#Eamon Devalera

[aoawarfare]

Recap of the Irish War of Independence

One cannot talk about or understand the Irish Civil War without understanding the Irish War of Independence. In fact, I’ve seen more and more historians argue that we can think of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War as one big civil war, since the Royal Irish Constabulary, the IRA’s main enemy before the Black and Tans arrived, were Irish themselves and IRA intimidated, harassed, and executed Irish people who they considered “informers and traitors.” Additionally, many of the hopes, dreams, and aspirations initiated by the women’s liberation moment of 1912, the Lockout of 1913, and Easter Rising were further refined by the Irish War of Independence, and contributed to the violent schism in Irish Society following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. These aspirations and goals would further be redefined by the Irish Civil War with participants of all sides feeling like they lost more than they gained from the entire affair.

Thus, why I feel it’s important to recap the major events of the Irish War of Independence

Leading Up to the Irish War of Independence

Ireland has always been a place of debate, uprisings, and desire for change, but in the early 1900s there were three movements that paved the way for the Irish War of Independence: the Suffragette Movement of 1912, the Gaelic Revival, the 1913 Lockout, the Home Rule Campaign and Easter Rising. I’ve discussed all four movements in great detail in the first season, but in summary, the Suffragette Movement, the Gaelic Revival, and the 1913 Lockout created an environment of mass organizing and brought together many activists and future revolutionaries. The Home Rule Campaign, combined with WWI, created the conditions for a violent uprising.

Charles Parnell

[Image description: A black and white photo of a white man with a high forehead and a thick, round beard. He is wearing a white button down and black tie and a grey double breast jacket.]

British Prime Minister Gladstone introduced the concept of Home Rule in 1880, with support from one of Ireland’s most famous statesmen: Charles Parnell. The entire purpose of Home Rule was to grant Ireland its own Parliament with seats available to both the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority and current power brokers). However, Parnell destroyed support for Home Rule by being involved in a messy and scandalous divorce and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the precursor to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), scared the British government with their terrorist attacks. Home Role went through another failed iteration, but John Redmond was confident he would get the third iteration passed. This newest iteration was introduced to Parliament in 1914 and have created a bicameral Irish Parliament in Dublin, abolished Dublin Castle (the center of British power in Ireland), and continued to allow a portion of Irish MPs to sit in Parliament. It was supported by many nationalists in Ireland, barely tolerated by the Asquith Administration, and despised by the Unionists.

The Unionists believed they had a reason to worry. They had not forgotten the Protestants slaughtered during the 1798 Uprising nor the power they lost through the machinations of O’Connell and Parnell. Facing a massive change in their lives should Home Rule pass, the Unionists took a page out of the physical force book and created their own paramilitary organization: the Ulster Volunteers. The Asquith government knew of the Ulster Volunteers, their gun smuggling, and their drilling, but did nothing except delay Home Rule as long as possible.

Asquith’s delaying tactics and the creation of the Ulster Volunteers made Irish Nationalists nervous and they took matters into their own hand. Arthur Griffith, an Irish writer, politician, and the source of inspiration for many young rebels created the political party, Sinn Fein. Griffith argued for a dual monarchy approach, similar to the Austrian-Hungary model. He believed Ireland and England should be separate nations, united under a single monarchy. He also introduced the concept of parliamentary absenteeism i.e., Sinn Fein was a political party that would never sit in British Parliament, because the parliament was illegitimate.

Eoin MacNeill

[Image description: A black and white picture of a tall man in a courtyard. He has a high forehead, wire frame glasses, and a shortly trimmed beard. He is standing with his hands behind his back holding a hat. He is wearing a white button down, a tie, a vest, and a suit jacket and grey pants.]

In response to the Ulster Volunteers, Eoin McNeill and Bulmer Hobson created the Irish Volunteers. Both men believed that the Irish wouldn’t stand a chance in an uprising against the British government and their best bet was to trust Redmond to pass Home Rule. The Irish Volunteers were created in order to defend their community from Unionist attacks. Things were tense in Ireland, but it seemed that parliamentary politics could save the day and the extremists would be pushed to the sidelines.

Then World War I began.

The British used the war to pass Home Rule but delay it taking affect for another three years. To add insult to injury, John Redmond encouraged young Irishmen to enlist in the British Army and fight for the Empire. McNeill and Hobson tried to convince its members to continue to trust Redmond, although they were angry that he was recruiting for the war. Yet, there was a handful of Irish Volunteers, who were also members of the resurrected IRB believed England’s difficulty, Irish opportunity.

They were Tom Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, Padraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett. These men, plus James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, would sign the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and it would serve as their death warrant.

They knew they would not be able to win without arms and support, so, keeping their plans to themselves, they sent Roger Casement to Germany to present their plans for a German invasion that would coincide with an Irish rising. The Germans rejected this plan (maybe remembering what happened in 1798, when the French made a similar landing, weeks after a massive Irish uprising), but promised to send arms.

The Irish Volunteers were often seen drilling and practicing for some vague rebellion, so it wasn’t suspicious to the authorities or to MacNeil and Hobson to see units marching around. When Pearse issued orders for parade practice on April 23rd, Easter Sunday, MacNeil and Hobson took it at face value while those in the know, knew what it really meant. This surreal arrangement would not last for long and the committee’s secrecy nearly destroyed the very rising it was trying to inspire.

The first bit of trouble was Roger Casement’s arrest. The Germans were less than supportive of the uprising, and Casement boarded the ship Aud to return to Ireland to either stop or postpone the rising. However, when he arrived in Ireland on either April 21st or 22nd, he was pick up by British police and placed in jail.

Pearse Surrenders

[Image description: A faded black and white photo of three men standing on a street in Dublin. There are two man on the left and they are wearing the khaki cap and uniform of the British army. On the right is a man wearing a wide brim hat and a long black jacket]

Then MacNeil and Hobson had their worst suspicions confirmed-Pearse and his comrades were secretly planning a rebellion without their support. MacNeill vowed to do everything (except going to the authorities) to prevent the Rising and sent out a counter-order, canceling the drills scheduled for Sunday. This counter-order took an already confused situation and turned it into a bewildering disaster. Units formed as ordered by Pearse and dispersed with great puzzlement and some anger and frustration. Pearse and his comrades met to discuss their next steps and decided the die had been cast. There was no other choice except to try again tomorrow, Monday, 24th, April 1916.

Easter Rising was concentrated in Dublin with a few units causing trouble on the city’s outskirts. The Irish rebels fought from Monday to Friday, surrendering Friday morning. The leaders of the rising were murdered, but many future IRA leaders such as Eamon DeValera, Michael Collins, Richard Mulcahy, Constance Markievicz, Liam Lynch, and others survived. They were sent to several different prisons, the most famous being Frongoch where Collins was held. The IRB turned it into a revolutionary academy and practiced their organizing and resistance skills while formalizing connections and relationships. When they were released starting in December 1916, they were ready to take those skills back to Ireland.

Creation of the IRA and the Dail

Their approach was two pronged: winning elections and rebuilding the Irish Volunteers/ Irish Republican Brotherhood.

When the prisoners were released, the Irish population went from hating them for launching a useless rebellion to cheering their return. The English helped flame the revolutionary spirit in Ireland by proclaiming Easter Rising a “Sinn Fein” rebellion and arresting many Sinn Fein members who had nothing to do with the Rising. This made it clear Sinn Fein was the revolutionary party while John Redmond’s party was out of touch.

