The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (17 page)

The second incident that highlighted the intensification of the IRA's campaign was the failed attempt to assassinate the
Lord Lieutenant
, Field Marshal Viscount French, in the Phoenix Park in December (Townshend, 1975: 48). The end of the year 1919 saw the conclusion of the first phase of the War of Independence. Violence had increased gradually throughout the year, the IRA had begun to arm itself more effectively and the crown forces had exhibited their intention to use reprisals in revenge for IRA assaults. The scene was set for 18 months of full-scale guerrilla war.

Lord Lieutenant
: The King's representative in Ireland under the Act of Union.

1920 marked the start of the second phase of the War of Independence and was characterised by a sustained assault by the IRA on RIC barracks throughout the country. This new strategy, sanctioned by the IRA's executive, was in part a response to a change in police tactics. At the end of 1919 the RIC closed approximately 500 of its smaller rural posts and withdrew to quarters in larger towns to reduce the number of easy targets for the IRA, which in turn was forced to find new methods of attacking the police (Townshend, 1984: 335; Augusteijn, 1996: 96). The withdrawal of the police from large parts of rural Ireland was a symbolic victory for the IRA and demoralised further the already beleaguered RIC as well as removing a valuable source of local intelligence for the government.

In Cork, one of the counties where the IRA was most active, 10 barracks were attacked in the first three months of 1920 (Hart, 1998: 72). The most daring and successful action was the co-ordinated arson attack on evacuated barracks, courthouses and local taxation offices at Easter 1920 which resulted in the destruction of nearly 350 buildings. In the first six months of the year the IRA destroyed 30 courthouses, 343 vacated RIC barracks, 12 occupied RIC barracks and caused damage to a further 104 vacated and 24 occupied police barracks. Such assaults continued for the remainder of the war but never with same intensity as during the first half of 1920 (Mitchell, 1995: 128–9, Townshend, 1975: 214).

The IRA's campaign against the RIC had reached its peak in mid-1920. Coinciding with the success of the republican courts, it was clear that British law and order was under sustained threat and a viable republican alternative was being established in its place. Another side-effect of the IRA's campaign was a dramatic decline in recruitment to the RIC. Fear, intimidation, a lack of appetite for the tactics necessary to defeat the IRA and support for the independence movement resulted in over 50 constables leaving every week in the summer of 1920. Recruitment did not match retirements or resignations
with the result that the force suffered a net loss of 1,300 men between July and September 1920 (Leeson, 2011: 20–2). The realisation that the war was being lost forced the British Government to resort to harsher tactics to curtail the success of the republican movement both politically and militarily.

The first such action had already been taken in January 1920 with the decision to recruit unemployed ex-servicemen from Britain to bolster the depleting ranks of the RIC. Dubbed the
Black and Tans
because of their combination of khaki and dark green uniforms, about 100 were recruited every month from January to June 1920, and as the IRA's campaign intensified in the latter half of 1920 so too did recruitment of Black and Tans, who were attracted by the prospect of employment that was proving so elusive at home and the generous remuneration on offer (Leeson, 2011: 24–5, 77).

Black and Tans
: Paramilitary police force recruited largely from ex-soldiers and introduced to Ireland in January 1920.

The government's counter-attack in the summer of 1920 was characterised by two actions. The first was the introduction of a second force to assist the RIC and Black and Tans. The
Auxiliaries
were a paramilitary force also recruited from ex-soldiers but primarily from officer level, whereas the Black and Tans were more likely to have served in lower army ranks. Reflecting their higher rank they were paid at the same rate as RIC sergeants. The Auxiliaries became known as ‘Tudor's Toughs’, after the new police adviser in Ireland, Hugh Tudor, and in recognition of the rough treatment they meted out to their opponents. Approximately 10,000 Black and Tans and Auxiliaries served in Ireland during the 18 months from January 1920 to the truce (Leeson, 2011: 30, 37, 1). The reputation which they earned for brutality, drunkenness and unrestrained violence gained for them a notoriety that remains strong in Ireland almost 100 years later.

