CHAPTER ONE
Political and military violence in Ireland is not a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years. Ireland's history over the last 300 years is one of a protracted struggle for land and power between groups with competing interests and religions. In particular, the modern conflict hinged upon the battle between those who sought to rid Ireland of its English connection and those who wished to maintain the link with the Protestant mainland. This division between so-called Unionists and nationalists can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Protestant ‘plantation of Ireland’, when the British Crown sponsored English and Scottish Protestants to settle in the north-eastern part of the colony. The ‘plantation’ of Ulster, as it became known, opened a period in which the Protestant English gentry confiscated land and oversaw a massive influx of Scottish settlers. They took into Ireland a different religion and culture from that of the indigenous peoples. These settlers and their descendants formed a Loyalist base and firmly implanted a connection with the mainland. Violence was endemic between the Anglo-Scottish settlers and the native Irish inhabitants as disputes over land ownership broke out.1 These struggles foreshadowed the development of what might be termed two nationalisms in Ireland over the next 200 years. The two nationalisms or identities are best described as that of a ‘Catholic Irishness’ and a ‘Protestant Irishness’, which established distinct identities and interests aligned to geographic locations; the Catholics in the south and the Protestants in the north of the island. The later British problem in Ireland was shaped in this period. The English supported the Protestants in securing their position in the island, but were unable fully to subdue the Catholics into acceptance of the arrangement.
From 1649 onwards, Oliver Cromwell, who had just won the English Civil War, turned his attention to Ireland and attempted to subdue the rebellious Catholic Irish. Such was his success that by 1655, four-fifths of the land in Ireland had been taken by the English. It is in this period that contemporary Irish Protestant rituals and myths can be located. In 1688, when the Catholic monarch James II was displaced, he fled to Ireland and claimed authority there. The Protestant communities in the northern towns of Deny and Enniskillen rose against him, in support of his son-in-law, William of Orange, who had succeeded to the British throne. In May 1689, when the Protestant garrison in Derry was besieged by an Irish Army, the apprentice boys locked the town's gates and withstood the attacks until they were relieved by one of William's armies, over three months later. During the next two years, the forces of King William defeated the Jacobite armies in Ireland. He scored two notable victories at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Battle of Aughrin in 1691. These victories became enshrined in Protestant mythology.
The Protestant community, which was primarily located in the North-east, became identified as the holders of wealth, power and land shored up by the English. Throughout the following years, the hegemony of the Protestant community was upheld by the use of violence and intimidation. Organizations such as the Orange Lodges and the Peep O'Day Boys were formed to maintain a hold on the land. These groups continually clashed with the secret societies formed by the Irish natives, such as the Defenders and the Ribbonmen, which were dedicated to the overthrow of English Protestant power.2 In 1798, the Irishman Wolfe Tone, aided by the French, attempted to overthrow English power. He led a rebellion in Co. Mayo, but was defeated by Crown forces at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. As a result of this rebellion, the English Parliament passed the Act of Union in 1801, declaring the integration of Ireland with England and Scotland, thus ending one part of Irish history. In part, the Act of Union arose from fears that Napoleon Bonaparte might have taken advantage of rebellious Ireland to launch an attack on the mainland as had been feared in 1798. The British took the view that Ireland must be subdued and secured through military force if necessary.
The period before the Act of Union clearly revealed the different dimensions of the conflict in Ireland: military force was used by the English to subdue the rebellious Irish; political violence was also a feature of the conflict between the native Irish and the settlers; while the competing interests of the landed classes during the English Civil War sparked bloodshed. The use of foreign armies in these conflicts formed part of the Irish historical landscape. From the Act of Union, however, the primary struggle in Ireland took place between the nationalists and the English, backed by the Protestant Unionists who wanted to maintain the connection with England. This axis was reinforced by formidable military power. Throughout the nineteenth century, the British military establishment in Ireland varied between 15,000 and 30,000 troops with battalions rotated in and out of the country on a three-year basis. Lord Redesale, who was sent to Ireland as Lord Chancellor in 1802, neatly summed up the twinning of British and Irish Protestant interests when he said: T have said this country must be kept for some time as a garrisoned county. I meant a Protestant garrison.’3 This assumption was underwritten by successive British Governments.
The estrangement between the Unionist and nationalist communities in Ireland was further sharpened in the nineteenth century as two trends developed. The first was the growth of a dynamic nationalist consciousness in Ireland among the Catholic communities that culminated in the Home Rule Campaign of the 1880s. The second trend was the rise of a distinct Protestant identity in Ulster, which arose partly as a response to nationalist demands. Unionists believed that Home Rule would threaten their economic and religious interests. This fear led to the grouping together of Unionist interests, premised on the need to maintain their power base through the connection with Britain.
By the 1880s therefore two distinct communities were in place. The two were distinguished by religion, culture and the vexed question of the connection with Britain. The North wanted to maintain its special relationship with the mainland, while the southern nationalists were determined to sever the connection with Westminster. It was this issue of the relationship with Britain that, more than any other, began to mark the struggle between the two at the end of the nineteenth century. The century had, on the whole, been marked by an uneasy co-existence, but the nationalist campaign for Home Rule exposed the cleavages between the two. For example, in 1885 Ulster had not been completely opposed to Home Rule – of the thirty-three seats in Ulster, seventeen of them were actually won by the Home Rule Party – but over the next twenty years, the picture was transformed and resistance to Home Rule in the Irish North-east grew. The opposition of the Unionists to an independent Ireland arose from a diversity of sources.
