The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (18 page)

On the other hand, areas of the country that had been slow to get off the mark in 1919 and 1920 were becoming very active, such as Mayo. The number of IRA actions continued to increase, especially in June 1921 (Costello, 2003: 144). There appeared to be no reduction in the IRA's ability to inflict casualties on its enemy; 17 policemen were killed in the last 11 days of the war between 1 and 11 July (Abbott, 2000: 261–6). Many IRA leaders themselves felt they possessed the ability to continue. Florence O’Donoghue believed the force had overcome many of its difficulties adjusting to the
hardship of being on the run, gaining greater combat experience and manufacturing effective mines and grenades (O’Donoghue, 1954: 176). The Mayo IRA leader, Tom Maguire, also believed that the IRA campaign could have gone on after July 1921 (Murphy, 1991: 324). Agreement among historians is also divided and perhaps the best conclusion is that of David Fitzpatrick and Peter Hart that the war had reached a stalemate by mid-July 1921 and that victory for either side ‘was a very distant prospect’ (Fitzpatrick, 1977: 230; Hart, 1998: 108).

THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION AND MOTIVATION OF THE IRA

Contemporary depictions from hostile British sources portrayed the revolutionary IRA as comprising ‘a horde of proletarians, grocers, curates, farm labourers, porters, stable boys, car-conductors and what not’, or ‘unmistakably of the rabble class to be found in every large town’, complemented by ‘intellectuals . . . young men with high foreheads and thin lips’ (Hart, 2003: 117, 131). Much recent research on the revolution has focused on the men who made up the guerrilla army and a reasonably clear picture of the typical volunteer has emerged, disproving much of the above characterisation.

Volunteers were young – most were aged in their late teens or early twenties and had been born in the decade of the 1890s – although officers tended to be slightly older. They were literate, educated (most possessing at least primary school education) and skilled. Very few were married, an absence of responsibility and obligation that made it easier for them to engage in IRA activities. The overwhelming majority were Roman Catholic – Peter Hart could only find three Protestants who were in the IRA – and there is ample evidence that they were devout practitioners of their religion, with many seeking blessings or absolution in advance of ambushes (Coleman, 2003: 148–50; Hart, 1998: 129–64; Hart, 2003: 110–38). Aside from a handful of well-known Protestants like Sam Maguire, Erskine Childers and Ernest Blythe, a couple of Jews, including Robert Briscoe and the republican lawyer Michael Noyk and a maverick Presbyterian clergyman, Reverend J. A. H. Irwin, the republican movement was almost exclusively composed of Roman Catholics.

The IRA was successful in recruiting from a variety of social classes, particularly from those involved in the building trade, drapers’ assistants, creamery workers, teachers and medical students. In rural areas guerrilla fighters not surprisingly came largely from agricultural backgrounds, although the proportion of volunteers who came from farming backgrounds did not correspond to the high proportion of young men of that age group involved
in agriculture in the country as a whole. This recent finding of historians such as Peter Hart is at odds with the IRA's conception of itself as having a strong rural base (Hart, 2003: 113–20). The title of the Cork IRA activist Micheál ó Suilleabháin's memoir of the revolution,
Where Mountainy Men Have Sown
, highlights the perception that the War of Independence was waged from isolated rural outposts: ‘he and his comrades were destined to fight a guerilla war on their native mountainsides, that was to become an important part of the pattern of the nation-wide fight for freedom’ (ó Suilleabháin, 1965). Another prominent Cork IRA man, who later became a respected writer on the subject, Florence O’Donoghue, similarly described the IRA in which he fought as ‘predominantly a product of the country’ (Hart, 2003: 116).

The social background of volunteers helps to explain in part their reasons for joining a revolutionary organisation and subsequently taking part in armed uprising against British rule in Ireland. Family circumstances often influenced men to join the IRA or their sisters to join Cumann na mBan. Some came from families with republican traditions stretching back to the United Irish revolt of 1798 and taking in involvement with the Fenians or the Land War. There had not been a violent revolt against British rule in Ireland between the Fenian uprising of 1867 and the Easter Rising in 1916; therefore some young volunteers felt their parents’ generation had let them down and had a desire to rekindle the revolutionary spirit (Augusteijn, 1990: 26). Family circumstances also appear to have been important in cases where fathers were absent and unable to exert a restraining influence. Prominent IRA leaders, including Seán Treacy and Dan Breen in Tipperary, and Seán MacEoin in Longford, fell into this category (Augusteijn, 1990: 33–4).