Eamon de Valera

[Image description: A black and white photo of a white man with a sharp nose and large, circular glasses. He has black hair and is wearing a white button down shirt, a polka dotted tie, and a grey suit.]

Sinn Fein ran several candidates such as Eamon DeValera, Michael Collins, and Thomas Ashe. Ashe would be arrested while campaigning and charged with sedition. While in jail, he went on hunger strike and was killed during a force feeding. Following an Irish tradition, Sinn Fein and the IRB turned Ashe’s funeral into a political lightning rod. They organized the funeral procession, the three-volley salute, and Collins spoke over Ashe’s grave: “There will be no oration. Nothing remains to be said, for the volley which has been fired is the only speech it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.”

On October 26th, 1917, Sinn Fein would hold their first national convention. During the convention, Eamon DeValera replaced Arthur Griffith as president and Sinn Fein dedicated itself to Irish independence with the promise that after independence was achieved the Irish people could elect its own form of government. However, there was still tension between those who believed in passive non-violence and the militant Sixteeners. 1917-1918 was spent building a bridge between parliamentary politics and militant politics of the 1920s, with Sinn Fein’s large young membership pushing it in a more militant direction.

Constance Markievicz

[Image description: A sepia tone photo of a white woman looking to her right. She is leaning against a stool and holds a revolver. She wears a wide brim hat with black feathers and flowers. She has short hair. She is wear a military button down short and suspenders.]

Sinn Fein was also breaking social conventions, even though Cumann na mBan was still an auxiliary unit, Sinn Fein would allow four ladies on the Sinn Fein Executive and would run two women in the 1918 election-Constance Markievicz and Winifred Carney, with Markievicz becoming the first women to win a seat in parliament. Many of its supporters and campaigners were also women. In fact, many men would complain in 1917 and later that the women were more radical than the men. Cumann na mBan fully embraced the 1916 Proclamation and even had Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington deliver a message to President Wilson in 1918, asking him to recognize the Irish Republic. Cumann na mBan took the front line in the anti-recruitment campaign and the police boycott and the anti-conscription movement. Like the Volunteers, Cumann na mBan believed they were a military unit, although they never got arms for themselves and worked closely with Volunteer units and Sinn Fein clubs.

Irish Volunteers and IRB

While Sinn Fein was slowly rebuilding itself, the Irish Volunteers were also being resurrected from the ashes. It started with local initiatives led by men like Ernest Blythe, Eoin O’Duffy, and Sean Treacy. Units popped up in local communities, organized and armed by their local leaders and eventually contacting GHQ which consisted of men like Collins, Mulcahy, and Brugha. While local units were rebuilding themselves, Collins was using the IRB to form a strict corps of officers, a growing source of personal power as well as military power that men like Brugha and De Valera (who were IRB during Easter Rising, but renounced their membership after the rising failed) distrusted.

GHQ issued an order saying that units should only listen to orders coming from their own executive (in order to prevent the order-counter-order disaster that doomed Easter Rising) and swore the Volunteers would only be ordered into the field if commanders were confident of victory. No forlorn battles. Mulcahy, as Chief of Staff, worked hard to instill a military spirit and discipline into the Volunteers while understanding that their most effective unit at the moment was the company and local initiative. (The companies would expand into battalions and brigades as the war progressed, but the fighting and tactics would remain local and territorial) So, while trying to act like a regular army and expecting the Volunteers to respect their officers and GHQ, he also had to allow for local improvisation as well as trust the local executives to have control over their soldiers. It was a difficult balancing act he would struggle to maintain during the entire Anglo-Irish War and into the Irish Civil War and the formation of the Free Irish State.

The Irish Volunteers convention on October 26th, 1917, elected DeValera as president, Brugha as the chairman of the executive with Collins as director of organization and Mulcahy as director of training, Liam Lynch as Director of Communications, Staines, Director of Supply and Treasurer, O’Connor director of engineering.

All of this work could have been for nothing if the British hadn’t handed the IRA the greatest gift in the world: the 1918 conscription crisis.

Lightning Rod Issues

Food Shortage 1917-1918

Before conscription was the food shortages in the winter of 1917-1918. The shortage was created because of food being exported to Britain, invoking memories of the terrible famine. Sinn Fein could not stop all of the food being exported, but they did what they could to protest this newest version of starvation. For example, a member of Sinn Fein, Diarmund Lynch took thirty pigs meant to for exportation, killed them, and shared the food with hard hit families, earning him deportation to America, but becoming a local folk hero and increasing Sinn Fein’s prestige.

There were also agrarian tensions because grazers (those who used farmland for their cows to graze instead of growing crops) were given preference to available land so the Congested Districts Board could maximize profits. While this makes sense, it added to the great unease in the land, especially as the food shortage grew more acute.

The IPP grew out of the Land Wars of 1880s and Sinn Fein, ever aware of Irish history, decided it would be no different. It joined in the fight for land, arguing that all the ranch land should be broken up evenly. All over the country, Sinn Fein created commission to break up the land and figure out the pricing as well as organizing mass occupation of available land, but ranchers refused to acknowledge the prices Sinn Fein proposed.

1917 Electoral Victory March

[Image description: A black and white photo of several men and women marching together through a park with several tall green trees and a cobblestone wall. Leading the crowd are three men in long coats and wide brim hats playing bagpipes. Everyone else is wearing long coats, suit coats, or dresses and hats.]

The Irish Volunteers officially stayed out of the new land war, claiming it wasn’t military or political in nature, but local groups sometimes participated. This combined with Sinn Fein’s own land seizures could lead to painful confrontations with police and other anger Irish men, so it was a difficult job balancing non-violent and not starting a mass uprising.

Another tool Sinn Fein used was boycotting. Said to original in Ireland during the Land Wars and used to great affect by Charles Parnell, Sinn Fein boycotted the RIC. This was a serious threat to the British system, decreasing the pool of candidates it could recruit from for the RIC and training the people to view the RIC as “others,” the first step to making a population comfort with violent action.

Boycotting the RIC was an old idea, something Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers wanted to implement it as soon as they were released from prison. This became a strong tool of the Volunteers to ostracize those who were betraying the rebel cause by working for the British as well as prepare the citizens for a war mentality.

Conscription crisis

No one yet knew that World War I would be over by November 11th, 1918. British thought she was facing long years of further bitter sacrifices and they needed new blood. They looked at Ireland and its large set of unruly young men itching for a fight and introduced the Military Service bill, extending forced conscription to Ireland-giving the Volunteers a shot in the arm while also uniting the Irish political parties, for the first time ever.

The Sinn Fein, IPP, and the Catholic Church pledged to resist Britain’s efforts to conscript Irishmen. DeValera prepared a statement, meant for Woodrow Wilson, insisting that their resistance was a battle for self-determination and principles of civil liberty, similar to the American’s cause during America��s revolution. The Volunteers planned local actions as well, using the conscription crisis as a springboard for intensive recruiting and introducing the idea of militant resistance into the greater Irish consciousness. The boycott of the RIC increased tenfold during the anti-conscription movement, shocking the police and trapping them in their barracks in locations such as North Tipperary. Women were particularly effective implementers of the boycott. Eventually the boycott was expanded to include those who helped or associated with the police. The boycott didn’t force many police to resign, but it built a belligerent and hateful mindset against the police-allowing for later violence.

