The Troubles 1916-21

The impact of the 1916 Rising on the Irish political landscape is best summed by the poet W. B. Yeats in the words; "all changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty was born". Prior to the events of Easter 1916 the organisers were not taken seriously by the British authorities, who were pre-occupied by the Great War, or by the majority of the Irish people.

For two years the Home Rule Act was on ice, set to come into effect when the First World War ended. For the first time in centuries Ireland was about to have some form of self-determination. Many Irishmen joined the British Army and when in 1915 some were awarded the Victoria Cross it was a cause for national celebration.

There were those who regarded England’s difficulty as Ireland’s opportunity and at a time when the extreme tradition of Irish patriotism was almost a distant memory there were those who regarded Home Rule as a sell-out. Men like Tom Clarke, a Dublin tobacconist who spent fifteen years in jail for an attempted bombing campaign in Britain, were members of the Irish Volunteers who refused to support the British war effort.

For poet and schoolmaster Padraig Pearse, a blood sacrifice was an obsession. Trade Union organiser and socialist James Connolly was set on armed action and put the ‘Irish Citizen Army’, originally formed to protect workers from police during the labour struggles, at the disposal of the rebels.

The would be insurgents used the funeral of the old republican Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915 as a litmus test of their organisational abilities and at the graveside Pearse delivered the oration which contained the rallying cry: ‘The Fools! The Fools! The Fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’

Connolly was impatient and doubted the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s resolve. However, a plan was hatched to take strategic sites in Dublin during Easter 1916. The General Post Office in O’Connell was to be the headquarters of the rebellion.

Plans to mobilise other parts of the country suffered a severe setback when a German ship, the Aud was intercepted by the British and Sir Roger Casement, a former British consular figure and ardent nationalist who organised the meagre German support was arrested.

When the official leader of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, who was opposed to armed struggle except in self-defence, was told that manoeuvres planned for Easter Sunday were a cover for insurrection he was appalled and placed an ad in the Sunday Independent cancelling them.

Connolly and Pearse seized the initiative and let it be known that the rising be delayed by 24 hours until Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. Understandably, the number of participants was greatly diminished with less than a thousand involved initially thought the number almost doubled in the succeeding days.

The main group of rebels march from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union to the GPO (General Post Office), where Pearse read aloud the Proclamation which began: “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood Ireland through us summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom …”

Rebels taking a strategic position in St. Stephen’s Green were jeered by hostile locals. Others availed of the confusion to indulge in looting Clerys department store close to the GPO. To some extent the authorities had been caught napping not expecting a rebellion following the capture of the Aud , the arrest of Casement and McNeill’s advertisement in the Sunday Independent.

Reinforcements were brought in with those coming from England arriving early on Wednesday morning being showered with chocolate and fruit by grateful locals. A cordon was methodically drawn around the rebels and by Friday the GPO was on fire and with the end in sight was evacuated. The slaughter of civilians persuaded Pearse to surrender the following day. Reluctantly, other garrisons followed suit.
Most of the activity was confined to Dublin though Thomas Ashe led a successful ambush on the Royal Irish Constabulary at Ashbourne Co. Meath on April 27.

Prisoners being marched to Richmond Barracks were jeered at by locals. The rank and file, some of whom were quite young were treated with considerable leniency. Other were subject to internment in Britain, but the ultimate sanction awaited the ringleaders. Meanwhile 300 civilians, 60 rebels and 130 British troops were dead and the city centre in ruins.

Thirty-seven were sentenced to death, twenty-three had their sentence commuted to life in prison. 14 men were executed, including the Pearse brothers Padraig and Willie, Tom Clarke and finally on May 12 James Connolly was shot while strapped to a chair because he could not stand on a wounded ankle.

The executions has a profound effect on public opinion and speaking to his wife on the eve of his execution Tom Clarke predicted that freedom was coming but ‘between this moment and freedom, Ireland will go through hell.’

Among those interred at the prison camp at Frongoch, in north Wales was Michael Collins. Born in West Cork in 1890, he emigrated to London at the age of sixteen, but returned to participate in the rising. During his internment he established an Irish Republican Brotherhood network and organised classes on guerrilla warfare. Furthermore, he was able to cultivate contacts from all parts of the country.

As a good will gesture many of those interred were released at Christmas 1916. The released volunteers now had to work on public opinion by capitalising on public sympathy for the executed leaders. The Irish Parliamentary party under the leadership of John Dillon and John Redmond still held sway but were challenged in a series of by-elections in 1917.

In February the father of Joseph Plunkett, one of those executed, scored a landslide victory over a Home Rule opponent in the Roscommon by-election. Three months later a prisoner still in jail in Britain won a by-election in Longford. A factor in both victories was the efficiency of Collins’ campaign network.

In another gesture of goodwill the British government released all the remaining prisoners in June 1917 including those who had death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. One of them, Eamon de Valera, stood in the East Clare by-election and with Collins’ machine at his disposal won easily. The new movement was officially banded together under de Valera’s leadership and called Sinn Fein (‘Ourselves’), a name recalling the policy of self-determination first put forward by Arthur Griffith in 1905.

The aim of this new party was to set up an Irish Parliament in Dublin and ignore Westminster, but how this was going to be achieved was unclear. Some wanted to appeal to the International Peace Conference which would sit at the end of World War I. But Michael Collins had other ideas.

