Civil War

Irish Civil War The Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 24 May 1923) was a conflict that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State as an entity independent from the United Kingdom within the British Empire. The conflict was waged between two opposing groups of Irish nationalists: the forces of the new Free State, who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty under which the state was established, and the Republican opposition, for whom the Treaty represented a betrayal of the Irish Republic. The war was won by the Free State forces. The Civil War may have claimed more lives than the War of Independence against Britain that preceded it, and left Irish society divided and embittered for decades afterwards. To this day, the two main political parties in the Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fil and Fine Gael, are the direct descendants of the opposing sides in the War. The treaty The Anglo-Irish Treaty arose from the Irish War of Independence, fought between Irish separatists (organised as the Irish Republic) and the British government, from 1919-1921. The treaty provided for a self-governing Irish state in 26 of Irelands 32 counties, having its own army and police. However, rather than creating the independent republic favoured by most nationalists, the Irish Free State would be an autonomous dominion of the British Empire with the British monarch as head of state, in the same manner as Canada and Australia. The treaty also stipulated that members of the new Irish Oireachtas (parliament) would have to take the following Oath of Allegiance I do solemnly swear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established, and that I will be faithful to His Majesty King George V, his heirs and successors by law in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of nations. This oath was considered highly objectionable by many Irish Republicans. Furthermore under the treaty, the state was not to be called a republic but a free state and it would be limited to the 26 southern and western counties of Ireland. The remaining six north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, would opt to remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland had already been decided by the Westminster parliament in the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and was confirmed in the Anglo-Irish treaty. Also, several strategic ports were to remain occupied by the Royal Navy.

Nonetheless, Michael Collins, the republican leader who had led the Irish negotiating team, argued that the treaty gave not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire and develop, but the freedom to achieve freedom. However, anti-treaty militants in 1922 believed that the treaty would never deliver full Irish independence. Split in the Nationalist movement The split over the treaty was deeply personal. Many of the leaders on both sides had been close friends and comrades during the War of Independence. This made their lethal disagreement over the treaty all the more bitter. Michael Collins later said that amon de Valera had sent him as plenipotentiary to negotiate the treaty because he knew that the British would not concede an independent Irish republic and wanted Collins to take the blame for the compromise settlement. He said he was deeply betrayed when de Valera refused to stand by the agreement that the plenipotentiaries had negotiated with David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. De Valera, for his part, was furious that Collins and Arthur Griffith had signed the treaty without consulting him or the Irish cabinet as instructed. Dil ireann (the parliament of the Irish Republic) narrowly passed the Anglo-Irish Treaty by 64 votes to 57 on 7 January 1922. Following the Treatys ratification, a Provisional Government, headed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, was set up to transfer power from the British administration to the Irish Free State. Upon the treatys ratification, amon de Valera resigned as President of the Republic and failed to be re-elected by an even closer vote of 60-58. He challenged the right of the Dil to approve the treaty, saying that its members were breaking their oath to the Irish Republic. De Valera continued to promote a compromise whereby the new Irish Free State would be in external association with the British Commonwealth rather than be a member of it. In early March he formed the Cumann na Poblachta (Republican Association) party while remaining a member of Sinn Fin. On a speaking tour of the more republican province of Munster, starting on 17 March 1922, de Valera made controversial speeches at Carrick on Suir, Lismore, Dungarvan and Waterford, saying that: If the Treaty were accepted, [by the electorate] the fight for freedom would still go on, and the Irish people, instead of fighting foreign soldiers, will have to fight the Irish soldiers of an Irish government set up by Irishmen. At Thurles, several days later, he repeated this imagery and added that the IRA: would have to wade through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish Government, and perhaps through that of some members of the Irish Government to get their freedom.

In a letter to the Irish Independent on 23 March de Valera accepted the accuracy of their report of his comment about wading through blood, but deplored that the newspaper had published it. More seriously, the majority of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) officers were also against the treaty and in March 1922, their ad-hoc Army Convention repudiated the authority of the Dil to accept the treaty. The Anti-Treaty IRA formed their own Army Executive, which they declared to be the real government of the country, despite the result of the 1921 general election. On 26 April the Minister of Defence, Richard Mulcahy, summarised alleged illegal activities by many IRA men over the previous three months, whom he described as seceding volunteers, including hundreds of robberies. Yet this fragmenting army was the only police force on the ground following the disintegration of the Irish Republican Police and the disbanding of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). By putting ten questions to General Mulcahy on 28 April, Sen McEntee argued that the Army Executive had acted continuously on its own to create a republic since 1917, had an unaltered constitution, had never fallen under the control of the Dil, and that: the only body competent to dissolve the Volunteer Executive was a duly convened convention of the Irish Republican Army not the Dil. By accepting the treaty in January and abandoning the republic, the Dil majority had effectively deserted the Army Executive. Then in a debate on defence, McEntee suggested that supporting the Army Executive even if it meant the scrapping of the Treaty and terrible and immediate war with England, would be better than the civil war which we are beginning at present apparently. McEntees supporters added that the many robberies complained of by Mulcahy on 26 April were caused by the lack of payment and provision by the Dil to the volunteers. Descent into war In the months leading up to the outbreak of civil war, there were a number of armed confrontations between the opposing IRA factions. In March, there was a major stand-off between up to 700 armed pro- and anti-treaty fighters in Limerick over who would occupy the military barracks being vacated by departing British troops. The situation was temporarily resolved in April when, after arbitration, the two sides agreed to occupy two barracks each. In April, a pro-treaty general, Adamson, was shot dead by antitreatyites in Athlone. In early May, there was an even more serious clash in Kilkenny, when anti-treaty forces occupied the centre of the town and 200 pro-treaty troops were sent from Dublin to disperse them. On 3 May, the Dil was informed 18 men had been killed in the fighting in Kilkenny. In a bid to avoid an all-out civil war, both sides agreed to a truce on 3 May 1922. Delay until the June election