Auxiliaries (Auxiliary Division of the RIC)
: Paramilitary police force recruited largely from ex-soldiers brought to Ireland in August 1920 to bolster the RIC

The government also resorted to new coercive legislation in an effort to quell the republican insurgency, with the hurried passing of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA) in August 1920
[Doc. 18]
. Many of the provisions in this legislation, including internment, were carried over from the wartime Defence of the Realm Act. One specific aim of the new legislation was to deal with the crisis in the crown and coroners’ courts. By mid-1920 the police were effectively unable to prosecute any crimes in the crown courts and many coroners’ juries refused to return verdicts of murder in cases where crown forces were killed in conflicts involving the IRA. Therefore, some of the most important provisions of the ROIA were those dealing with the courts. The jurisdiction of courts martial (military courts) was extended to ‘virtually all types of crime’ and they were empowered to impose the death penalty for a wider variety of offences. Coroners’ juries were also increasingly replaced by courts martial after September 1920. The Act also contained provisions for the imposition of curfews and restrictions on the use of motor transport (Campbell, 1994: 24–9). The provisions of the ROIA were also aimed at suppressing the Dáil courts.

The impact of the new government strategy was noticeable by the end of September 1920 as the number of IRA actions began to decline. The new measures forced the IRA to adapt its tactics and its principal unit of action became the flying column or active service unit. Rather than an entire brigade or battalion carrying out large-scale actions like attacks on RIC barracks, which had been the standard method of operation in the first half of 1920, IRA activists now went on the run and formed themselves into smaller more mobile units which focused on ambushing crown force units as they travelled around the countryside (Townshend, 1984: 335–6). The conflict had now become an outright guerrilla war.

The mobilisation of the IRA into flying columns ushered in the final and most violent phase of the war during which some of the most renowned ambushes of the conflict, producing some of the highest casualty figures, took place. November 1920 proved to be one of the bloodiest months of the war. Tensions in Ireland were running high at the time following the death of the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, in Brixton Prison on 25 October on the seventy-fifth day of a hunger strike and the execution on 1 November of the 18-year-old Dublin medical student, Kevin Barry, for his part in an IRA ambush in Dublin City in September that had resulted in the deaths of three soldiers. Four policemen were killed in an ambush at Inches Cross in County Tipperary on 13 November and 17 Auxiliaries died in controversial circumstances when they were waylaid by Tom Barry's west Cork flying column at Kilmichael, near Macroom, on 28 November. Barry subsequently claimed that half of these were killed after tricking the IRA with a false surrender, claims that were disputed by Peter Hart in the 1990s occasioning a heated debate about
revisionism
among historians of the revolution. There were also allegations that the Auxiliaries’ bodies were mutilated after their deaths (Abbott, 2000: 149–50, 156–63; Hart, 1998: 21–38).

Revisionism
: A term used to describe a critical reevaluation of history that emerged in Ireland from the 1930s. In the context of the Irish revolution it is often a pejorative term applied to historians seen as critical of the traditional nationalist interpretation of the period.

The most infamous deaths of the War of Independence took place on Sunday, 21 November, or
Bloody Sunday
as it later became known. Thirteen British personnel, most of them intelligence officers, and two civilians, were shot dead in their lodgings early that morning by Michael Collins's Squad. Later that day 14 unarmed civilians, including two boys and a woman, were killed when police opened fire on the crowd attending a Gaelic football match at Croke Park stadium in Dublin City, possibly in reprisal for the previous killings. This was followed by the killing of two senior figures in the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, and an innocent Gaelic League activist from County Clare, Conor Clune, shot while in custody in Dublin Castle
[Doc. 19]
. The fourth person to die in Dublin Castle that day was an Auxiliary who died of a self-inflicted wound. The cumulative death toll for the day was 41, including three RIC officers shot dead by the IRA in Cork, Down and Waterford, four civilians killed by crown forces in Dublin,
Mayo and Meath, and one soldier, whose death in Dublin remains unexplained (Carey and de Búrca, 2003; Leeson, 2003; Leonard, 2012: 139–40).

Bloody Sunday
: 21 November 1920. Forty-one people were killed including British Intelligence agents, civilians attending a football match at Croke Park and senior IRA prisoners in Dublin Castle. Not to be confused with Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972.