The death of Thomas Ashe in September 1917 helped generate further support for this new movement . Ashe, who participated in the Easter Rising, was arrested on a charge of sedition and died during forced feeding while on hunger strike. Collins used his funeral, during which 30, 000 lined the streets of Dublin, as a show of strength for the Volunteers.

The English Daily Express noted the funeral had made ‘100,000 Sinn Feiners out of 100,000 constitutional nationalists.’ Still the imprecise nature of the new party’s policies persuaded many to remain loyal to Redmond and after his death in March 1918 his son William, a captain in the British Army easily defeated the Sinn Fein candidate in the Waterford City by-election.

With the war going badly the British proposed extending conscription (which had been in the rest of the UK since 1916) to Ireland. With tens of thousands of men from all parts of Ireland already fighting side-by-side as volunteers, Sinn Fein exploited the widespread opposition to the move and the proposal was dropped.

A new military viceroy, General French acting on mistaken information that Sinn Fein was implicated in a pro-German plot had most of the leaders arrested. Collins tipped by his network of friendly police evaded capture.

A General Election took place shortly after the Armistice in November 1918. The national feeling had been transformed since the previous election eight years earlier and the election register had changed too with women over thirty included for the first time.

Sinn Fein stormed to victory, boosted by key by-election victories and defections from the Irish Parliamentary Party, who were unable to field candidates in a number of seats. Other factors favoured Sinn Fein including the failure of Irish soldiers serving the British Army, most of whom were likely to support the Irish Parliamentary Party, to receive their postal votes.

The rigging of the vote by Sinn Fein supporters was crucial to their success. The electoral register was studied carefully for the names of people who were dead,ill or away resulting in some people voting several times for Sinn Fein candidates.

Sinn Fein won three quarters of the seats and the Parliamentary Party was annihilated. Many of the successful candidates were still in jail after the ‘German plot’ arrests earlier in the year. But in January 1919 the rest of the elected Sinn Fein members met in the Mansion House, Dublin and declared a sovereign Republic and called their parliament Dáil Eireann.

After escaping from Limerick jail, Eamon de Valera was elected President of Dáil Eireann and headed to the US hoping to secure recognition for the fledgling state. He was well received by Irish Americans and raised much needed funds for the republican cause but failed the get the hoped for recognition from the US Government.

On the same day as Dáil Eireann first met, January 21, 1919, two members of the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) escorting a load of gelignite to a quarry in County Tipperary were gunned down by masked Volunteers Dan Breen and Sean Treacy who were acting on their own initiative.
It was the first act in a guerrilla campaign that lasted over two years and became known as the War of Independence.

A few weeks later Collins speaking at a meeting of the Sinn Fein executive expressed the view that fighting was the only course of action open to the new state. He set about organising a terror campaign against the forces of the crown with single-mindedness and efficiency. While co-ordinating military action Collins was also Minister of Finance and organised a vast loan for the Irish Republic administered through secret bank accounts which the British authorities could not trace.

The campaign against members of the RIC considered dangerous on the basis of intelligence information gathered through Collins’ efficient network continued into 1920. The stakes were upped when on March 15 1920 The Lord Mayor of Cork an ardent nationalist was gunned down by RIC men in civilian clothes.

Reinforcements were now being recruited in England and because of the shortage of traditional bottle green uniforms new members of a special British task force were given khaki trousers or tunics where required and acquired the nickname Black and Tans. A short time later a highly paid Auxiliary force was pressed into RIC service. These were an aggressive and formidable opposition to the IRA (Irish Republican Army, as the Volunteers were now called).

The war continued throughout 1920. Collins located the Dublin hideouts of British intelligence officers and on November 21 had fourteen of them shot. In an act of reprisal 12 people were shot during a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary at Croke Park. One of the dead was Michael Hogan, whose memory is immortalised in the Hogan Stand at the ground. Later that night two IRA men and a Sinn Fein supporter were murdered in Dublin Castle. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

Seven days later Tom Barry’s West Cork brigade wiped out an 18-man Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael Co. Cork. The Auxiliaries suffered further casualties in Cork city on December 11 and the same day the Black and Tans set fire parts of that city. In the same month the Government of Ireland Act led to the partition of Ireland into the political division which remain in force.

There was widespread international revulsion at the British tactics but war continued into 1921. In May the IRA launched an ambitious attack on the Custom House in Dublin, the centre of British administration in Ireland. The Dublin Brigade surrounded the building, ordered the civil servants out and set it on fire. They were then surrounded by forces of the crown and their most audacious operation ended in failure.

Collins was fighting a losing battle in Dublin, but elsewhere morale was good. Stalemate prevailed and on June 11 a truce was agreed between the IRA and the British. The quest for a political solution was not going to be easy. De Valera wanted a sovereign Irish Republic but it was Michael Collins who headed the Irish delegation that went to London to hammer out a treaty.

After six months of tough negotiations the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed on December 6 1921, which provided for some level of self-determination with its own army and control of internal affairs, but still subject to the king. It was not the Irish Republic De Valera wanted. Swearing an oath of allegiance to the King of England was anathema to many Irish Republicans. Soon after signing the treaty Collins was reported as saying prophetically; “I have signed my death warrant”.

A bloody chapter in Irish history closed, but another one that resulted in greater hurt and division was about to begin.