Collins established an army re-unification committee to re-unite the IRA and organised an election pact with de Valeras anti-treaty political followers to campaign jointly in the Free States first election in 1922 and form a coalition government afterwards. He also tried to reach a compromise with anti-treaty IRA leaders by agreeing to a republican-type constitution (with no mention of the British monarchy) for the new state. IRA leaders such as Liam Lynch were prepared to accept this compromise. However, the proposal for a republican constitution was vetoed by the British as being contrary to the terms of the treaty and they threatened military intervention in the Free State unless the treaty were fully implemented. Collins reluctantly agreed. This completely undermined the electoral pact between the pro- and anti-treaty factions, who went into the Irish general election on 18 June 1922 as hostile parties, both calling themselves Sinn Fin. The Pro-Treaty Sinn Fin party won the election with 239,193 votes to 133,864 for Anti-Treaty Sinn Fin. A further 247,226 people voted for other parties, most of whom supported the Treaty (although Labours 132,570 votes were ambiguous with regard to the Treaty[citation needed]). The election showed that a majority of the Irish electorate supported the treaty and the foundation of the Irish Free State, and that the Sinn Fin party did not represent the opinions of everyone in the new state, but de Valera, his political followers and most of the IRA continued to oppose the treaty. De Valera is quoted as saying, the majority have no right to do wrong. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, the pro-treaty Provisional Government set about establishing the Irish Free State, and organised the National Army to replace the IRA and a new police force. However, since it was envisaged that the new army would be built around the IRA, Anti-Treaty IRA units were allowed to take over British barracks and take their arms. In practice, this meant that by the summer of 1922, the Provisional Government of the Free State controlled only Dublin and some other areas like Longford where the IRA units supported the treaty. Fighting would ultimately break out when the Provisional Government tried to assert its authority over well-armed and intransigent Anti-Treaty IRA units around the country particularly a hardline group in Dublin. Dublin fighting The Four Courts along the River Liffey quayside. The building was occupied by anti-treaty forces during the Civil War, whom the National Army subsequently bombarded into surrender. The Irish national archives in the buildings were destroyed in the subsequent fire. The building was badly damaged but was fully restored after the war. On 14 April 1922, 200 Anti-Treaty IRA militants, led by Rory OConnor, occupied the Four Courts and several other buildings in central Dublin, resulting in a tense stand-off. These anti-treaty Republicans wanted to spark a new armed confrontation with the British, which they hoped would unite

the two factions of the IRA against their common enemy. However, for those who were determined to make the Free State into a viable, self-governing Irish state, this was an act of rebellion that would have to be put down by them rather than the British. Arthur Griffith was in favour of using force against these men immediately, but Michael Collins, who wanted at all costs to avoid civil war, left the Four Courts garrison alone until late June 1922. By this point the Pro-Treaty Sinn Fin party had secured a large majority in the general election, along with other parties that supported the Treaty. Collins was also coming under continuing pressure from London to assert his governments authority in his capital. The British lost patience as result of an action secretly ordered by Collins. He had Henry Hughes Wilson, a retired British Army field marshal, assassinated in London on 22 June because of his role in Northern Ireland. Winston Churchill assumed that the Anti-Treaty IRA were responsible for the killing and warned Collins that he would use British troops to attack the Four Courts unless the Free State took action. In fact the British cabinet actually resolved to attack the Four Courts themselves on 25 June, in an operation that would have involved tanks, howitzers and aeroplanes. However, on the advice of General Nevil Macready, who commanded the British garrison in Dublin, the plan was cancelled at the last minute. Macreadys argument was that British involvement would have united Irish Nationalist opinion against the treaty and instead Collins was given a last chance to clear the Four Courts himself. The final straw for the Free State government came on 27 June, when the Four Courts republican garrison kidnapped JJ Ginger OConnell, a general in the new National Army. Collins, after giving the Four Courts garrison a final ultimatum to leave the building, decided to end the stand-off by bombarding the Four Courts garrison into surrender. The government then appointed Collins as Commander-in-Chief of the National Army. This attack was not the opening shots of the war as skirmishes had taken place between pro- and anti-treaty IRA factions throughout the country when the British were handing over the barracks. However, this represented the point of no return when all-out war was ipso facto declared and the Civil War officially began. Collins had accepted a British offer of artillery for use by the new army of the Free State (though General Macready gave just 200 shells of the 10,000 he had in store at Kilmainham barracks). The anti-treaty forces in the Four Courts, who possessed only small arms, surrendered after two days of bombardment and the storming of the building by Free State troops (June 28-30 1922). Shortly before the surrender of the Four Courts, a massive explosion destroyed the western wing of the complex including the Irish Public Record Office, injuring many advancing Free State soldiers and destroying the records of several centuries of government in Ireland. It was alleged by government supporters that the building had been deliberately

mined. Historians dispute whether the PRO was intentionally destroyed by mines laid by the Republicans on their evacuation or if the explosions occurred when their ammunition store was accidentally ignited by the bombardment. Pitched battles continued in Dublin until 5 July, as Anti-Treaty IRA units from the Dublin Brigade, led by Oscar Traynor, occupied OConnell Street provoking a weeks more street fighting. The fighting cost both sides 65 killed and 280 wounded. Among the dead was Republican leader Cathal Brugha, who made his last stand after exiting the Granville Hotel. In addition, the Free State took over 500 Republican prisoners. The civilian casualties are estimated to have numbered well over 250. When the fighting in Dublin died down, the Free State government was left firmly in control of the Irish capital and the anti-treaty forces dispersed around the country, mainly to the south and west. The opposing forces The outbreak of the Civil War forced pro- and anti-treaty supporters to choose sides. Supporters of the treaty came to be known as pro-treaty or Free State Army, legally the National Army, and were often called Staters by their opponents. The latter called themselves Republicans and were also known as anti-treaty forces, or Irregulars, a term preferred by the Free State side. The Anti-Treaty IRA claimed that it was defending the Irish Republic that had been declared in 1916 during the Easter Rising, that had been confirmed by the First Dil and that had been invalidly set aside by those who accepted the compromise of the Free State. amon de Valera stated that he would serve as an ordinary IRA volunteer and left the leadership of the Anti-Treaty Republicans to military leaders such as Liam Lynch, the IRA Chief of Staff. The Civil War split the IRA. When the Civil War broke out, the Anti-Treaty IRA (concentrated in the south and west) outnumbered the pro-Free State forces by roughly 15,000 men to 7,000 or over 2-1. (The paper strength of the IRA in early 1922 was over 72,000 men, but most of them were recruited during the truce with the British and fought in neither the War of Independence nor the Civil War). However, the Anti-Treaty IRA lacked an effective command structure, a clear strategy and sufficient arms. They started the war with only 6,780 rifles and a handful of machine guns. Many of their fighters were armed only with shotguns. They also took a handful of armoured cars from British troops as they were evacuating the country. More important still, they had no artillery of any kind. As a result, they were forced to adopt a defensive stance throughout the war. By contrast, the Free State government managed to expand its forces dramatically after the start of the war. Michael Collins and his commanders were able to build up an army which was able to overwhelm their opponents in the field. British supplies of artillery, aircraft, armoured cars, machine guns, small arms and ammunition were much help to pro-treaty forces. The

