Irish Political Prisoners 1920-1962

Pilgrimage of Desolation

Sean McConville

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367697242
• eBook ISBN: 9781000082746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Irish Political Prisoners presents a detailed and gripping overview of political imprisonment from 1920-1962. Seán McConville examines the years from the formation of the Northern Ireland state to the release of the last border campaign prisoners in 1962.

Drawing extensively and, in many cases, uniquely on archives and special collections in the three jurisdictions, and interviews with survivors from the period, McConville demonstrates how punishment came to embody and shape the nationalist consciousness. Irish Political Prisoners 1920-1962 commences with the legacy of the Anglo Irish and Irish Civil Wars - militancy, division and bitterness. The book travels from the embedding of Northern Ireland's security agenda in the 1920's, and the IRA's search for a role in the 1930's (including the 1939 bombing campaign against Britain) to the decisive use of internment during the war and the border campaign years. This volume will be an essential resource for students of Irish history and is a major contribution to the study of imprisonment.

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1
LOYALTIES

Britain and Ireland

Blea landscape, troubled times

A hard, bitter and imperfect peace began on 11 November 1918 as the echo faded of the Great War’s last shot. Lesser wars continued in the Baltic, Russia, Asia Minor, the Middle East and Ireland. Boundary changes and a clutch of new states altered maps and political balances and stirred new passions. The foundations of the world financial system had been undermined. European economies were prostrate; the Treasury of the United States of America could scarcely contain its vast reserves of bullion.¹ Revolution had shattered tsarist Russia and was the spectre that stalked central Europe. The most perspicacious strained to see ahead. The major conflict had lasted for fifty-one months; it was to be as long again before an uneasy and profoundly insecure armistice took hold across the Continent and its offshore islands.² Some of the post-war conflicts were social: working-class risings inspired by Marxist, anarchist or socialist doctrine; crumbling and discredited ruling classes and castes were swept aside, with others yet to triumph and consolidate. Authority was elusive in substance and frequently experimental in form. Blood was spilled for language and ethnicity, for irredentist or expansionist opportunities, and in a quest for safety in the unfamiliar and dangerous landscape emerging from the debris of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. Struggles based on language and ethnicity were shot through and stiffened by religious confrontations: Christian against Muslim, Protestant against Catholic, Catholic against Orthodox, and a growing temper of anti-Semitism. Dragon’s teeth were sown aplenty, fed and watered well and promised an early and bountiful harvest.

That place, blood, belief and language will fuel murderous conflicts is now a notion of domestic familiarity, headlines more tedious than shocking. Is it insecurity that leads communities to abandon neighbourliness, the routines and rewards of a peaceful and settled life — humanity itself — and take the awful plunge into violence? Must that violence, once loosed, fuel a chain reaction that endures and taints the generations? Is a longing for ‘freedom’ so devouring that it places this or that form of government, culture, people or language so far above another that deeds of depraved cruelty and violence are rationalised, excused and even glorified? By some appalling alchemy does simple distrust mutate into hatred of the different that drives a war of religion or language? Is the perennial longing and fighting lust of young men a force in itself or merely potential, an instrument in the orchestra of malignity?

There was much to be taken, freely or at little cost, in the weeks, months and years following the 11 November armistice of 1918. Exclusion multiplies opportunity for the victorious: homes become vacant, employment and promotion available. When in the 1940s European Jews were finally driven out for slaughter, their stolen property was minutely recorded, carefully stored and recycled to reward the regime’s supporters. Those occupying the vacated houses and apartments, filling the jobs and taking the promotions, those behind the directors’ desks of the workshops and factories seized from the outcasts, those who took their time from another’s watch: each had opportunity, comfort and good fortune to still conscience and to keep prejudice and hatred warm. All of this had been enacted on a smaller scale twenty years before.

