arthur Griffith estimated that in the first 18 months of the conflict, Crown forces carried out 38,720 raids on private homes, arrested 4,982 suspects, committed 1,604 armed assaults, sacked and shot up 102 towns and killed 77 unarmed republicans or other civilians. Griffith was responsible for setting up the "Dáil Courts", a legal system that operated in parallel with the British one, and eventually came to supersede it as the moral authority and territorial control of the IRA increased.
The IRA's main target throughout the conflict was the mainly Catholic Irish police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, which they saw as the British government's eyes and ears in Ireland. Its members and barracks were vulnerable, and they were a source of much-needed arms. The RIC numbered 9,700 men stationed in 1,500 barracks throughout Ireland. A policy of ostracism of RIC men was announced by the Dáil in April 1919. This proved successful in demoralising the force as the war went on, as people turned their faces more and more from a force increasingly compromised by association with government repression. The rate of resignation went up, and recruitment dropped off dramatically. Often they were reduced to buying food at gunpoint as shops and other businesses refused to deal with them. Some RIC men cooperated with the IRA through fear or sympathy, supplying the organisation with valuable information. In 1919, 11 RIC men and 4 Dublin Metropolitan Police were killed and another 20 RIC wounded. In 1920, 143 RIC were killed and 197 wounded. In 1921 205 RIC men were killed and 291 wounded. In total, there were 363 RIC men were killed in the war, with 510 wounded .
Michael Collins and the IRA
Michael Collins was the main driving force behind the independence movement. Nominally the Minister of Finance in the Republic's government as well as IRA Director of Intelligence, he was actively involved in providing funds and arms to the IRA units that needed them, and in the selection of officers. Collins' natural intelligence, organisational capability and sheer drive galvanised many who came in contact with him. He established what proved an effective network of spies among sympathetic members of the
Dublin Metropolitan Police's "G division" and other important branches of the British administration. The G division men were detested by the IRA as often they were used to identify volunteers who would have been unknown to
British soldiers or the later Black and Tans. Collins set up
the "Squad", a group of men whose sole duty was to seek out and kill "G-men", members of the DMP's relatively small political division active in subverting the republican movement, and other British spies and agents. Collins began killing RIC intelligence officers from 1919 onwards. Many G-men were offered a chance to resign or leave Ireland by the IRA, and some took these options.
The Chief of Staff of the IRA was
Richard Mulcahy, who was responsible for organising and directing IRA units around the country. In theory, both Collins and Mulcahy were responsible to
Cathal Brugha, the Dail's Minister of Defence. However, in practice, Brugha had only a supervisory role, recommending or objecting to specific actions. A great deal also depended on IRA leaders in local areas who organised guerrilla activity, largely on their own initiative. For most of the conflict, IRA activity was concentrated in Munster and Dublin, with only isolated active IRA units elsewhere, such as in north county Longford and western county Mayo.
While the paper membership of the
IRA, carried over from the Irish Volunteers was over 100,000 men, Michael Collins estimated that only 15,000 men actively served in the IRA during the course of the war, with about 3,000 on active service at any time. There were also support organisations for the I
Cumann na mBan and
Fianna Éireann , who carried weapons and intelligence for IRA men and secured food and lodgings for them.
The IRA benefited from the widespread help given to them by the general Irish population, who generally refused to pass information to the RIC and the British military and who often provided "safe houses" and provisions to IRA units "on the run". Much of the IRA's popularity was due to the excessive reaction of the Crown forces to IRA activity. An unofficial government policy of reprisals began in September 1919 in Fermoy,
County Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town, after one of their number had been killed in an arms raid by the local IRA. Actions such as these, repeated in
Limerick and
Balbriggan, increased local support for the IRA and international support for Irish independence.
In April, after several IRA raids, the
Inland Revenue ceased to operate in most of Ireland. People were encouraged to subscribe to Collins'
National Loan, set up to raise funds for the young government and its army. Resident Magistrate Alan Bell, from Banagher, had been tasked by the British to track down the money. By the 26th of March 1920, he had successfully confiscated over £71,000 from Sinn Féin's HQ and, by investigating banks throughout the country, was set to seize much more. On that day he was pulled off a tram in south Dublin and shot three times in the head. By the end of the year the loan had reached £357,000.
Rates were still paid to local councils, as these were controlled by Sinn Féin members, who naturally refused to pass them on to the British government.