National Army amounted to 14,000 men by August 1922, was 38,000 strong by the end of 1922 and by the end of the war, it had swollen to 55,000 men and 3,500 officers, far in excess of what the Irish state would need to maintain in peacetime. Collins most ruthless officers and men were recruited from the Dublin Active Service Unit (the elite unit of the IRAs Dublin Brigade), which Collins had commanded in the Irish War of Independence and in particular from his assassination unit, The Squad. In the new National Army, they were known as the Dublin Guard. Towards the end of the war, they were implicated in some notorious atrocities against anti-treaty guerrillas. Most of the National Armys officers were Pro-Treaty IRA men, as were a substantial number of their soldiers. However, many of the new armys other recruits were unemployed veterans of the First World War, where they had served in the Irish Division of the British Army. Former British Army officers were also recruited for their technical expertise. A number of the senior Free State commanders such as Emmet Dalton John T. Prout and W.R.E. Murphy had seen service as officers in World War One, Dalton and Murphy in the British Army and Prout in the US Army. The Republicans made much use of this fact in their propaganda claiming that the Free State was only a proxy force for Britain itself. However, in fact, the majority of the Free State soldiers were raw recruits without military experience in either the First World War or the subsequent Irish War of Independence. The Free State takes major towns With Dublin in pro-treaty hands, conflict spread throughout the country. The war started with the anti-treaty forces holding Cork, Limerick and Waterford as part of a self-styled independent Munster Republic. However, since the anti-treaty side were not equipped to wage conventional war, Liam Lynch was unable to take advantage of the Republicans initial advantage in numbers and territory held. He hoped simply to hold the Munster Republic long enough to force Britain to re-negotiate the treaty. The large towns in Ireland were all relatively easily taken by the Free State in August 1922. Michael Collins, Richard Mulcahy and Eoin ODuffy planned a nationwide Free State offensive, dispatching columns overland to take Limerick in the west and Waterford in the south-east and seaborne forces to take counties Cork and Kerry in the south and Mayo in the west. In the south, landings occurred at Union Hall in Co. Cork and Fenit, the port of Tralee, in Co. Kerry. Limerick fell on 20 July, Waterford on the same day and Cork city on 10 August after a Free State force landed by sea at Passage West. Another seaborne expedition to Mayo in the west secured government control over that part of the country. While in some places the Republicans had put up determined resistance, nowhere were they able to defeat regular forces armed with artillery and armour. The only real conventional battle

during the Free State offensive, the Battle of Killmallock, was fought when Free State troops advanced south from Limerick. Guerrilla war Government victories in the major towns inaugurated a period of guerrilla warfare. After the fall of Cork, Liam Lynch ordered Anti-Treaty IRA units to disperse and form flying columns as they had when fighting the British. They held out in areas such as the western part of counties Cork and Kerry in the south, county Wexford in the east and counties Sligo and Mayo in the west. Sporadic fighting also took place around Dundalk, where Frank Aiken and the Fourth Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army were based and Dublin, where small scale but regular attacks were mounted on Free State troops. August and September 1922 saw widespread attacks on Free State forces in the territories they had occupied in the July-August offensive, inflicting heavy casualties on them. In this period, the republicans also managed several relatively large-scale attacks on rural towns, involving several hundred fighters. Dundalk, for example was taken by Frank Aikens AntiTreaty unit in a raid on 14 August, Kenmare in Kerry in a similar operation on 9 September and Clifden in Galway on 29 October. There were also unsuccessful assaults on for example Bantry, Cork on 30 August and Killorglin in Kerry on 30 September in which the Republicans took significant casualties. However as winter set in the republicans found it increasingly difficult to sustain their campaign and casualty rates among National Army troops dropped rapidly. For instance, in County Sligo, 54 people died in the conflict of whom all but 8 had been killed by the end of September. In October 1922, amon de Valera and the anti-treaty Teachta Dla (TDs, Members of Parliament) set up their own Republican government in opposition to the Free State. However, by then the anti-treaty side held no significant territory and de Valeras government had no authority over the population. In any case, the IRA leaders paid no attention to it, seeing the Republican authority as vested in their own military leaders. In the autumn and winter of 1922, Free State forces broke up many of the larger Republican guerrilla units. In late September, for example, a sweep of northern county Sligo by Free State troops under Sean MacEoin successfully cornered the Anti-Treaty column which had been operating in the north of the county. Six of the column were killed and thirty captured, along with an armoured car. A similar sweep in Connemara in county Mayo in late November captured Anti-Treaty column commander Michael Kilroy and many of his fighters. December saw the capture of two separate Republican columns in the Meath/Kildare area. Intelligence gathered by Free State forces also led to the capture on 5 August of over 100 Republican fighters in Dublin, who were attempting to destroy bridges leading into the city and on 4 November Ernie OMalley, commander of Anti-Treaty forces in Dublin was

captured when National Army troops discovered his safe house. Elsewhere Anti-Treaty units were forced by lack of supplies and safe-houses to disperse into smaller groups, typically of nine to ten men. An exception to this general rule was the activities of a column of Cork and Tipperary Anti-Treaty IRA fighters led by Tom Barry. In late December 1922, this group of around 100 men took a string of towns, first in Cork, then in Tipperary and finally Carrick on Suir, Thomastown and Mullinavat in county Kilkenny where the Free State troops surrendered and gave up their arms. However, even Barrys force was not capable of holding any of the places it had taken and by January 1923 it had dispersed due to lack of food and supplies. Despite these successes for the National Army, it took eight more months of intermittent warfare before the war was brought to an end. The guerrilla phase of the war was marked by assassinations and executions of leaders formerly allied in the cause of Irish independence. Commander-in-Chief Michael Collins was killed in an ambush by anti-treaty Republicans at Bal na mBlth, near his home in County Cork, in August 1922. Collins death increased the bitterness of the Free State leadership towards the Republicans and probably contributed to the subsequent descent of the conflict into a cycle of atrocities and reprisals. Arthur Griffith, the Free State president had also died of a brain hemorrhage ten days before, leaving the Free State government in the hands of W.T. Cosgrave and the Free State army under the command of General Richard Mulcahy. By late 1922 and early 1923, the Anti Treaty guerrillas campaign had been reduced largely to acts of sabotage and destruction of public infrastructure such as roads and railways. In January 1923 the Great Southern and Western Railway released a report detailing the damage Anti-Treaty forces had caused to their property over the previous six months; 375 miles of line damaged, 42 engines derailed, 51 over-bridges and 207 under-bridges destroyed, 83 signal cabins and 13 other buildings destroyed. In the same month, Republicans destroyed the railway stations at Sligo, Ballybunnion and Listowel. It was also in this period that the Anti-Treaty IRA began burning the homes of Free State Senators and of many of the Anglo-Irish landed class. End of the war By early 1923, the offensive capability of the IRA had been seriously eroded and when, in February 1923, Republican leader Liam Deasy was captured by Free State forces, he called on the republicans to end their campaign and reach an accommodation with the Free State. The States executions of AntiTreaty prisoners, 34 of whom were shot in January 1923, also took its toll on the Republicans morale. In addition, the National Armys operations in the field were slowly but steadily breaking up the remaining Republican concentrations. On 18

