De Valera's Irelands (14 page)

The Irish Civil War resembled others of its kind in its viciousness and in the enduring hatreds that it generated. In this paper I would like to sug­gest some effects on the structure of Irish politics and even society that were consequent on the Civil War.

The first point that I would like to make is that it is probably not true that the conflict was triggered off by the actual terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty or by any public actions of de Valera. During the Truce period of July 1921 to December of the same year, it was obvious to many observ­ers that some elements of the IRA, now fortified with armaments acquir­ed in relative ‘peacetime', were determined to use physical force against any compromise settlement short of a republic. Behind them again were others who were equally determined to push Ireland the whole way to a perhaps vaguely imagined socialist republic dominated by the self-declared representatives of the small farmers and the workers rather than by what were thought of as the electorally chosen minions of national capitalism.
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The fact that the Treaty was an extraordinary concession was scarce­ly understood by some IRA soldiers and radical ideologues, galvanised as they were by the expectations raised by the emotional rhetoric of the time. The fact that it marked the final defeat of Anglo-Ireland was also not fully grasped, partly because some among the nationalists could per­haps be seen as trying to step into the shoes of the ascendancy. Collins' desperate plea that the Treaty offered the ‘freedom to achieve freedom' was not always believed, and was sometimes denounced as a device to camouflage a continuation of ascendancy Ireland under green symbols. This noisily-expressed perception of the Treaty settlement as a sell-out was not just shared by extreme republicans or bolshevik sympathisers of the time, but even by later ‘bourgeois liberal' comment­ators such as Seán Ó Faoláin in old age, at least in his more acidulous moments.

This mentality persisted for many years, and perhaps still is amongst us: the proposition that 1922 was a defeat rather than a victory or, at least, was not much better than an ignoble compromise. The ‘Free State', it was felt, was a disappointment. The horrors of civil war made it worse: a military and psychological defeat for the ideals of the national revolution that was total.

This mentality persisted despite the fact that the Treaty was given huge majorities in the general elections of both 1922 and 1923. Republic­ans knew, in fact, that the vast majority of the population was in favour of the settlement, but rejected this popular will as being illegitimate, the product of clerical and press propaganda and an expression of the en­slaved minds of the vast majority of the Irish people; the majority were ignoble and unworthy of the glorious destiny republicans offered them. In the eyes of republican purists, not only did northern unionists suffer from what Lenin would have termed ‘false consciousness', but so did the majority of southern nationalists. Republicans were actually pleasantly sur­prised to find that they actually received about one-quarter of the votes in the first Free State election of 1923.
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The personal hatreds and distrusts that surfaced among the leaders in 1921–2 cast a revealing light on the tensions which had been inside the separatist movement and had lain buried there most of the time during the War of Independence. It was in part a division between administrators and fighters, and in part a division between groups of comrades, loyal to one or other of the groups of leaders on the pro- and anti-Treaty sides. In part again it was, indeed, between socialist and republican radicals and ‘national bourgeois' leaders allied with Redmondite and ex-unionist elements.

There was a clear correlation between social class and support for the Treaty, with employers, big farmers and many urban middle- and work­ing-class people supporting it, while other workers, small farmers and inhabitants of more remote areas opposed it. At the elite level, however, there was little obvious correspondence between social origin and posi­tion on the Treaty: many scions of the ‘Big Houses' took up the anti-Treaty cause, while many young men of humble origin followed Collins, Griffith and local IRB leaders such as Alec McCabe in County Sligo.
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One of the reasons why the split took place so slowly and reluctantly between mid-1921 and mid-1922 was the vivid folk awareness the actors had of the destructive impact the Parnell split had had, a generation pre­viously. Even in advance, the leaders feared the bitterness of a new one. Splits were dreaded, and were seen as a cardinal political sin, but dis­loyalty was also a cardinal political sin in the secret societies of the nine­teenth century; fundamentally it was disloyalty which each side imputed to the other. The mind-set which labelled the other side as disloyal to the national cause created a mutual contempt which still, I would suggest, residually poisons political relationships in the politics of the Republic two generations later.