As well as taking their example from their ancestors, Volunteers followed along with their friends and the decision to join was often more of a collective than an individual one. The core of a local IRA company was often composed of a group of friends of a similar age who had been at school together, worked together or were members of the same social or sporting club (Hart, 1998: 208). In this way recruitment to the IRA mirrored much of the voluntary recruitment to the British Army during the First World War, when members of the same social organisations often joined up together forming the so-called pals’ battalions.

The failure to implement conscription in Ireland during the First World War resulted in a surplus of young men especially in rural areas and the restrictions on emigration closed off a traditional exit route for them. In the same way that this phenomenon contributed to the recurrence of land agitation in the west of Ireland, it also appears to have been a factor in some of these disaffected youths finding vent for their frustrations through politicisation and revolutionary violence (Garvin, 1981: 110).

Many volunteers believed that their education influenced their subsequent participation in revolutionary organisations. This is especially true in regard to the
Christian Brothers
. According to the Dublin volunteer, Todd Andrews, who attended the Christian Brothers’ school in Dublin's Synge Street: ‘Without the groundwork of the Christian Brothers’ schooling it is improbable that there would ever have been a 1916 Rising and certain that the subsequent fight for independence would not have been successfully carried through’ (Andrews, 1979: 74). Eamon Price, another Dubliner who fought in the Rising, considered the Christian Brothers to have played an important role in his political formation (McGarry, 2010: 34). A Christian Brothers education certainly appears to have been a predominant feature of the backgrounds of Irish revolutionaries in the 1910s; seven of the 14 men executed in Dublin after the Rising and a very significant proportion of the members of the Sinn Féin executive elected in October 1917 were products of these schools (Laffan, 1999: 193; McGarry, 2010: 34).

Christian Brothers
: An Irish Catholic teaching order founded in the nineteenth century.

However, it is too simplistic to see Christian Brothers’ schools (CBSs) simply as factories of revolution. From his study of Ernie O’Malley, one of the Christian Brothers’ more renowned revolutionary alumni, Richard English, has concluded that ‘the impact of the Brothers’ schools involved the intensification and reinforcement of Catholic values rather than their creation’ (English, 1998: 124–5). This echoes the first-hand experience of Todd Andrews, for whom the importance of the Christian Brothers came from the way in which they taught religion and religious history. Rather than indoctrinating ‘their pupils with Irish nationalism or hostility to Britain’, the Anglophobia of a CBS education was the product of ‘the teachings of the Catholic Faith which it was the basic objective of the Brothers to inculcate. The persecution of the Catholics rather than the persecution of the Irish as such was the burden of the Brothers’ history teaching’. All of this was underpinned by a broad nationalist curriculum, with a strong emphasis on Irish history and Gaelic civilisation (Andrews, 1979: 73).

In rural areas nationalist-minded teachers in national schools were equally if not more influential. Denis Lyons and James Santry infused Michael Collins with ‘a pride of the Irish as a race’ in Lisavaird National School (Coogan, 1990: 10). In Garryshane, County Tipperary, Charlie Walshe departed from the official curriculum to provide his students – who included Dan Breen, Seán Treacy, Dinny Lacey and Seán Hogan – with ‘the naked facts about the English conquest of Ireland and the manner in which our country was held in bondage. We learned about the Penal Laws, the systematic ruining of Irish trade, the elimination of our native language’ (Breen, 1981: 21). Education outside the confines of a classroom also appears to have played an important role in the formation of Irish revolutionaries. Gaelic League classes were a particular source of politicisation by ‘promoting an awareness
of the importance of national identity and the baleful impact of “Anglicization” ’. William Daly, a London-born 1916 rebel of Irish ancestry, admitted that he ‘knew nothing of Ireland . . . until I joined the Gaelic League’ (McGarry, 2010: 18, 108). The League's emphasis on the distinctiveness of the Irish language and Gaelic culture underpinned the development of a belief in Irish separatism in the minds of many aspiring revolutionaries. Senior figures in the pre-Rising Volunteers, including Pearse and MacNeill, also held leadership roles in the Gaelic League. By 1916 the League had fallen strongly under the influence of the IRB, especially in Dublin where the Keating Branch of the League was effectively a front for the Teeling circle of the brotherhood.

