The Irish Civil War and Society

Politics, Class, and Conflict

G. Foster

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137425706
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Irish Civil War and Society sheds new light on the social currents shaping the Irish Civil War, from the 'politics of respectability' behind animosities and discourses; to the intersection of social conflicts with political violence; to the social dimensions of the war's messy aftermath.

1

Re-approaching the Social Dimensions of the Irish Civil War

Between the 1916 Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish Truce of July 1921, the nationalist project in Ireland reached its apotheosis with the emergence of an effective mass movement for an Irish Republic that achieved a remarkable degree of unity even as it accommodated a diverse collection of interests. Six months into the fragile truce with Britain, the Sinn Féin movement (as it was known) began to fracture as differences within it arose over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the political settlement that set up a 26-county ‘Irish Free State’. By the middle of 1922, southern Ireland had erupted into a bitter and destructive year-long civil war fought amongst rival nationalists that ended with the pro-treaty or Free State camp’s victory over its anti-treaty or republican opponents.

While earlier phases of Ireland’s revolution were driven by an Anglo-Irish conflict dynamic amenable to a teleological nationalist narrative, as a messy intra-nationalist conflict pitting rival factions of the independence movement and different sections of Irish society against one another, the Irish Civil War of 1922–3 has proven far more difficult to narrate, much less explain. The conflict that simultaneously ended the Irish Revolution and ‘formed the [modern Irish] state’¹ has belatedly begun to acquire a historiography commensurate with its historical importance, but most studies have concentrated strictly on military matters or politics, with relatively little attention paid to the conflict’s social dimensions. That this latter area deserves more serious scrutiny is suggested by the complex fractures and divisions that appeared within the ranks of the independence movement in response to the treaty and which have long fed assumptions about a possible class basis or deeper social logic to the nationalist split and ensuing civil war. Such speculation speaks to a broader debate among students of Irish nationalism and modern Irish history alike regarding the nature, motives, and limits of the nationalist project in Ireland. In particular, argument has focused on whether or not the physical-force nationalism or republicanism that drove the fight for Irish independence between 1916 and 1923 was motivated by any social revolutionary tendencies (beyond James Connolly and his tiny socialist militia, the Irish Citizen Army), or was narrowly political and ultimately socially conservative in its outlook and aims. It is fair to say that the majority of scholars have come down on the latter side, pointing to the virtual settlement of the volatile land question by the turn of the century; the social safety valve of mass emigration; the nearly hegemonic social power of the Catholic Church; the growth of the Irish middle classes; and the necessarily cross-class basis of Sinn Féin’s electoral support, among other factors, to explain Ireland’s ‘social revolution that never was’.² But, as is implicit in Seán Cronin’s absolutist verdict that ‘the victory of Sinn Féin in 1917–21 was political; it had no social dimension…’,³ the view of an essentially conservative Sinn Féin movement and Irish political revolution blissfully untroubled by social tensions or concerns often rests on a truncated periodization of the Irish Revolution that elides the post-1921 breakup of movement solidarity. Presumably, if a significant social dimension were to emerge in the course of a political revolution for national independence, it would be at the moment when various interests within the nationalist coalition parted ways over the terms of a settlement. And indeed, even one of the more vigorous critics of leftwing republicans’ efforts to attribute socially radical aims and working-class interests to the Irish republican cause concedes that ‘it is undoubtedly the case that socio-economic forces played a significant part’ in the civil war, and that an appreciation of the more complex interaction of class, social structures, and economic forces is ‘plainly vital to any full understanding’ of the conflict.⁴

The goal of this study is to shed further light on the causes, character, and outcomes of the Irish Civil War – and, by extension, to illuminate the dynamics of the Irish revolutionary decade more broadly – by closely scrutinizing the conflicting social interests, divergent outlooks, roiling undercurrents of animosity, and other socially inflected aspects of the 1922–3 conflict and its aftermath. It will be argued that although the political dispute over the treaty with Britain was the initial cause of the parting of ways among fellow nationalists, the ensuing civil war fueled, and was fueled by, deeper social, material, and sociocultural tensions inside the independence movement and throughout Irish society. While not necessarily amenable to strict Marxist models of social revolution or rigidly quantitative definitions of social class, the complex dynamics of Ireland’s civil war offer a rich field of study for a more nuanced, culturally informed exploration of the ways that class and status-based hierarchies and interests interacted with nationalist politics and violence and how these combined currents shaped the conflicts, impacts, and outcomes of the revolution’s settlement for winners and losers alike. Before proceeding to an outline of the book’s approach and structure, it will be helpful to offer a synopsis of the main developments in the Irish Revolution, followed by a brief historiographic discussion of the ways that the civil war has thus far been framed and debated in terms of class.

