Truce

Murder, Myth and the Last Days of the Irish War of Independence

Padraig Óg Ó Ruairc

• Publisher: Mercier Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781781173862
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

On 8 July 1921 a Truce between the IRA and British forces in Ireland was announced, to begin three days later. However, in those three days at least sixty people from both sides of the conflict were killed. In 'Truce', Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc goes back to the facts to reveal what actually happened in those three bloody days, and why.
What sparked Belfast's 'Bloody Sunday' in 1921, the worst bout of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland's troubled history?
Why were four unarmed British soldiers kidnapped and killed by the IRA in Cork just hours before the ceasefire began?
Who murdered Margaret Keogh, a young Dublin rebel, in cold blood on her own doorstep?
Were the last spies shot by the IRA really working for British intelligence or just the victims of anti-Protestant bigotry?

1
Introduction

For decades, nationalist Ireland has told glorious stories of IRA flying columns beating the dastardly Black and Tans. In fact there were few flying columns and an awful lot of … murders … In [July] 1921, with the Truce just hours away, an RIC man named Alfred Needham, aged 20, clearly thought that finally he could marry his sweetheart. But a clerk in Ennis tipped off the IRA that the groom’s profession was ‘Constable’. So a beaming Alfred and his teenage bride emerged from the registry office and two gunmen shot him dead. Yet … this July our political classes will once again unite around the fiction that ‘the War of Independence’ was honourable and necessary and largely worthwhile.¹

This is how newspaper columnist Kevin Myers described one of the last killings of the Irish War of Independence in an article in the Irish Independent marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Anglo-Irish Truce, which ended the war on 11 July 1921. Myers dismissed the IRA military campaign of 1919–21, which eventually led to the creation of an independent state in southern Ireland, as part of a ‘cycle of psychiatric futility’. Furthermore, he claimed that the ‘murder’ of Alfred Needham exposed as a fiction the concept of the War of Independence as a necessary and legitimate war.

Ironically, Myers’ account of Needham’s killing is almost entirely fictional. There was no wedding ceremony, no teenage bride and no clerk who tipped off the IRA. Needham, a Black and Tan from London, was shot standing at the door of a stable with two other armed members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) – not while leaving a registry office with his new bride. The tale about Needham being killed immediately after getting married appears to have been invented for melodramatic effect in a propaganda story. Yet different versions of this story continue to resurface every few years masquerading as factual history. Author Richard Abbott, an RUC officer who compiled a history of RIC casualties during the War of Independence, claimed that the IRA had attacked both Needham and his new bride after their wedding ceremony – killing him and hospitalising her.² Eunan O’Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, stated in a recent television documentary that Needham had married in a church ceremony and was shot dead in front of his new bride just minutes after they had exchanged wedding vows.³ A common element in most of these accounts is the suggestion that the IRA Volunteers who killed Needham knew a ceasefire had been agreed with the British forces and that this was a motivating factor in the attack.

The stories about Needham’s wedding are part of a wider narrative about the War of Independence, which claims that the announcement of the Truce on 8 July 1921 led to a wave of unjustifiable ‘eleventh-hour’ IRA attacks before the ceasefire began. Supporters of this narrative claim that republicans launched a determined campaign to kill as many people as possible before the war ended and that these final IRA attacks were made mainly against so-called ‘soft targets’, i.e. unarmed members of the British forces and loyalist civilians. Some historians and commentators allege that attacks on ‘soft targets’ accounted for the bulk of IRA activity throughout the War of Independence, which they claim was more akin to terrorism than to a military campaign. It has also been asserted that Protestants were targeted as part of a sectarian campaign conducted by the IRA, and that such attacks intensified after the Truce was announced.

A number of stories similar to the one about Needham’s wedding are reproduced regularly in histories of the War of Independence to support the idea that the IRA exploited the declaration of the Truce as an opportunity for wanton violence. These include claims that:

• After the announcement of the Truce, the IRA killed up to a dozen alleged spies, most of whom were innocent Protestants with no connection to the British forces.

• Four teenage soldiers, mere boys who had left their post to visit a sweet shop, were abducted and murdered by the IRA for no apparent reason.

• Three Protestant boys were abducted, killed and secretly buried by the IRA in Cork city because of republican paranoia about spies.

• A devout Catholic serving in the RIC was shot dead by IRA gunmen while on his way to Mass on the morning of the ceasefire.

• The IRA in Kerry launched its only attack of the war, killing a soldier and an innocent young woman, just minutes before the Truce started.

• A Black and Tan strolling through a picturesque Wicklow village was murdered by republicans less than an hour after the ceasefire began.

Some of these stories have a grain of truth to them. Others are entirely fictional or are genuine killings taken out of context and with new details invented for propaganda value. For years, Irish and British authors writing about the War of Independence have accepted these stories as truthful, repeating and recycling them without question. Meanwhile the activities of the British forces in the same period have been ignored, with many authors unquestioningly accepting assurances that the British Army, RIC and Black and Tans all ceased hostilities the minute the Truce was announced, leaving the IRA as the sole protagonists in the final violent days of the conflict.