Anti-conscription Rally in Ballaghaderreen County

[Image description: A blur black and white photo of a large gathering of people. They are surrounding a wooden platform where as group of men stand. Above the platform there is a white banner that says: No conscription Stand United]

The Irish Volunteers were not as engaged with the conscription crisis as Sinn Fein, because they still didn’t have a doctrinal strategy in place. Instead, volunteers were told to avoid getting arrested and if the RIC tried to arrest them, to resist. The Volunteers held daily drills and parades and prepared for battle, should the order ever arrive. However, GHQ seemed more concerned with getting rifles and ammunition than ordering a massive uprising. Conscription allowed them to demand that the local area their units controlled give up their guns to the Irish Volunteers. Some Volunteers even bought rifles off RIC or local British soldiers. Lack of guns would be a problem that plagued the IRA through their war with the British. Conscription also saw a spike in people joining the Irish Volunteers. GHQ tried to manage this wave of volunteers by issuing orders regarding how men should be recruits and how they should be vouched for and accepted.

The Irish Volunteers allowed their own soldiers to elect their officers (how could this go wrong?) GHQ seemed to try and curb who could be elected like requiring that they be member of the IRB, but given the haphazard nature these units were created, but it was only somewhat successful, some units merging the Volunteers and IRB men seamlessly, while other companies were dominated by non-IRB men or vice versa.

They threatened mass slaughter should Britain try to enforce conscription and, apparently, there was a plan for Cathal Brugha to lead a group of men to assassin the British cabinet (relying on Collins and Mulcahy-who was now chief of staff-to recruit for this venture).

German Plot

The British back down on conscription in mid-May while also arresting 73 nationalist leaders from May 17-18 under the Defense of the Realm Act, including Eamon DeValera, Constance Markievicz, Arthur Griffith, and William Cosgrave. They claimed there was a German plot i.e., Sinn Fein was working with Germany-like the 1916 rebels did and the 1798 rebels with the French.

It quickly became clear how flimsy the excuse was, that there was scant information, and undermined the government’s credibility in Ireland. It successfully knocked Sinn Fein off its feet for a moment, especially since all nine of the twenty-one members of Sinn Fein’s Standing Committee were arrested, but the British failed to arrest some of the most dangerous rebels such as Collins, Brugha, Mulcahy, and Harry Boland. But in the long run, it boosted Sinn Fein’s cause and destroyed any chance IPP had of reclaiming the national narrative. As Constance Markievicz claimed, "sending you to jail is like pulling out all the loud stops on all the speeches you ever made…our arrests carry so much further than speeches.”

1918 Election

Sinn Fein had won a total of five elections between 1917 and 1918 (De Valera, Count Plunkett, Cosgrave, Patrick MacCartan, and Griffith) and lost two elections. 1918 was their first general election. The election was held on December 14th, 1918, and is considered one of the most important moments in modern Ireland’s history. It was the first election after the end of the First World War and, because of the Representation of the People Act, women over the age of 30 and working-class men over the age of 21 could vote, tripling the Irish electorate from 700,000 in 1910 to 1.93 million in 1918.

The IPP won only 6 seats, the Unionists took 26 seats, and Sinn Fein won 73 seats.

The Sinn Fein victory can be explained in three different ways:

The new electoral: women and working-class men: people who had been hardest hit by the war and the rising and the conscription crisis, as well as the good shortage in 1917.Not only was Sinn Fein and Irish Volunteers campaigning, but Cumann na mBan campaigned hard as well, possible driving people into the arms of Sinn Fein since Sinn Fein stood for a republic which was against everything as it currently was. iSinn Fein’s rivals: the IPP and Labour had been broken by WWI and needed to rebuild themselves and their reputations if they wanted to compete.

The clergy was on Sinn Fein’s side because of conscription. DeValera also went a long way to argue that anti-conscription was not anti-soldiers nor were they ignoring the sacrifice of the Irishmen who had fought in the war so far. But the crime was that Britain sacrificed the best Ireland had for a colonial war.

Curated candidates. Sinn Fein ran those it was confident would win and in seats that would not weaken its own position or risk schism with the Labor movement. Also, there was some election rigging and voter intimidation.

Instead of sitting in parliament, the Sinn Fein candidates would sit in a new parliament: the first Dail of Eireann.

The Dail

The First Dail was formed on January 21st, 1919. It held its first meeting in the Round Room of the Mansion house of Dublin and created a Declaration of Independence and the Dail Constitution. Only 27 minsters appeared because 34 were in jail or on secret missions. Sinn Fein invited the IPP and Unionists to participate but they refused. The declaration of independence ratified the Proclamation of the Republic of Easter Rising and outlined a socialist platform, but it was more of a propaganda message because there was only so much the Dail could realistically achieve while battling England.

Members of the First Dail

[Image description: A black and white photo of three rows of men. The first row of men are sitting down on chairs, the second and third rows of men are standing. Most men are wearing black suits with white button down shirts and ties. Others are wearing tan or grey jackets. Some men had beards and mustaches, but most are clean shaven. Behind the men is a metal staircase and a white building.]

The constitution was a provisional document and created a ministry of the Dail Eireann. The ministry consisted of a President and five secretaries. First ministers of the Dail were:

Chairperson of the Dail: Cathal Brugha (because DeValera was in jail and Collins and Harry Boland were planning how to break him out)

Minister for Finance: Eoin MacNeill

Minister for Home Affairs: Michael Collins

Minister for Foreign Affairs: Count Plunkett

Minister for National Defense: Richard Mulcahy

The Dail expanded the number of ministers in April. It now included nine ministers within the cabinet and four outside the cabinet as well as a mechanism to create substitute presidents and ministers in the realistic event someone was arrested or killed.

This second ministry members were:

President: DeValera

Secretary for Home Affairs: Arthur Griffith

Secretary for Defense: Cathal Brugha

Secretary for Foreign Affairs: Count Plunkett

Secretary for Labour: Constance Markievicz

Secretary for Industries: Eoin MacNeill

Secretary for Finance: Michael Collins

Secretary for Local Government: W. T. CosgraveAustin Stacks would become minster after his release from jail and then took over as secretary for home affairs after Griffith became deputy president.

Once the Dail was convened, the Irish Volunteers saw themselves as an army of an Irish Republic hence why they named themselves the Irish Republican Army. They were formally renamed the IRA on August 20th, 1919, and took an oath of allegiance to the republic and to serve as a standing army.

On June 18th, 1919, the Dail officially established the Dail courts which were meant to replace the British judiciary. They eventually created several series of courts including a parish-based arbitration courts, district courts, and a supreme court which the people trusted more than the British courts. On June 19th, the Dail approved the First Dail Loan to raise funds they couldn’t raise via taxes. Collins would also create a bond scheme which helped keep the Dail and the IRA financially afloat.

England declared the Dail illegal in September 1919, but it was too little too late to undermine Ireland’s shadow government. DeValera left Ireland to fundraise in the United States, leaving Griffith as his Deputy President. The conduct of the Dail fell to its ministers while the conduct of the war fell to Collins, Mulcahy, Brugha, and the field commanders.

BRIEF Summary of Guerrilla Warfare in Ireland

The IRA would be broken into General Headquarters (GHQ) and local commanders. GHQ was run by Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy who answered to Cathal Brugha, the Minister of Defense. Mulcahy also worked closely with Michael Collins, Minister of Finance and Intelligence and this amorphous command structure created a lot of tension amongst the three men. While Mulcahy tried to install discipline and standardization from GHQ, he was only partially successful as conditions on the ground often trumped whatever master plan GHQ had cooked up.