Ambushes continued into 1921. Four Auxiliaries died in a well-planned ambush by the Longford IRA at Clonfin on 2 February. On the following day 11 RIC and Black and Tans were killed in an ambush by the East- and Mid- Limerick IRA Brigades at Dromkeen. Two major ambushes in County Mayo, at Tourmakeady in May and Carrowkennedy in June, resulted in the deaths of four and seven police officers respectively. Two more ambushes resulting in multiple police fatalities took place in Castlemaine (Kerry) and Kellegbeg Cross (Tipperary) on consecutive days in June. Incidents in which individual police or police travelling in pairs were attacked and killed by the IRA also became much more common during 1921; between January 1921 and the truce there were 118 incidents that resulted in the death of an individual policeman (Abbott, 2000).

One of the few examples of the IRA laying an ambush for the army (rather than the police) was the Battle of Crossbarry, in County Cork in March 1921, where Tom Barry's column attacked a detachment of the Essex Regiment, killing nine soldiers and one Auxiliary (Kautt, 2010: 146). While the IRA usually inflicted heavier casualties on the crown forces in these engagements, the Battle of Clonmult, near Midleton in County Cork, in February 1921 was an example of the IRA coming off worst; 12 members of the east Cork flying column were killed and eight captured effectively destroying the active service unit (O’Neill, 2006). Similarly, the burning of the Custom House in Dublin on 25 May, while successful from the point of view of causing serious damage to the headquarters of British local government in Ireland, was a logistical disaster that resulted in the arrest of between 80 and 130 men; the IRA had inadvisedly, probably at the prompting of de Valera, resorted to an unusual 1916-style assault that left little room for retreat (Hopkinson, 2002: 103).

From January 1921 IRA general headquarters (GHQ) encouraged local units to undertake smaller operations including digging up and blocking roads to hamper the movement of crown forces, raiding mail trains to capture documents that would assist the IRA's intelligence gathering, disrupting communications (such as cutting telephone and telegraph wires) and sniping at police. The change in tactics was designed to allow the IRA to carry out a greater number of actions as these smaller operations required fewer personnel than the large-scale ambushes (Townshend, 1979b: 342).

It also reflected the realties of the war. IRA manpower was always much more limited than that of the police or army and was further depleted by deaths and arrests, examples of which included the deaths of three IRA men at Kilmichael, the decimation of the east Cork flying column at Clonmult and the capture of the Longford IRA leader, Seán MacEoin, in March 1921.
The strength of the IRA was estimated to be 5,000 in May 1921, the vast majority of whom (3,386) were based in Munster (Townshend, 1975: 179). Firepower was in equally short supply. It was estimated that the IRA had approximately 3,000 rifles, 4,600 revolvers, 1,200 automatic pistols and 15,000 shotguns at the time of the truce in addition to approximately 50 machine guns of various types (Comerford, 1978: 839). Ammunition was in even shorter supply than arms; according to Tom Barry, the Cork IRA had 310 rifles at the time of the truce, but only 50 rounds of ammunition for each (Barry, 1981: 207).

The IRA's new strategy was also an admission that the police and army were becoming more effective in dealing with guerrilla warfare. They no longer made themselves an easy target for ambush, ensuring their motorised transport was more heavily fortified and often carrying civilians with them to ensure safe passage. The Clare IRA leader, Michael Brennan, complained that ‘there seemed no possibility of finding any British parties in the open where we could attack them on more or less equal terms’ (Brennan, 1980: 86). In Cork the IRA found it equally hard to engage either the Auxiliaries or the army (Barry, 1981: 154). The army also began to receive special instruction in dealing with guerrilla warfare and from early 1921 greater use was made of the military in conducting large-scale round-ups in parts of the country where the IRA was most active, often resulting in the arrest of prominent local IRA fighters (Coleman, 2003: 131–2).

The declining manpower and firepower of the IRA, combined with the sense that the British forces were starting to cope better with the guerrilla conflict, has resulted in an inconclusive debate about whether the war could have continued much longer had the truce not been agreed in July 1921. Parts of the country that had been active, such as Longford, had practically ceased to play any serious role in the fighting and the IRA was dealt a serious blow with the large number of arrests that followed the burning of the Custom House. In addition the fine weather conditions of July 1921 made it difficult to carry out successful guerrilla operations; it was much easier for the crown forces to mend roads and travel more quickly, while long hours of daylight forced the IRA to stay hidden for longer (O’Donoghue, 1954: 173).