Republican purists developed a conspiracy theory about the split, one that still survives in republican folklore. Collins was, it was held, seduced by the bright lights of London and the flattery of the English aristocracy; absurdly, offers of marriage to a royal princess in return for national apos­tasy were alleged. In turn, it was alleged, Collins and his lieutenants had used the secret network of the IRB to cajole, bribe and bully TDs and IRA leaders to support the Treaty.

In fact, Collins signed the Treaty in good faith, but the purists needed a
Dolchstosslegende
, rather like that of Joseph Goebbels: a myth of the glorious IRA betrayed foully in mid-fight by internal betrayal and the preternatural cunning and corruption of the British political establish­ment.
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The Fighting

The very term ‘Civil War' may be a somewhat grandiloquent misnomer for the fighting that occurred in the twenty-six counties between June 1922 and May 1923. In part, the anti-Treaty IRA had local roots in a tradi­tion of local solidarity, much as had the pre-Treaty IRA. However, during the Civil War both sides had local contacts; the rather bewildered British, with their massive armaments, were replaced, from the IRA point of view, by men with local knowledge and almost equally impress­ive arma­ments. Local men faced local men, often wearing similar uni­forms and often even having bonds of affection. On the Free State side however, was an army drawn from ex-British veterans, IRA veterans and the apolitical youth of the towns. The old local cunning of IRA leaders was in vain against the Free State's combination of similar cunning, weight of armaments and men.
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An example of this is afforded by the capture of Liam Deasy by the Free State in January 1923. It was decided to execute him. In return for a stay of execution, Deasy eventually was to consent to sign a circular let­ter calling for an immediate end to the hopeless resistance to the Free State. Before this ‘treasonous' act, Deasy was seen as a potential martyr by the republicans. Denis (Dinny) Lacey of South Tipperary IRA arrest­ed five farmers who were brothers of the local Free State army's ex-IRA commanders in the area. If Deasy were executed, Lacey announced, all five would be killed by the anti-Treatyites. Tom Ryan, the senior Free State officer involved, recalled fifty years later:

I knew that it was possible to contact Lacey urgently, through a sweetheart Miss Cooney, a Flying Column comrade of mine pre-Truce, who became Irregular and was at this time one of Lacey's key men [sic] … She was at business in Clonmel and was known to be doing Irregular work. I called to her address and gave her a dispatch to be delivered in haste to Lacey. The word­ing of the dispatch was as follows: ‘I understand that Liam Deasy will be executed tomorrow. Should you, following on the event, carry out your threat to execute the five prisoners now held, inside twenty-four hours of execution confirmation – every male member of the Lacey family in South Tipperary will be wiped out.

Signed Tom Ryan, Vice Brigadier, National Army

Deasy was reprieved. The point is that the closeness with which the lead­ers of the two forces knew each other gave the conflict a peculiar inti­macy and intensity that made its occasional viciousness even more un­forgivable, as perpetrators and victims commonly knew each other and had roots in the same localities.
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Hideous murders occurred on both sides, and the hideousness was intensified by the fact that the killers and their victims commonly knew each other. Young Protestant men in west Cork were taken out and mur­dered by local IRA; their neighbours, Free State soldiers, chained IRA prisoners to landmines and blew them up. It seems that the murder­ers and victims at Ballyseedy knew each other and had a common back­ground of local agrarian differences. IRA attempts to kill Free State TDs were followed by a terrible retaliation against republican leaders and IRA prisoners. The Civil War ended in a whimper rather than a bang, and no formal surrender was either offered by the republicans or in­sisted upon by the Free State.

