The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 10, 18 March 1925, Page 7

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O'Brien)

CHAPTER XXlX.—(Continued.)

It is more creditable to the moral courage of the Irish delegates,, and I believe, truer to the facts, to conclude that their signatures were obtained, not so much under pressure of the threats of the Government, shameful though they were, as in reliance upon the promise of Mr. Winston Churchill and the Prime Minister that the Boundary Commission would result in the inevitable merger of the Six Counties in the Free State of Ireland. As it turned out, that promise had to be broken and the Boundary Commission reduced to a parochial business, if it is to be heard of any more; and the first violation of the Treaty, in its spirit if not in its letter, had to be charged against England. The root cause of thinking Irishmen's V.. repugnance to the Treaty of Downing Street went deeper than the pedantic difference between genuine Canadian Home Rule and a Republic. Had the Sinn Fein leaders . —those who unwisely remained in Dublin, as well as those who shouldered the responsibility in Londontaken their stand from the start upon the impregnable rock of the integrity of their country, and all their efforts been bent to overcoming the apprehensions of Ulster, nothing could have resisted the tide of thanksgiving which would have borne the Treaty to victory in a country blent together with the high mission and inspiration of National Regeneration. Even if these particular negotiations had to be broken off upon the clear issue of "Ireland a Nation, {'- and not two hostile States," we should have f had a justification in the eyes of civilised mankind against which Black-and-Tan methods could never again have raised their I blood-guilty hands. For, whatever else may be doubtful, Black-and-Tannery was flatly and for ever beaten to the earth as an instrument of human I government. And that, as I have already I insisted, not by the valor of the young solI diers of Ireland alone, but by noble and en--1 lightened co-operation from British lovers f |of " freedom. A race of natural kindliness I J akin:to weakness might, indeed, have been HC almost too effusive in forgetting all but the U cheerfulness with which Mr. Lloyd George i% and his Ministers themselves gave up their L> prejudices and boasts of only a few months ; before, were it not that their' change of i'L. heart was made manifest only after it be-

came clear that the savagery of the Black-and-Tans was a failure as well as a crime—if not a crime because it was a failure. The game was up, at all events, in Ireland. The surrender of arms, on which the conversations with Archbishop Clune were broken off, had to be meekly given up. The Truce was proclaimed for the 11th July, 1921, as between two armies on an equal footing. The last engagement of the war was a characteristic one. The Truce was to come into force at noon on July 11th. At twenty minutes before noon a detachment of Black-and-Tans passing in caged lorries through the village of Castleisland, Co. Kerry, was attacked by a company of the I.R.A. and a fierce, and, I am sorry to say, deadly conflict ensued, in the brief war-minutes still remaining. When at twelve o'clock the first stroke of the Angelus Bell sounded from the village church-tower, the I.R.A. took off their caps and put up their guns. Not another shot was fired after the appointed hour in Castleisland or anywhere else through the country. That afternoon "the boys" scampered down from the hills into the towns "on a fortnight's furlough," as they modestly calculated, and celebrated their -holiday in the half-schoolboy, half-fanatic spirit in which they had for two years maintained their war against an Empire still inebriated with the greatest military triumph in its history. They had their devout Requiem Masses for the fallen, their vast processions for the removal of the bodies of their dead comrades from the resting places in the bogs and mountains where they had found their temporary graves ; they ordered the closing of the public houses with as stern a discipline as ever; but in the sweet summer evenings sang their "Soldier's Song" and danced their jigs around the bonfires with their sweethearts with the same frolic welcome with which they had for many a month of danger hailed the thunder or the sunshinethe ghastly wounds or the shouts of victory. CHAPTER XXX— AFTER? Here a book specially designed to trace "How the Irish Revolution Came About" might well come to its rightful end. From untold depths of degradation the young men of the Sinn Fein cycle had raised the Irish cause to a pinnacle at which the most pewer-

ful empire on the earth, its Coercion Ministers, its iron captains, and both Houses of its Imperial Parliament solicited almost on bended knees Ireland's acceptance of a Treaty, which to a more down-trodden generation might have seemed fabulously favorable. The first phase of the Revolution finished in all but unspotted glory with the Truce of July 11th, 1921. The Truce which was the work of the soldiers marked the truly memorable date rather than the Treaty of December 5-6, 1921, which was the work of the .politicians. For, to the humiliation of English statesmanship and of Irish "Constitutional" methods as well, be it recorded, the Treaty could never have come up for discussion at all were it not for the heroic fortitude and the sheer military genius with which the Truce was first achieved by a host of unknown striplings, flinging themselves unterrified against the seeming omnipotence of English militarism in its most barbaric mood and in its most intoxicated hour of triumph. It was the last of the soldiers' part of a gallant and united war.

