Search Results

This chapter summarizes the course of events during the civil war. It is divided into three parts. Part one documents the efforts made to keep the IRA united and prevent the Treaty split resulting in civil war, which resulted in the making of the Collins de Valera electoral pact in the spring of 1922. Part two describes the conventional fighting between June and September. Part three explores the guerrilla phase and the executions which accompanied it. The significance of the death of Michael Collins is discussed, as is the formation of a Republican Government on the anti-Treaty side. The disintegration of republican military opposition in 1923 is chronicled, and the one-sided outcome to the fighting was attributed to the unequal distribution of power resources between the two sides.

This chapter focuses on the means by which IRA companies, IRB circles, Cumann na mBan branches and Na Fianna Éireann troops were established and managed in Britain during the war of independence. The important people in the major centres of republican activity are introduced, including Art O’Brien in London, Neil Kerr and Paddy Daly in Liverpool, Paddy O’Donoghue in Manchester, Joe Vize in Glasgow, Richard Purcell in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and James Cunningham in Birmingham. The figures at IRA headquarters who interested themselves in the movement in Britain are introduced too, including Michael Collins, Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellows. The activities of associated political groups, such as Sinn Féin and the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain (ISDL), are studied. Membership figures are discussed, as are the type of people who joined republican organizations and their motivations. Relations between units in Britain and IRA headquarters in Dublin are explored. Problems like loose organization and bad leadership are noted.

The new Irish ministers were obsessed with issues of financial credibility, eager to demonstrate the seriousness of Irish national purpose by avoiding bankruptcy or extensive debt. They were determined to preserve the institutions of the state and to demonstrate that these institutions could themselves hollow out the last remnants of British rule. They were motivated to vindicate the celebrated claim of Michael Collins, that the Free State constituted the freedom to build freedom. However, the shadow of the civil war, the looming World War, and the poverty of the new state ensured that there was little appetite for radical social and cultural change. The first section of this chapter explores the ‘Orange Terror’ in inter-war Northern Ireland. The second section looks at Irish nationalism during the World War and its aftermath. The third section examines Ulster Unionism, the impact of the Second World War, and welfarism.

The Anglo Irish Treaty of December 1921 established the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Commonwealth at a time when the dominions did not have their own foreign policy or diplomats abroad. The Free State did not legally exist until December 1922. In the interim, a Provisional Government managed the transition from British rule while the revolutionary Dáil government continued to exist in parallel. Chapter 4 looks at the awkward cohabitation between the two, the split in the foreign service established by Dáil Éireann as Ireland slid towards civil war over the terms of the Treaty, and the consequences for the efforts of George Gavan Duffy and Michael Collins to craft a foreign policy for the new state.

The political prison cell is a place of community. Prisoners build networks of communication using a variety of techniques ranging from smuggled notes to hand signals to knocking on walls. Political prisoners also organize themselves in prison. They are influenced by the development of prisoners of war camps in the early twentieth century. The Frongoch internment camp in Wales for Irish rebels of 1916 and the Szczypiorno POW camp for Poles who had refused allegiance to the German Empire a year later are key instances of how political incarceration and military hierarchy could reinforce one another. The komuna among Polish communists in the interwar years shows how such organization could further integrate and discipline members of a movement behind bars.