The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (14 page)

By the time the AARIR was established towards the end of 1920, de
He had failed to achieve any serious political recognition for an independent Irish republic, though he had been successful in heading off any American statement of support for Ireland remaining an integral part of the UK. He contributed to the divisions among the Irish-Americans, although they were well established before his arrival. The money raised from the bond drive looked impressive at face value but very little of it made its way back to Ireland and was later tapped into by de Valera in the 1930s to set up Fianna Fáil's newspaper
The Irish Press
(Carroll, 2002: 90). Critics accused him of abandoning Ireland during some of the most crucial months of the revolution; was it acceptable for the President of the Dáil to be totally absent from the country for 18 months between June 1919 and December 1920? Overall, his trip was most successful as a propaganda exercise for the First Dáil, which was in itself a very important aspect of the Dáil's foreign policy.

The creation of a distinct Department of Publicity in March 1919 signified the importance the Dáil attached to publicising its activities, especially outside Ireland. The first Minister for Publicity was Laurence Ginnell but following his imprisonment he was replaced by Desmond FitzGerald, a 1916 veteran. The cosmopolitan FitzGerald was successful in making contact with foreign journalists and encouraging them to publicise the work of the Dáil as well as highlighting the ‘acts of aggression’ by the police and military in Ireland. The medium through which the revolutionary message was distributed was a news sheet initially called the
Weekly Summary
, which was replaced by the
Irish Bulletin
in November 1919. The matter-of-fact style adopted by the
Irish Bulletin
was central to the impact of its message, as seen in the following stark report of the killing of an elderly labourer:

Irish Bulletin
: Propaganda newspaper of Dáil éireann.

Murders
: Richard Lumley, a day-labourer, aged 60 of Rearcross, Co. Tipperary was shot dead without warning by a British military and police patrol, whilst on his way home from a wake at Abbey Hotel, Rearcross on the morning of July 4
^th
.

Walsh, 2008: 113)

Emotive headlines such as ‘Eighteen Innocent Men Murdered in Twenty-one Days’ added to its effectiveness
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.

The
Bulletin’s
first issue had a circulation of only 30, which was said to have risen to 2,000 (although this figure was produced by the Dáil's propaganda department and might not be reliable) by 1921 when five issues were produced each week. By 1921 foreign language editions were being published to cater for its popularity in Europe. It was popular in countries like India and Egypt that were also seeking to break away from British rule. Excerpts were published in reputable and influential foreign newspapers, such as the London
Times
. A copy appeared in the House of Commons in
November 1920 and the British propagandists in Ireland even tried to produce bogus issues to undermine its success, a ploy that backfired because the imitations were so unconvincing (Walsh, 2008: 113; Mitchell, 1995: 103–5, 250–2; Inoue, 2002: 89).

Even IRA guerrillas, who were often contemptuous of the politicians and administrators, were conscious of the important contribution of the
Irish Bulletin
to the success of the revolution; the Dublin volunteer Todd Andrews equated its worth to that of

several
Flying Columns
. . . H ad it not been for the exposures of the
Bulletin
the British campaign of terror could have been conducted relatively quietly and the measure of resistance of the IRA would never be known to the outside world.

(Andrews, 1979: 176)

Flying Column
: Mobile active service unit formed by the IRA during the War of Independence to wage guerrilla warfare.

The
Bulletin
's success is even greater when seen in the context of the harsh press controls that were in place. Both the Defence of the Realm Act and the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act contained provisions to censor reports of events in Ireland during the First World War and the revolution, including the power to suppress newspapers deemed as seditious. The success of the
Bulletin
pierced this ‘paper wall’ erected around Ireland by British censorship restrictions (Kenneally, 2008).