Would there not, however, be a certain heartlessness in concluding without some endeavor with the best skill at one's command to lift a corner of the black curtain behind which the dread drama of the future is in preparation? In all the revolutions of men success brings its sacrifices of broken friendships, which passed through the fire and were not burnt, of illusions that seemed certitudes, of dreams that were divine. The faith, that wrought miracles in the obscurity of the Catacombs, showed a less holy flame when the miracle-workers marched out to fame and power in the Golden House of the Caesars. Que la Bepublique etait belle — VEmpire ! has its meaning for others than the cynics of the Third Republic. The mere ugliness which is everywhere apt to overspread the first radiant face of armed Revolution was not to be avoided in Ireland. Of poisoned words and vindictive passionsof deeds on both sides to make honest Irish blood run cold — was enough and to spare, but of greed or self-seeking as little as may consort with the motives of mortals. Taunts of "place hunting" against unfortunate Ministers every day or night of whose lives might be their last, in their efforts to preserve what they regarded as the only semblance of settled government left to the country, were not more absurdly unjust than the counter-charge that the many thousands of outlaws hunted and maligned who were crouching in the winter hills wasted with hunger and exposure were simply pursuing a lucrative means of livelihood as they trod an unregarded Calvary for'their Idea. •

The rudimentary facts of the case are not so simple as they are too often taken to be. The divine right of the Provisional Government rested on the following proposition: "The outstanding fact is that the Free State Government is the Government selected by the will of the people of Ireland and consequently it is the lawful government." That is the very claim on which the case for unquestioning submission to the Free State Government topples over. There is no. such "outstanding fact." There was no such pronouncement of the clear will* of the people of Irelandnot even of "Southern Ireland/'

which alone was permitted any voice. A' Treaty which was only sanctioned by a of one, of its five Irish signatories, and by a majority of seven in (the Dail even '•under the dishonest threat of the return of

the Black-and-Tans, can hardly be said to carry in itself the sacredness of an irrevocable decree by a nation. The Provisional Government which was the outcome of that narrow vote based all its authority upon the claim that it represented the vote of an overpowering majority of the Irish people—it was put as high as 95 and even 99 per cent. — the General Election of June, 1922. That claim is however a notoriously untenable one. True majority rule was represented at the General Election by the Collinsde Valera Pact solemnly recommended to the country by the unanimous resolutions of the Dail and of the Ard-Fheis—that is to say of the men who alone had made any Treaty possible. The painful violation of that Pact at the last moment all but completely mystified and nullified the vote of "Southern Ireland" at the General Election, sending hack a decreased number of Free

Staters as well as a more largely decreased number of Republicans and substituting for the defeated candidates of both sides a new body of Laborites and nondescript Independents, whose appearance was the only genuine resultant of the General Election. The General Election was in reality a stalemate. Those who stirred up the repudiation on the eve of the polls of the modus vivendi unanimously endorsed by the Dail and by th.fi Ard-Fheis were the men who set the Civil

i War, with all its horrors, going. v It was idle to claim any divine right for a Government proceeding from a confusion such as this — Government which although forming the largest group was in matter of fact a minority Government, since even an expurgated Dail from which the 34 elected Republicans were excluded the Government thus apotheosised could only command a majority of four on a Vote of Censure upon an issue so vital as their policy of reprisals and must have been promptly turned out of office had the Republicans been admitted to the Division Lobby. When a Government with this precarious title beganeven before summoning the newly elected representatives of the people at all to ask their sanction by bombarding the Four Courts and starting the Civil War the night after receiving something like an insolent order from Mr. Churchill it is not difficult to understand, why the claim of such a Government to a sanction from on high in the name of "Majority Rule!" was scouted by the young soldiers of Ireland who were old enough to remember that the same cry of "Majority Rule raised largely by the same people was responsible for all the disasters of Ireland in the previous fifteen yearsthe Killing of Land Purchase, the Partition' of the country and the uniI versal shipwreck from which nothing but the gjtf Revolution now anathematised could have Y saved the Irish cause. 4 The ease with which Mr. Winston Chur-

