The Secret Army

The IRA

J. Bowyer Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351474450
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Secret Army is the definitive work on the Irish Republican Army. It is an absorbing account of a movement that has had a profound effect on the shaping of the modern Irish state. The secret army in the service of the invisible Republic has had a powerful effect on Irish events over the past twenty-five years. These hidden corridors of power interest Bell and inspired him to spend more time with the IRA than many volunteers spend in it. This book is the culmination of twenty-five years of work and tens of thousands of hours of interviews. Bell's unique access to the leadership of the republican movement and his contacts with all involved—British politicians, Irish politicians, policemen, arms smugglers, and others committed or opposed to the IRA—explain why The Secret Army is the book on the subject. This edition represents a complete revision and includes vast quantities of new information.

Bell's book gives us vital insight into our times as well as Irish history. This edition of The Secret Army contains six new chapters that bring the history of this clandestine organization up to date. They are: The First Decade, The Nature of the Long War, 1979-1980"; "Unconventional Conflict, The Hunger Strikes, January 1980-October 3, 1981"; The Protracted Struggle, September 1981-January 1984"; "War, Politics, and the Split, January 1984-December 1986"; The Troubles as Institution, 1987-1990": and The Armed Struggle Transformed, 1991-1996, The End Game." In his new introduction, Bell reflects on his decades of research, the experiences he has had, and the people he has met during his extensive visits to Ireland.

Part I
The Glorious Years: 1916–1927

Chapter I
The Rising: The Republic Proclaimed, The Army Committed, April–September 1916

At a few minutes past noon on Monday, April 24, a glorious spring day, Pádriac Pearse came out between the Ionic columns of the General Post Office on Sackville Street in the heart of Dublin and began reading from a large, hastily printed Proclamation. In front of him was a scant crowd of the curious; behind him, inside the GPO, the forces of the Irish Republic which he was proclaiming were securing the building. Pearse finished. There was the odd cheer, mostly from his own men, and then more waiting. On the roof of the GPO, several volunteers ran up first a green flag, emblazoned Irish Republic, and then the green-white-and-orange tricolour. There were a few more scattered cheers. The very curious read the Proclamations stuck up on the walls, addressed by the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the people of Ireland. There were seven signatures to the Proclamation: Thomas J. Clarke, Seán MacDiarmada, P. H. Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamon Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett. Some were well-known eccentrics: Tom Clarke, the old Fenian felon with a tobacco shop, Pearse with his Irish-Irish School out in Rathfarnham, and James Connolly, Ireland’s most distinguished Labour radical and professional agitator. Apart from these, none of the other men were known except to the British police and a narrow circle of extreme nationalists. The Proclamation of the Republic was to change all that; but to the few who watched events from outside on Sackville Street or as temporary prisoners inside the GPO the whole affair reeked of farce. And yet as a young volunteer called Michael Collins began breaking the windows in the GPO to prepare for the defence of the headquarters of the new Republic, the onlookers realized that the mad men in their grey-green uniforms and slouched hats were serious. Across the Liffey an Irish Citizen Army group, Connolly’s two-hundred-man force, shot the sentry at the Castle gate, broke in the yard, but then retired to the City Hall and the newspaper offices across the street from the main gate without realizing that the Castle had been stripped clean of British soldiers and lay open for the taking. Elsewhere Citizen Army men took over St. Stephen’s Green and began digging trenches. A thousand Irish Volunteers occupied positions in an erratic arc around the rim of Dublin proper: Boland’s Bakery and some houses commanding the approaches from Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), Jacob’s Factory, a vast workhouse (the South Dublin Union), the Four Courts on the Liffey, positions near the railway stations, and on the North Wall. As at the GPO, there was little opposition. As at the Castle, there was almost total surprise. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, few in a position of power had in their wildest dreams imagined that the Irish would “rise again”. A close watch had been kept on radicals like Connolly and extreme nationalists like Pearse, their newspapers had been shut down, their speeches monitored, and their names inscribed high on the list of the potentially dangerous; but no one had really expected open rebellion, if that was what was actually unfolding in Dublin early on Monday afternoon.

With the British caught entirely by surprise, the nerve centre at the Castle in jeopardy, the allocated positions occupied as intended by the forces of the Irish Republic, and the populace dumbfounded at the audacity of the rebels, the seven-man provisional Government might have been expected to feel well-pleased. The Republic had been proclaimed, and the tricolour flew over Dublin; but any joy was tempered by the cold knowledge that short of a miracle the Republic was doomed to a short and violent life.