When FitzGerald was arrested in February 1921 he was replaced by Erskine Childers, an English-born republican sympathiser who had also served as a British intelligence officer during the First World War. Childers had been an active member of the Dáil's publicity staff since settling in Ireland permanently in March 1919, publicising Ireland's cause in Paris during the Peace Conference and contributing to the
Irish Bulletin
. Under his stewardship the foreign editions of the
Bulletin
were launched, there was greater co-ordination with the IRA's publicity organ
An tóglach
[
The Volunteer
], edited by Piaras Béaslaí, and questions about the government's Irish policy were planted with sympathetic MPs to be asked in the House of Commons in order to embarrass the government (Mitchell, 1995: 250). The activities of the IRA also received wider coverage in the
Bulletin
under Childers’ editorship (Inoue, 2002: 92). Childers was also responsible for a number of pamphlets including
The Constructive Work of Dáil éireann
, which highlighted the success of Dáil policies such as the arbitration courts, and
Military Rule in Ireland
, an account of British reprisals.

An tóglach
: Journal of the Irish Volunteers/IRA, edited by Piaras Béaslaí.

Propaganda was also an important function of the Dáil's foreign missions. In addition to its various foreign representatives mentioned above, by June 1921 there were also official press bureaux in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Geneva and throughout the USA, and Dáil propaganda was circulated further
afield to Denmark, Canada, Australia and South America (Inoue, 2002: 88). In Great Britain, an important centre for publicising events in Ireland, especially the impact of crown force reprisals, much of the propaganda work was undertaken by the Irish Self-Determination League, which played an important role in distributing the
Irish Bulletin
and circumventing censorship restrictions to keep British journalists informed about Ireland (Inoue, 1998: 48). By contrast to this extensive, sophisticated and effective foreign propaganda machinery, the Dáil's record on domestic publicity was poor, due to the focus on getting its message heard abroad and the impact of censorship on both the local and national press (Inoue, 2002: 97–8).

DOMESTIC POLICY

Much of the Dáil's early work was taken up with foreign policy because of the timing of the Paris Peace Conference. However, by mid-1919 it had begun to work on domestic issues in an effort to give effect to the existence of a separate government in Ireland. The Dáil Government faced a number of obstacles. Few of its ministers had any serious political experience, other than W. T. Cosgrave, who had served as a member of Dublin Corporation since 1908, making him the obvious choice for the local government portfolio. The constant harassment of the Dáil and its members, especially after it was outlawed in September 1919, also hampered its ability to work coherently. Many of its ministers also had other commitments, both in revolutionary and civilian life. In addition to serving as Minister for Finance, Michael Collins was at various times the IRA's Director of Organisation and Intelligence, while Defence Minister Cathal Brugha continued to be employed as a salesman for Lalor's candles.

The survival, continuity and success of the revolutionary Dáil owed much to the ability of its few permanent civil servants, in particular Diarmuid ó héigeartuigh (O’Hegarty), the secretary to the Dáil cabinet and clerk of the Dáil. ó héigeartuigh was on the Supreme Council of the IRB and the executive of the IRA, and had fought in the Rising. In addition to his republican credentials, he was an experienced civil servant, having worked for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction from 1910 until his dismissal in 1918 for refusing to take an oath of allegiance. He was responsible for taking the minutes of Dáil sittings and cabinet meetings, organising its secret meetings, handling its correspondence and facilitating communication between ministers, earning him a reputation as ‘the civil servant of the revolution’ (Pakenham, 1972: 102). The first priority of the Dáil's domestic agenda was to raise funds to finance its ambitious foreign activities and to run the bureaucracy at home.
The choice of Michael Collins as Finance Minister owed much to his experience working for the accountancy firm Craig Gardner prior to the Rising, and as secretary to the National Aid Association that handled fundraising for the families of republican prisoners afterwards. As such, he had more experience of financial administration than most other TDs, although this was still relatively slight for a finance minister. He was also a senior figure in both the IRA and the IRB, so his appointment also appeased the military wing of the movement, as Finance was possibly the most important post in the government (Hart, 2005: 188).