February, Anti-Treaty officer Dinny Lacey was killed and his column rounded up at the Glen of Aherlow in Tipperary. Lacey had been the head of the IRAs 2nd Southern Division and his death crippled the Republicans cause in the Tipperary/Waterford area. A meeting of the Anti-Treaty leadership on 26 February was told by their 1st Southern Division that, in a short time we would not have a man left owing to the great number of arrests and casualties. The Cork units reported they had suffered 29 killed and an unknown number captured in recent actions and, if five men are arrested in each area, we are finished. March and April 1923 saw this progressive dismemberment of the Republican forces continue with the capture and sometimes killing of guerrilla columns. Among the more well known of these incidents was the wiping out of an Anti-Treaty IRA column under Tim Lyons (known as Aeroplane) in a cave near Kerry Head on 18 April. Three anti-treaty IRA men and two National Army soldiers were killed in the siege of the cave and the remaining five Republicans were taken prisoner and later executed. A National Army report of 11 April stated, Events of the last few days point to the beginning of the end as a far as the irregular campaign is concerned. As the conflict petered out into a de facto victory for the pro-treaty side, de Valera asked the IRA leadership to call a ceasefire, but they refused. The Anti-Treaty IRA executive met on 26 March in county Tipperary to discuss the wars future. Tom Barry proposed a motion to end the war, but it was defeated by 6 votes to 5. amon de Valera was allowed to attend, after some debate, but was given no voting rights. Liam Lynch, the intransigent Republican leader, was killed in a skirmish in the Knockmealdown mountains in County Tipperary on 10 April. The National Army had extracted information from Republican prisoners in Dublin that the IRA Executive was in the area and as well as killing Lynch, they also captured senior Anti-Treaty IRA officers Dan Breen, Todd Andrews, Sen Gaynor and Frank Barrett in the operation. It is often suggested that the death of Lynch allowed the more pragmatic Frank Aiken, who took over as IRA Chief of Staff, to call a halt to what seemed a futile struggle. Aikens accession to IRA leadership was followed on 30 April by the declaration of a ceasefire on behalf of the anti-treaty forces. On 24 May 1923, Aiken followed this with an order to IRA volunteers to dump arms rather than surrender them or continue a fight which they were incapable of winning. amon de Valera supported the order, issuing a statement to Anti-Treaty fighters on 24 May: Soldiers of the Republic. Legion of the Rearguard: The Republic can no longer be defended successfully by your arms. Further sacrifice of life would now be in vain and the continuance of the struggle in arms unwise in the national interest and prejudicial to the future of our cause. Military victory must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic.

Thousands of Anti-Treaty IRA members (including amon de Valera on 15 August) were arrested by the Free State forces in the weeks and months after the end of the war, when they had dumped their arms and returned home. The Free State government had started peace negotiations in early May which broke down. Without a formal peace, holding 13,000 prisoners and worried that fighting could break out again at any time, it enacted the Emergency Powers Act on 2 July by a vote of 37 13. In October 1923 around 8,000 of the 12,000 Republican prisoners in Free State gaols went on hunger strike. The strike lasted for forty one days and met little success. However, most of the women prisoners were released shortly thereafter and the hunger strike helped concentrate the Republican movement on the prisoners and their associated organisations. In July de Valera had recognised the Republican political interests lay with the prisoners and went so far as to say: The whole future of our cause and of the nation depends in my opinion upon the spirit of the prisoners in the camps and in the jails. You are the repositories of the NATIONAL FAITH AND WILL.

http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Valera_Eamon_de.html
The Treaty The Republic's delegates to the Treaty Negotiations were accredited by President de Valera and his cabinet as Plenipotentiaries (ie, negotiators with the legal authority to sign a treaty without reference back to the cabinet.). However the Treaty proved controversial in so far as it replaced the Republic (which was unrecognised by any international state) by a dominion of the British Commonwealth with the King represented by a Governor-General of the Irish Free State. De Valera baulked at the agreement, even though his opponents claimed he had refused to go because he knew what the outcome would be and didn't want to get the blame. Curiously, he reacted to news of the signing of the Treaty not with anger at its contents (which he refused even to read when offered a newspaper report of its contents) but with anger over the fact that they had not consulted with him, their president, before signing! De Valera and minority of supporters in Sinn Fein left Dil ireann and tried unsuccessfully to set up a republican administration with a republican ministry under himself. Griffith was elected President of Dil ireann in his place. A Crown-appointed administration under Michael Collins was created also. Civil War Relations with the new Irish government, which was backed by most of the Dil and the electorate, and the Anti-treatyites under the nominal leadership of deV, now descended into the Irish Civil War (June 1922), in which the pro-treaty Free State forces defeated de Valera's Republicans. Even de Valera's most passionate supporters admit his behaviour at that point was the low point in his career. Speeches where he talked of "wading through the blood" of ministers hardly cooled tempers. Though nominally head of the Anti-treatyites, de Valera had little influence and spent part of the time in prison. Among the Civil War's many tragedies were the assassination of the Collins, who was the

head of the Provisional Government, the death through exhaustion of the President of Dil ireann, Arthur Griffith, the execution of one of the treaty signatories, Robert Erskine Childers and the deliberate booby-trapping and destruction by republicans of the Irish Public Records Office, which destroyed one thousand years of Irish state records in an act that even the strongest defenders of the anti-treaty cause describe as a "pointless act".

Independence war
http://theirishwar.com/history/irish-war-of-independence/

Irish War of Independence The Irish War of Independence (Irish: Cogadh na Saoirse, also known as the Anglo-Irish War or Tan War) was a guerrilla war mounted against the British government in Ireland by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It began in January 1919, following the Irish Republics declaration of independence, and ended with a truce in July 1921. The subsequent negotiations led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended British rule in most of Ireland and established the Irish Free State. However, six northern counties would remain under British rule. The IRA that fought in this conflict is often referred to as the Old IRA to distinguish it from later organisations that used the same name. Origins The Home Rule Crisis Since the 1880s, Irish nationalists in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had been demanding Home Rule, or self-government, from Britain. Fringe organisations, such as Arthur Griffiths Sinn Fin instead argued for some form of Irish independence, but they were in a small minority at this time. The demand for Home Rule was eventually granted by the British Government in 1912, immediately prompting a prolonged crisis within the United Kingdom as Ulster Unionists formed an armed organisationthe Ulster Volunteers to resist this measure of devolution. In turn, Nationalists formed their own military organisation, the Irish Volunteers. The British Parliament passed the Third Home Rule Act with an amending Bill for the partition of Ireland introduced by Ulster Unionists, but the Acts implementation was postponed by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The majority of Nationalists followed their IPP leaders and John Redmonds call to support Britain and the Allied war effort in Irish regiments of the New British Army, the intention being to ensure the commencement of Home Rule after the war. But a significant minority of the Irish Volunteers opposed Irelands involvement in the war. The Volunteer movement split, a majority leaving to form the National Volunteers under John Redmond. The remaining Irish Volunteers, under Eoin MacNeill, held that they would maintain their organisation until Home Rule had been granted. Within this Volunteer movement, another faction, led by the