Richard Mulcahy

[Image description: A sepia toned photo of a thin white man with a prominent nose. He is wearing the military cap and uniform of the Irish National Army.]

It's estimated that the IRA had 15,000 members but only 3,000 were active at one time. The members were broken into three groups: unreliable, reliable, and active. Unreliable meant they were members in name only, reliable meant they played a supporting role, and active meant they were full-time fighters. It’s believed at least 1/5 of the active members were assistants and clerks. Skilled workers dominated the recruitment while farmers and agricultural workers were a minority. About 88% percent of the IRA members were under thirty and a majority of them were Catholics. The most active units were in Dublin County and Munster County which includes the cities of Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford.

The local units were supposed to be organized along the lines of a battalion but it was up to the local commanders, who were originally elected by their men. Initially, GHQ tried to assign two to three brigades to a county, but it would take a while before those brigades solidified. For the first year, the IRA could only muster small units, which actually worked in their favor.

Local commanders adopted the “flying columns” method of attack and GHQ eventually gave it their blessing. Flying columns consisted of a permanent roster of soldiers who worked together in small groups in coordinated attacks. The flying columns performed two kinds of attacks: auxiliary and independent

In an auxiliary attack, the flying column was assigned to a battalion as extra support for a large local operation already taking place. In an independent attack, the flying column itself would strike the enemy and retreat. This type of attack included harassing small military camps and police stations, pillaging enemy stories, interrupting communications, and eventually ambushes. The flying columns would become an elite and coveted unit but its soldiers were always on the run and relied on local support to survive.

Michael Collins

[Image description: A black and white photo of a white man shouting to a large crowd. He is standing outside on a platform, in the middle of a city street. He has short hair and is clean shaven. He is wearing a white shirt and a black suit.]

The IRA would go through two different reorganizations. The first occurred in March 1921. It broke up the brigade structure into small columns, built from experienced men. The brigade staff existed to provide supplier of arms, ammunition, and equipment while battalions provided the men for the columns. During the same reorganization, GHQ broke Ireland up into four different war zones to encourage activity in quieter areas.

In late 1921, the IRA was organized a second time. This time, GHQ created divisions. Division commanders were responsible for large swaths of territory, similar to the war zones created earlier that year. The purpose of the divisional commanders was to increase the likelihood of brigade and battalion coordination, make the IRA feel like it was growing into a real army, but still allowed (and encouraged) independent command, and transplant some of the administrative burden from GHQ to the divisional commanders. This was especially important if something were to happen to GHQ.

You can listen to season 1 to learn about specific battles. For the purpose of this recap, all you really need to know is that the IRA went from singular ambushes lead by ambitious local commanders to coordinated ambushes, assassinations (the most famous being Bloody Sunday carried out by Collins’ personal assassins), prison riots, hunger strikes, and outright assaults on barracks in the rural areas of Ireland. In addition to these military developments, the Dail supported the war effort by retaining the people’s support and maintaining the functionality of the Dail Courts and the Dail Loans.

The British responded by implementing martial law, launching large scale searches and arrests, curfews, roadblocks, and interment on suspicion and by creating the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. The Black and Tans arrived in Ireland on March 25th, 1920. They were meant to reinforce the RIC and recruited mostly British veterans. They were called black and tans because of their uniform (dark green which appeared black and khaki. They weren’t special forces, just normal reinforcements which may explain why they were known for their brutality and violence. The auxiliaries were founded in July 1920s as a paramilitary unit of the RICs. It consisted of British officers and were meant to serve as a mobile strike and raiding force. 2,300 men served during the war and they were deployed in the southern and western regions of Ireland – where fighting was the heaviest. They were absolute brutes, known for arson and cruelty.

The British wanted to subdue Ireland by the May 1921 election, so they sent over fifty-one battalions of infantry, however, confusion over the military’s role, the RIC’s role, an inability to coordinate amongst the army, RIC, Black and Tans, and Auxiliaries, and the implementation of martial law hurt British efforts.

The IRA were feeling the pressure. In early 1921, they suffered some of their most drastic defeats contributing to poor morale and disgruntlement with the Dail and GHQ. GHQ was losing control over local forces while also trying to maintain a guerrilla war on a shoestring budget. To make matters worse, DeValera returned from America in December 1920 and spent most of 1921 trying to reorganize the IRA and Dail according to his vision. His arrival exasperated already existing tensions amongst several ministers, including Collins, Mulcahy, and Brugha, and threatened to tear the IRA apart from the inside.

Cathal Brugha

[Image description: A sepia toned photo of a small and thin man in a military uniform and a white button down and stripped tie. He has short hair and is clean shaven. Behind him is a blank white wall.]

Despite all of this, by May 1921, the IRA had reached its peak and the crown forces suffered record losses. From the beginning of 1921 to July, the IRA killed 94 British soldiers and 223 police officers. This was nearly double the totals from the last six months of 1920. This was also when the IRA launched their most ambitious attacks such as their attack on the Shell factory which amounted to 88,000 pounds in damage and their assault on the Dublin Custom House destroying the inland revenue, stamp office, and stationery office records. In addition to these attacks, the IRA increased the number and sophistication of their attacks in what is now Northern Ireland. However, these attacks could be self-defeating as they only enraged the Ulster Volunteers and left the Catholic population at the mercy of angry Unionists. These attacks would convince the British that Ireland was already partitioned (even if Sinn Fein and the IRA refused to acknowledge the fact) and it was in their interest to protect Northern Ireland from IRA incursions. This meant another army and more money that could have been spent elsewhere.

It was clear that neither side could win this conflict through military efforts alone.

References:

The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence by Charles Townshend, 2014, Penguin Group

Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922by Ronan Fanning, 2013, Faber & Faber

Richard Mulcahy: From the Politics of War to the Politics of Peace, 1913-1924 by Padraig O Caoimh, 2018, Irish Academic Press

A Nation and Not a Rabble: the Irish Revolution 1913-1923by Diarmaid Ferriter, 2015, Profile Books

Eamon DeValera by Ronan Fanning, 2016, Harvard University Press

#Irish War of Independence #Irish History #Michael Collins #Richard Mulcahy #Irish Republican Army #IRA #Eamon Devalera #Cathal Brugha #Constance Markievcz #easter rising #history blog #queer historian #podcast episode #Spotify

[graceandfamily]

Princess Caroline of Monaco yawns broadly as she waits at doorway fo the residence of Irish President Eamon DeValera in Dublin while her parents, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier bid farewell to their hosts. Little Prince Albert finds it amusing. June 15, 1961.

#princess grace #prince rainier #princess caroline #prince albert #eamon devalera #1961

[thephoenixandthecrocodile]

Episode 62 - Electoral Pacts, Constitutions, and Kidnappings

Michael Collins takes a novel approach to avoiding civil war: election rigging and writing a constitution that will undermine the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The British Government prefers direct action against the anti-treaty IRA members who took the Four Courts and may have assassinated Field Marshall Wilson. Which option do you think seems more likely to avoid civil war? Support this podcast by…

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#1922 general election #Assassination of Field Marshall Wilson #beginning of the irish civil war #collins and devalera electoral pact #Eamon Dalton #Field Marshall Wilson #Four Courts #IRA #Ireland #irish civil war #Irish Constitution #Irish Republican Army #Kidnapping of Ginger O&039;Connell #lloyd george #Michael Collins #Richard Mulcahy

[gracie-bird]

FUNERAL OF EAMON DEVALERA.

