Decoding the IRA (33 page)

In common with the IRA units south of the border, the Scottish IRA reached peak membership during the Anglo-Irish War, and in August 1920 600 IRA members were reported to be in Scotland. By 1922 this had been reduced to 138.
¹⁸¹
In 1921 an attempt to destroy an oil pipeline along the Forth and Clyde canal failed.
¹⁸²
And in May of that year the IRA killed a police inspector in a failed attempt to rescue a prisoner from a police van. The aggressive police response, including the arrest of a priest, resulted in rioting – the only case of a serious confrontation between an Irish community and the police in Britain.
¹⁸³

In September 1923, following the Civil War, morale among the IRA's supporters in Glasgow was in ‘a condition of coma'. In addition to the disillusionment resulting from the Civil War, there was great uncertainty as to what the policy of the republican leaders in Dublin was. There was infighting among pro- and anti-communist supporters in the Scottish IRA and these problems were compounded by the effects of the post-war unemployment and poverty on ‘the working class [which] have always been the back bone' of the IRA's support in the city. The Catholic clergy were no longer supportive: ‘The clergy who formerly helped a good deal, will not touch us, and in a number of cases have actively worked against us publicly and privately.'
¹⁸⁴

In November 1924 when the adjutant general inspected the Scottish unit he reported that there were 300 members, 200 of whom would turn
out for a monthly parade. However, ‘there has been nothing done at these parades save to fall men in and give them a few minutes squad drill, [and] collect subscriptions'. The OC was a ‘hardworking enthusiastic man a little bit militaristic'. This perhaps was not such a damning criticism in what after all was supposed to be a military organisation! The AG wryly commented: ‘On the whole they are the best bunch of officers I ever met in England [
sic
]. This does not say too much, but they are at least good average men.' He recommended that the unit should henceforth report directly to headquarters in Dublin and not through the OC. Britain in London – something that was a source of much dissatisfaction.

Aside from the size of the unit, it was of importance to the IRA in that it had members and informants working in the factories of the area, many of which manufactured products that had a military application, and also because of the large number of dockers on the Clyde who were Irish. As in Liverpool, IRA support among the dockers enabled the organisation to smuggle weapons and explosives to Ireland. And for this reason Seán Russell was in direct contact with the unit.
¹⁸⁵
In 1924, however, the unit appeared not to have any contacts among ships' crew members sailing in and out of Glasgow, and the AG rejected the adjutant's suggestion that they pay men to smuggle for them. The OC however reassured him that he could send anything needed to Dundalk and could get as much gelignite as the IRA required.
¹⁸⁶

Some time after 1924, as part of the IRA's reorganisation, the status of the Scottish brigade was downgraded to that of a battalion. In 1925 divisions in the unit resulted in a violent feud, with allegations of ‘vice and corruption prevalent among certain officers', including drunkenness. On one occasion a group of armed men raided a dance hosted by an opposing group and threatened to smash the violin belonging to the musician, who was the widow of an IRA man.
¹⁸⁷
A little later one of its most prominent officers, Séamus Reader, was charged before an IRA court martial with misappropriation of funds and, though found not guilty, he was convicted of criminal negligence. However, he disputed the IRA's jurisprudence in the case, arguing that he couldn't be found guilty of negligence as he was never charged with the offence to begin with.
¹⁸⁸
Serious allegations were also made against the battalion's OC, who in September 1926 just upped
and left Scotland. Twomey reported: ‘I was amazed when I returned to find that [the] O/C. Scotland had left there for good and is here in Dublin.'
¹⁸⁹

In February 1927 Twomey wrote to the OC that he was ‘very disappointed that you have not reported to GHQ for a long time' and he complained about the ‘slackness' of the battalion's intelligence officer.
¹⁹⁰
In his apology the OC claimed that the unit had been busy and had placed 200 bombs among coal sent to China. The plan was that after the coal was shovelled into the boilers of Royal Navy patrol vessels in China, the bombs would explode and sink the vessels.
¹⁹¹
This unverifiable claim is further discussed in Chapter 8. Other correspondence with the Scottish brigade mentions attempts to smuggle weapons and to procure a wireless radio.
¹⁹²