When
Éamon de Valera returned from the
United States, he demanded in the Dáil that the IRA desist from the ambushes and assassinations that were allowing the British to successfully portray it as a
terrorist group, and to take on the British forces with conventional military methods. This unrealistic proposal was immediately dismissed, but illustrated how many in the Sinn Féin leadership were out of touch with the nature of the conflict.
British Response
The "Black and Tans" were set up to bolster the flagging RIC. 7,000 strong, they were mainly ex-British soldiers demobilised after
World War I. Most came from
English and
Scottish cities. While officially they were part of the RIC, in reality they were a paramilitary force. After their deployment in March 1920, they rapidly gained a reputation for drunkenness and ill-discipline that did more harm to the British government's moral authority in Ireland than any other group. In response to IRA actions, in the summer of 1920, the "Tans", burned and sacked numerous small towns throughout Ireland, including
Balbriggan, Trim, Templemore and others. In July came the Auxiliaries, 2,214 former British army officers. The
Auxiliary Division had an equally bad repution as the Tans for their mistreatment of the civilian population but tended to be more effective and willing to take on the IRA. The policy of reprisals, which involved public denunciation or denial and private approval, was famously satirised by Lord Hugh Cecil when he said: "It seems to be agreed that there is no such thing as reprisals, but they are having a good effect."
In August of 1920, the British Parliament passed the Restoration of order in Ireland Act. suspended all coroners' courts, due to the large number of warrants served on members of the Crown forces. They were replaced with "military courts of enquiry". This act has been interpreted by historians as a choice by
David Lloyd George to put down the rebellion in Ireland rather than negotiate with the Republican leadership. As result, violence escalated steadily from that summer, and sharply after November 1920 until July 1921.
The War, November 1920-July 1921
On November 21, 1920, Collins' Squad killed 18 British intelligence agents at different places around Dublin. In response, Auxiliaries drove in trucks into
Croke Park during a football match, shooting into the crowd at random. 14 unarmed people were killed and 65 wounded. Later that day two republican prisoners, and an unassociated friend who had been arrested with them, were supposedly "shot while trying to escape" in Dublin Castle. This day became known as Bloody Sunday. Today a stand in Croke Park is named the Hogan Stand, after a Tipperary player who was killed in the attack.
Outside of Dublin,
County Cork was easily the scene of the most bitter fighting. Many of the tactics which soon became the standard for the Crown forces throughout Ireland began in Cork, such as the destruction of property in retaliation for IRA attacks, and the murder of prominent republicans. In March 1920,
Tomás Mac Curtain, the
Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, was shot dead, in front of his wife at his home, by men with blackened faces who were later seen returning to the local police barracks. His successor,
Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in
Brixton prison in London in November, along with two other IRA prisoners. The jury at the inquest into his death returned a verdict of willful murder against
David Lloyd George and District Inspector Swanzy, among others. Swanzy was later tracked down and killed in Lisburn, in County Antrim. The centre of Cork was burnt out by Crown forces, who then prevented firefighters from tackling the blaze, on December 11, 1920 in reprisal for an IRA ambush in the city.
Cork also saw the first
"flying columns": mobile units of around 100 men, who could strike in ambushes and melt into the countryside, which they knew far better than the British soldiers who were deployed to fight them. Some regiments of the British army had a reputation for killing unarmed prisoners. The
Essex Regiment was one of these. On November 28 1920, only a week after Bloody Sunday in Dublin, the west Cork unit of the IRA, under
Tom Barry, ambushed a patrol of Auxiliaries at
Kilmicheal in
County Cork, killing all but one of the 18 man patrol. This action marked a significant escalation of the conflict, with counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, all in the province of Munster being put under martial law on December 10. Shortly afterwards, in January of 1921, "official reprisals" were sanctioned by the British and they began with the burning of seven houses in Midleton in Cork. In March the Dail declared war on Britain.
The following eight months until the Truce of July 1921 saw a spiralling of the death toll in the conflict, with 1,000 people including the RIC Police, British Military, IRA volunteers and civilians, being killed in the months between January and July 1921 alone. This represents about 70% of the total casualties for the entire three year conflict. In addition, 4,500 IRA personnel were
interned in this time .
On the 1st of February, the first execution under martial law of an IRA man took place. Cornelius Murphy of Millstreet, Cork, was shot in
Cork city. On the 28th, six more were executed, again in Cork. In all, 14 IRA Volunteers were officially executed in the course of the war.
