HELENE O’KEEFFE, JOHN CROWLEY, DONAL O’DRISCEOIL, JOHN BORGONOVO and MIKE MURPHY (eds)
Cork University Press
€69
ISBN 9781782055921
REVIEWED BY
Charles Lysaght
Nobody in nationalist Ireland felt proud of the Civil War that followed hard upon independence in 1922. Unlike the War of Independence, it produced no heroes. Neither side could be happy with its entire conduct during it. It provided ammunition for those who had asserted that the Irish were unfit to govern themselves and those who believed that the resort to violence to achieve independence had been a mistake. It left a residue of bitterness that poisoned political life for generations. It facilitated the unionist rulers of the newly created Northern Ireland in establishing a one-party hegemony that was to survive undisturbed for 50 years.
The Civil War could be said to have been about very little in that there was no ideological difference between the contestants. The leaders on both sides wanted an independent all-island republic. The difference was that one side was prepared to accept less as the best that could be then obtained to bring the War of Independence to an end. The concessions made by those who had signed up to an agreement with the British, known to history as ‘the Treaty’, in December 1921 were that the self-governing Irish Free State would remain within the Empire, retaining the king as head of state, while Northern Ireland would be free to opt out of the Free State and remain within the United Kingdom if their elected parliament so decided.
Opposition to the Treaty focused almost exclusively on the concession that the Free State should remain within the Empire with dominion status, although this was, in reality, the less important concession and was to prove the less enduring. In part this was because it was realised all round that the million unionists in Northern Ireland could not be coerced into a united Ireland, and in part it was because the terms of the Treaty seemed to envisage the transfer to the Free State of areas within Northern Ireland that were judged by a Boundary Commission to have nationalist majorities.
Éamon de Valera, the president of the government established by the rebel Sinn Féin party in 1919, opposed the Treaty that was agreed by the plenipotentiaries sent to London to negotiate it. A slender majority in his government and of Sinn Féin members elected to the Dáil in 1921 took the opposite view and voted to accept the Treaty. De Valera resigned as president and Arthur Griffith, the leader of the delegation that had negotiated the Treaty, was elected in his place. Another member of that delegation, Michael Collins, was elected chairman of the provisional government to which, under the terms of the Treaty, the British government handed over the administration in January 1922. An election was to be held for a parliament that would adopt a constitution on whose basis the Irish Free State would come into existence formally on 6 December 1922, the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty.
This was the background to the slide towards a civil war, which did not break out until June 1922. De Valera campaigned against the Treaty, warning presciently that its adoption would lead to bloodshed between supporters of the Treaty and those loyal to the Republic and unwilling to remain within the Empire. Most local IRA (Irish Republican Army) leaders were opposed to the Treaty and made to take over barracks vacated by the British troops who were beginning to depart. IRA leaders supportive of the provisional government took over other vacated barracks. In April 1922, IRA units opposed to the Treaty took over the Four Courts in Dublin. Initiatives to effect conciliation between the two sides failed.
The provisional government hoped that the elections for the Dáil in June would enable the will of the people in favour of the Treaty to manifest itself. The results of the election did that but failed to quell the opposition. The clarity of the outcome was obscured by a pact made between Collins and de Valera, and then repudiated by Collins, that each side would support Sinn Féin candidates, who were drawn almost equally from those supporting the Treaty and those opposing it.
Armed with their electoral mandate, the provisional government yielded to pressure from the British government to fire on the republicans occupying the Four Courts. This provoked other opponents of the Treaty to join in armed resistance to it. De Valera enlisted as a private soldier; although subsequently made president of a shadow government set up by the republicans, he was leading from behind and had little influence over the military leaders.
Within a short period, the National Army recruited by the provisional government and equipped with assistance from the British overcame the republicans in the field; by the late summer of 1922 republicans were reduced to fighting a guerrilla war from civilian cover. Atrocities were committed by both sides.
Wholesale executions of those found illegally in possession of arms eventually broke the republican resistance. At an early stage de Valera sought to call a halt, but succeeded in doing so only in May 1923 after Liam Lynch, the IRA chief of staff, had been killed in action. Although there was no surrender by the republicans, executions ceased shortly after their ceasefire, but a sizeable number of republicans, including de Valera himself, were arrested and interned until the middle of 1924; some were released earlier but, in many cases, only after they had signed an undertaking renouncing anti-government militarism.