The first was that the Protestants in the North-east regarded themselves as different from the Catholic occupants of the island, in the simple terms they were Unionists first and foremost. They saw a division of Ireland lying between the Catholic Irish and the rest of Britain. The geographical separation of Ireland from the mainland was not, to Unionist minds, the important boundary. As descendants of British settlers they believed that they had carved out and constructed an enclave that was superior economically, culturally and socially to that of the native Irish peoples. This enclave had to be protected against absorption into an Irish Catholic state.4
Cultural and historical factors which prohibited Protestant Ulster's acceptance of Irish Republicanism were underwritten by powerful economic rationales. Unionists believed that the relative economic prosperity of the business centres in the North would be threatened by southern rule. Business interests in Belfast did not believe that a nationalist government in Dublin would maintain the necessary economic links with the mainland. In addition, many in the North feared the nature and political immaturity of any future government in the south. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Unionists saw themselves as inhabiting a flourishing region that needed to maintain the industrial link with imperial Britain, not be tied to the agrarian south.5
Opposition also centred on the issue of the church and the state. The Protestant North was deeply distrustful of any regime which would be dominated by a Catholic majority. Many Protestants equated rule from Dublin with ‘Rome Rule’. This distrust of Catholicism ran deep. In Ulster itself, Catholic communities had long suffered discrimination. The Catholics, on the whole, underwent relative economic deprivation in comparison with their Protestant counterparts. The nature of the Catholic communities, with their devotion to the church in Rome, helped set them apart from the majority in the North.6 The Unionists had no desire to cede control of the region to a government in the south which they believed would not only side with the Catholics but actively oppose Protestant religious beliefs. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century most of the British establishment had accepted that some measure of self-government for Ireland was both necessary and appropriate; it was a question of how much. Much of the debate on the British mainland over Ireland was over exacdy what constitutional solutions would be acceptable to the Unionists yet would also stem the rising tide of nationalism.
In their opposition to Home Rule, the Unionists felt confident that they could count upon the support of at least part of the British establishment. The Conservative Party had, at the end of the nineteenth century, openly sided with the Unionists. While this support was motivated by pure political opportunism as much as anything else, it provided a powerful filip to the Unionist cause. In 1886, for example, the Conservatives under Randolph Churchill had used the issue of Home Rule to break the Liberal Government of Gladstone. Lord Randolph Churchill declared that the Orange card was the card to play. Churchill decided that if Gladstone opted for Home Rule, the Conservatives would oppose it. He declared: ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ There was at this point, however, no need for Ulster to fight as the bill for Home Rule was defeated in Parliament. In Belfast the Unionists were triumphant and during the ensuing ‘celebrations’, several Catholics were killed. The British Parliament was subsequently dissolved and the Conservatives were returned to office under Salisbury. The battle over Home Rule was not yet over and in 1882 Gladstone was returned, and with the support of the Irish representatives in the House carried a Second Home Rule bill in 1893. This time it was defeated by the House of Lords and it appeared as if Home Rule was indeed a lost cause. Yet outside the British Parliament, the forces of Irish nationalism continued to grow. In 1893, the Gaelic League was founded. This movement was dedicated to the revival of Irishness in a non-sectarian fashion and attempted to foster the Irish language and Irish literature. Around this group, Irish nationalist political aims developed and, as the century drew to a close, the nationalist aim became an Irish republic divorced from the mainland.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the triangular shape of the violent struggle in Ireland had been set. The nationalists were intent on independence from Britain, antagonizing the Protestants in the North who sought and gained a commitment to the Union from the Conservative Party in Westminster. This in turn provoked bloody sectarian violence between the two communities in the North.
The decade between 1910 and 1920 was one of particular turmoil. In 1912, under the Liberal Government of Asquith, the Third Home Rule bill passed through the British Parliament. This was made possible not only by the genuine commitment of the Liberal Party to the cause of Home Rule, but also by the rise of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The votes of the eighty-four Irish nationalist seats were critical to the life of the Asquith regime. This combination of Irish nationalism and Liberal commitment forced the success of the bill. The Home Rule Act was placed on the statute books in 1914 but remained dormant. The Ulster Unionists were determined that it should not be implemented and half a million Protestants, under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, signed a covenant to defeat Home Rule. Conservative politicians once again pledged their support to the Unionist cause. In Ulster the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was founded with a membership of 100,000 and the aim of defeating Home Rule through military means if necessary, and then to form a provisional government if required. Some of the British military garrison in Ireland announced that they would not fight against the UVF.7
The militant resistance of the Loyalists in the North, meant that by 1914, a devolved system of government for the south was unlikely to be initiated for the whole of Ireland. Loyalist resistance and the delay of the passage of the Home Rule bill in Westminster had immediate and violent repercussions in the south. The Irish volunteers (otherwise known as the IRA) was formed in 1913 and dedicated itself to the achievement of political reform by violent means. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, who since the 1850s had been the driving force behind nationalist violence, joined the organization.8 After almost three decades of attempts to find a constitutional solution to the question of Ireland, the island appeared ready to lurch back into violence, with the British military garrisons embroiled between Northern and southern factions. By 1913, the British Government had become alarmed over the loyalty of Crown forces in Ireland. Many in the Army had sympathy with the position of the Protestant Unionists and were clearly worried at the prospect of having to underwrite any banish- ment from Britain of Protestants.9 In addition, the formation of rival paramilitary organizations in both North and south had greatly increased the prospect of armed conflict. Civil war between North and south appeared to be inevitable, but was tempered by the outbreak of World War I. Recruiting, conscription and the general question of what level of support the Irish should provide for the war had replaced Home Rule as the central question for debate in the south. At first, recruitment to the British cause in the larger towns reached reasonable levels.10 The southern Irish were, broadly, in favour of the British position but with one important caveat. This was that Irish support would be rewarded by a Home Rule settlement for all of Ireland. The IRA itself split over the war with a majority supporting the British position but a significant minority opposing.