On March 19 1921, Tom Barry's 100 strong West Cork IRA unit fought a large scale action against 1,200 British troops - the
Crossbarry Ambush. Barry's men narrowly avoided being trapped by converging British columns and inflicted between ten and thirty killed on the British side. Just two days later, on March 21, the Kerry IRA attacked a train at the Headford junction near
Killarney. An estimated twenty British soldiers were killed, as well as two IRA men and three civilians. Most of the actions in the war were on smaller scale than this, but the IRA did have other significant victories in ambushes, for example at Millstreet, also in March 1921 and at Tourmakeady and Carowkennedy in Mayo in May and June. Equally common however, were failed ambushes, the worst of which, for example at Upton and Clonmult in Cork in February 1921 saw five and twelve IRA men killed respectively and more captured. The IRA in Mayo suffered a comparable reverse at Kilmeena. Fears of informers after such failed ambushes often led to a spate of IRA shootings of informers, real and imagined.
The biggest single loss for the IRA however, came in Dublin. On May 25 1921, several hundred IRA men from the Dublin Brigade occupied and burned
the Custom House in Dublin city centre. Symbolically, this was intended to show that British rule in Ireland was untenable. However, from a military point of view, it was a fiasco, which saw five IRA men killed and over eighty captured. This showed the IRA was not well enough equipped or trained to take on British forces in a conventional manner. However, it did not, as is sometimes claimed, cripple the IRA in Dublin. The Dublin Brigade carried out 107 attacks in they city in May and 93 in June, showing a fall off in activity, but not a dramatic one. However, by July 1921, most IRA units were chronically short of both weapons and ammunition. Also, for all their effectiveness at guerrilla warfare, they had, as
Richard Mulcahy recalled, "been unable to drive the British out of anything bigger than a fairly good sized police barracks".
Still, many military historians have concluded that the
IRA fought a largely successful and lethal guerrilla war , which forced the British government to conclude that the IRA could not be defeated militarily. . By the time of the Truce however, many Republican leaders, including Michael Collins, were convinced that if the war went on for much longer, there was a chance that the IRA campaign as it was then organised could be brought to a standstill. Because of this, plans were drawn up to "bring the war to
England". The IRA did take the campaign to the streets of Glasgow. It was decided that key economic targets, such as the
Liverpool docks, would be bombed. Nineteen warehouses there had been burned to the ground by the IRA the previous November. The units charged with these missions would more easily evade capture because England was not under, and British public opinion was unlikely to accept, martial law. These plans were abandoned because of the Truce.
The War in the North-east July 1920-July 1922
In the
Government of Ireland Act 1920 , the British government attempted to solve the conflict by creating two Home Rule parliaments in Ireland,
Northern Ireland and
Southern Ireland. While Dáil Éireann ignored this, deeming the
Irish Republic to be already in existence, unionists in the north-east accepted it and prepared to form their own government. This part of Ireland, which was predominantly Protestant and Unionist, saw as a result a very different pattern of violence from the rest of the country. Whereas in the south and west, the conflict was between the IRA and British forces, in the north-east and particularly in
Belfast, it often developed into a cycle of sectarian killings between Catholics, who were largely nationalist and Protestants, who were mostly unionist.
While IRA attacks were less common in the north-east than elsewhere, the unionist community saw itself as being besieged by armed Catholic nationalists who seemed to have taken over the rest of Ireland. As a result, they retaliated against the northern Catholic community as a whole. Such action was largely condoned by the unionist leadership.
James Craig, for instance, wrote in 1920, "The Loyalist rank and file have determined to take action... they now feel the situation is so desperate that unless the Government will take immediate action, it may be advisable for them to to see what steps can be taken towards a system of 'organised' reprisals against the rebels".
The first cycle of attacks and reprisals broke out in the summer of 1920. On 17 July 1920, British Colonel Gerard Smyth was assassinated by IRA in County Club in Cork city in reprisal for a speech he made to RIC men encouraging reprisals. Smyth came from Banbridge,
county Down and his killing provoked retaliation in the north against Catholics in Banbridge and Dromore. On July 21 1920, loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast, forcing over 7000 Catholic and left wing Protestants from their jobs. Sectarian rioting broke out in response in Belfast and Derry, resulting in many Catholics and Protestants being expelled from their homes. On August 22 1920, RIC Detective Swanzy was shot dead by Cork IRA men while leaving Church in Lisburn county Antrim. Swanzy had been blamed by an inquest jury for the killing of Cork Mayor
Thomas MacCurtain. In revenge, local loyalists burned Catholic residential areas of Lisburn. While several people were later prosecuted for the burnings, no attempt seems to have been made to halt the attacks at the time. Michael Collins organised a boycott of Belfast goods in response to the attacks on the Catholic community.