This sense of cultural distinction was reinforced by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), which had been founded in 1884 to revive and codify traditional Irish sports such as hurling and Gaelic football. Involvement in the administrative structures of the organisation was a significant factor in the development of leadership skills that would serve many of these young men well and help then to achieve leadership roles within the IRA. This was particularly noticeable in the revolutionary careers of Michael Collins (secretary of the Geraldines Gaelic Athletic Association club in London from 1908 to 1915), Harry Boland (chairman of the Dublin County Committee) and Eoin O’Duffy (secretary of the Ulster Council) among others (Fitzpatrick, 2003: 33; Hart, 2005: 44; McGarry, 2005: 26–9). The significance of cultural nationalist organisations raises the question of how important political ideology was as a factor in the conditioning of republicans and revolutionaries in the Ireland of the 1910s. Ideological inclinations were often reinforced by specific events. In this regard the Rising appears to have galvanised many young men into joining the Volunteers in 1917 and 1918. For Florence O’Donoghue, a draper's apprentice in Cork, ‘the Rising was an illumination’ and he joined the Volunteers in 1917 (Borgonovo, 2006: 25).

Many historians consider ideology to be less important in the formation of revolutionaries than social circumstances or personal experience. After the 1918 general election, the Sinn Féin activist, Father Michael O’Flanagan, felt the party now had to explain ‘what Sinn Féin is’ to those who had voted for it, and according to Michael Laffan, ‘People joined Sinn Féin in their tens of thousands because they were attracted by its image, not because they believed in its ideology’ (Laffan, 1999: 214). Florence O’Donogue believed that ‘Republicanism, as a form of Government, had no more than an academic interest for Volunteers’ and ‘republic’ was a by-word for freedom from British rule rather than a political ideology (O’Donoghue, 1954: 43).

Apart from Griffith, there were few ideologues in the movement. While a commitment to achieving a republic became an article of faith after the Rising, very few appeared to have a clear idea of what it would entail. There were certainly very few signs of the secularism or anti-clericalism of
European republicanism, or even of nineteenth-century Fenianism, present in the version of republicanism promoted by Sinn Féin and the IRA. Eamon de Valera is well known for his disavowal of ‘doctrinaire' republicanism and initially at least appears to have had an open mind on what form of government an independent Ireland would have, even allowing for the possibility of ‘an Irish monarch’, and while Michael Collins was ‘one of the more vociferous republicans’, his republicanism was ‘nationalistic rather than ideological’ (Laffan, 1999: 214, 241–2). Thus, it is ironic that while ideology does not appear to have ben a primary factor in the motivation of revolutionaries, it would later emerge as the main cause of the split in 1922.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF WAR

The question of why certain young men joined the IRA is linked to the question of why the IRA was more active in certain areas of the country than others at various times during the course of fighting from the Rising until the end of the Civil War. The War of Independence was a series of small localised campaigns, rather than a nation-wide struggle, with little co-ordination between brigades or overall control by IRA GHQ, in spite of its efforts to impose some form of uniformity. The scale and extent of IRA violence varied widely over the course of the war and the most active areas of the country changed. In certain areas of the country, such as Munster (and especially Cork) and Dublin City, the IRA remained active throughout the conflict. Other counties, such as Longford between November 1920 and February 1921, were active for a sustained period but then faded. Longford was the only midland county to experience a high level of IRA activity that was not matched by surrounding counties such as Westmeath, Cavan, Leitrim or Roscommon.

Some counties which had a proud tradition of fighting in 1916, in particular Wexford, were inexplicably dormant during the guerrilla campaign, and some slow starters (Mayo) had made up ground by the time of the truce. Even within individual counties and brigades the levels of activity and violence varied dramatically. In the small county of Longford, IRA activity was confined to an enclave in the north of the county around the towns of Ballinalee and Granard, while the south of the county saw very little action at all. In Cork, the contrast between west and north Cork was striking.