The allegation that the IRA callously took the announcement of the Truce as an opportunity to attack ‘soft targets’ was first employed as anti-republican propaganda in early accounts of the war written by British authors. The official history of the British Army’s 6th Division in Ireland, written in 1922, claimed the IRA exploited the declaration of the Truce as:

… an opportunity for attacking and murdering people when vigilance would obviously be relaxed, and if they could only postpone these murders to the last moment, the murderers could not possibly be punished. They carried out their programme to the letter. A private of the Machine Gun Corps was murdered on July 10th … four unarmed soldiers were kidnapped and murdered in Cork, and a patrol in Castleisland was ambushed, with results more disastrous to the rebels than even to the patrol itself; and finally, within fifteen minutes of the Truce, the inhabitants of Killarney, who had never summoned up courage to strike a blow for freedom during the progress of the war, attacked two sergeants of the Royal Fusiliers in the street, one of whom died. Thus was the Truce inaugurated.⁴

Walter Phillips, an English historian who published one of the first popular histories of the conflict in 1923, said: ‘the weekend before the coming of the Truce was one of the bloodiest on record in Ireland’. Phillips held the IRA solely responsible for this increase in violence and focused on the killings of off-duty soldiers and loyalist civilians.⁵ In his memoirs, published in 1924, General Nevil Macready, the former commander of the British forces in Ireland, contrasted the morality of the military campaigns waged by the rival forces in the final days and hours before the Truce began. According to Macready, British forces refrained from any hasty and unnecessary last-minute attacks, while the IRA intensified its military campaign through opportunistic killings:

The Truce would begin at 12 noon on 11th July, 1921, until which time the troops, while taking no risks, should abstain as far as possible from unnecessary activity against the rebels, who, far from imitating such chivalrous forbearance, continued their campaign of outrage and assassination until the clocks struck twelve on 11th July.⁶

Like Phillips, Macready cited attacks on the British forces, the killing of civilians and the destruction of the homes of loyalists as proof of an IRA ‘campaign of outrage’ prompted by the announcement of the Truce.⁷

Allegations that the IRA engaged in unjustified military operations in the dying hours of the conflict were not confined to British writers. This accusation became a core piece of anti-republican propaganda in the Irish Free State. During the Civil War both sides accused their opponents of cowardice, denouncing them as ‘eleventh-hour warriors’ and ‘Trucileers’, i.e. men who joined the IRA at the time of the Truce but who had played little or no part in the War of Independence. The military record of its various supporters and opponents often dominated the debates surrounding the acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.⁸ Free State propaganda defined republican opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty as ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ who ‘had never challenged Dublin Castle’ or ‘ever fired a shot against the British forces’. Furthermore they denounced the guerrilla tactics used by IRA ‘Trucileers’ and, with no sense of irony or hypocrisy, encouraged them to ‘fight fair’ even though the exact same guerrilla tactics had been employed during the War of Independence.⁹

In his 1924 book The Victory of Sinn Féin, the Free State polemicist P. S. O’Hegarty condemned the anti-Treaty IRA as ‘a terrorist army’ of ‘Tinpikemen’ that had shied away from danger during the War of Independence but who had sprung into action at the last moment: ‘all the young men in all the counties who had kept aloof of the fighting when it was dangerous were now eager to become heroes, and to be able to tell stories about this and that ambush’.¹⁰ Piaras Béaslaí, the former IRA director of publicity who wrote a biography of Michael Collins shortly after the Civil War, castigated the republican opponents of the Treaty, whom he dismissed as ‘Trucileers’:

A great many eleventh-hour warriors, in comparatively peaceful parts of the country, hastened to make up arrears by firing shots at the last moment, and there were attacks on the English forces up to within a few minutes of the Truce. These belated exhibitions of prowess, with no military objective, when the danger seemed past, reflected no credit on Irishmen.¹¹

Many of the IRA units responsible for these operations later fought against acceptance of the Treaty, and Béaslaí’s comments are likely to have been influenced by his support for the Treaty and his experiences during the Civil War.

Abusive comments about ‘Trucileers’ were directed in particular against republicans in Kerry, where there had been limited IRA activity in the pre-Truce period but an increase in operations in the last days of the war. In October 1933, following a republican attack on a ‘Blueshirt’ rally in Tralee, Eoin O’Duffy, leader of the pro-Treaty Fine Gael party, taunted his political opponents in the county by declaring: ‘Kerry’s entire record in the Black and Tan struggle consisted in shooting an unfortunate soldier the day of the Truce. To hear such people shouting “Up the Republic” would make a dog sick.’¹²

Years later, a number of historians began repeating allegations that the IRA had exploited the announcement of the Truce to commit unjustified and morally questionable attacks, and over time this allegation became widely accepted as historical fact. In his book The Black and Tans, Richard Bennett claimed that there was ‘a wild flurry of activity’ by ‘Eleventh hour warriors of the IRA [who] hurried to get their last shots in’. Bennett cited the IRA execution of civilians suspected of spying and atta...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Political and Military Origins of the Truce
• 3 The Execution of Suspected Spies
• 4 IRA Attacks on Off-Duty British Troops
• 5 Pre-Truce Offensives and IRA Operations, 8–11 July 1921
• 6 Fatalities Inflicted by the British Forces
• 7 Belfast’s Bloody Sunday
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• About the Publisher