After a lull over the new year, killings in the north again intensified in the spring of 1921. The northern IRA units came under pressure from the their leadership in Dublin to step up attacks in line with the rest of the country. Predictably, this unleashed loyalist reprisals against Catholics. For example, in April 1921, the IRA in Belfast shot dead two Auxiliaries in Donegal Place in the city centre. The same night, two Catholics were killed on the
Falls Road. On July 10 1921 the IRA ambushed British forces in Raglan street in Belfast. In the following week, sixteen Catholics were killed and 216 Catholic homes burned in reprisal. Killings on the loyalist side were largely carried by the
Ulster Volunteer Force, allegedly with the aid of the police, army and the auxiliary police B Specials. Worse still, the B Specials were largely recruited from Ulster Volunteer Force and
Orange Lodges and, in the words of historian Michael Hopkinson, "amounted to an officially approved UVF". . In May James Craig made an effort to end the violence, and was smuggled by the IRA through Dublin to meet De Valera.
While the fighting in the south ended on July 11, 1921, in the north, the killings went on until the summer of 1922. Despite the truce, there were clashes between the IRA and Crown forces along the new border in early 1922. A number of IRA men were arrested in
Derry when they travelled there as part of the Monaghan
Gaelic football team. In retaliation, Michael Collins had forty-two loyalists taken hostage in Fermanagh and Tyrone. B-Specials sent to rescue them were ambushed at Clones in Southern territory, with four men killed. Despite the setting up of a Border Commission to mediate between the two sides in late February, March saw IRA raids on three British barracks along the border. All of these actions provoked retaliatory killings in Belfast. Winston Churchill arranged a meeting between Collins and James Craig on 21 January and the southern boycott of Belfast goods was lifted and then reimposed after several weeks. Despite a joint declaration that "Peace is declared" on March 30, the violence continued .
From April to June 1922, Collins launched a clandestine guerrilla IRA offensive against Northern Ireland. By this time, the IRA was split over the
Anglo-Irish Treaty, but both pro and anti-treaty units were involved in the operation. Arms sent by the British to arm the new
Irish Army were in fact given to IRA units and their weapons were sent to the North. However, the offensive, launched with a series of IRA attacks in the North on May 17-19, ultimately proved a failure. On May 22, after the assassination of unionist politician William Twaddell, 350 IRA men were arrested in Belfast, crippling its organisation there. The largest single clash came in June, when British troops had to use artillery to dislodge an IRA unit from the village of Pettigo, killing seven, wounding six and taking four prisoner. This was the last major confrontation between the IRA and British forces in the period 1919-1922. The cycle of atrocities however continued into June 1922. On June 17, in revenge for the killing of two Catholics,
Frank Aiken's IRA unit killed six Protestant civilians in Altnaveigh, south Armagh.
Michael Collins held the British general
Henry Hughes Wilson responsible for the attacks on Catholics in the north and had him killed in June 1922, an event that inadvertently helped to trigger the
Irish Civil War . The outbreak of the civil war in the South had the ironic effect of ending the violence in the North, as the war demoralised the IRA in the northeast and distracted the attention of the rest of the organisation from the question of partition. After Collins' death in August 1922, the new Irish Free State quietly dropped his aggressive policies towards Northern Ireland.
A total of 557 people died in political violence in what would become Northern Ireland between July 1920 and July 1922. Of these, 303 were Catholics , 172 Protestants and 82 RIC or British Army personnel. Belfast saw the majority of the violence, 452 people being killed there - 267 Catholics and 185 Protestants Catholic nationalists have argued that this violence represented a
pogrom against their community, as a disproportionate number of victims of the northern violence were Catholics, even though they represented only around 35% of Northern Ireland's population.
Casualties
The total numbers killed in the guerrilla war between Republicans and Crown Forces of 1919-21 came to over 1,400. Of these, 363 were Police personnel, 261 were from the regular British Army, 550 IRA volunteers were killed and about 200 civilians . Some other sources give higher figures. In addition, another 557 died in Northern Ireland, the bulk of whom were civilians, . This death toll is usually counted separately from the southern causalites as many of these deaths took place after the July 11 truce that ended fighting in the rest of Ireland.