The Irish Revolution: background

Generally known as the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish War, the early Troubles, or the early twentieth-century phase of the struggle for Irish independence, the political upheaval against British rule in Ireland in the years bookending the First World War has come to be known as the ‘Irish Revolution’ in scholarly usage.⁵ Despite disagreements over periodization and divergent assessments of the scope and character of revolutionary change, most historians regard the tumultuous birth of the two states that define Ireland’s political geography to this day as sufficiently dramatic, violent and consequential to merit the appellation ‘revolution’. It has long been the convention to divide Ireland’s roughly decade-long revolution into several discrete phases or acts. Although the complex and chaotic events of this period resist being rendered quite so tidily, such a schema is nonetheless useful for locating the civil war within the broader revolutionary process.

‘Act one’ then, roughly 1912–14, commenced with the political crisis over the Third Home Rule Bill which promised to fulfill constitutional nationalists’ long efforts to undo the Act of Union of 1800 and re-establish an independent Irish Parliament. With a physical-force or Fenian tradition exerting its influence on the margins of mainstream nationalism, and an equally militant Irish Unionist minority resolutely committed to upholding Ireland’s (or, at least, Ulster’s) connection to Britain, the renewed political controversy over home rule quickly ‘brought the gun back into Irish politics’ via the formation of rival nationalist and Unionist militias, the Irish Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force, respectively. The British Empire’s entry into the European War in August 1914, which was accompanied by the suspension of the Home Rule Act, helped to avert a threatened north–south/Unionist–nationalist civil war. However, the Great War ultimately created the opportunity for militant republicans to launch the Easter Rising, the outbreak of which is usually treated as the spectacular opening of ‘act two’ of the revolutionary drama. As the executed leaders of the rising had predicted, the week-long demonstration of military resistance to Britain and the latter’s repressive response had a radicalizing and catalyzing effect on Irish public opinion, and out of the ashes of the rising a mass movement for full national independence gained traction. ‘Act three’ (1918–21), or what republican polemicist Frank Gallagher dubbed the ‘Four Glorious Years’,⁶ saw the resurrected Sinn Féin Party’s electoral eclipse of the once hegemonic Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the setting up of a republican counter-state known as Dáil Éireann, and the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) guerilla campaign against crown forces. Remembered by republican fighters as the ‘Tan War’, after their infamous adversaries the Black-and-Tans, this celebrated phase of the national struggle came to an inconclusive conclusion with the Anglo-Irish Truce of July 1921. Six months of political wrangling between Sinn Féin leaders and the British government followed, resulting in the controversial Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921, which set into motion the final act of the revolutionary drama – the bitter treaty split and civil war of 1922–3.

The treaty and civil war

The Anglo-Irish Treaty (or, more properly, the ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’), created a 26-county Dominion named the Irish Free State. The future of the six counties in the northeast where the majority of Irish Protestant-Unionists resided had already been dealt with in 1920 with the setting up of the partitioned Unionist-dominated mini-state, Northern Ireland, with its own Prime Minister and home-rule-style parliament, but otherwise thoroughly wedded to Great Britain. Though bitterly opposed and boycotted by Irish nationalists north and south, the Northern Irish government was thus already a ‘fact on the ground’ by the time Sinn Féin and British representatives met to negotiate a treaty. The equivalent of Canada in terms of its constitutional status and relationship to the United Kingdom, a semi-autonomous Free State was a considerable advance upon old home rule aspirations. However, it fell short of a fully independent republic and contained many provisions that were obnoxious to republicans, including an ‘Oath of Allegiance’ to the symbolic authority of the British crown in the new constitution, a (largely symbolic) resident royal representative known as the Governor-General, Britain’s retention of key Irish ports and installations, and an implicit recognition of some form of permanent partition. After many days of rancorous debate in the nationalist assembly known as the Dáil, a narrow majority of TDs (the Irish equivalent of MPs) voted in favor of the treaty, prompting the sizeable anti-treaty minority led by Éamon de Valera to repudiate the decision. Public opinion in Ireland, under heavy pressure from the press and church, tended to favor the settlement, but the various institutions that made up the revolutionary movement (the IRA, its female auxiliary Cumann na mBan, the Sinn Féin Party, and so on) rapidly fractured into hostile pro- and anti-treaty camps. The country plunged into chaos as the rival factions grappled for possession of evacuated British Army barracks, government buildings, police stations, military stores, and other posts. By the summer of 1922 the political crisis had erupted into a bitter intra-nationalist civil war waged within the territory of the southern state.

Fighting officially commenced on 28 June 1922 when the Provisional Government, under pressure from its British sponsors to assert its fragile authority, began shelling republicans garrisoned inside Dublin’s Georgian-era Four Courts complex. Within weeks the capital was in the hands of treatyite forces and fighting moved to the provinces. With a number of factors in its favor – including massive British military and financial assistance; widespread civilian support; and an open recruitment policy that rapidly brought thousands of demobilized British Army soldiers and unemployed workers into its army – the Provisional/Free State Government succeeded in driving republican forces from all the sizeable towns in their former strongholds of the south and west by the end of the summer.⁷ With the Free State’s successes in the field and the death of its Commander-in-Chief, Michael Collins, in August, the conflict moved into a prolonged second phase that lasted until late spring when the war petered out. In this final period of low-intensity but often vicious violence, the IRA adopted increasingly desperate guerilla tactics including hit-and-run ambushes, arson attacks on the homes of prominent government supporters, use of concealed explosive mines, and relentless assaults on the country’s transportation and communications infrastructure (see Figure 1.1). Not to be outdone, the Free State created, almost overnight, a sprawling military and security apparatus and enacted repressive public safety laws that allowed for mass internment, military courts, and executions. In addition to carrying out over 80 official executions (though 77 is the talismanic figure recorded in republican memory), the new state was implicated in roughly 150 extrajudicial murders of republican prisoners and unarmed political activists. Some of these killings, in particular a series of atrocities against prisoners in County Kerry in March 1923, were carried out in a particularly brutal and shocking manner.