Princess Grace of Monaco leaving the graveside after the ceremony in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Ireland, on September 2, 1975.

#grace kelly #princess grace #eamon de valera #eamon devalera #president devalera #ireland #dublin #glasnevin #1975 #veil

[reconstructionbaby]

wait does ANY irish person follow this blog? can i make civil war jokes?

#eamon devalera amirite??

[seashellronan]

May I interest u in a spicy Devalera meme in this trying times

i’m always up for eamon memes

[room4creation]

#for once my spotify discover weekly doesnt suck #music

[chromolume]

drag name

Eamon DeValera

[atheistcartoons]

The image is of Eamon DeValera, former president (1959-1973) and prime minister (1957-1959) of Ireland, genuflecting before the Catholic Archbishop McQuaid, who, according to Wikipedia, is “known for the unusual amount of influence he had over successive governments”.

Yesterday was the launch of the Atheist Ireland campaign to remove the blasphemy law from the Irish constitution. 

Here are Five Reasons To Vote Yes in the referendum on 26th October. 

Here is an open letter from 24 victims of blasphemy laws worldwide asking for a Yes vote. 

#blasphemy #Atheist Ireland #atheism #atheist #Ireland

[missymoo23]

He'll get the Holy Ghost, he'll spread it on toast

It's fucking Eamon De Valera and he's double dropping yokes!

[aoawarfare]

Episode 53 – The Provisional Government and the Anti-Treaty Side

What should have been a cause for celebration – the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ending 800 years of British dominance – was the final strike needed to shatter the Irish movement for liberation. Eamon DeValera, president of the Dail and leader of the Irish Republican movement, so incensed by the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, renounced his presidency and led a number of Dail members out in protest. Arthur Griffith was elected the new Dail President and seven days later, Michael Collins was named Chairman of the Provisional Government. Griffith and Collins, who spearheaded the efforts to negotiation the Anglo-Irish treaty, were now responsible for handling the transition from being a British colony to British dominion and prevent a civil war.

During the Dail debates, Collins described the Anglo-Irish Treaty as a “steppingstone” towards Irish independence. I would tweak that thought slightly by calling it a series of steppingstones, the first one being the creation of the Provisional Government of Ireland. What was the Provisional Government?  

 The Provisional Government was created by Article 17 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It was meant to be a temporary government to handle the transition from being purely a colonized nation to the Irish Free State. Once a constitution was passed, the Provisional Government would step down for the constitutionally sanctioned government of the Irish Free State. The Provisional Government would go through two different governments: the first government led by Collins lasted from January 14th until the June General Election, which elected the second government. This was led by William Cosgrave, Minister of Home Affairs, and ruled until the approval of the Irish Constitution on December 6th, 1922. Despite being created by the treaty, Britain did not actually confer any powers to the Provisional Government until April 1922. Additionally, the Provisional Government was supposed to be answerable to a House of the Parliament, but did not specify a specific parliament or even create one.  

The first Provisional Government consisted of the following members:

Michael Collins: Chairman

Eamonn Duggan: Minister for Home Affairs

W. T. Cosgrave: Minister for Local Government

Kevin O’Higgins: Minister for Economic Affairs

Fionan Lynch: Minister for Education

Patrick Hogan: Minister for Agriculture

Joseph McGrath: Minister for Labour

J. J. Walsh: Postmaster-General 

While Britain did not acknowledge the Dail as a legitimate form of government, Ireland was ruled by both the Provisional Government and the Dail. The Dail considered of a president, Arthur Griffith, and his own cabinet. The Provisional Government, technically, was not answerable to the Dail until a new election was called. This election would be held in June and took their oaths in September 1922. Still both sides worked closely together since many of their ministers served in both governments.

Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith

[Image Description: A picture of two white men in suits. The man on the left is leaning to the left. He is a white man with brown hair. He is wearing a white button down shirt and a black tie with small dots. he is wearing a dark grey vest and a light grey suit. The man on the right is sitting straight with his hand in his lap. He is white with brown hair, a thick brown mustache, and round, wire frame glasses. He is wearing a white, button down shirt, a light tie, and a dark suit with black lapels]

The dual government could create awkward situations such as when Richard Mulcahy, Minister of Defense in the Dail’s cabinet, had to “arrange” with the “Provisional Government to occupy for them all vacated military and police posts for the purpose of their maintenance and safeguarding”. While Mulcahy did not hold an official position within the Provisional Government, he attended many meetings to organize the country’s defense and deal with the schisming IRA. The British never understood this arrangement but were forced to accept it even though Churchill observed that it was “an anomaly unprecedented in the history of the British Empire” (Charles Townshend, The Republic, pg 386).

Florrie O’Donoghue, a Republican IRA member, described the dual government as a master-stroke by the pro-treaty side. The pro-treaty side used the continued existence of the Dail and Irish republicanism to distract people from the core dispute around the treaty all the while allowing the Provisional Government and National Army to strengthen its political and military power. He claimed that:

“if Dail Eireann had been extinguished by the vote on the Treaty the issue would have been much more clear-cut, and many of the subsequent efforts to maintain unity would have taken a different direction. Despite Republican hopes, time was on the side of the pro-treaty party” - Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green

P. S. O’Hegarty, however, felt that the provisional government was a disaster for the pro-treaty side, revealing a weak government eager to appease an intransigent opposition. Similarly, Griffith warned that a dual government would create chaos. What actually happened was that the Dail existed in name and basically merged with the Provisional Government by the time of the general election in June.

The National Army

The Provisional Government created the National Army on January 21st, 1922, even though legally it wouldn’t be formally recognized by the Irish Free State government until August 1923. The National Army structure was based on the British Army and it employed many men who had served In the British army to help with organization and discipline. However, it used the IRA ranks until January 1923, when they switched to a rank system that utilized by most armies. The National Army got most of its equipment, uniforms, and ammunition from the British Government. Once the treaty was signed the British government was invested in preserving the Provisional government. They even offered to send troops to help curb the civil war. About half of the National Army were half-trained troops thrown into counter-insurgency work. The army would have issues with discipline, human rights violations, and ill-discipline. Many in the National Army had combat experience, but little administration, training, and logistical experience. It wasn’t like the IRA could properly train or equipment their forces during the Irish War of Independence. However, core units, such as the Dublin Guard, proved themselves disciplined and effective military units.

Fionan Lynch and National Army Soldiers

[Image Description: A black and white photo of a group of white soldiers in grey military tunics and pants. They are standing on loose dirt and there is an old fashion truck behind them]

The first core unit of the National Army was the Dublin Guards, who were a mixture of IRA veterans loyal to Collins (many who came from the Squad, Collins’ assassins) and ex-Royal Dublin Fusiliers who are known for their brutality in Co. Kerry. Their commander, Brigadier Paddy Daly, who once served as officer commanding of the Squad, said, “nobody had asked me to take kid gloves to Kerry, so I didn’t.” (Diarmaid Ferriter, Between Two Hells, pg 24).

As the army grew, it relied on men with British army experience such as General W. R. E. Murphy, Major-General Dalton while Lt-General J.J. O’Connell and Major-General John Proust served in the US Army during WWI, which would create problems for Richard Mulcahy and William Cosgrave during and after the civil war.

The Provisional Government knew they couldn’t rely on the army to keep civil order, so they created the Civic Guards to replace the withdrawn British Army and RICs. They played a small roll in the civil war itself except for a mutiny later in 1922, which we’ll talk about in another episode.