Meanwhile, in a general election held in September 1923, republican candidates, many of whom were internees, had obtained over a quarter of the votes cast. This encouraged them to take part in constitutional politics, leading to the formation of Fianna Fáil under de Valera’s leadership in 1926. After their victory in the general elections of 1932 and 1933, they unilaterally dismantled the links with the Crown and Empire that had been unacceptable to republicans. They had a new constitution enacted by referendum that replaced the one negotiated with the British in 1922. Ironically, this vindicated the argument made by those who supported the Treaty that it gave ‘freedom to achieve freedom’. It did not, of course, deliver a united Ireland.
This book follows The atlas of the Irish revolution produced in 2021 by the same team from University College Cork; its outstanding feature is the illustrative material, notably photographs and reproductions of documents. The most original item is the list of the 1,484 fatalities compiled and analysed in an article by Andy Bielenberg, John Dooney and Helen O’Keeffe. In its detail, however, it falls short of the individual accounts of the deaths of the War of Independence compiled by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin in their book The dead of the Irish revolution, published in 2020. Helene O’Keeffe also provides a valuable case-study of a mass hunger strike of prisoners who were interned.
Editor John Borgonovo is the most prolific contributor to the volume with four pieces, the longest of which is a military history of the actual war. Heather Jones’s account of the neglected subject of reactions in Britain pinpoints how developments in Ireland from early 1922 sapped the enthusiasm for a united Ireland voiced by Treaty signatories Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead in the immediate aftermath of its signing, when they urged Northern Ireland unionists not to exercise their right under the Treaty to opt out of the Irish Free State.
Some of the articles, such as that by Seán Enright on the executions, repeat what was in longer authoritative works by the same author. Enright is described as a circuit court judge; oddly, it is not mentioned that this was in England. Nor is it mentioned that he is the grandson of Seán Moylan, who was among the leaders of the republican forces in Munster during the Civil War. One may dispute Enright’s contention that the executions were unnecessary to bring the conflict to an end, but he is surely right that they could and should have been carried out within the law and that they damaged politically those responsible for them. The article contains some interesting new information about the last Master of the Rolls, Charles O’Connor (not Sir Charles), who declined to halt the execution of leading republican Erskine Childers to allow an appeal; unfortunately, no sources are cited.
The shorter vignettes cover a wide range of topics, including the songs and poetry of the Civil War, the attitude of playwright Seán O’Casey, the cartoon war and the postal strike of 1922—the latter two by Donal O’Drisceoil, one of the editors, who has also contributed a longer piece on propaganda and censorship during the conflict. Violence towards women and towards Protestants are treated in other short pieces.
The Civil War cast a long shadow; the manner in which it shaped and was harnessed in politics for many years is discussed in an article by Fearghal McGarry. The difficulty with this exercise is to identify what was the result of the war as such, and what would have happened if there had been no war and all those opposed to the Treaty had pursued their opposition only constitutionally.
What is certain is that the Civil War imposed a substantial financial burden on the new state, both in fighting it and in paying for the damage caused to property and businesses. This is not satisfactorily quantified in this volume. Nor is there an analysis of how far the burden was alleviated by assistance from the British to the Free State government to fight the Civil War, and afterwards in 1925 when the financial provisions of the Treaty were amended to the advantage of the Free State. This was facilitated by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, always a champion of the Free State government and an ardent admirer of its lead minister, Kevin O’Higgins.
Although the Act of Indemnity passed in the aftermath of the Civil War protected only government forces for crimes committed during it, it seems that those on the other side were not pursued or prosecuted for such crimes. It is acknowledged that those who opposed the Treaty were denied employment in the civil service and elsewhere, leading many to emigrate. They suffered in not being granted military pensions or compensation for loss suffered as a result of their service before and after the Treaty until Fianna Fáil entered government in the 1930s. What about those who opposed the Treaty without taking up arms? All this was worthy of more systematic and authoritative treatment than it receives anywhere in this volume. For all its many merits, this work cannot be described as the last word.
What can be said is that the restraint exercised by the Cosgrave government, and by that led by de Valera after 1932, compared favourably with the vengeful behaviour of victors in civil wars in countries such as Spain. This, and the lack of a deep ideological divide between the Civil War contestants, diminished the long-term harm that it caused and secured the future of independent Ireland as a stable democracy.
Charles Lysaght is a barrister and biographer.