Irish nationalism became more militant during the war years.11 In particular, the military committee of the IRA planned to take advantage of the struggle with Britain whose forces from 1914 onwards were bogged down on the battlefields of France. The IRA was dedicated to the establishment of a thirty-two-county republic and was the spearhead of the Anglo-Irish war of 1916, This began with the Easter rising of 1916, which took the British garrison by surprise. Military reinforcements were rushed from the mainland to impose martial law.12 The uprising failed, not least because the IRA was badly organized and uncontrolled.13 The nationalist position however flourished, partly because of the brutality of British actions in subduing the rebellion. A panoply of repressive measures were taken, including execution and internment.14 The nationalist position was particularly strengthened by the birth of new Sinn Fein as a political party. Sinn Fein (ourselves alone) had been founded as a political party by a Dublin journalist – Arthur Griffith – in 1905. Its original goal had been the imposition of a dual monarchy for Britain and Ireland and a policy of complete Irish withdrawal from British institutions. This policy was never really taken seriously. Sinn Fein was not part of the Easter rising, but benefited from the emotional atmosphere after the 1916 failure. The convention to promote Sinn Fein met on 25 October 1917 and formulated a position explicitly designed to appeal to the various strands of nationalist sentiment. In particular, it adopted a policy of abstentionism from Westminster and a programme for a republic which succeeded in rallying the various groups to the leadership of Sinn Fein.15 The appointment of Eamon De Valera, who had been in charge of the Easter uprising, brought along a substantial number of Irishmen committed to the cause of a republic. The continuing British failure to establish a Home Rule settlement during negotiations in late 1916–17 and indeed, the prolonged debate over the partition of Ireland, hardened nationalist sentiment in the south and support for Sinn Fein. As a consequence, Sinn Fein made significant victories in the elections of 1917.16
Nationalist grievances were further compounded in April 1918, when the British Government passed the Military Service bill, which provided authority to impose conscription in Ireland by an order in council. This meant that there need be no further debate on the issue. By April 1919, Sinn Fein, in pursuit of its abstentionist policies, had refused to take seats in the House of Commons, established the Dail, declared independence and provisionally constituted a republic.17 In addition, in an attempt to override the British Government, they made a direct plea to the Paris Peace Conference to try to find an international solution to the problems of British rule in Ireland. This however came to nothing, and Ireland was left caught between the somewhat incoherent rule of the Dail18 and the military conflict with the British Government. This confrontation is known variously as either the Anglo-Irish war or the Irish war of Independence. (Some analysts dislike the latter term, as Ireland did achieve full independence.)
The most important figure in the military conflict on the Irish side was Michael Collins. He was Director of Organization and Intelligence in the Volunteers, but he was also Minister of Finance in the Dail. This combination of functions summed up the dualistic nature of politics and the military in Ireland at this time. It was Collins who was responsible for the conduct of the war, but also the operation of government. De Valera, the President of the Dail, was, in this period, either in jail in Lincoln or later, with the help of Collins, was smuggled to the United States. Between 1918 and 1921 the IRA under Collins waged a struggle designed to break the British will to stay in Ireland. The IRA strategy was to fight a guerrilla war consisting of hit-and-run attacks on military garrisons, political assassinations and kidnapping. A great deal of romanticism still attaches itself to many assessments of the Anglo-Irish war, yet historians, while acknowledging the superficial attractiveness of the notion of gallant Irishmen taking on the might of the British military, also point to the part-time and episodic nature of the military confrontation.19 In particular, it has been argued that the military efforts made by the IRA remained concentrated in few areas and were always dictated by a shortage of arms and, in some places, by the lack of volunteers. Despite this, in the course of the conflict, the IRA achieved success, managing to tie down 43,000 British troops, police and auxiliaries.
The British Cabinet had vacillated during the course of the conflict about how it should respond both politically and militarily to the Irish challenge. Specifically, the British Government did not want to acknowledge the struggle as a war, because it was believed that this would confer legitimacy upon the IRA.20 As in the modern conflict after 1969, the British Government preferred to describe the IRA as a group of criminals engaged in a conspiracy against the Crown. However, despite British protestations that this was a rebellion, not a war, there were substantial casualties. During the period 1920–21, Crown forces suffered losses of 525 killed, while 707 civilians died. The British Government banned the Dail, proscribed nationalist organizations, reinforced the garrisons in Ireland and, from the beginning of 1920, began to recruit in England for auxiliary ‘forces’ which could be sent to Ireland. The result was the so-called ‘Black and Tans’. These volunteers were recruited from former servicemen, criminals and mercenaries, and by May over 1,000 had arrived in Ireland. The brutality of their behaviour, as they raced around the countryside in armoured cars engaging in what was essentially a policy of counter-terror, became infamous. In particular, they undertook a strategy of reprisals, that is attacking the property or families of those connected to Sinn Fein, that merely hardened nationalist resistance and escalated the use of violence. Michael Collins, in particular, led some spectacular and bloody assaults against the British forces. On the morning of 21 November 1920, Collins engineered the simul- taneous shooting of over a dozen British intelligence officers. This became the first of many Sundays in Ireland which would be remembered for their bloodshed. At the end of 1920, the Cabinet was driven into a declaration of martial law in south-west Ireland. (The remit of martial law eventually covered the counties of Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, Limerick, Clare, Kilkeny, Waterford and Wexford.)21
Despite the ‘reinforcement’ of British forces and tactics, the IRA managed to break Westminster's will. The IRA did not win a military victory, but they did achieve a political one. In 1921, Westminster, exhausted by the prolonged and expensive war in Europe and frustrated after centuries of the so-called Irish Troubles, withdrew most of its troops. (The last of the British troops left in December 1922.) The historian Bowyer Bell has summed up the victory thus: ‘the IRA, unable to win, had refused to lose, thus bombing the British to the bargaining table’.22 This provided the lief motif for the future strategy of the IRA. By this stage, the British pattern of behaviour in Ireland had been set. Westminster had already accepted the Unionist position over the North and were now left to coerce nationalists into some form of constitutional settlement that fell well short of their demands.