The original decision to rise against the British had been taken at a meeting of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) soon after the European war began in August 1914. Then on September 9, in the rooms of the Gaelic League at 25 Parnell Square, the formal decision to revolt at some point during the war was accepted. An Advisory Committee was established but by the end of November the leaders of the IRB felt it was too large and too loose and allowed it to lapse. Instead, detailed planning of the insurrection was taken over in the summer of 1915 by a Military Council of three men, Pearse, Joseph Plunkett and Eamon Ceannt, reporting directly to the Executive of the IRB. In the autumn MacDiarmada and Clarke were brought on the Council, then Connolly in January 1916, and MacDonagh at the last minute in April. The forces for the rising would be drawn from units of the Irish Volunteers. These had been formed in 1913 at least partly in response to the creation by the Unionist Orange establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force, whose object was to discourage the Liberal Government in London from proclaiming Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Volunteers had mushroomed in size and by the summer of 1914 numbered 180,000. Few were armed despite the arrival of two “illegal” arms shipments in July/August 1914 and few were dedicated separatists. When the European war began, the leading constitutional Irish politician John Redmond, who had forced his way into the booming organization, pledged Ireland to the British war effort and split the Volunteers. The overwhelming number followed Redmond’s lead and many enlisted in the British army. A hard core of eleven or twelve thousand stayed with Eoin MacNéili, the Chief of Staff. This was the base the IRB planned to use for the Rising, augmented by Connolly’s Irish Citizens’ Army and the tiny Hibernian Rifles financed by the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH).

To give the insurrection a better chance the Clan na Gael, the IRB in America, had early on approached the Germans as potential allies. Sir Roger Casement, knighted by the British Government for his consular services, had gone first to New York and then to Germany to attempt to create an Irish Brigade and negotiate an arms shipment for the IRB. By January 1916, the IRB was fully committed to the rising and anticipated the arrival of German aid. Casement in Germany might doubt Germany’s good intentions, but the Clan in New York and the IRB in Dublin were willing to take what they could get even if it did not include a German expeditionary force or modern arms in quantity. As soon as the arms arrived, the IRB was ready to go. Connolly, who had often seemed on the verge of setting off a mini-revolt with his tiny Citizen Army, was co-opted onto the Military Council in January and the final plans were drawn up. All this was behind the back of MacNéill who felt that a Rising during the war was out of the question unless the British tried to introduce conscription into Ireland. After the war he was willing to threaten the use of guerrillas to achieve extensive Home Rule but clearly he felt a coup would be foolhardy. The IRB, however, had so penetrated the Volunteers that MacNéill’s prudence would not be a serious consideration. When the German arms landed in Kerry, the Volunteers would receive the word to rise without MacNéill’s consent.

This was largely the situation at the beginning of April. The arms were expected around Easter. They would be distributed in Kerry, Cork, and up to Limerick. There the country units would hold a great crescent in the south and west. Elsewhere units would rise, drawing off British reinforcements and confusing the pattern. The main key, however, was Dublin where Joseph Plunkett had drawn up an elaborate war plan. Central Dublin would be seized in a coup de main while the country rose. The British would be unable to control the country without pouring in massive reinforcements revealing to all that the Crown’s control was dependent on British troops not Irish acquiescence. Perhaps if the people, reminded of their revolutionary heritage, came out—even with knives and forks—the British sorely pressed in the Great War might be unwilling, even unable, to pacify Ireland. This was a faint hope at best; the IRB accepted that the Rising would probably be a military failure, but a great and significant moral victory would have been won. Then within a few days of the hour chosen to strike, the whole intricate plot began to fall apart as had so many Irish plots in the past.

MacNéill and his staff suddenly discovered the plans for a rising. The deceit of his colleagues and the foolishness of the plan appalled him. MacNéill was adamantly opposed to an Easter Rising without a real hope of success. On Spy Wednesday, April 19, a document purporting to show the British plans for a swoop on all nationalist centres in Dublin was shown to MacNéill. This, coupled with the revelation that a German arms ship was already on the way, left MacNéill by Friday, April 21, with no alternative but to bow to the inevitability of the Rising. This was the last good news. The arms ship, the Aud, had left Lubeck on April 9 without a wireless transmitter and never received word of a change in landing dates. As MacNéill was agreeing to the Rising in Dublin, the Aud was being escorted by the British navy to Cobh harbour where Captain Karl Spindler scuttled her. Casement had equally bad luck. After landing from the German U-19, his two companions slipped away to make contact but he was arrested almost at once. The British had known something was up as early as April 18, as a result of a raid on the German Consulate in New York City. With the Aud and Casement in their hands by Friday evening, all hope of surprise appeared gone.