The Propaganda War
Another feature of the war was the use of propaganda by both sides. The British tried to portray the IRA as anti-Protestant in order to encourage loyalism in Irish Protestants and win sympathy for their harsh tactics in Britain. For example, in their communiqués they would always mention the religion of spies or collaborators the IRA had killed if the victim was Protestant, but not if they were Catholic , trying to give the impression, in Ireland and abroad, that the IRA were slaughtering Protestants. They encouraged newspaper editors, often forcefully, to do the same. In the summer of 1921, a series of articles appeared in a London magazine, entitled "Ireland under the New Terror, Living Under Martial Law". While purporting to be an impartial account of the situation in Ireland, it portrayed the IRA in a very unfavourable light when compared with the Crown forces. In reality the author, Ernest Dowdall, was an Auxiliary and the series was one of many articles planted by the Dublin Castle Propaganda Department to influence public opinion in a Britain increasingly dismayed at the behaviour of its security forces in Ireland.
In February 1921, two Loyalists were shot dead by the IRA in Enniskeane in Cork, after being suspected of the killings of the Coffey brothers, local IRA men. Both of the Loyalists had been members of the local Anti-Sinn Féin Society, at least a dozen more leading
UVF members were killed within the next few weeks.
The
Catholic hierarchy was critical of the violence of both sides, but especially that of the IRA, continuing a long tradition of condemning militant republicanism. The Bishop of Kilmore, Dr. Finnegan, said:
"Any war...to be just and lawful must be backed by a well grounded hope of success. What hope of success have you against the mighty forces of the British Empire? None...none whatever and if it unlawful as it is, every life taken in pursuance of it is murder." The Archbishop of Tuam, Dr Gilmartin, issued a letter saying that IRA men who took part in ambushes
"have broken the truce of God, they have incurred the guilt of murder." However in May 1921,
Pope Benedict XV dismayed the British government when he issued a letter that encouraged the "English as well as Irish to calmly consider...some means of agreement", as they had been pushing for a condemnation of the rebellion. They declared that his comments "put HMG and the Irish murder gang on a footing of equality".
Desmond FitzGerald and
Erskine Childers were active in producing the "Irish Bulletin", which detailed government atrocities Irish and British newspapers were unwilling or unable to cover. It was printed secretly and distributed throughout Ireland, as well as to international press agencies and
American,
European and sympathetic British politicians.
While the military war made most of Ireland ungovernable from early 1920, it did not actually remove British forces from any part. But the success of
Sinn Féin's propaganda campaign did remove the option from the British administration to deepen the conflict. The British cabinet had not sought the war that had developed since 1919. By 1921 one of its members,
Winston Churchill, reflected: What was the alternative? It was to plunge one small corner of the empire into an iron repression, which could not be carried out without an admixture of murder and counter-murder ... Only national self-preservation could have excused such a policy, and no reasonable man could allege that self-preservation was involved.
The Truce — an uneasy peace
The war ended in a
Truce on July 11 1921, in some respects, the conflict was at a
stalemate. Talks that had looked promising the previous year had petered out in December when
Lloyd George insisted that the IRA first surrender their arms. Fresh talks, after the Prime Minister had come under pressure from
Herbert Henry Asquith and the Liberal opposition, the Labour Party and the
Trades Union Congress, resumed in the spring and resulted in the Truce. From the point of view of the British government, it appeared as if the IRA's guerrilla campaign would continue indefinitely, with spiralling costs in
British casualties and in money. More importantly, the British government was facing severe criticism at home and abroad for the actions of Crown forces in Ireland. On the other side, IRA leaders and in particular Michael Collins, felt that the IRA as it was then organised could not continue indefinitely. It had been hard pressed by the deployment of more regular British soldiers to Ireland and by the lack of arms and ammunition.
The initial breakthrough that led to the truce was credited to three people: King
George V, General
Jan Smuts of
South Africa and
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The King, who had made his unhappiness at the behaviour of the Black and Tans in Ireland well known to his government, was dissatisfied with the official speech prepared for him for the opening of the new
Parliament of Northern Ireland, created as a result of the partition of Ireland. Smuts, a close friend of the King, suggested to him that the opportunity should be used to make an appeal for conciliation in Ireland. The King asked him to draft his ideas on paper. Smuts prepared this draft and gave copies to the King and to Lloyd George. Lloyd George then invited Smuts to attend a British cabinet meeting consultations on the "interesting" proposals Lloyd George had received, without either man informing the Cabinet that Smuts had been their author. Faced with the endorsement of them by Smuts, the King and the Prime Minister, ministers reluctantly agreed to the King's planned 'reconciliation in Ireland' speech.