A
SIDE FROM THE SMUGGLING
of explosives and the procurement of false passports, there was little that the IRA in Britain could perform with any degree of competence. The members were demoralised, disorganised and undisciplined. The units were also crippled by infighting and even George, the OC. Britain, allowed personal enmity get in the way of efficiently carrying out his job. While some of the blame lies with the members themselves and their local leadership, GHQ was primarily to blame for its failure to develop and communicate a clear strategy and to adequately train, equip and organise the British units.

Moss Twomey appeared impressive when he sent orders for a campaign of sabotage under the cover of the 1926 general strike. But there was no planning, organisation or capability to undertake this, and for these failings he and the rest of the senior leadership in Dublin were also responsible.

As Seán Russell reported, the IRA in Britain needed to be reorganised into small secret highly trained units. It was with this ‘cellular' structure and a bombing campaign that targeted primarily economic targets in London that the Provisional IRA was to achieve considerable strategic success almost seventy years later in the 1990s.

CHAPTER 7

The IRA in America

With twenty [tear gas] machines you might be able to take all [of] Dublin without killing non-combatants.

IRA agent in America to the chief of staff, Moss Twomey

We have made wonderful progress in [the] GAA and will be able to control it … Our policy otherwise is to purify and cleanse the organisation and [the] games. We will succeed.

Connie Neenan, IRA representative in America

America was an important source of funds and weapons for the IRA. The organisation maintained its own agents in New York, who worked closely with the Irish-American organisation Clan na Gael. Aside from smuggling weapons and money, these agents attempted to acquire chemical weapons for use in Ireland, infiltrated the Gaelic Athletic Association in New York and conducted military espionage for the Soviet Union.

Many of these activities are discussed in detail for the first time ever in this chapter. The Soviet connection is covered in Chapter 8.

Historical background

Since the nineteenth century Irish immigrants in America (especially in the major population centres in the north-east) found kinship in a variety of cultural, religious and sporting organisations. These societies, such as the Galway Ladies' Association or the County Cork Men's Benevolent Patriotic and Protective Association, were often based upon the immigrants' county of origin and created a sense of community while allowing immigrants to share information about jobs and housing.
¹

Additionally, the Irish community had their own political organisations which supported Irish separatism, and these political societies tended to be more radical than their counterparts in Ireland. This militancy was the product of a number of factors, including the immigrants' own experience of discrimination and hostility in America from the Protestant ‘Anglo-Saxon' establishment and the collective Irish-American folk memory of
poverty and ‘British atrocities' in Ireland. These factors were compounded by the immigrants' distance and separation from the realities of life back home.
²
The societies had a history of bitter (and sometimes violent) internal feuds. As societies were dissolved, others took their place. Disputes were as much about personality as political differences. The world of radical Irish-American politics was truly Byzantine. However, a basic overview is important to understand the situation in the 1926–7 period.

Clan na Gael (Family of the Irish) was the single most influential Irish-American society whose primary goal was Irish independence. The Clan was a secret society formed in 1867 by a group of Fenians to bring about an Irish Republic by ‘physical force'.
³
It made a formal alliance with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Ireland, which it provided with money and some weapons. Internal dissent and fighting bedevilled it throughout its history, and British secret service agents significantly compromised it. The Clan pursued a more violent strategy than the IRB itself, and sent a number of men on bombing missions to England. Most of these disastrous ‘Fenian' dynamite teams of the 1880s were either created by British
agents provocateurs
or involved spies who had infiltrated the Clan.
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In 1900 the warring factions of the Clan were re-united under the veteran Fenian, John Devoy.