Finally, the British withdrew all forces except for 5000 men under General Macready, who was there, Churchill claimed because:

“We shall certainly not be able to withdraw our troops from their present positions until we know that the Irish people are going to stand by the Treaty, neither shall we be able to refrain from stating the consequences which would follow the setting up of a Republic." - Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green

The British either sensing that civil war was imminent or simply being racist and assuming the Irish “couldn’t rule themselves” constantly pestered the Provisional Government to do a better job at governing. While they acknowledged that to interfere in Irish affairs before the Irish Free State was created would only exasperate things, they had no problem threatening the Provisional Government with the return of British forces whenever they didn’t respond as quickly as the British expected.

The British had some right to be concerned as the National Army was weak. It’s estimated that about 70% of the IRA disapproved of the Treaty, while others supported it simply because Collins said to. This left Mulcahy with the difficult task of keeping together a republican army that didn’t respect or acknowledge the powers of the provisional government and felt the Dail was being co-opted. We’ll get into this more in the next episode, but by February 1922, the Provisional Government was facing the unsettling truth that the National Army was in a race with the IRA to claim ownership of the abandoned British barracks and large swaths of the country.

The Provisional Government gained its first victory on January 16th, just two days after it’s creation, when Michael Collins took the keys for Dublin Castle from the British. For centuries Dublin Castle as served as a citadel for British forces and one of the most distinct symbols of British colonial rule. The fact that it was now in Irish hands was maybe the first true sign that Ireland was free of British control. The Times described the moment as follows: 

“All Dublin was agog with anticipation. From early morning a dense crowd collected outside the gloomy gates in Dame Street, though from the outside little can be seen of the Castle, and only a few privileged persons were permitted to enter its grim gates… [At half past 1] members of the Provisional Government went in a body to the Castle, where they were received by Lord FitzAlan, the Lord Lieutenant. Mr. Michael Collins produced a copy of the Treaty, on which the acceptance of its provisions by himself and his colleagues was endorsed. The existence and authority of the Provisional Government were then formally and officially acknowledged, and they were informed that the British Government would be immediately communicated with in order that the necessary steps might be taken for the transfer to the Provisional Government of the powers and machinery requisite for the discharge of its duties. The Lord Lieutenant congratulated … expressed the earnest hope that under their auspices the ideal of a happy, free, and prosperous Ireland would be attained… The proceedings were held in private, and lasted for 55 minutes, and at the conclusion the heads of the principal administrative departments were presented to the members of the Provisional Government.” - The Times, 17 January 1922 – Dublin Castle Handed Over, Irish Ministers in London Today, The King’s Message. 

Later that day, Collins would issue the following telegram: 

“The members of the Provisional Government of Ireland received the surrender of Dublin Castle at 1.45 p.m. today. It is now in the hands of the Irish nation. For the next few days the functions of the existing departments of the institution will be continued without in any way prejudicing future action. Members of the Provisional Government proceed to London immediately to meet the British Cabinet Committee to arrange for the various details of handing over. A statement will be issued by the Provisional Government tomorrow in regard to its intentions and policy." - Michael Collins, Chairman, The Times, 17 January 1922 – Dublin Castle Handed Over, Irish Ministers in London Today, The King’s Message.

As monumental as this victory was, it did little to ease the many issues facing the Provisional Government. They were responsible for

taking the executive from the British

maintaining public order during the transition

drafting a constitution

preparing a general election

preventing a civil war

Win over their furious, anti-treaty colleagues who refused to acknowledge the Provisional Government or the Dail as a legitimate government.

As much shit as the Provisional Government and later the Cosgrave Administration gets (and I will give because wow they make some terrible decisions), I think it can be easy to overlook what they were facing and how overwhelmed they must have been. Many of the members of the Provisional Government had either been violent rebels since 1916 or had been ministers in an illegal ministry risking arrest and death since 1916. They didn’t have any real government experience, they hadn’t dealt with any of their trauma, and the tools that had worked for them for the past few years are not necessarily the best tools when you’re trying to build a nation state.  

Kevin O'Higgins

[Image Description: A black and white picture of a white man with a a receding hairline and a high forehead. He is wearing a white button down shirt, a thin tie, and a black suit coat. Behind him is an out of focus tan building and black metal gate.]

Another thing to keep in mind, because this will be an undercurrent to the entire war, is the relationship between the IRA and the IRB and the Dail. In season one, I spent a lot of time analyzing the tension between Cathal Brugha’s civilian ministry of defense and Mulcahy and Collin’s more militant Squad and IRA as well as the limited control GHQ actually had over its own units. This culture of might makes right and violence is ok if Collins says it is, is one of the reasons the civil war occurs and will plague Ireland for a long time. It was up to the Provisional Government to handle this problem, but how can the Provisional Government do that when it’s run by Michael Collins, a bit of a strong man himself who never had issues with assassins, disappearances, and violent solutions to irritating problems.  

I find this quote from Kevin O’Higgins as capturing the feeling of the Provisional Government in 1922 both moving and enlightening: The Provisional Government was: 

“simply eight young men in the City Hall standing amongst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the keyhole” - Diarmund Ferriter, A Nation and Not a Rabble, pg 268

For the anti-treaty side, the acceptance of the treaty and the creation of the Provisional Government was nothing short of the very betrayal of everything they had fought for both in 1916 and during the Irish War of Independence. Worst, the anti-treaty side saw the Provisional Government co-opting the many institutions that were supposed to belong to the “Irish Republic” such as the Dail, Sinn Fein, and the Irish Republic Army. In an attempt to buy time to win over more people to the pro-treaty side and to work a compromise that would prevent civil war, Collins, during a Sinn Fein meeting, delayed the general election from February to June. On one hand, this could be seen as a pragmatic thing to do, especially if he feared he didn’t have the votes to uphold the treaty and he thought he could legitimately find a compromise that would satisfy everyone. However, many anti-treatyites saw this as election rigging. Mary MacSwiney ruefully wrote:  

“When Collins saw he had a majority against him…he put up the unity plea to stave off the vote.” - Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green

Many blamed DeValera for agreeing to this compromise. Katheen O’Connell, DeValera’s secretary, wrote of the meeting were the compromise took place:  

“The vast majority were Republicans. What a pity a decision wasn’t taken. We could start a new Republican Party clean. Delays are dangerous. Many may change before the Ard-Fheis meets again” - Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green

The thing was that no one wanted a civil war. Collins was desperate to prevent a military conflict and he believed that if he could craft a constitution before the next election, he could prove that the Treaty was only a steppingstone meant to placate the British. The constitution would be closer to a republican ideal. Similarly, DeValera, who even during the Irish War of Independence disliked guerilla warfare, wanted to avoid war. He believed he could use the next three months to win over the Provisional Government and tweak the treaty itself.

February 21, 1922 Sinn Fein meeting

[Image Description: A sepia toned photo of a gathering of mostly white men with a handfuil of white women. They are organized in three rows, the people in the front row are sitting, the people in the second and third row are standing. They are outside, in a park with bare branched trees.]