separatist Irish Republican Brotherhood, began to prepare for a revolt against British rule. The Easter Rising The plan for revolt was realised in the Easter Rising of 1916, in which the Volunteers, now explicitly declaring a republic, launched an insurrection whose aim was to end British rule and to found an Irish Republic. The rising, in which over four hundred people died, was almost exclusively confined to Dublin and was put down within a week, but the British response, executing the leaders of the insurrection and arresting thousands of nationalist activists, galvanized support for the separatist Sinn Fin the party which the republicans first adopted and then took over. By now, support for the British war effort was on the wane, and Irish public opinion was shocked and outraged by some of the actions committed by British troops, particularly the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and the imposition of wartime martial law. Secondly, the British, in the face of the crisis caused by the German Spring Offensive in April 1918, attempted to introduce conscription into Ireland combined with Home Rule outlined at the Irish Convention. This further alienated the Irish electorate and produced mass demonstrations during the Conscription Crisis of 1918. By the time of the November 1918 election, alienation from British rule was widespread. To Irish Republicans, the Irish War of Independence had begun with the Proclamation of the Irish Republic during the Easter Rising of 1916. Republicans argued that the conflict of 1919-21 (and indeed the subsequent Irish Civil War) was the defence of this Republic against attempts to destroy it. The First Dil In the 1918 general election Irish voters showed their disapproval of British policy by giving Sinn Fin 70% (73 seats out of 105) of Irish seats, 25 of these unopposed. Sinn Fin won 91% of the seats outside of Ulster on 46,9% of votes cast, but was in a minority in Ulster, where Unionists were in a majority. Sinn Fin pledged not to sit in the UK Parliament at Westminster, but rather to set up an Irish Parliament. This parliament, known as the First Dil, and its ministry, called the Aireacht, consisting only of Sinn Fin members, met at the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. The Dil reaffirmed the 1916 declaration with the Declaration of Independence, and issued a Message to the Free Nations of the World, which stated that there was an existing state of war, between Ireland and England. The Irish Volunteers were reconstituted as the Irish Republican Army or IRA. The IRA was perceived by some members of Dil ireann to have a mandate to wage war on the British administration based at Dublin Castle.

The years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the beginning of the War of Independence in 1919 were not bloodless. Thomas Ashe, one of the Volunteer leaders imprisoned for his role in the 1916 rebellion died on hunger strike, after attempted force-feeding in 1917. In 1918, during disturbances arising out of the anti-conscription campaign, six civilians died in confrontations with the police and British Army and over 1,000 were arrested. Armistice Day was marked by severe rioting in Dublin, which left over 100 British soldiers injured. There were also raids for arms by the Volunteers, at least one shooting of an Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) policeman and the burning of an RIC barracks in Kerry. However, there was as yet no co-ordinated armed campaign against the British presence in Ireland. Chronology Initial hostilities While it was not clear in the beginning of 1919 that the Dil ever intended to gain independence by military means, and war was not explicitly threatened in Sinn Fins 1918 manifesto, an incident occurred on 21 January 1919, the same day as the First Dil convened. Several IRA members acting independently at Soloheadbeg, in County Tipperary, led by Sen Treacy and Dan Breen, attacked and shot two Royal Irish Constabulary officers who were escorting explosives. Breen later recalled: we took the action deliberately, having thought over the matter and talked it over between us. Treacy had stated to me that the only way of starting a war was to kill someone, and we wanted to start a war, so we intended to kill some of the police whom we looked upon as the foremost and most important branch of the enemy forces. The only regret that we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen in it, instead of the six we had expected. This is widely regarded as the beginning of the War of Independence, and the men acted on their own initiative to try to start a war. The British government declared South Tipperary a Special Military Area under the Defence of the Realm Act two days later. The war was not formally declared by the Dil until well into the conflict, however. On 10 April 1919 the Dil was told: As regards the Republican prisoners, we must always remember that this country is at war with England and so we must in a sense regard them as necessary casualties in the great fight. In January 1921, two years after the war had started, the Dil debated whether it was feasible to accept formally a state of war that was being thrust on them, or not, and decided not to declare war. Then on 11 March, Dil ireann President amon de Valera formally accepted the existence of

a state of war with England. The delay allowed a balancing of the military and political realities. Violence spreads Volunteers began to attack British government property, carried out raids for arms and funds and targeted and killed prominent members of the British administration. The first was Resident Magistrate John C. Milling, who was shot dead in Westport, County Mayo, for having sent Volunteers to prison for unlawful assembly and drilling. They mimicked the successful tactics of the Boers, fast violent raids without uniform. Although some republican leaders, notably amon de Valera, favoured classic conventional warfare in order to legitimise the new republic in the eyes of the world, the more practically experienced Michael Collins and the broader IRA leadership opposed these tactics as they had led to the military dbacle of 1916. Others, notably Arthur Griffith, preferred a campaign of civil disobedience rather than armed struggle. The violence used was at first deeply unpopular with the Irish people and it took the heavy-handed British response to popularise it among much of the population. During the early part of the conflict, roughly from 1919 to the middle of 1920, there was a relatively limited amount of violence. Much of the nationalist campaign involved popular mobilisation and the creation of a republican state within a state in opposition to British rule. British journalist Robert Lynd wrote in the Daily News in July 1920 that: So far as the mass of people are concerned, the policy of the day is not active but a passive policy. Their policy is not so much to attack the Government as to ignore it and to build up a new government by its side. The IRAs main target throughout the conflict was the mainly Catholic Irish police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which were the British governments eyes and ears in Ireland. Its members and barracks (especially the more isolated ones) were vulnerable, and they were a source of much-needed arms. The RIC numbered 9,700 men stationed in 1,500 barracks throughout Ireland. A policy of ostracism of RIC men was announced by the Dil on 11 April 1919.[26] This proved successful in demoralising the force as the war went on, as people turned their faces from a force increasingly compromised by association with British government repression. The rate of resignation went up, and recruitment in Ireland dropped off dramatically. Often the RIC were reduced to buying food at gunpoint as shops and other businesses refused to deal with them. Some RIC men cooperated with the IRA through fear or sympathy, supplying the organisation with valuable information. By contrast with the effectiveness of the widespread public boycott of the police, the military actions carried out by the IRA against the RIC at this time were relatively limited. In 1919, 11 RIC men and 4 Dublin Metropolitan Police were killed and another 20 RIC wounded.