The Dáil considered levying an income tax but was unable to draw up a suitable plan for it. Therefore, the main method of raising funds was a national loan, which it was hoped would raise £250,000, half of it expected to come from Ireland. In fact the final total for the domestic subscription was £370,000, £171,000 of which came from the province of Munster alone (Hart, 2005: 189; Fanning, 1978: 21). The bond drive launched in the USA in January 1920 was expected to raise most of the foreign contributions. By November 1920, over US$5 million had been pledged, most of it from New York and Massachusetts, and had it not been for the in-fighting among the Irish-Americans a significantly larger amount could have been raised. In spite of the success in raising money in the USA, the Dáil would never see the full benefit of it; only £58,000 had been repatriated by mid-1920 and eventually only about half of the sum raised ever made its way to Ireland (Hart, 2005: 191–2).

Collins hid the money and bonds in banks whose managers were sympathetic to the republican cause and in a variety of locations around Dublin, including in a child's coffin hidden under the floor of Batt O’Connor's home in Donnybrook. O’Connor, a builder and close ally of Collins, modified other buildings used by Sinn Féin to provide safe hiding places for the precious funds (O’Connor, 1929: 116–18). British intelligence tried hard to confiscate the Dáil funds in an effort to cripple the revolutionary government. In 1920 a former RIC officer and magistrate, Alan Bell, who had investigated Land League funds during the 1880s, was tasked with locating the republican purse. On 26 March 1920 he was assassinated by members of Collins's hit unit, the
Squad
, while travelling by tram from his home in Monkstown to Dublin Castle (Foy, 2006: 81–2). His death was a significant setback for British intelligence and eliminating a man who was getting uncomfortably close to discovering his secret stash of funds was an important strategic victory for Collins. British Intelligence only succeeded in confiscating a total of £23,000 (Mitchell, 2002: 79). From 1920, when the War of Independence began in earnest, much of the Dáil's budget was spent on the Department of Defence – over £150,000 from mid-1920 until the end of 1921. The Department of Foreign Affairs accounted for a further £36,529 in the same period (Carroll, 2002: 11).

Squad
: A death squad controlled by Michael Collins that targeted British intelligence agents and was responsible for high-profile killings such as Bloody Sunday.

A significant amount of the money – at least £200,000 – was spent by the Dáil's National Land Bank, which was set up to finance the purchase of land by tenants in an effort to curtail the re-emergence of land agitation. In spite of the series of Land Acts passed by the British Government between 1870 and 1909 that broke up many of the large landed estates and advanced loans to tenants to purchase their holdings, serious land problems remained into the 1910s and 1920s, especially in the west of Ireland. Many farms were small in size and uneconomic; land in the west of Ireland was often of poor quality; the new class of peasant-proprietor did not possess the money to expand or improve their holdings; and there was still insufficient land available to meet the demand of those who sought to make a livelihood from agriculture. These landless men looked enviously at large grassland farms used for grazing livestock and were frustrated in their efforts to increase their holdings by the inefficiency of the Land Commission, the body tasked with overseeing land redistribution. This situation was exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. The increased wartime demand for food was a boon to Irish tillage farmers and increased further the demand for land, while the curtailment of emigration meant that many who would otherwise have left the country joined the queue for it (Dooley, 2004: 26–32; Campbell, 2003: 161).

The fear that social unrest such as this would detract from the national question and initiate class conflict led Sinn Féin to take control of the situation by setting up a system of arbitration courts to settle the problem. The establishment of these courts, where disputes would be settled by compromise rather than confrontation, was first suggested by Griffith in his pamphlet
The Sinn Féin Policy
in 1906 and was based on the ideas of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s and courts used by the Land League in the 1880s
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. In 1917 Sinn Féin began to establish arbitration courts to settle land disputes, beginning in County Clare. In 1919 they were brought under the jurisdiction of the Dáil and extended beyond land to deal with all legal matters in an effort to supplant the existing crown courts with a domestic judicial system controlled by the revolutionary administration (Laffan, 1999: 311–13).