Sinn Fein fell apart shortly after the treaty was ratified and DeValera created his own party, Cumman na Poblachta. Despite wanting compromise, DeValera went on the offensive as he campaigned for the upcoming general election, claiming, on March 18th, 1922, that the IRA would have to “wade through Irish blood, the blood of the soldiers of the Irish Government, and, perhaps, the blood of some of the members of the Government” to achieve Irish freedom. (Charles Townshend, The Republic, pg 361)

The developing split wasn’t simply a matter of semantics or principles. This was a clear divide between those who were willing to work with what they managed to wrangle from the British and those who wanted to fight until all of their goals were achieved. These goals included complete separation from Britain, a return to a glorified Gaelic past, and an Irish republic, not a parliament that swore its loyalty to a British king. If the Provisional Government saw themselves as the protectors of Ireland’s future, the Anti-Treaty side saw themselves as the protectors of Ireland’s republican past. They draped themselves in the rhetoric and principles of Easter Rising, believed that the Dail under DeValera was the last legitimate government in Ireland, and that they alone had Ireland’s true interests as heart.  

I want to save the in depth discussion about the IRA’s feelings for the next episode, where we talk about the taking of barracks and the army convention, but the army’s growing disgruntlement and anger with everything political, its disrespect for the Dail and GHQ, and its firm belief it “won” the war and thus had a right to determine Ireland’s future, also played a huge role in sparking the civil war. The Irish Civil War was both a legitimate political argument but also a huge army mutiny.  

In his magnificent book, Vivid Faces, R. F. Foster explains the treaty split in class terms. He writes that one can see the Irish Civil War as a long brewing divide between those who were influenced by Catholic piety and social conservatism and pragmaticism against those who were ardently revolutionary and radical and socialist. Liam Mellows argued that:  

“We do not seek to make this country a materially great country at the expense of its honour. We would rather have this country poor and indigent, we would rather have the people of Ireland eking out a poor existence on the soil, as long as they possessed their souls, their minds, their honour” - R. F Foster, Vivid Faces, pg 282

Liam Mellows

[Image Description: A black and white photos of a white man with curly blonde hair that is shaped upwards. He has a faint mustache. He is wearing a white, collared, button down shirt with a black tie and a black suit. The wall behind him is grey]

This sounds great on paper, but how do you sell that to a people who have been colonized, gone through a world war, and spent the last few years in a guerilla war? Ireland had been economically, physically, socially, and culturally brutalized during the Irish War for Independence and it makes sense that while some people would want to fight until everything they desired was achieved, others simply wanted a break and a chance to recover and heal. But even healing was a matter of contention because what did healing really mean when you still had to take an oath of loyalty to your colonizer? When your national army is being armed by your former oppressor so you can fire on the disgruntled members of your own society? When your island is split in two and the only way to unite it is still through violent intervention? When so many of the heady promises made during the revolutionary period are put aside for more practical concerns?

 I would add that there is something that happens when people are presented with the opportunity to form a state. We saw this in our Season 2, Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. The minute the Jadids, Alash Orda, Soviets, and others were given the chance to form their own definition of their boundaries and identities, is the moment we see this idea of “us” vs “them” and the “other” form as well as the concept of elites who control political and economic power.The Treaty shifted the debate that was occurring in Ireland during the Irish War for Independence. No longer were the IRA fighting a guerrilla war that they could lose at any moment and they needed lofty ideals such as a Republic and a Free Gaelic Ireland. Or an Ireland cleansed of all British influence. The Treaty gave the people of Ireland a real tangible chance to build something and that changed a lot of desires, hopes, and plans for a lot of people.          

Mary MacSwiney

[Image Description: A black and white picture of a white woman wearing a simple, black, long sleeved dress. Her wavy, brown hair is pulled back into a bun. Behind her is a grey wall]

The anti-treaty side were not wild people who wanted to destroy simply to destroy. The split tore them apart. Many simply couldn’t understand how their comrades could give up on their republican dreams so easily. Many anti-treatyites wrote to their pro-treaty friends, begging them to support the Republic. Mary MacSwiney, one of the most vehemently anti-treaty women, wrote to none other than Richard Mulcahy, claiming:  

“No matter what good things are in the Treaty, are they worth all this unhappiness, Dick? Do you not realize we hold the Republic as a living faith – a spiritual reality stronger than any material benefits you can offer – cannot give it up. It is not we who have changed it is you.” - R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces, pg 280

Formerly close family members found themselves bitterest of enemies. For example, the Ryans family found themselves torn apart as Min, Mulcahy’s wife, along with Agnes and Denis McCullough supported the treaty, while their siblings Phyllis, Chris, Nell, and James and Mary Kate were against it. Some would spend time in jail and even go on hunger strike while Mulcahy was minister of defense. He would refuse to release them or give into their demands during the war. Phyllis at one point told Min to leave Mulcahy, but Min refused.            

The treaty nearly ruined Mabel and Desmond Fitzgerald’s marriage and shattered friendships, the most famous being Michael Collins and Harry Boland. Others, like Liam Lynch, bent themselves into pretzels trying to find a way to avoid a split. Both sides appealed to the Catholic Church to support their side as they grew closer and closer to war.            

Others couldn’t find it in themselves to blame their comrades and turned their anger on the British, Protestants, and the “other”. Muriel MacSwiney, wife to Terence, wrote to Mulcahy, stating:

“I don’t feel anything against anybody but England for what has happened…Although I think this treaty is by a long way the greatest infamy that the enemy has ever perpetrated on us & I will always oppose it or anything like it I feel nothing against any Irishman; the whole weight of my venom is directed against the English people…I shall spend my life not, as up to this, working for the complete independence of Ireland’s Republic, but also working for the destruction & downfall of England & of every single English person I come across. The English people are to me now a plague of moral lepers. - R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces, pg. 280

Finally, I would argue that trauma played a huge role in the split. You simply can’t take a majority of young men and women who have spent the last few years fighting to survive and tell them use this new political process to register your disagreements with this government that we’re building on the fly. The sense of betrayal – on both sides – was very real and very vivid and there wasn’t any mechanism to deal with it.

For the Provisional Government, they couldn’t believe their comrades were willing to risk their very state over something as “miniscule” as an oath. The hatred of the treaty and the government that would follow must have also felt quite personal since so many former members of DeValera’s government transferred to the Provisional Government. All of a sudden they weren’t trusted to lead Ireland into a liberated future.

For the anti-treaty, apparently everything they fought for was a lie and the comrades they thought they could trust were traitors to the very idea of an Irish Republic. Old, festering personal clashes rose to the surface with sudden ferocity, because the treaty released the pressure of war.

All these the differences and issues that had been developed during the Irish War of Independence could be ignored as long as survival was paramount. But now that the war was over, the pressure that kept all that shit down, was gone, and the world isn’t better. In fact, it looks like it’s either going to be more of the same or a compromised reality which doesn’t really justify all the shit you went through to get to this point.

It’s like when you’re working on your own trauma and you dive really deep and you accidentally ram into a deep, dark trauma and now it’s out and all these emotions your brain was protecting you from, rises to the surface and so now you’re a swirl tornado of emotions with no tools to handle it and nothing seems to help.  The biggest tragedy is that both sides tried so hard to avoid war, but it wasn’t enough. The sense of betrayal was too strong and the promised achievements of the treaty were too minuscule.  

References 

The Republic by Charles Townshend 

Between Two Hells by Diarmaid Ferriter 

Vivid Faces by R. F. Foster 

Irish Civil War 1922-23 by Peter Cottrell 

Richard Mulcahy: From the Politics of War to the Politics of Peace, 1913-1924 by Padraig O Caoimh 

Eamon De Valera: a Will to Power by Ronan Fanning 

Green Against Green by Michael Hopkinson

#irish history #irish civil war #anglo-irish treaty #michael collins #richard mulcahy #eamon devalera #Kevin O'Higgins #W. T. Cosgrave #queer historian #queer podcaster #Spotify

[nationaltreasuresireland]

"Eamon DeValera Presidential Campaign Election Poster. An original election poster published by John S. O'Connor and produced by Bray Printing for the 1916 Rising Leader and President from 1959 to 1973" Thanks to Neil Murphy Add you object to the story of modern Ireland by visiting http://ift.tt/2AmGJjK — view on Instagram http://ift.tt/2kkYgoN

#Instagram #IFTTT

[jeanreinhardt]

A view of the West Wing.