A little remembered aspect of the conflict was cost. The Irish Civil War involved the hiring of fifty thousand soldiers. It also involved the systematic wrecking of the country's infrastructure by the IRA. The war was estimated at the time to have cost about £50,000,000. In our money that would be close on three billion euro. As the GNP of the country was perhaps less than one-third of what it is now, it possibly represents the equivalent today of nine billion euro, all taken out of the country in eight months, possibly a quarter of a year's GNP, or the equivalent of the entire EU tranche for Ireland for this decade. This crippling blow to the infant state was to make the penny-pinching traditions of the new De­partment of Finance institutionalised at the moment of birth.

Consequences

The consequences of the Civil War for the minor European democracy that emerged from its ashes were so multifold as to defy any brief listing. However, in the rest of this paper I will try to list what seem to be some of the major consequences of the split and conflict that wrecked the nation­al liberation movement of 1916–21. I suggest that these conseq­uences fall conveniently under four headings:

a. north-south and British and foreign relations;

b. the structure of the party system and of democratic politics in the state;

c. social and political culture;

d. the structure of public policy.

The permanent partition of Ireland

The partition of Ireland was, as we all know, institutionalised a year and a half before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. Some partition under some constitutional formula was foreseen years earlier, but it was by no means clear that the ‘deep partition' of 1922 was inevit­able. The collapse of public order in the south of Ireland had var­ious in­cidental effects. One effect that, I believe, has been inadequately comment­ed on, was the weakening of anti-partitionist purpose among both Free State and republican elites. After Collins' death, solidarity be­tween the Free State and northern nationalists weakened, and clear signs of accept­ing the north as a separate entity, perhaps to be negotiated with, but not to be absorbed, appeared among Free State leaders. The unionists' poli­tical hand was immeasurably strengthened by the much-publicised spec­tacle of disorder in the south, the apparent uncontroll­ability of the IRA and the equally apparent willingness of the Provisional Government to bring it to heel. It was easy for London newspapers to speak of the in­ability of the ‘native Irish' to govern themselves; to ask how could any­one ask ‘Ulster' to permit itself to be swallowed up in such a squalid, post-revolutionary and backward state. All the tradition­al stereotypes of the backward, superstitious and murderous ‘native Irish' could be wheel­ed out, and were, by the
Morning Post
and other newspapers. The fact that the Civil War was rather short and was rapid­ly replaced by a return to civic peace was less emphasised.
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The Treaty settlement had been warmly supported by the ‘Old Dom­inions,' in part because Ireland's energetic striving for an ever fuller measure of independence reinforced Canadian and other similar striv­ings. In mid-1922, for example, Canada legislated for the right of the fed­eration to declare war independently of the imperial parliament; India watched attentively as the Irish blazed a trail which she longed to follow. Sympathy for the idea of a united Ireland existed in both the Canadian Federation and in what might be termed the ‘latent federation' of British India. The violence in Ireland strengthened those in the Domin­ions who accepted Irish partition as acceptable and even natural, as against those who felt that Ireland, like Canada, South Africa or India, was somehow a ‘natural' historic entity which should not be carved up at the whim of the imperial parliament. The diplomatic kudos of the Free State, very considerable in January 1922, was far less in May 1923.
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The party system

Irish political parties derive, in the main, from the divisions of the Irish Civil War, as we know. Only the Labour Party and the Farmers' parties have other structural origins. The opposition between de Valera and Cos­grave became one that still structures Irish party politics two gener­ations later. The hatreds are now faded, but strange residues still persist of cer­tain mutual perceptions.

These hatreds persisted for an extraordinarily long time, and seem to have partaken of a characteristically Irish persistence. As Helen Litton has commented, this persistence has sometimes been attributed to the small size of the population, which would have intensified the effect of personal relationships to people killed on both sides. However, Finland, with roughly the same population, suffered a ferocious little civil war in 1918, 25,000 people being killed, many of them murdered in concen­tration camps. The Irish conflict involved perhaps 3,000 killings at most, in the twenty-six counties. In Finland, former enemies were sharing gov­ernment by 1937.
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