Other aspects of mass participation in the conflict included strikes by organised workers in opposition to the British presence in Ireland. In Limerick in April 1919, a general strike was called by the Limerick Trades and Labour Council, as a protest against the declaration of a Special Military Area under the Defence of the Realm Act which covered most of Limerick city and a part of the county. Special permits, to be issued by the RIC, would now be required to enter the city. The Trades Councils special Strike Committee controlled the city for fourteen days in an episode that was nicknamed the Limerick Soviet. Similarly, in May 1920, Dublin dockers refused to handle any war matriel, and were soon joined by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, who banned railway drivers from carrying British forces. Train drivers were brought over from England after drivers refused to carry British troops. The strike badly hampered British troop movements until December 1920 when it was called off. The British government managed to bring the situation to an end when they threatened to withhold grants from the railway companies, which would have meant that workers would no longer have been paid. Violent attacks by the IRA also steadily increased, however. By early 1920, they were attacking isolated RIC stations in rural areas, causing them to be abandoned as the police retreated to the larger towns. Collapse of the British administration In early April 1920, 400 abandoned RIC barracks were burned to the ground to prevent them being used again, along with almost one hundred income tax offices. This had two effects. Firstly the RIC withdrew from much of the countryside, leaving it in the hands of IRA.[30] In JuneJuly 1920, assizes failed all across the south and west of Ireland. Trials by jury could not be held because jurors would not attend. The collapse of the court system demoralised the RIC, and many police resigned and retired. The Irish Republican Police (IRP) was founded between April and June 1920 under the authority of Dil ireann and the former IRA Chief of Staff Cathal Brugha to replace the RIC and to enforce the ruling of the Dil Courts, set up under the Irish Republic. By 1920, the IRP had a presence in 21 of Irelands 32 counties. The Dil Courts were generally socially conservative, despite their revolutionary origins, and halted the attempts of some landless farmers at redistribution of land from wealthier landowners to poorer farmers. Secondly, the Inland Revenue ceased to operate in most of Ireland. People were instead encouraged to subscribe to Collins National Loan, set up to raise funds for the young government and its army. By the end of the year the loan had reached 358,000. It eventually reached 380,000. An even larger amount, totalling over $5 million, was raised in the United States by Irish Americans and sent to Ireland to finance the Republic. Rates were still paid to local councils, but nine out of eleven of these were controlled by Sinn

Fin, who naturally refused to pass them on to the British government. Thus, by mid 1920, the Irish Republic was a reality in the lives of many people, enforcing its own law, maintaining its own armed forces and collecting its own taxes. The British Liberal journal, The Nation, wrote in August 1920 that the central fact of the present situation in Ireland is that the Irish Republic exists. The British forces, in trying to re-assert their control over the country, often resorted to arbitrary reprisals against republican activists and the civilian population. An unofficial government policy of reprisals began in September 1919 in Fermoy, County Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town, after one of their number had been killed in an arms raid by the local IRA. Arthur Griffith estimated that in the first 18 months of the conflict, British forces carried out 38,720 raids on private homes, arrested 4,982 suspects, committed 1,604 armed assaults, carried out 102 indiscriminate shootings and burning in towns and villages, and killed 77 people including women and children. In March 1920, Toms Mac Curtain, the Sinn Fin Lord Mayor of Cork, was shot dead, in front of his wife at his home, by men with blackened faces who were later seen returning to the local police barracks. The jury at the inquest into his death returned a verdict of wilful murder against David Lloyd George (the British Prime Minister) and District Inspector Swanzy, among others. Swanzy was later tracked down and killed in Lisburn, in County Antrim. This pattern of killings and reprisals escalated in the second half of 1920 and in 1921. IRA organisation and operations Michael Collins was the main driving force behind the independence movement. Nominally the Minister of Finance in the republics government, and IRA Director of Intelligence, he was actively involved in providing funds and arms to the IRA units that needed them, and in the selection of officers. Collins natural intelligence, organisational capability and sheer drive galvanised many who came in contact with him. He established what proved an effective network of spies among sympathetic members of the Dublin Metropolitan Polices (DMP) G division and other important branches of the British administration. The G division men were a relatively small political division active in subverting the republican movement, and were detested by the IRA as often they were used to identify volunteers who would have been unknown to British soldiers or the later Black and Tans. Collins set up the Squad, a group of men whose sole duty was to seek out and kill G-men and other British spies and agents. Collins Squad began killing RIC intelligence officers from July 1919 onwards. Many G-men were offered a chance to resign or leave Ireland by the IRA, and some chose to leave Ireland.

The Chief of Staff of the IRA was Richard Mulcahy, who was responsible for organising and directing IRA units around the country. In theory, both Collins and Mulcahy were responsible to Cathal Brugha, the Dils Minister of Defence. However, in practice, Brugha had only a supervisory role, recommending or objecting to specific actions. A great deal also depended on IRA leaders in local areas (such as Liam Lynch, Tom Barry, Sen Moylan, Sen Mac Eoin and Ernie OMalley) who organised guerrilla activity, largely on their own initiative. For most of the conflict, IRA activity was concentrated in Munster and Dublin, with only isolated active IRA units elsewhere, such as in County Roscommon, north County Longford and western County Mayo. While the paper membership of the IRA, carried over from the Irish Volunteers, was over 100,000 men, Michael Collins estimated that only 15,000 men actively served in the IRA during the course of the war, with about 3,000 on active service at any time. There were also support organisations Cumann na mBan (the IRA womens group) and Fianna ireann (youth movement), who carried weapons and intelligence for IRA men and secured food and lodgings for them. The IRA benefited from the widespread help given to them by the general Irish population, who generally refused to pass information to the RIC and the British military and who often provided safe houses and provisions to IRA units on the run. Much of the IRAs popularity arose from the excessive reaction of the British forces to IRA activity. When amon de Valera returned from the United States, he demanded in the Dil that the IRA desist from the ambushes and assassinations that were allowing the British to successfully portray it as a terrorist group, and to take on the British forces with conventional military methods. The proposal was immediately dismissed. Martial law The British responded to the escalating violence in Ireland with increasing use of force. Reluctant to deploy the regular British Army into the country in greater numbers, they set up two paramilitary police units to aid the RIC. The Black and Tans were set up to bolster the flagging RIC. Seven thousand strong, they were mainly ex-British soldiers demobilised after World War I. First deployed to Ireland in March 1920, most came from English and Scottish cities. While officially they were part of the RIC, in reality they were a paramilitary force. After their deployment in March 1920, they rapidly gained a reputation for drunkenness and ill discipline that did more harm to the British governments moral authority in Ireland than any other group. In response to IRA actions, in the summer of 1920, the Tans burned and sacked numerous small towns throughout Ireland, including Balbriggan, Trim, Templemore and others.