chill's heavy artillery enabled the Free State

Generals to dispose of military operations on the grand scale, led the Irish and the English papers to form a ridiculously erroneous

estimate of the insignificance of the resistance before them. Months after the capture of the "last rebel stronghold" and of another last and still another last had been proclaimed until men's hearts were sick of the boast, the Generals of the Free State found themselves in the same position 4 n which General Macready had been twelve months before: every town and village was theirs and their foe was more unseizable than ever. They were cutting unresisting waters with an irresistible sword, but the waters were not dispersed. When President Oosgrave assured the English public through the Times that he was only dealing with "a handful of boys and of neurotic women," he was making a boast which only the isolation from public opinion in which he and his government were compelled to live could excuse. The "handful" multiplied to above ten thousand men in the Free State gaols and still enough of the "handful" remained outside to make the task of an army of fifty thousand trained men a heartbreaking and futile one. If the Free State Ministry could succeed in drowning resistance in a river of young Irish blood, their troubles would be only thickening.

It is no less true that the proceedings of the Republicans or of those who disguise themselves in their garb have often reached a pitch of folly that might well be mistaken for dementia. Their criminal recklessness of the life and limbs of non-combatants, their forced levies, their bomb-throwings and burnings and railway raids in every form of blind destructiveness that could imperil the people's means of communication, their sources of employment and even their daily food shook the foundations of morals and civilisation to their base and might well seem to justify the sacred fury with which any suggestion of a truce with such men on any terms short of unconditional subjection or extermination was denounced as treason to the first principles of society. Recriminations are natural enough in the first heat of hasty and uninformed judgments on both sides. But recriminations are a poor game when it has become a question of splitting Ireland from top to bottom by new chasms of hatred among her sons, Which generations may labor in vain to reclose. A cause capable of inspiring a hundred thousand young Irishmen to the most amazing and tenacious sacrifices, month after month, in the face of overpowering odds, cannot be a wholly guilty one, and assuredly is not to be disposed of by words of wrath any more than by the volleys of the firing platoons to which the official reprisals were entrusted.

The Civil War began as soon as the General Election, which was neutralised by the violation of the Collins-de Valera Pact was over, and is dragging along ever since. It is to be lamented that every effort of honest public opinion to stop the war before the mischief should be irreparable, was overbearingly and even flippantly stamped out. "These peace resolutions are all moonshine" were the first words of the Democratic President of the Free State in a manifesto waving aside a long series of conciliatory resolutions beginning with the unanimous appeal of the Senate, which he had himself just nominated

as the Second House of his own Parliament, and followed by the resolutions of all the National Corporations and most of the County Councils in "Southern Ireland"; and there were other jibes and threats still more unworthy of his high station. The Bulletin, which is supposed to be the official organ of Mr. de Valera, responded with the no less irrational ultimatum "Ireland shall not enter into the British Empire so long as there is a man of us left alive."

To stand up against stiff-necked unreason on both sides such as this, the only friends of peace who have hitherto presented themselves with a dog's chance of being listened to are "The Old I.R.A. Association" of men who fought in the Anglo-Irish War, up to the Truce of July 11th, 1921, and since the Civil War broke out have refused to imbrue their hands in brothers' blood on either side. As I write, their claims, too, to interfere are being insidiously counterworked and that largely by those who were never militants in the united Sinn Fein movement and would not be'too disconsolate to see it going to pieecs through intensified dissensions. Whether "The Old I.R.A. Association" may not fail of a hearing as sadly as all that went before them have failed who shall dare to think unlikely? They have at least the advantage that in no other direction can any prospect of an enduring National Pacification be now discerned. They are believed to represent the cream of the fighters who were ready for any feat for Freedom's sake except fratricide; and they if any have the commission to carry their appeal at need from the half a dozen men on each side who forbid negotiations to the overwhelming majority of a people, who abhor a war of partisans and can see nothing but bankruptcy and red ruin before the country unless it can be stopped. (To be concluded.) <X>