Thus, by 1921, the IRA had not achieved the victory they had sought, that of a thirty-two-county republic. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which established the new Irish Free State in the south, also set up a separate Northern Irish Government to rule the six counties (Fermanagh, Down, Antrim, Londonderry, Armagh and Tyrone) in the North, in recognition of Unionist wishes. This was the compromise measure taken by the British Government to satisfy both North and south. This decision was taken after much controversy in London, not so much over the exemption of Ulster from the treaty, but over what geographical space constituted Ulster. The Irish Committee, established in 1919 to consider the future of Ireland, had originally proposed that the nine counties which had historically constituted Ulster be separated off. The Unionists, who dominated the Cabinet of Lloyd George, insisted that only six of these counties should make up Ulster.23 The Unionists effectively defeated the nationalist claim to incorporate Ulster on the basis of a three-to-one majority in Ireland as a whole, while having their claim to Ulster upheld on the basis of only a 55 per cent majority. This anomaly worried the British Government. The British Cabinet would in fact have preferred an arrangement whereby nine counties, with only a narrow Unionist majority, were exempted from the agreement, but the Northern Irish nationalists were boycotting Westminster and the Unionist wish prevailed. Lloyd George justified the six-county division as a temporary measure. The Cabinet committee dealing with the Irish question claimed that it had done everything that it could to bring about Irish authority, without infringing on the freedom of Ulster.24 The Cabinet committee went so far as to claim that their proposals encouraged Irish unity. Indeed, the treaty envisaged a reconciliation between North and south. For example, it set up a Council of Ireland, consisting of both Northern and southern representatives to facilitate this process.25 The two Irish Parliaments were still free to cooperate in transferring to the Council any of the services they wished.26 This notion of a Council of Ireland would become a familiar theme of English attempts to resolve the Irish question and at least in theory gave southern Ireland some influence in the future of the North. Yet, despite British protestations of the supposed impermanence of the arrangement and their attempts to persuade the Unionists to accept this proposition, in reality they had long accepted that Ulster could not be persuaded. Unionists would have preferred to be governed directly from Westminster as an intregal part of the United Kingdom. These discussions produced a lingering distrust of the British administration. The Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, actively opposed the Act of 1920 and strongly advised against forcing upon the people of Ulster a parliament ‘they had not sought and which they did not want’.27 Nevertheless, Unionists also saw that acceptance of the 1920 Act gave them certain benefits. Not least, they believed that the establishment of a separate Irish administration in the North foreclosed the possibility of any future incorporation into an All Ireland arrangement.28 The Act underwrote the British connection to and responsibility for Ireland. The newly created Northern Irish political system was modelled on that of Westminster, with upper and lower chambers, while the British Crown was represented by a governor of the Province. This arrangement strictly limited Northern Irish powers and subordinated them to Westminster where Northern Ireland was assigned twelve members in the House of Commons, plus a university representative.
The 1920 Act effectively set the framework for the future, sanctioning partition and destroying any immediate prospect of a united Ireland. It also meant that any future change in the status of Northern Ireland would have to come about with the consent of the North. The southern Irish Government attempted to hedge on the treaty in an attempt to achieve a more favourable outcome, but after two months of negotiation with Lloyd George's Government and the threat of war against them, Collins and Griffith settled for an agreement, in December 1921, known as the Anglo-Irish treaty. This conferred dominion status on the twenty-six counties of southern Ireland, making it, at least in formal terms, the equivalent of Canada. Article 12 set up a boundary commission which, in theory, had powers to modify the partition line, but the full extent of its powers remained unclear. The nationalists hoped that in time it would oversee the reincorporation of the North into a united Ireland.
The nationalist movement violently divided over both the treaty and its future strategy. In March 1922, the IRA split into pro- and anti-treaty factions. In pursuit of the lost ideal of a thirty-two- county republic, anti-treaty IRA members, or irregulars as they became known, engaged in a brief and bloody civil war with the new Government of the Republic, but it was defeated and forced underground.29 The IRA remained a potential threat to the new Irish Free State using tactics of intimidating jurors, bombings and assassination attempts. In response, the Irish state inserted Article 20 (a public safety bill) into the Irish constitution permitting the establishment of military tribunals, the arrest of ‘radicals’ and proclaiming the illegality of subversive groups.30
The North-South divide
Just as some of the Irish nationalists disputed even the legitimacy of the new southern Irish Government, they also opposed the establishment of the six counties in the North as a separate entity. In this they were in some ways supported by Dublin. The actions of the southern Irish Government after the signing of the treaty compounded the division between North and south. The nationalists tried to organize a boycott of Belfast goods and attempted to cut all economic links between North and south. Collins, in his position as head of the Provisional Government, used his power to block the removal of civil servants and docu- ments from the south to the North. These attempts reinforced the fears of the Unionists that they could not expect cooperation from the south. Nineteen-twenty saw the final separation of Ulster from the rest of Ireland. During this year the IRA launched a series of attacks on Government offices, including some in the North. In 1922 the IRA began a major initiative designed to break the North. The Ulster Unionists, fearing that existing forces would prove inadequate for maintaining the law, created a special constabulary – the infamous B-Specials.31 Also fearing pressure from the south and from its own Catholic communities, the Unionists used its new police forces vigorously to enforce the sectarian divide in the North. During August, violence erupted in Belfast. In the ensuing strife, 8,000 Catholic workers were driven from their jobs.32
