Combatants and Civilians in Revolutionary Ireland, 1918-1923

Thomas Earls FitzGerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This book is based on original research into intimidation and violence directed at civilians by combatants during the revolutionary period in Ireland, considering this from the perspectives of the British, the Free State and the IRA.

The book combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, and focusses on County Kerry, which saw high levels of violence. It demonstrates that violence and intimidation against civilians was more common than clashes between combatants and that the upsurge in violence in 1920 was a result of the deployment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, particularly in the autumn and winter of that year. Despite the limited threat posed by the IRA, the British forces engaged in unprecedented and unprovoked violence against civilians. This study stresses the increasing brutality of the subsequent violence by both sides. The book shows how the British had similar methods and views as contemporary counter-revolutionary groups in Europe.

IRA violence, however, was, in part, an attempt to impose homogeneity as, beneath the Irish republican narrative of popular approval, there lay a recognition that universal backing was never in fact present.

The book is important reading for students and scholars of the Irish revolution, the social history of Ireland and inter-war European violence.

1 Fond memories, location and hostility

The role of civilians in republican testimony, 1918–23¹

Introduction

Due to the political upheavals following the First World War, much of Europe experienced a rise in inter-state and revolutionary violence. As opposed to the regular armies that, by and large, had previously defined most wars these new conflicts saw the emergence of non-professional politically motivated paramilitaries. A defining aspect of these new armed groups was that the battle lines between combatant and civilian were blurred, if not, at times, indistinguishable. This was due to factors such as the lack of standardised uniforms and their often unofficial or non-state-sanctioned role. Historian Julie Eichenberg writes that ‘violence after the end of the First World War marked a break in the relations between civil society and military formations, eroding the usual dichotomy between combatants and civilians’.² The IRA emerged from rural and urban communities across Ireland, and operated from within the civilian population. They largely continued to wear civilian clothing, distinguishing them from regular state soldiers. But importantly, in much of the available testimony, the IRA viewed themselves as the natural revolutionary expression, or even simply as the expression, of the majority of the people of Ireland.

Tom Barry, from West Cork, the most successful IRA field commander of the 1919–21 conflict and the subsequent 1922–23 civil war, in 1949 wrote the most enduring and popular account of the time period from 1919 to 1921 in Guerrilla days in Ireland. His narrative presents West Cork as an unjust and divided society. He wrote that ‘the large majority of the people had a hard struggle for existence’ living on poor land, while the descendants of the Protestant settlers of the plantations lived on the fertile land. ‘In 1919 the “big house” near all the towns was a feature of first importance in the lives of the people. In it lived the leading British loyalist, secure and affluent’. Other smaller Protestant farmers had ‘a privileged position upheld by British domination, and it was their mission in life to see that their privileged and aloof status was maintained’. Barry also recognised co-religionist opponents as being a ‘small number of the bigger merchants and strong farmers’, who, ‘although catholic in religion, aspired to become members of the loyalist society through motives of snobbery or gain. They were strong in wealth and not in numbers’. Against the British army and their civilian supporters ‘were three quarters of the people of west Cork… From these people sprang the Irish Republican Army’.³

According to Barry, the 1919–21 conflict was not simply a war of national liberation but a conflict in which the IRA as a natural expression of the poor ‘majority’ of the nation were in rebellion against Britain and a rich elite minority. Barry also characterised the IRA as being the protectors of the people.⁴ John Horne and Robert Gewarth have noted that a defining aspect of the new paramilitary groups that emerged in the wake of the First World War was their self-definition as ‘political soldiers’, driven by political allegiance but apart from the regular population.⁵ The IRA also regarded themselves as being separate from civilians, like a type of benevolent guardian. Tellingly, the West Cork IRA characterised the arms levy they imposed on the local population as necessary for the people’s ‘protection’.⁶

Barry also, importantly, argues that the IRA did not have universal backing of the civilian population. Barry stresses that the IRA’s political identity was not shared by the pro-British and the wealthier sections of the population. Barry’s narrative effectively states that the IRA were fighting a type of social conflict for a more just society rather than it being a simple British versus Irish conflict. Sentiments like these are common themes in the memories of IRA men.