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Devoy saw the cause for Irish independence best served by a German victory over Britain and along with many Irish-American activists he took a pro-German stance. In 1916 he helped found the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), which unlike the Clan was an open, mass-based society. Judge Daniel Cohalan, a close ally of Devoy's, led the FOIF. Rather than directly supporting separatists in Ireland he promoted Irish self-determination through propaganda, political activity and fundraising in America.

When the US entered the war alongside Britain in 1917, Devoy and Cohalan were forced to change tack and call for Irish-American patriotic support for the war effort and for the granting of Irish self-determination as part of an eventual peace settlement.
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However, at the end of the war Britain was able to exclude the independence of Ireland from the settlement and Cohalan went on to divert his energies into successfully lobbying for the United States Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in
1919. He argued that the Treaty favoured British imperial interests at America's expense.
⁶

In 1919, during the Anglo-Irish War, the FOIF inaugurated the Irish Victory Fund, which raised over a million dollars. Cohalan and Devoy envisaged that much of this money would be spent on promoting the Irish cause in America rather than in Ireland.
⁷
But that summer, when Éamon de Valera, the president of Sinn Féin, arrived in America he clashed with Devoy and Cohalan. Unlike them, de Valera wanted the money sent to Ireland to support the revolution and diverted away from propaganda efforts in the United States, and felt that as leader of the separatists in Ireland he had a leadership role to play among the Irish-American community. The stage was set for an extremely bitter dispute. The Clan split, with the majority of its executive supporting Devoy and Cohalan, and a minority led by Joseph McGarrity siding with de Valera. McGarrity's faction of the Clan was initially called ‘Clan na Gael re-organized' but as the section under Devoy's leadership faded, it soon became known simply as ‘Clan na Gael'.
⁸
Devoy and Cohalan retained control of the FOIF and of the paper, the
Gaelic American
, while the single most influential Irish-American paper, the
Irish World
, supported McGarrity and de Valera.
⁹

In 1920 de Valera founded the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR) as a mass organisation and an alternative to the FOIF.
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Before leaving the US, he also started a successful bond drive for the Irish Republic.
¹¹

During the Irish Civil War Devoy and Cohalan, along with the majority of Irish Americans, supported the Free State, while McGarrity and his Clan backed de Valera and the IRA. However, Irish-Americans on the whole were greatly disillusioned by both the Civil War in Ireland and the feuding between the Irish societies in America, resulting in a massive drop off in their involvement and financial contributions. In 1926 an IRA document from America reported: ‘There is a general feeling of apathy and inactivity and little or no money coming into the office.'
¹²

Clan na Gael

Under Joseph McGarrity, Clan na Gael aligned itself with the IRA and dedicated its resources once again to the achievement of a republic by
military means. McGarrity, as chairman of the executive committee, was its dominant figure up until his death in 1940. He was a romantic Irish nationalist, a staunch Catholic, and a militarist who regarded ‘political activism as the grave of militant nationalism'.
¹³
An intermittently successful businessman, he reportedly spent much of his money supporting Irish republicanism. He had a deep attachment and respect for Éamon de Valera, and their friendship even survived de Valera's entry into the Free State Dáil in 1927.

Before November 1925, when the IRA disassociated itself from de Valera's republican ‘government', it had been represented in America by the government's ‘military attaché', Liam Pedlar – an IRA gunrunner. Money raised by the Clan and others was given to the ‘government' and a proportion allocated to the IRA in Ireland. However, following the IRA's parting of ways with de Valera and his supporters, a new arrangement was needed.

In the spring of 1926, Andy Cooney, as chairman of the IRA Army Council, travelled to America. His objectives were to update the Clan on the recent developments in Ireland and clarify the IRA's relationship with de Valera, to negotiate a formal agreement with the Clan and particularly to reach an agreement on the Clan's funding of the IRA. In America Cooney found the IRA's mission to be disorganised and in ‘an awful state of affairs'. He wasn't able to communicate with GHQ back in Dublin, Liam Pedlar had forgotten the covering address for telegrams sent from Ireland, and there was no money available to fund his living expenses.
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