But these mass movements transcend mere avarice. In whatever combination of malign and benign, men and women cannot be induced to step outside the customary and domestic round, to smother conscience and the instincts of pity and decency, to risk all, indeed, simply for material gain. National and religious movements channel the energies of many idealists and make devotees and disciples of those who seek a new dimension in their lives, who wish to be of service, to partake of transcendent forms of passion and joy, to be significant. This psycho-spiritual longing is the extra charge that makes so many conflicts truly ferocious. The grabbing of land, property and jobs has some boundaries of risk, some calculation of cost and benefit; the sordid and the selfish have human dimensions: there are only so many hours in the day for consumption, and most appetites can be sated. The transcendent cause and spiritual plunge are dangerously without calculation and seem to have no boundaries. There is a repulsive inhumanity in these quests for the perfect — and yet they are inseparable from our condition. Joy in death and delight in anticipation would seem perverse and over-imagined were it not for the astonishing fact that we now hear of them on a daily basis.

Ireland and Britain provide examples of many of these phenomena in the aftermath of the First World War. Victorious, the British Empire had been destroyed.³ Carnage so vast inevitably subjects institutions of authority to question and challenge. This cultural, social and industrial turbulence of the inter-war decades is well documented.⁴ The Anglo-Irish struggle finds its context here. Between a great swathe of nationalist, Catholic Ireland and Britain a fierce and brutal war raged between 1919 and 1921, in its causes and conduct part spiritual, part political and part material. Waged by peoples long intermingled and interconnected, it had the qualities of disillusionment and bitter shards of emotion of a shattered family. A ceasefire in July 1921 found fruition in a hard-negotiated Treaty the following December. Neither party was fully satisfied: the document was a thing of thin politeness, strained beliefs and only half substantial; the negotiators had cared far too little about reconciliation. The Irish secured independence, but it was hedged about, denied burnish and glory, was not generously given, and did not extend to the whole of the island.⁵ A part of the Empire’s mother-country had been torn away, and Britain faced a new neighbour, alive with deeds and rumours of republicanism. Imaginative generosity was needed from both sides, but the wars had dried up the springs. And there was a fatal triangle. Ulster unionism, which had watched, deplored and feared the long negotiations and ambiguous agreement of the other two, now faced many deadly uncertainties.

In those three states — Britain, the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland — the events of the First World War, the complex Anglo-Irish relationship and the several years of armed struggle in Ireland, had thrown loyalties up in the air. They had fallen hither and yon, new patterns replacing the old. Their working out would shape Irish history for the rest of the century, eventually returning Irish issues to the heart of British politics.

Britain: the reluctant midwife

Surviving a trauma, individuals and institutions often seek the comfort of familiar and now deeply cherished pathways. Never dominant, this current cut a path through inter-war political, social and cultural life; grievous loss vented in nostalgic longings. And yet with the losses and changes came possibilities which had to be evaluated, lived with, seized and exploited. Nor was this a period of change for which other great peace-tides provided a guide. The Paris Peace Conference was no Congress of Vienna. No obvious balances and bulwarks had been established. Punishing, draining and humiliating Germany would have seemed both vulgar and dangerous to a modern Castlereagh. Such cautionary voices were raised unheeded. The now-shattered frontiers of the old Europe were perhaps the least important changes. The fierce certainties of nationalism and ideology almost immediately began to whirl about and gather the storm that would renew Europe’s unfinished war.

Following a convulsion of such proportions, the term ‘victory’ must be empty, misleading and, ultimately, mocking. Britain’s endurance, its survival, had cost almost a million men, three-quarters of whom were from the UK. The war memorials are widely distributed. In great city centres, tiny villages and institutions as varied as churches, cathedrals, gentlemen’s clubs, schools, universities, factories, offices and railway stations, they are so commonplace that we fail to see them. The death of youth on such a scale, the living reminders provided by the several million maimed and afflicted survivors, and the anguish of the bereaved ensured that, directly or indirectly, the war ate at the heart of all but the most isolated and insulated. The joy of peace, its profound relief, found expression in those public outpourings that still flicker and jerk in old movie newsreels. But after the Bacchanal came anger and cynicism, powerful solvents of the politics of pomp, presumption and grand gesture, it is true, but also of national confidence and ease.

Britain was deeply in the red. The National Debt had risen to fourteen times its pre-war level, and its servicing ate up nearly half the taxation take. Fiscal concern and the international financial order dominated policy discussions. Owing the USA £850 million, Britain was unable to collect the large sums due from other wartime allies. There was a pervasive sense of skating on very thin ice: frugality and retrenchment seemed inescapable. Within two years of the armistice, restrictions in government expenditure combined with severe market downturns, unemployment and a rise in left-wing ideology in the labour movement to corrode workplace relations. The miners faced a lockout from April 1921 and were beaten back to work three months later with nothing gained. Humiliation bred hatred, and class warfare released more toxins.