The historian J.C. Beckett has argued that the establishment of Northern Ireland was entered into not ‘because anyone wanted it locally, but because the British Government believed that it was the only way of reconciling the various interests’.33 Indeed, given the centuries of dispute between the Catholics and the Protestants, partition did appear inevitable and at least it was a pragmatic recognition that two variants of Irish nationalism existed and had to be accommodated. Yet, this was not quite the full story. The arrangement whereby the six counties were turned into Northern Ireland had a persuasive logic for upholding the Protestant Unionist position and the British connection in Ireland. Within the nine counties, which were traditionally held to constitute Ulster, there were 900,000 Protestants, most of whom wanted to continue the connection with Westminster, as opposed to 700,000 Catholics who wanted to end it. In the six counties, however, the religious breakdown was 820,000 Protestants and 430,000 Catholics. C.C. Craig, the brother of the first Northern Irish Prime Minister James Craig, put the case for the six counties thus: ‘in a ninecounty parliament, with sixty-four members, the Unionist majority would be about three or four; but in a six-county Parliament, with fifty-two members, the Unionist majority would be about ten’.34
That the division of Ireland was premised upon Unionist demands is undeniable. The institutions in the North were also geared to this principle. It is difficult to dispute the nationalist interpretations of British and Protestant collusion at this point.35 For example, the actual political constituencies established under the Government of Ireland Act were arranged to maximize the winning of Unionist seats at the general election of 1921. In May, the Unionists did in fact carry forty out of the fifty-two seats.36 The county councils of Fermanagh and Tyrone were dissolved when they declared allegiance to the southern Irish Parliament in late 1921.37
This inbuilt political dominance by the Ulster Protestant majority was further reinforced by the refusal of many of the Catholic community to participate in committees or local structures. Many of the minority refused to recognize the new state in which they were living, so at the very moment when the new institutions were being established, a number of citizens refused to participate in its structures. Many of the Catholics were, however, excluded because of the Local Government Franchise, which until 1969 was based on property ownership. This meant, in some cases, the exclusion of non-ratepayers, while property owners had extra votes. The vast amount of property was owned by the Protestant population. Indeed, the maintenance of Unionist dominance was ensured through the gerrymandering of constituency borders, most notably in Londonderry.
Law and disorder
The establishment of other institutions in the North also fed the sectarian divide. Mention has already been made of the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913. This was soon reorganized into a three-tier outfit that was exclusively Protestant. By August 1922 there were three classes of soldiers: class A on full-time duty; class B who were part-time in their own areas; and a reserve force, class C. The latter class had, by 1922, 17,000 members who had the right to bear arms. The implications were fairly obvious – a large proportion of the male Protestant population had access to firearms.
All of this reflected the siege mentality of the Protestant population. The Catholic population was seen not only as the enemy to the south, but also as the enemy within – as a ‘fifth column’. This view was translated into the apparatus of law and order in the North. The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act of 1922 was renewed annually until 1928, then extended for a further five years, and by the end of 1933 had become a permanent feature of the regime.38 The Act provided for the imposition of curfew, the restriction of public meetings, arrest for the possession of unlawful documents and flogging. A constant watch was maintained over the suspect Catholic communities and whenever the Unionists felt threatened, as for example during the periods when the IRA was most active, the Northern Irish authorities used the Act to justify the introduction of measures such as internment.39 Given these circumstances, the 1920s proved to be the most violent in the history of the Province.
It was not only internal disorder that Craig feared in the decade after the Government of Ireland Act. In March 1922, Craig and Collins had met under the auspices of the British Government in London. They met to discuss the position of the Catholic minority in the North. For Collins, the situation which had developed after the treaty was complicated. Dublin had no desire to see the North succeed in establishing a separate state, but the priority had to be stability in the south. Indeed, Collins struggled to control the antitreaty forces in the south and he could not have really expected that the Northern parts of the IRA would stand by and allow Catholics in the Province to be discriminated against. Collins therefore met Craig in London to sign a pact which protected minority rights, which in some ways settled the status of Catholics.40 Despite this meeting, Craig feared that the south might invade. This fear took a concrete form when, in May 1922, the North called more men to arms. The period was characterized by Craig as one in which Ulster had to be mobilized.41 Specifically, Craig feared that recent events in the south marked a determination on the part of both Collins and De Valera to intervene in the affairs of the North. De Valera and Collins had signed an electoral pact which for many Unionists represented an attempt to provide for southern unity before attempting the integration of the North. It was against this backdrop of suspicion that the Belleek and Pettigoe incidents took place. Belleek was and is a predominantly Catholic village located in the Northern county of Fermanagh, and isolated from the rest of the North by lakes and mountains. The road connecting Belleek to the rest of the Province actually ran at some points through the south. Forces loyal to Collins, identified at first as part of the IRA, occupied Pettigoe and an old fort just outside Belleek. These men seized a few Unionists and a crisis ensued over the status of the area. Class A and B specials were alerted and sent in to recover the area but had to retreat under fire. By the end of May there were no Unionist forces left in the area and the IRA appeared to be parading through the streets freely. Part of the debate over this rather curious incident revolves around whether it was actually the IRA involved, or a group of over-enthusiastic and ill-disciplined ‘Free State’ troops. It now appears to have been the latter. At the time, however, Craig, fearing that this was the thin end of the southern wedge, telephoned the Cabinet in London for support. In particular he demanded that Churchill take some form of military action.42 British troops retook the village on 4 June, while other troops occupied the fort at Belleek and stayed garrisoned there to reassure Unionists until August 1924. A neutral zone was established for a couple of miles either side of the border near the village, and a major crisis between North and south was averted. Some historians claim that Churchill's actions were actually ludicrous and a massive over-reaction to the activities of a few ill- equipped troops.43 Yet, Churchill claimed that he had to reassure the Unionists that the integrity of the territory of the Province would be enforced.44 While the British Government had more or less resolved the Irish question with the Act of 1920 and the treaty of 1921, they could not entirely contract out of the running of the Province. From the 1920s, it was the British troops who underwrote the division of Ireland and upheld the position of the Unionists.