In July 1920, another quasi-military police body, the Auxiliaries, consisting of 2,215 former British army officers, arrived in Ireland. The Auxiliary Division had a reputation just as bad as the Tans for their mistreatment of the civilian population but tended to be more effective and more willing to take on the IRA. The policy of reprisals, which involved public denunciation or denial and private approval, was famously satirised by Lord Hugh Cecil when he said: It seems to be agreed that there is no such thing as reprisals, but they are having a good effect. On 9 August 1920, the British Parliament passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act, which suspended all coroners courts, because of the large number of warrants served on members of the British forces. They were replaced with military courts of enquiry. In addition, the powers of military court martials were extended to cover the whole population and were empowered to use the death penalty and internment without trial. Finally, government payments to local governments in Sinn Fin hands were suspended. This act has been interpreted by historians as a choice by Prime Minister David Lloyd George to put down the rebellion in Ireland rather than negotiate with the Republican leadership. As a result, violence escalated steadily from that summer, and sharply after November 1920 until July 1921. It was in this period that a large-scale mutiny broke out among the Irish Connaught Rangers, stationed in India. Two were killed whilst trying to storm an armoury and one was later executed. Escalation, October-December 1920 A number of events dramatically escalated the conflict in late 1920. First the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in London in October, while two other IRA prisoners on hunger strike, Joe Murphy and Michael Fitzgerald, died in Cork Jail. Then, on 21 November 1920, there was a day of dramatic bloodshed in Dublin. In the early morning, Collins IRA Squad attempted to wipe out the British Intelligence operatives in the capital. The Squad shot 19 people, killing 14 and wounding 5. They consisted of British Army officers, police officers and civilians. The dead included members of the so-called Cairo Gang and a Courts-martial officer at different places around Dublin. In response, Auxiliaries drove in trucks into Croke Park (Dublins GAA football and hurling ground) during a football match, shooting into the crowd. Fourteen civilians were killed, including one of the players, Michael Hogan and a further 65 people were wounded. Later that day two republican prisoners, Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and an unassociated friend, Conor Clune who had been arrested with them, were killed in Dublin Castle. The official account was that the three men were shot while trying to escape,

which was rejected by Irish nationalists who were certain the men had been tortured then murdered. This day became known as Bloody Sunday. On 28 November 1920, only a week after Bloody Sunday in Dublin, the west Cork unit of the IRA, under Tom Barry, ambushed a patrol of Auxiliaries at Kilmichael in County Cork, killing all but one of the 18-man patrol. These actions marked a significant escalation of the conflict. In response, counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperaryall in the province of Munster were put under martial law on 10 December. Shortly afterwards, in January 1921, official reprisals were sanctioned by the British and they began with the burning of seven houses in Midleton in Cork. On December 11, the centre of Cork was burnt out by British forces, who then shot at firefighters trying to tackle the blaze, in reprisal for an IRA ambush in the city on 11 December 1920 which killed one Auxiliary and wounded eleven. Peak of violence, December 1920-July 1921 During the following eight months until the Truce of July 1921, there was a spiralling of the death toll in the conflict, with 1,000 people including the RIC police, British military, IRA volunteers and civilians, being killed in the months between January and July 1921 alone. This represents about 70% of the total casualties for the entire three-year conflict. In addition, 4,500 IRA personnel (or suspected sympathisers) were interned in this time. In the middle of this violence, the Dil formally declared war on Britain in March 1921. Between 1 November 1920 and 7 June 1921 twenty four men were executed by the British. The first IRA volunteer to be executed was Kevin Barry, one of The Forgotten Ten who were buried in unmarked graves in unconsecrated ground inside Mountjoy Prison until 2001. On 1 February, the first execution under martial law of an IRA man took place. Cornelius Murphy of Millstreet, Cork was shot in Cork city. On 28 February, six more were executed, again in Cork. On 19 March 1921, Tom Barrys 100-strong West Cork IRA unit fought a large-scale action against 1,200 British troops the Crossbarry Ambush. Barrys men narrowly avoided being trapped by converging British columns and inflicted between ten and thirty killed on the British side. Just two days later, on 21 March, the Kerry IRA attacked a train at the Headford junction near Killarney. Twenty British soldiers were killed or injured, as well as two IRA men and three civilians. Most of the actions in the war were on a smaller scale than this, but the IRA did have other significant victories in ambushes, for example at Millstreet in Cork and at Scramogue in Roscommon, also in March 1921 and at Tourmakeady and Carowkennedy in Mayo in May and June. Equally common, however, were failed ambushes, the worst of which, for example at Upton and Clonmult in Cork in February 1921, saw three and twelve IRA men killed respectively and more captured. The IRA in Mayo

suffered a comparable reverse at Kilmeena. Fears of informers after such failed ambushes often led to a spate of IRA shootings of informers, real and imagined. The biggest single loss for the IRA, however, came in Dublin. On 25 May 1921, several hundred IRA men from the Dublin Brigade occupied and burned the Custom House (the centre of local government in Ireland) in Dublin city centre. Symbolically, this was intended to show that British rule in Ireland was untenable. However, from a military point of view, it was a catastrophe in which five IRA men were killed and over eighty were captured. This showed the IRA was not well enough equipped or trained to take on British forces in a conventional manner. However, it did not, as is sometimes claimed, cripple the IRA in Dublin. The Dublin Brigade carried out 107 attacks in the city in May and 93 in June, showing a falloff in activity, but not a dramatic one. However, by July 1921, most IRA units were chronically short of both weapons and ammunition. Also, for all their effectiveness at guerrilla warfare, they had, as Richard Mulcahy recalled, as yet not been able to drive the enemy [the British] out of anything but a fairly good sized police barracks. Still, many military historians have concluded that the IRA fought a largely successful and lethal guerrilla war, which forced the British government to conclude that the IRA could not be defeated militarily. The failure of the British efforts to put down the guerrillas was illustrated by the events of Black Whitsun on 1315 May 1921. A general election for the parliament of Southern Ireland was held on 13 May. Sinn Fin won 124 of the new parliaments 128 seats unopposed, but its elected members refused to take their seats. Under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act, the Southern Parliament was dissolved, and Southern Ireland was to be ruled as a crown colony. Over the next two days (1415 May), the IRA killed fifteen policemen. These events marked the complete failure of the British Coalition Governments Irish policyboth the failure to enforce a settlement without negotiating with Sinn Fin and a failure to defeat the IRA. By the time of the truce, however, many Republican leaders, including Michael Collins, were convinced that if the war went on for much longer, there was a chance that the IRA campaign as it was then organised could be brought to a standstill. Because of this, plans were drawn up to bring the war to England. The IRA did take the campaign to the streets of Glasgow. It was decided that key economic targets, such as the Liverpool docks, would be bombed. Nineteen warehouses there had been burned to the ground by the IRA the previous November. The units charged with these missions would more easily evade capture because England was not under, and British public opinion was unlikely to accept, martial law. These plans were abandoned because of the truce.