Sean Moylan, leader of the North Cork flying column, was equally adamant that it was, indeed, the rural poor who supported the IRA’s campaign. Moylan, in his extended statement to the Bureau of Military History, described the type of people who harboured the IRA:

In the evening we arrived at the district where we had proposed to halt for a few hours, bleak, cold, bare, unfruitful land: ugly, small and ill kept houses. Here was the submerged tenth of the Irish farming community. Here for one who loved his fellow man was one incentive to revolution. These were the people to whom Kickham’s sympathy went out. They sheltered Doheny and the Fenians. They were those for whom Davitt planned and worked and suffered: for them, too, as for the town labourer Connolly died. ‘To hell or Connaught’, but not the whole Gaelic race crossed the Shannon. Within the limits of their poor resources they fed and cared for the fighting men.⁷

In citing former Irish leaders who struggled for social change as much as political autonomy, Moylan skilfully equates the IRA of 1919–21 with older social struggles and shows that he is in agreement with Barry’s account that the IRA’s revolution was as much for a new society as for a free Ireland.

Like Barry, Moylan was equally strident in his views on those civilians who did not support the IRA. In the spring of 1922, Moylan said, ‘there were some people who did not stand by us the last time and they would not be forgotten’. Moylan also declared that the IRA would ‘give a call to the fine fat Unionists with fine fat cows. The domestic enemy was the most dangerous, and they would have to start fighting him now’.⁸

The political identity of post-First World War paramilitaries was firmly either right or left, with Barry and Moylan identifying vaguely with the latter. The issues of identification with social issues will be returned to, but, interestingly, the IRA veterans when discussing the 1919–21 conflict would largely make broader statements of being in communion with the whole nation rather than sections of it. In the civil war the leadership of the anti-Treaty movement seemed to have recognised a loss of universal backing. At the close of the civil war in 1923 Eamon de Valera told the IRA that the people ‘are weary and need a rest’, and republicans should understand that the war-weary people would eventually come back to their cause, suggesting the IRA had previously held the love of the people.⁹

On the flip side the IRA leaders were also often contemptuous and dismissive of civilians, as when IRA commander Ernie O’Malley proudly stated that ‘we… never consulted the feelings of the people’.¹⁰ And this is essentially the crux of this chapter: did the IRA consider themselves as representative benevolent guardians of a nation who loyally supported them or were they paramilitaries driven by a desire to achieve their aims at any cost?

Fond memories

How did other Volunteers rate the civilian community? The leadership of the movement in December 1920 emphatically claimed, ‘we have the ardent goodwill of the population’.¹¹ Some IRA men later also certainly believed this to be the case. Séan Ó Faoláin, a Cork city short story writer and IRA veteran, wrote that ‘they [the IRA] could not, it must be said, have done anything without the silence, patience, and loyal help of the whole people’.¹²

It is not difficult to see similar patterns emerging in the testimony from IRA veterans from Kerry. Patrick Sheehan of Ardfert, in the north-west of the county, recalled that most people gave money to the republican cause.

I, with other members of the Company, took part in collecting for the Dáil Éireann loan. The people of the area subscribed very generously: they, for the most part, were by now strong supporters of Sinn Féin and the IRA generally.¹³

John Joe Rice, from Kenmare, felt that ‘when the flying columns were formed, the nation was solidly united in support of the IRA’¹⁴ Jeremiah Murphy, from Rathmore in East Kerry on the border with Cork, recalled that ‘it was good fighting country and the loyalty of the people was never in doubt’.¹⁵ Dan Keating, from Castlemaine but active in the Tralee IRA, and the last surviving veteran of the period and a lifelong republican, recalled that across Kerry:

They were great, the local pe...