Sectarian violence in the Province was exacerbated by the economic depression of the 1930s and continued to threaten the stability of the new Province. Between 1930 and 1939, unemploy- ment did not fall below 25 per cent.45 The fierce competition for jobs created sectarianism. The Ulster Protestant League, founded in 1931, encouraged the exclusive employment of Protestants. Unionist ideology found its most cogent channel through the Orange Order which had been founded over 200 years earlier. While members of the Orange Order were highly placed in most aspects of Northern Irish life, the most public expression of Protestant ideology was the staging of the annual ‘Orange’ march on 12 July to commemorate the defeat of the Catholic forces at the Battle of the Diamond in Co. Armagh in 1795. This display of triumphalism did much to ensure that historic hatreds were not forgotten in the ‘new arrangement’. By 1935, violence in Northern Ireland reached a peak during an outbreak of severe communal rioting. Twelve people were killed and over 600 injured. A privately sponsored inquiry into the violence by the National Council for Civil Liberties (an organization based on the mainland) in 1936 suggested that a not inconsiderable source of the conflict was the fact that Catholics were discriminated against by the Special Powers Act of 1922.46 This perspective on the causes of discontent was ignored by the Northern Irish Government, which was itself under intense pressure from the Protestant community to alleviate the economic recession, not to inquire into the grievances of the minority. Indeed, one disquieting trend during this period was the appearance of a new sectarian body among working-class Protestants – the ‘Protestant League’. It first appeared during the early 1930s in Scotland and then in Ulster and was dedicated to the ‘rights’, above all else, of Protestant citizens.47 This was a timely reminder that the legacy of the Protestant ‘plantation’ of Ulster remained in force.
States of Ireland
As the 1930s progressed, the triangular relationship between North and south, between Dublin and London and between the two communities in the North appeared to grow ever more strained. Tensions between the North and the south in particular were exacebated by the increasingly nationalistic actions of the southern Irish Government under Eamon De Valera. In particular, the formation of the new Irish constitution in 1937 reaffirmed the distinct territorial and political integrity of Ireland. Article 1 of the document declared that the Irish nation reaffirmed its inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government and to determine its relations with other nations, while Article 2 proclaimed that the national territory consisted of the whole island of Ireland. While a republic was not at this point proclaimed, the nature of the constitution was republican both in nature and content, and from a Unionist point of view immensely provocative.48
The constitution upheld the nationalist view, which was frequently reiterated by De Valera, that partition had been a short-term solution and that it had been forced upon a reluctant south. Roy Foster has recently pointed to the sophisticated and effective actions of De Valera in publicly advocating separatism from Britain but actually adopting gradualist policies vis-à-vis the mainland. Not least, Foster points out that it was De Valera who signed an important series of economic agreements with London during the 1930s. However, nationalist orthodoxy, which was publicly upheld by De Valera, holds that if it had not been for the British connection, partition would never have taken place.49 At one level this is obviously true. The British connection in Ireland, from the ‘plantation’ period onwards, forms the backdrop to the rest of the story, but by 1920 this interpretation flies in the face of the reality of an entrenched Unionist opposition to the south. As it was, Articles 1 and 2 of the Irish constitution were pretty well calculated to provoke the Unionists, as indeed was Article 44 which enshrined the special position of the Catholic church within the state and did nothing to soften Unionist attitudes towards the south.
De Valera, recognizing British preoccupation with the growing Nazi threat, seized the opportunity to pressurize Westminster over nationalist aims. The IRA too, sensing British vulnerability, entered a new period of militancy. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, the IRA attempted to take the nationalist war to the British mainland. On 12 January 1939, the IRA Council sent the British Government an ultimatum to withdraw its troops from Ireland. Three days later, with no British response, they issued a proclamation of war. The subsequent campaign in Britain consisted of random bombings of cinemas, public houses, shops and post offices. The worst incident was an explosion on 25 August 1939 in Coventry which killed five people.50 The bombing campaign was politically ineffective. It took place when the British Government was concerned not with sporadic terrorist bombings but with the looming Nazi threat. During World War II, the IRA failed to dent the British position in Ireland.
The events of the late 1940s undercut even further the ambitions of the IRA. The Dublin Government moved further to confirm its status as both a republic and a sovereign whole. The 1948 Republic of Ireland Act confirmed both its status as a republic and its withdrawal from membership of the Commonwealth.51 Despite this declaration of additional independence, however, the Governments in Dublin and Westminster continued to maintain and even reinforce their close political and economic links. One contemporary commentator spoke of the British determination to hold Ireland within the orbit of ‘sterling’ and the Commonwealth.52 The UK Ireland Act, which was introduced the following year, recognized the new status of the Republic vis-à-vis the Commonwealth, but also had within its terms a guarantee to the Unionists from the mainland that the partition of Ireland would not occur without their consent.53 All of this was, of course, interesting because it appeared, at least superficially, that the British Government was still operating in a role of trying to satisfy both the south and the North. Yet, British motives in the late 1940s were not that simple. Not least, it has been argued that this guarantee was in part motivated by the post-war interests of the British Ministry of Defence.54 The emerging Cold War had fuelled British fears that a newly dominant USSR could threaten, through its vast military power, the stability of the European continent. In practice, the British Ministry of Defence argued that this meant the maintenance of strategic bases in Northern Ireland. In particular, the British Chiefs of Staff argued that they needed to maintain access to Lough Foyle and the Royal Naval Base at Lishally. One Chiefs of Staff Report in 1948 noted that ‘it was undesirable that there should be any division of the waters between Eire and the UK as a result of a decision by an international court which did not give the UK the navigable channel’.55 This type of consideration during the period of the Cold War provided another dimension for the British rationale for the military presence on the island which was quite separate from worries of ethnic conflict in the Province. British strategic concerns were further fuelled when the southern Irish refused to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Potentially, this meant that a neutral Ireland could, in a future war, be given over to hostile forces.