Not many doors remained open.

This week’s Thursday Doors tour of Cork City Gaol features some interesting characters, such as these two warders playing cards while they are off-duty. In those days a warder, along with his wife and children, would have all lived in this one room. It might have been okay as a bedsit but it was certainly a tight squeeze for a family.

I bumped into the prison doctor as I left the West Wing but he didn’t have time to stop for a chat. He was on his way to attend a sick prisoner. One of the warders was escorting him.

Doctor Beamish spent many years tending sick prisoners in the city gaol. By all accounts, he was underpaid and overworked, treating everything from minor infections and fevers to small pox, typhus and even malaria at one time. An outbreak involving almost 1,000 cases occurred in Cork in the mid 1800’s. It was believed that infected soldiers brought it back when they returned from the Crimean War and it was transmitted by local mosquito populations.

One famous person to have been incarcerated in Cork Gaol was Countess Constance Markievicz, known as the ‘Rebel Countess’ here in Ireland.

  She was passionate about equality and women’s rights and was dismayed at the great disparity between rich and poor in Irish society. This was in spite of her being born into a family of landed gentry and having lived a privileged life on their extensive estate, ‘Lissadell’ in Sligo. The Countess set up food kitchens for the poor, assisted in their education and rescued children from the slums in which so many lived. She went to great lengths to ensure those children had clean clothes and food on their plates every day.

Constance also supported Jim Larkin in the Labour movement against the exploitation of workers. When James Connolly founded the Irish Citizens Army to defend workers against police brutality Constance was among the first of his supporters. She later became an officer in the Irish Citizens Army.

During the Easter Rising of 1916, the Countess was second in command under Michael Mallin and proved fearless under fire, fighting alongside the men. After their defeat, Constance Markievicz marched at the head of her company. She was tried for treason to the Crown and sentenced to death. However, this was commuted because she was a woman and she resented being discriminated against because of her sex. All of the other male leaders of the rising were executed, except for Eamon deValera, who was spared because he was an American citizen. Over the next seven years the Countess was incarcerated for various lengths of time in quite a few prisons in the UK and Ireland, one of which was Cork City Gaol.

It was during her stay in Holloway that Constance Markievicz became a Sinn Féin candidate and the first woman ever to be elected to British parliament. She refused to take her seat, as was the party policy at the time. After her release in 1919 she became a member of the first Dáil Éireann as minister for Labour.

The Rebel Countess died at the age of 59 on 15th July 1927, of complications related to appendicitis. She had given away the last of her wealth and died among the poor in a public ward of a Dublin hospital.

Last week I posted this photo of a prisoner’s clothes outside his cell door. The reason they were there was because he had been caught trying to escape. When a prisoner did this, all of his clothes were taken from him at night to prevent any more attempts at absconding. The thinking was that he would not be so quick to do so if he was stark naked. Pretty chilly punishment at any time of year in an Irish prison.

I’ll be posting the last of the photos from Cork City Gaol in next week’s Thursday Doors. Thanks for stopping by and if you take a trip over to Norm’s blog you’ll find a great selection of international doors waiting for you.

Thursday Doors This week's Thursday Doors tour of Cork City Gaol features some interesting characters, such as these two warders playing cards while they are off-duty.

#Cork City Gaol #Countess Markievicz #irish history #ThursdayDoors

[johnwaterslookslike]

(Source)

#Eamon DeValera #Ming the Merciless #John Waters

[youbaroquemyworld]

It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Michael Collins and it will be recorded at my expense.

 - Eamon de Valera, President of Ireland. 1966

#Michael Collins #Eamon DeValera #Ireland #Irish History

[thebarrykeating-blog]

I fucking hate quants...

Thousands of years ago, before the Iphone, before the Romans, back in a time where you had to hunt for your own food and marry your cousin because there was nobody else around, mankind worshiped the sun. It gave us light to help us in our day, went to bed so we could too, it brought nutrients to the things around us so we could use them as food, it was the bringer of life to the planet. We worshiped our sun gods with might and gusto and were at their complete mercy. We would sacrifice each other in the hope of appeasing them so we could have a good harvest so we could continue to survive and prosper. But as mankind progressed, so did our demands from our gods. We became more inquisitive and began asking questions for which our sun gods could not answer, because they could not talk. Our gods were unable to fulfill our demands so we got new ones.

We moved to ones that could talk to us, the idea of an all powerful sentient being like ourselves who could give us a purpose and some perspective on this world that we knew little about, but desperate to learn. With this brought the constructed formulation of morality, direction and social order. We believed that these gods were the all powerful bringer of life and must do whatever we can to appease them. But after thousands of years and even more thousands of gods, mankind is at a changing point once again. Once again we have progressed to stage where our gods are not meeting our demands and we are asking questions for which they can not answer. Our strive for knowledge has brought us to an understanding of the universe to the point where our gods are out of fashion and we go searching for the answers ourselves in the form of science. Now our religious beliefs are coming full circle, and we begin to realise that we had it right in the first place. The sun was the all powerful bringer of life to the planet, and it was our own selfish desires that had driven us away from that.

We wanted more. We wanted to feel more important. We wanted not to be afraid, so we followed something that said it had the answers, when realistically it didn't. It made us feel good, but it was all false hope. This cost us dearly, we lost some good men along the way, Galileo for example, and kept tripping ourselves up on our run forward. For all the progress and understanding we have achieved, how could we expect ourselves to understand the meaning of life when we couldn't understand something as simple as what creates it in the first place. We were going in the wrong direction. 

There is a quote in history that I feel has reflected some of the most dangerous developments in our existence. It was by Eamon DeValera on the Catholic church in Ireland, and was that "the majority have no right to be wrong". I learned that quote in 6th year History, and is something that has stuck with me since. It's a dangerous philosophy to believe in because if going by our understanding of the sun as a species as one example, the majority have every right to be wrong. Maybe it's because we are the most dominant creature on the planet that we are so egocentric, but mankind has a sense of infallibility to what we know and realistically have always felt that majority has no right to be wrong. 

But to go against all our hopes and beliefs, we are not that knowing, we are not always right, and we are not all that important. We are but specs on a rock floating through space in a universe that was not created to serve us. What we want and what is right in this life can be two contradictory things, and no matter how easy or comforting its is, living in that blissful place of ignorance will hold mankind back again. The late Carl Sagan expressed it perfectly when he said that "the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition" and that "it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring". 

Essentially, there are things in this life which we hate, but because we disagree with them doesn't make them wrong. We are not the deciders of facts in this universe, we must merely be reactive to them. This sometimes means doing the things which we hate, but unfortunately they must be done.And even though I have spent the guts of the last hour writing this, analyzing mankind's history and belittling every religion that ever existed, to be honest it all boils down to this one key development.....

This whole thing has just been one long complicated way of motivating myself to do a horrible quantitative research project for college.

Fuck you universe, I don't want to do it....

#Carl sagan #the universe #god #existence #eamon devalera #life #the meaning of life #college work #the sun #atheism