The speech, when delivered, had a massive impact. Seizing the momentum, Lloyd George then issued an appeal for talks to Éamon de Valera in July 1921. The Irish, unaware of the extent to which the speech did not fully represent the views of all the British government, but was to a significant degree a 'peace move' engineered by the King, Smuts and Lloyd George, with only the reluctant consent of the cabinet, responded by agreeing to talks. De Valera and Lloyd George ultimately agreed to a truce that was intended to end the fighting and lay the ground for detailed negotiations. These were delayed for some months as the British government insisted that the IRA first decommission its weapons, but this demand was eventually dropped. It was agreed that British troops would remain confined to their barracks. Most IRA officers on the ground interpreted the Truce merely as a temporary respite and continued recruiting and training volunteers. The continuing militancy of many IRA leaders was one of the main factors in the outbreak of the
Irish Civil War as they refused to accept the
Anglo-Irish Treaty that Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith had negotiated with the British.
The Treaty
Ultimately, the peace talks led to the negotiation of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty , which was then ratified in triplicate: by
Dáil Éireann in December 1921 , by the
House of Commons of Southern Ireland in January 1922 , and by both Houses of the British parliament.
The Treaty allowed
Northern Ireland, which had been created by the
Government of Ireland Act, 1920, to opt out of the Free State if it wished, which it duly did under the procedures laid down. As agreed, an Irish Boundary Commission was then created to decide on the precise location of the border of the Free State and Northern Ireland. The Irish negotiators understood that the Commission would redraw the border according to local nationalist or unionist majorities. Since the 1920 local elections in Ireland had resulted in outright nationalist majorities in
County Fermanagh, County Tyrone, the City of
Derry and in many District Electoral Divisions of County Armagh and
County Londonderry , this might well have left Northern Ireland unviable. However, the Commission chose to leave the border unchanged; as a trade-off, the money owed to Britain by the Free State under the Treaty was not demanded.
A new system of government was created for the new Irish Free State, though for the first year two governments co-existed; an
Aireacht answerable to the Dáil and headed by President Griffith, and a Provisional Government nominally answerable to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland and appointed by the Lord Lieutenant.
Most of the Irish independence movement's leaders were willing to accept this compromise, at least for the time being, though many militant Republicans were not. A minority of those involved in the War of Independence, led by resigned president
Eamon de Valera, refused to accept the Treaty and started an insurrection against the new Free State government, which it accused of betraying the ideal of the Irish Republic.
Independence and the Irish Civil War
The subsequent
Irish Civil War lasted until mid-1923 and cost of the lives of many of the leaders of the independence movement, notably the head of the Provisional Government Michael Collins, ex minister
Cathal Brugha, as well as anti-Treaty republicans
Harry Boland, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Liam Lynch and many others: total casualties were several times those in the earlier fighting against the British. President
Arthur Griffith also died.
Following the deaths of Griffith and Collins,
W.T. Cosgrave became head of government. On 6 December 1922, following the coming into legal existence of the
Irish Free State,
W.T. Cosgrave became President of the Executive Council, the first internationally recognised head of an independent Irish government.
The war ended in mid-1923 in defeat for the anti-treaty side.
Later in his life, as
President of Ireland, when asked what had been his biggest political mistake,
Éamon de Valera said "not accepting the Treaty".
Memorial
A memorial called the Garden of Remembrance was erected in Dublin in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the
Easter Rising. The date of signing of the truce is commemorated by the National Day of Commemoration, when all those Irish men and women who fought in wars in whatever armies are commemorated.
Footnotes
Sources
- Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins
- M.E. Collins, Ireland 1868-1966
- F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine
- Dorothy MacCardle, The Irish Republic
- Lord Longford, Peace by Ordeal
- Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence
- Michael Hopkinson, Green against Green, the Irish Civil War
- Peter Hart, The IRA at War 1916-1923 and The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923
- Meda Ryan, Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter . ISBN 1-85635425-3
- Richard English, Armed Struggle, a History of the IRA,
- Richard Comerford, Ireland Inventing the Nation .
External links
- 3 February, 1921, on the Limerick Leader web site.