All of these strategic considerations by-passed the IRA. In 1949, after reflecting on its abortive strategy of the war years, the IRA formulated a new policy, declaring war solely against the administration in the North. This strategy was proclaimed at Borderstown by Christrar O'Neill, the Vice President of Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA). He declared that ‘the aim of the army is simply to drive the invader from the soil of Ireland and to restore the sovereign independent republic declared in 1916’. To that end, the policy was to prosecute a successful military strategy. Previously, the IRA had waged war against the Government in Dublin, but these military actions were now ‘outlawed’ in the south and the IRA reverted to war against British rule in the North. The IRA orders issued in October 1954 made this new policy explicit; it stated that the policy was ‘to drive the British forces of occupation out of Ireland’.56 The lines of the conflict were drawn between the Republican aims of a united Ireland and the Unionist/British desire to uphold partition.
At the beginning of the 1950s, members of the IRA crossed the border from the south to perpetrate raids on military barracks in the North. The assaults on British training posts in Armagh in June 1954 produced sizeable arms hauls. The IRA concentration on Northern Ireland was in part a recognition that De Valera's actions had satisfied much, if not all, of nationalist sentiment in the south. The introduction of the 1937 constitution, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938, had provided the Republic with independence and a degree of confidence. The issue of Irish unity, while still an emotional subject, was no longer at the forefront of the agenda. The emphasis on the North reflected the recognition of the IRA that it had to target a different audience to proceed with its agenda of unity by violence. Sinn Fein, for example, ran an enthusiastic campaign in the North and in the Westminster elections of May 1955 received the bulk of the nationalist vote.57 These activities were the prelude to the guerrilla campaign the IRA initiated with a series of cross-border attacks in 1956. During ‘Operation Harvest’, as it was known, the IRA attacked barracks and British troops in a style that would be later replicated in the 1970s. The self-proclaimed mission of the IRA was to strengthen resistance in the so-called occupied areas of the Province to British rule. The means by which this would be accomplished was outlined in the IRA training manual, which argued that the IRA had to adopt ‘guerilla warfare … through a series of little blows’.58 Despite the emphasis which the IRA claimed to make on the primacy of guerrilla tactics, and specifically the notion of winning hearts and minds, their attacks did not evoke popular support among the Catholics in the North.59 The notion that the IRA claimed that it was actually a ‘people's army’ does not really stand up to scrutiny.
The failure of the IRA to gain support for its aims in the North may be explained by certain societal developments in the North. Since the 1950s there had been a significant improvement in economic conditions in the North. The Catholic minority had, on the whole, found its position improved. For example, the 1947 Education Act, which provided for free secondary schooling, meant that a higher proportion of Catholics were able to attend university. This type of change created a trend within the minority community to see its future as part of a Northern Irish state that was offering greater opportunities.60 Acceptance by the Catholic communities of the Northern Irish state was borne out in the elections of 1959, when Sinn Fein lost both its seats at Westminster.61 The campaign expired in 1962, with the aims of the IRA apparently redundant and irrelevant to the concerns of the Catholics in the North. In its final campaign message of early 1962, the IRA blamed its recent defeat on the general public and the lack of interest in what it designated as the primary purpose of the Irish people – the unity of Ireland.62
The IRA also lost momentum because of the actions of the Irish Government. In July 1957, the Dublin Government introduced internment as an instrument for dealing with the IRA. So successful was this strategy that by the end of 1958, nearly all the IRA executive were in jail and the IRA was unable to function properly without its command. By the end of 1962, the IRA accepted that they had ‘lost’ the battle and following the failure of the border campaign, entered a period of internal dissension and schism. The appointment of a new Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, meant a period of reappraisal before engaging the British Army again.
By the late 1960s, the Republican vision of a thirty-two-county state was no closer to realization than in 1923. Events in Northern Ireland would later provide the setting and conditions in which the IRA could once again challenge the British state, but in the interim, Northern Ireland appeared to have entered a period of calm and at least superficially the partition of 1920 appeared to have resolved the Irish question: two Irelands, a nationalist Catholic Republican south and a Unionist Protestant North with a connection to Britain.64 The linkage with the mainland had, when necessary, been underwritten by British troops, as in 1922. Rather neatly, or so it seemed at the time, the 1920 Act had provided a compromise of self-determination for the south and self- government for the North. As A.J.P. Taylor wrote of Irish partition, ‘Lloyd George appeared to have “conjured” the Irish problem out of existence’.63 It might also be argued that this ‘conjuring trick’ provided the British Government with an excuse for not having to think too hard about an all-Ireland solution, at least in the short term. Yet, a longer-term problem remained. This was that two nationalisms or identities co-existed on one island. These two groups had different cultures, religions and, most critically of all, different aspirations vis-à-vis the mainland. It was especially problematic because the division of the island had not provided homogeneity on both sides of the partition. It had left an enclave of Catholics in the North. This group, potentially, provided the rationale for multi-layered disputes between both North and south, within the Province itself and with the British Government which had sanctioned the division of Ireland and guaranteed its enforcement. In the late 1960s, it was indeed the dissatisfaction of the minority in the North which disrupted the arrangements of 1920–21 and provided the forces of nationalism with an opportunity to challenge once again the British connection in Ireland.
1 Robert Kee, The Most Distressful Country. Vol. one of The Green Flag (London: Quartet Books, 1976).
2 Ibid.
3 R. Barry O'Brien, Dublin Castle and the Irish People (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Treubner and Co. 1909), p. 43, quoted in Elizabeth A. Muenger, The British Military Dilemma in Ireland Occupation Politics, 1886–1914 (Kansas/Dublin: University Press of Kan sas/Gill and Macmillan, 1991), p. 3.
4 For an explanation of the Unionist mentality, see A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster 1609–1969 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977).