Figure 1.1 Jaunting car on Cork road damaged in civil war fighting, 1922

Source: This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Hogan-Wilson Collection, HOGW 28, NLI, www.nli.ie.

Weakened and demoralized by the Free State’s superior military performance and determined (even ruthless) prosecution of the war, the anti-treaty military campaign collapsed during the spring of 1923. At the end of April, the IRA’s new Chief of Staff, Frank Aiken, successor to the indefatigable Liam Lynch who had been killed in action weeks earlier, ordered a suspension of all offensive operations followed by a final ceasefire and dump arms order in late May, though mass internment and sporadic violence continued into 1924. Conceding that ‘other means must be sought to safeguard the nation’s right’,⁸ chastened anti-treaty political leader (and President of the Government of the Irish Republic) de Valera succeeded within a few years in leading the bulk of the treaty’s militant opponents away from the less compromising but increasingly moribund Sinn Féin party and into his new, ‘slightly constitutional’ Fianna Fáil party. As it has in many other contexts, parliamentary politics henceforth became the ‘pacific substitute for civil war’ in southern Ireland.⁹

The violence and destruction that accompanied the conflict was considerable – claiming somewhere between 2000 and 4000 lives (as of yet, there is no precise or agreed-upon figure),¹⁰ including many important national figures on both sides, and costing the new state upwards of £50 million (or several billion euros today).¹¹ Yet, as Eunan O’Halpin has observed, serious anti-state violence proved surprisingly transient.¹² It ultimately did little to prevent the Free State from consolidating its authority throughout the 26 counties, and revolutionary republicanism would never again seriously threaten the southern state. Remarkably, a mere ten years after being defeated in the civil war, a section of the republican movement, reconstituted as Fianna Fáil, came to power. With this peaceful change of government, post-revolutionary southern Ireland emerged as one of the most successful successor states in contemporary Europe in terms of its political stability and democratic performance.¹³ The ‘ghosts of the civil war’, however, cast a long shadow over Irish society. In place of the left–right ideological cleavage more typical of European party systems, the original division over the treaty formed the basis of the two parties (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) that have dominated southern Irish politics (until the 2011 election, at least), and although the treaty settlement did not partition the country as is often mistakenly assumed (the ironically titled 1920 ‘Act to Provide for the Better Government of Ireland’ did that), it did end up reinforcing the northern border and thus arguably helped sow the seeds of the post-1968 Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Beyond politics, the legendary bitterness and enmities produced by the traumatic ‘war of friends’ festered long after the fighting ended, feeding a fraught and barely repressed social memory that exerted a lingering influence over myriad aspects of Irish communal life, family dynamics, and the private life stories of the aging revolutionary generation.

The class and social dimensions of the civil war: historiography and interpretations

The burning out of the Irish Revolution in intra-nationalist civil war has inspired many different explanations and interpretations. The 1922–3 conflict has variously been portrayed as the tragic consequence of ‘perfidious Albion’s’ strategy of divide et empera; as the unfortunate result of the independence movement’s elevation of physical-force methods over political ones; as a needless falling-out between kindred nationalists who merely disagreed over the best means to achieve their shared goal; as a necessary stage of national development; as the product of profound ideological incompatibilities within the Sinn Féin movement; as a titanic personal quarrel between ‘Mick’ and ‘Dev’ in which the entire country became embroiled; as the consolidation of a democratic revolution by moderate liberal revolutionaries; as a quasi-Jacobin revolt against a bourgeois ‘Thermidor’; even as an historical fluke or accident, to name only a few interpretations. To what extent have presumed socioeconomic differences between the two camps featured in interpretations of the civil war?

In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, both sides published polemical accounts and ‘instant histories’ justifying their respective causes. An almost unbridgeable chasm exists between early works suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Re-approaching the Social Dimensions of the Irish Civil War
• 2 Pro-Treaty Social Attitudes and Perceptions of Republicans
• 3 Republican Social Attitudes and Perceptions of the Free State
• 4 Social and Political Meanings of Clothing Pre- to Post-Revolution
• 5 The Varieties of Social Conflict in the Civil War
• 6 State Repression in the Civil War’s Aftermath
• 7 Winners and Losers: Financial Victimization and the Economics of Animosity after the Civil War
• 8 IRA Emigration and the Social Outcomes of the Civil War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index