The north-east In the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (enacted in December 1920), the British government attempted to solve the conflict by creating two Home Rule parliaments in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. While Dil ireann ignored this, deeming the Irish Republic to be already in existence, Unionists in the north-east accepted it and prepared to form their own government. In this part of Ireland, which was predominantly Protestant and Unionist, there was, as a result, a very different pattern of violence from the rest of the country. Whereas in the south and west, the conflict was between the IRA and British forces, in the north-east and particularly in Belfast, it often developed into a cycle of sectarian killings between Catholics, who were largely Nationalist, and Protestants, who were mostly Unionist. Summer 1920 While IRA attacks were less common in the north-east than elsewhere, the unionist community saw itself as being besieged by armed Catholic nationalists who seemed to have taken over the rest of Ireland. As a result, they retaliated against the northern Catholic community as a whole. Such action was largely condoned by the unionist leadership and abetted by state forces. James Craig, for instance, wrote in 1920: The Loyalist rank and file have determined to take action they now feel the situation is so desperate that unless the Government will take immediate action, it may be advisable for them to see what steps can be taken towards a system of organised reprisals against the rebels. The first cycle of attacks and reprisals broke out in the summer of 1920. On 19 June a week of inter-sectarian rioting and sniping started in Derry, resulting in 18 deaths. On 17 July 1920, a British Colonel Gerald Smyth was assassinated by the IRA in the County Club in Cork city in response to a speech that was made to police officers of Listowel who had refused orders to move into the more urban areas, in which he stated you may make mistakes occasionally, and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped. No policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man. Smyth came from Banbridge, County Down in the north-east and his killing provoked retaliation there against Catholics in Banbridge and Dromore. On 21 July 1920, partly in response to the killing of Smyth and partly because of competition over jobs due to the high unemployment rate, loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast and forced over 7,000 Catholic and left-wing Protestant workers from their jobs. Sectarian rioting broke out in response in Belfast and Derry, resulting in about 40 deaths and many Catholics and Protestants being expelled from their homes. On 22 August 1920, RIC Detective Swanzy was shot dead by Cork IRA men while leaving church in Lisburn, County Antrim. Swanzy had been blamed by an inquest jury for the killing of Cork Mayor Toms Mac Curtain. In revenge, local

Loyalists burned Catholic residential areas of Lisburn destroying over 300 homes. While several people were later prosecuted for the burnings, no attempt seems to have been made to halt the attacks at the time. Michael Collins, acting on a suggestion by Sen MacEntee, organised a boycott of Belfast goods in response to the attacks on the Catholic community. The Dail approved a partial boycott on 6 August and a more complete one was implemented by the end of 1920. Spring 1921 After a lull in violence in the north over the new year, killings there intensified again in the spring of 1921. The northern IRA units came under pressure from the leadership in Dublin to step up attacks in line with the rest of the country. Predictably, this unleashed loyalist reprisals against Catholics. For example, in April 1921, the IRA in Belfast shot dead two Auxiliaries in Donegal Place in Belfast city centre. The same night, two Catholics were killed on the Falls Road. On 10 July 1921 the IRA ambushed British forces in Raglan street in Belfast. In the following week, sixteen Catholics were killed and 216 Catholic homes burned in reprisal. Killings on the loyalist side were largely carried by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), allegedly with the aid of the RIC police and especially the auxiliary police force, the Ulster Special Constabulary or B-Specials. The Special Constabulary (set up in September 1920), was largely recruited from Ulster Volunteer Force and Orange Lodges and, in the words of historian Michael Hopkinson, amounted to an officially approved UVF. In May James Craig came to Dublin to meet the British Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Fitzalan, and was smuggled by the IRA through Dublin to meet Eamon de Valera. The two leaders discussed the possibility of a truce in Ulster and an amnesty for prisoners. Craig proposed a compromise settlement based on the Government of Ireland Act, with limited independence for the South and autonomy for the North within a Home Rule context. However, the talks came to nothing and violence in the north continued. The propaganda war, Summer 1921 Another feature of the war was the use of propaganda by both sides. The British tried to portray the IRA as anti-Protestant in order to encourage loyalism in Irish Protestants and win sympathy for their harsh tactics in Britain. For example, in their communiqus they would always mention the religion of spies or collaborators the IRA had killed if the victim was Protestant, but not if they were Catholic (which was more often), trying to give the impression, in Ireland and abroad, that the IRA were slaughtering Protestants. They encouraged newspaper editors, often forcefully, to do the same.[citation needed] In the summer of 1921, a series of articles appeared in a London magazine, entitled Ireland under the New Terror, Living Under Martial Law. While purporting to be an impartial account of the situation in

Ireland, it portrayed the IRA in a very unfavourable light when compared with the British forces. In reality the author, Ernest Dowdall, was an Auxiliary and the series was one of many articles planted by the Dublin Castle Propaganda Department (established in August 1920) to influence public opinion in a Britain increasingly dismayed at the behaviour of its security forces in Ireland. The Catholic Church hierarchy was critical of the violence of both sides, but especially that of the IRA, continuing a long tradition of condemning militant republicanism. The Bishop of Kilmore, Dr. Finnegan, said: Any war to be just and lawful must be backed by a well grounded hope of success. What hope of success have you against the mighty forces of the British Empire? None none whatever and if it unlawful as it is, every life taken in pursuance of it is murder. Thomas Gilmartin, the Archbishop of Tuam, issued a letter saying that IRA men who took part in ambushes have broken the truce of God, they have incurred the guilt of murder.[61] However in May 1921, Pope Benedict XV dismayed the British government when he issued a letter that exhorted the English as well as Irish to calmly consider . . . some means of mutual agreement, as they had been pushing for a condemnation of the rebellion. They declared that his comments put HMG (His Majestys Government) and the Irish murder gang on a footing of equality. Desmond FitzGerald and Erskine Childers were active in producing the Irish Bulletin, which detailed government atrocities which Irish and British newspapers were unwilling or unable to cover. It was printed secretly and distributed throughout Ireland, and to international press agencies and American, European and sympathetic British politicians. While the military war made most of Ireland ungovernable from early 1920, it did not actually remove British forces from any part. But the success of Sinn Fins propaganda campaign did remove the option from the British administration to deepen the conflict. The British cabinet had not sought the war that had developed since 1919. By 1921 one of its members, Winston Churchill, reflected: What was the alternative? It was to plunge one small corner of the empire into an iron repression, which could not be carried out without an admixture of murder and counter-murder. Only national self-preservation could have excused such a policy, and no reasonable man could allege that selfpreservation was involved.