5 J.C. Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 159.
6 See A.C. Hepburn (ed.), Minorities in History (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 85.
7 Muenger, op. cit., p. 3.
8 See Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), p. 2.
9 Ibid., p. 2.
10 See An tÓglach (the new volunteer journal), October 1918, quoted in Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance Since 1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 320.
11 Robert Moss, Urban Guerillas (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 91.
12 See House of Commons Debate (hereafter HC), vol. 82, cols 935–70, 3 May-1 June 1916.
13 Hopkinson, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
14 HC, vol. 82, cols 935–47, 11 May 1916.
15 Contemporary Review CXIII (June 1918), p. 606, quoted in A.C. Hepburn, The Conflict of Nationalities in Modern Ireland (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), pp. 108–9.
16 Ibid., pp. 108–9.
17 See An tÓglach, quoted in Townshend, op. cit., pp. 324–5.
18 See Hopkinson, op. cit., p. 7.
19 Ibid., pp. 108-9. See also Charles Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland 1919–21: The Development of Political and Military Policies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
20 Keith Jeffrey, ‘British Security Policy in Ireland 1919–1921’ in Peter Collins (ed.), Nationalism and Unionism: Conflict in Ireland, 1885–1921 (Belfast: Queens University Belfast, Institute for Irish Studies, 1994), p. 172.
21 Hopkinson, op. cit., p. 10. See also Jeffrey, op. cit., p. 171.
22 J. Bowyer Bell, A Time of Terror – How Democratic Societies Respond to Revolutionary Violence (Columbia, NY: Basic Books, 1978), p. 206.
23 See John McColgan, British Policy and the Irish Administration (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 3.
24 HC, vol. 127, cols 1333-4, 31 March 1920.
25 Government of Ireland Act, section 10.
26 Committee on Ireland, Fourth Report, CP series 247 (2 December 1919). PRO CAB 241/94. Quoted in McColgan, op. cit., p. 38.
27 HC, vol. 123, col. 1198, 22 December 1919.
28 Carson, in HC, vol. 123, col. 1202, 22 December 1919. See also Sarah Nelson, Ulster's Uncertain Defenders: Protestant Political, Paramilitary and Community Groups and the Northern Ireland Conflict (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1984), p. 28.
29 J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army. A History of the IRA (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1970), pp. 32–7.
30 Ibid., p. 41.
31 Charles Townshend, op. cit., p. 341.
32 For an account of the violence and the response of the Northern Irish Government, see Bryan A. Follis, A State Under Siege: The Establishment of Northern Ireland 1920–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 106–15.
33 J.C. Beckett, The Ulster Debate (London: Bodley Head, 1972), p. 11.
34 HC, vol. 127, col. 990, 29 March 1920.
35 For nationalist interpretations, see Whyte, op. cit., pp. 117–46.
36 D.W. Harkness, Northern Ireland Since 1920 (Dublin: Helican, 1983), p. 9.
37 Ibid., p. 25.
38 Belfast Gazette (26 May 1922), quoted in Follis, op. cit., p. 99.
39 Ibid., p. 99.
40 See The Times (31 March 1922).
41 HC, vol. 152, cols 1087-97, 20 March-7 April 1922.
42 Craig to Churchill, 30 May 1922. PRONI CAB 4/46/3, quoted in Follis, op. cit., pp. 102–5.
43 See Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants. The Formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the Royal Ulster Constabulary 1920–1927 (London: Pluto, 1983) p. 134.
44 W.S. Churchill, The Aftermath: Being a Sequel to the World Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1941), p. 336.
45 John Darby, ‘The Historical Background’ inj. Darby (ed.), Northern Ireland: The Background to Conflict (New York: Appletree Press/Syracuse University Press; 1983). See also, ‘Cabinet Memorandum by Sir Dawson Bates’, 8 July 1932, quoted in Hepburn, Minorities, op. cit., p. 163.
46 See Hepburn, Minorities, op. cit., p. 166.
47 Ibid., p. 166.
48 Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question. The Anglo-Irish Settlement and its Undoing 1912–1972 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 299.
49 Whyte, op. cit., pp. 117-46. For Foster's account, see ‘Anglo-Irish Relations and Northern Ireland. Historical Perspectives’ in Dermot Keogh and Michael Haltzel (eds), Northern Ireland and the Politics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
50 Moss, op. cit., p. 92.
51 See R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 566–7.
52 Reported in Ian McCabe, A Diplomatic History of Ireland, 1948–1949 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1991), p. 154.
53 Foster, op. cit., pp. 566–7. Foster points to the shock on the Irish side when the British Government issued the guarantee to the Unionists. In fact, the southern Irish had hoped to use their potential involvement in NATO as a lever against the British Government to reopen the issue of partition.
54 See McCabe, op. cit., p. 15.
55 PRO DEFE 59. Chiefs of Staff (COS) Committee memorandum, 16 November-31 December (0) series 165-234, quoted in McCabe, op. cit., p. 137. (Former reference 43/214. Cited as PRO DEFE 5. 9. COS (48) 18 December 1948.)
56 Tim Pat Coogar, The IRA (Glasgow: Fontana, 1980), p. 327.
57 B. Purdie, Politics in the Streets (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990), p. 41, quoted in M.L.R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland: The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 69.
58 ‘Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army: Notes on Guerilla Warfare, IRA GHQ, 1956’, pp. 5–6, quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 68.
59 Moss, op. cit., p. 93.
60 Darby, ‘The Historical Background’ in Darby (ed.), op. cit., pp. 24–5.
61 Ibid., p. 24.
62 See Smith, op. cit., p. 72.
64 Whilst taking into account the early distinction between Republicans, who advocated physical force to achieve a united Ireland, and the nationalist Party who advocated constitutional means, this text uses the terms nationalist and Republican interchangeably to describe those opposed to the British presence. See Whyte, op. cit., p. 74.
63 A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 213.