On Saturday, with no arms in prospect and the Castle almost certainly aware of the threat, MacNéill was adamant that no rising must take place. On the next morning the Sunday Independent carried a notice that the Irish Volunteer manœuvres announced on April 8 in the Irish Volunteer would not take place. MacNéill sent messengers to assure that the local units would carry out his last orders and not follow the IRB instructions. For the Military Council Sunday was a deeply depressing day. The loss of the Aud meant not only a military fiasco but almost certainly the swift destruction of much of the separatist movement. In fact on Sunday, Ivor Churchill, Baron Wimborne, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was unsuccessfully urging swift and extensive arrests. If MacNéill’s order was let stand, the movement would be destroyed in any case by routine police measures. Most important the dream of a great blow for Ireland, a new generation’s contribution to an Irish Ireland free of the Saxon would be gone; without such a gesture the slow absorption of Ireland into Great Britain would continue unimpeded and with every chance of success. The Military Council decided to strike. The Rising would be a failure, the Volunteers slaughtered and the Military Council shot, but Ireland desperately needed a glorious failure to awake the latent revolutionary tradition.

What to the Military Council and to a great many Irishmen was a glorious tradition, the annual of the delirium of the brave, was to the British the habitual and irrational outbreak of native Irish irresponsibility. During the previous twenty years, despite the persistence of a separatist fringe, the British had come to feel the Irish were at last accepting their rational place within the United Kingdom. Redmond, leader of the Irish Party in the House of Commons, had pledged Ireland to the war effort. Two hundred thousand Irishmen had volunteered for service. Once the details of Home Rule, held in abeyance until after the war as a result of Orange manœuvres, could be worked out, the Irish problem would be finally resolved. Every sign pointed this way and had for years.

And yet, when on April 23 the Military Council decided on the Rising, the seven men were acting within a tradition and to a large extent as an organization which could trace its antecedents back into the eighteenth century. It was in the eighteenth century that Republicanism had been linked to the long-standing Irish revolutionary tradition. Wolfe Tone, an Irish Republican and Protestant sought to unite the men of little property into the United Irishmen to break the connection with Great Britain with the help of France and set up an independent Irish Republic. Tone failed twice and the last time in 1798 was arrested and committed suicide in prison. He became not only another martyr but also the founder of Irish Republicanism, his written word the basis for future doctrine and his grave at Bodenstown in County Kildare the centre and shrine for generations of Irish revolutionaries. His contention that the connection with Britain must be broken by physical force became the foundation stone of Irish Republicanism. Robert Emmet tried and failed in 1803. Again in 1848 there was a new movement, Young Ireland, a new leader, John Mitchel, a new rising, and the same old failure, giving rise to new ballads, and new Wild Geese fleeing British persecution. Increasingly after the famine years of the 1840s, Irishmen poured into America, scraped themselves out a place often at great cost, and then many turned their attention to Ireland. Some of the men who had been out in ’48 and some of a new generation in 1858 banded together into a new organization,¹ which in time in the United States became known as Clan na Gael. Ireland was organized on American money often by men with military experience gained in the American Civil War. By the mid-’sixties, the IRB—the Fenians—had honey-combed the British Army in Ireland and to some extent in Britain and a successful rising seemed assured. A typical Gaelic combination of bad luck, poor judgement, and informers turned a certainty into a miserable failure and from the years 1865 and 1867 came not an Irish revolution but another defeat, three new martyrs convicted of murder during a prison break, and another broken generation. In 1882 the “Invincibles” assassinated the new Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Under-Secretary, T. H. Burke, in Phoenix Park in Dublin. This flurry of violence in the ’eighties coupled with dynamite attacks in Britain seemed to be the last breath of Fenianism for Parnell and Parliamentarianism rode high.