British political possibilities seemed changed with the election of December 1918. A nominal Liberal, David Lloyd George, still bestrode the political landscape. His stature as wartime prime minister, his absolute conviction in his own indispensability and his need to continue in a coalition ministry fed disarray among his party colleagues and helped destroy the old Liberal Party. This rout was almost as comprehensive as that of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.⁶ The Liberal—Irish alliance, which had dominated Anglo-Irish affairs for half a century and more, simply evaporated. Sinn Féin’s refusal to sit at Westminster meant that the unionist and imperialist outlook achieved an overwhelming parliamentary dominance.

Lloyd George’s desire to continue as national leader required him to placate the Conservative and Unionist Party, now riding the political tide. Coalition Liberals were very junior partners in what was an alliance, but no longer a partnership. In the improbable event that Lloyd George wished to reconstruct Liberalism and make an alliance with Labour, the Conservative majority would have remained at an unshakeable 120 seats. Had Sinn Féin sacrificed its dearest principles — its raison d’être — and come to Westminster to join an anti-Conservative alliance, it would have counted for little: Conservatives would have retained an overall majority of around fifty. But this was the stuff of a disordered political imagination. Convinced that almost alone he had the ability and authority to make the peace and establish a new order among the nations, Lloyd George continued to lead the government, to display tactical virtuosity, and to hope for who knows what kind of political deliverance.⁷

British foreign policy was dominated by the need to reach an agreement with the defeated but unstable and still dangerous Germany, to restrain France, to deal with American plans for peace and reconstruction, to combat Bolshevism and to find productive relations with the new nations of central Europe. No one in the leadership thought it possible or even worthwhile to attempt to synchronise foreign and monetary policy. Maintenance of the Empire was an axiom. It was unthinkable in the immediate aftermath of a war in which it had so desperately and narrowly prevailed, that Britain should join the defeated empires which were stripped of possessions. The ruin and pathos of the vanquished hardened feelings against any change in the make-up of the UK; an obligation to honour the sacrifices of the dead and maimed meant loyalty to the Empire.

By war’s end, the Irish insurgency which had begun in 1916 was again boiling up. The awful years of terror and counter-terror, of murders, ambushes, executions, retaliations, atrocities of all kinds, arson, intimidation, a gendarmerie and soldiery amok and a population conscripted for subversion, all drained the cup of human feeling between the two nations and their leaderships. Beset with difficulties on all sides, struggling to find a place in a world in which the tremors of shifting foundations were frequently felt, Lloyd George and his colleagues worked out an agreement with the rebellious Irish.

This peace had been snatched from seemingly irresolvable disagreements by means of Lloyd George’s deftness and lack of scruple. In an act of political philandering, Carson and Craig, Collins and Griffith had been courted and made quite different and irreconcilable promises. In Ireland, personalities (living and dead), utopianism, elements of nihilism and revolutionary metaphysics then fuelled a civil war. From Westminster, the view was sombre and deeply unsettling: the Irish were at it again. But although British intervention was talked about, there was a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Reading paths
• List of abbreviations
• Author’s note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Loyalties: Britain and Ireland
• 2 Northern Ireland: ourselves alone
• 3 Closing the books: Britain and Ireland, 1920–6
• 4 An instrument of war: Free State prisoners, 1922–4
• 5 Women in prison
• 6 The inter-war years in the South
• 7 Northern Ireland: internment in the 1920s
• 8 Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: the inter-war years
• 9 The 1939–40 bombing campaign
• 10 Internees in Northern Ireland, 1939–45
• 11 Imprisonment in Northern Ireland, 1939–48
• 12 A world at war: guarding the Irish state
• 13 Imprisonment and internment in Éire, 1939–48
• 14 The Border Campaign, 1953–62
• 15 Convicted prisoners in Northern Ireland and England, 1954–62
• 16 Northern Ireland: internment, December 1956–April 1961
• 17 Be careful what you wish: the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s
• 18 Internment in the Republic of Ireland: July 1957–March 1959
• 19 The desolated shrine
• Bibliography
• Index