When Parnell came to grief in 1890, shattering the Irish Party, little seemed to stand in the way of the eventual absorption of Ireland into Great Britain. Even Gladstone’s Home Rule had little chance in view of the adamant dissent of the House of Lords. Fenianism and the IRB, like the Young Irelanders and the United Irishmen, appeared more a subject of ballads than a living philosophy. Over he past generations Irish nationalism had been killed with kindness, the restrictions against Catholics slowly removed, the inequities of the land system slowly corrected. The old ways seemed to be going: the Irish language a burden not a joy replaced by English, Irish history forgotten in schools teaching the Victorian world view, Irish traditions fading away to be replaced by those of the Empire. There was a place for commercial success, professional recognition, amalgamation, absorption into the United Kingdom—and many took the route as solicitors and soldiers, estate agents, policemen, and civil servants. Apparently Irish Ireland and Irish Republicanism, attractive to a few romantics or a few malcontents, kept alive more by exiled Americans than common sense, had seen its day.

Yet in the bleak years after Parnell, there were new if not yet powerful forces at work within and without the tradition of Irish Republicanism. In 1884 the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed to urge the old games, hurling and Irish football, on the young men. In 1893 the Gaelic League was founded in Dublin to salvage the dying Irish language and almost immediately was tremendously popular as the classrooms became jammed with eager scholars and young men stalked the West to hear the living language.² At the centenary of the 1798 rising, Wolfe Tone clubs were formed, attracting more onto the Republican path. In that year several Fenian prisoners were released, including Tom Clarke, and were greeted all over Ireland with bonfires on the hills. In 1902 a National Council with separatist aims was founded and in 1905 the Dungannon Clubs were begun in Belfast where Bulmer Hobson edited The Republic. The next year the Dungannon Clubs and Cumann na nGaedheal united to form the Sinn Féin League which absorbed the National Council in September 1908 and became Sinn Féin. Almost entirely a creation of Arthur Griffith, Sinn Féin was separatist but not Republican, proposing a dual monarchy like Austria–Hungary, to be achieved by a passive policy of abstention rather than by physical force. There was even an Irish literary revival; in April 1902, Maude Gonne appeared in the title role of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, a play by an Anglo-Irishman called William Butler Yeats. All this new nationalism, tentative separatism, and interest in Irish-Ireland had little real political impact. In 1908 Sinn Féin lost the Leitrim by-election and its membership declined to one Dublin club. Neither Irish speakers nor hurley players nor even poets were going to break the connection with England. Increasingly after the Liberal victory in 1906, the new leader of the Irish Party in Parliament, John Redmond, had seemed capable of working out effective compromises and continued to hold out hope that in time Home Rule could be achieved.

The 1910 elections again gave the balance of power to the Irish Party, and it appeared that Home Rule would follow close on the heels of the British Parliament Act, passed in August, which restricted the powers of the House of Lords. Just at this moment, however, as attention focused on events at Westminster, Irish Republicanism was again emerging as a political force of some significance. In 1907 Tom Clarke had returned from New York to begin reorganizing the organization, by then largely fraternal and futile. He had attracted several most interesting young men and edged out their tired elders. In 1909, under the auspices of the Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), an avowedly Republican boy scout movement, Fianna Eireann, had been launched. On November 15, 1910, the little newspaper Irish Freedom appeared in Dublin—another IRB project. As membership of the IRB grew, Republicans shifted into positions of prominence or influence in all the separatist organizations. When the Orangemen had determined to prevent Home Rule by intimidation and had formed the Ulster Volunteers, the IRB had manœuvred MacNéill into heading an Irish Volunteer unit and remained close to the sources of control over the next years.

When Pearse read out the Proclamation in front of the GPO, he drew into the light of day not a single strain of Irish Republicanism but the entire tapestry of Irish traditions: social radicalism in the person of Connolly; the conspiratorial dedication to physical force personified in the old Fenian Tom Clarke; the romantic Ireland, supposedly dead and gone, glowing not only from Pearse’s poems and his Irish-Ireland school, but from the poetry of Plunkett and MacDonagh. There was John MacBride who had taken the opportunity of the Boer War to fight the English so that the Irish sword would not grow cold. There was the Countess Markievicz with her...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Secret Army: The IRA
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword to the 1979 Edition
• Foreword to the 1970 Edition
• Part I The Glorious Years: 1916–1927
• Part II The Cosgrave Years: 1927–1932
• Part III The De Valera Years: 1932–1938
• Part IV The War Years: 1938–1945
• Part V The Campaign Years: 1945–1969
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Sources
• Addenda 1979
• Addenda 1996
• Index