Ireland 1919-1921

[jmm99]

David:

Nice find; it caused me to lookup a question that is reflected by this statement on the second page of the book review:

Brits, in sharp contrast, found few native-born Irish who were willing to help penetrate Sinn Fein and IRA cells. Many who volunteered to help had lived outside the homeland quite long and lost touch with potentially lucrative contacts. Wholesale murder of Dublin’s Metropolitan Police Detective Force concurrently decimated members who knew leading rebels by sight. The residue predictably became reluctant to risk their lives after odds against success sagged precipitously.

No doubt that the Brits had few indigenous Irish (whether Gaelic-, Norman- or Anglo-Irish) so committed on their side in (say) 1918-1919 as to be penetration agents.

I've thought from time to time about the shift in attitude from (say) 1914 to the 1918-1919 period. In 1914, it was common for Irishmen to flock to the colors, and many Irish before that were professional military - e.g., my grandfather's first cousin's husband was a member of the 18th (Queen Mary's Own) Hussars, and his father was Royal Navy.

Another book review I found today partially answers my question - and in the context of Cork (from which my direct line comes, and where Michael Collins lived); Thomas Fitzgerald, Rebel Cork, reviewing John Borgonovo, The Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork City, 1916-1918 (2013):

In 1914 Cork city was known as “Loyal Cork”; within ten years the city and county would be rechristened “Rebel Cork”. This change in designation owed much to the fact that during the decade in question Cork saw more military action and experienced more bloodshed than any other county in Ireland. Some of the most traumatic events of the period, such as the burning of the city centre, the Kilmichael ambush and issues around possible sectarian murders, have long made Cork a topic of interest to historians.

John Borgonovo’s study focuses on the city’s experience of war and political turmoil between 1916 and 1918. It is the first in a proposed trilogy: the second and third volumes will deal with the 1919-21 and 1922-23 periods respectively. In this first book Borgonovo details the changes the city experienced in the final two years of the Great War. The greatest of these was the growth in popular support for a new wave of young nationalists and the eventual widespread rejection of Irish Parliamentary Party constitutionalism in favour of the more radical politics of Sinn Féin.

... Borgonovo’s perspective is confined to Cork City but, partly because of this, his study casts an interesting light on some long established questions associated with the period. Prominent among these are: What was the link between the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence? What were the results of the attempt to introduce conscription? Was it the 1916 Rising or the failures of the Irish party to achieve results in the 1916 convention that doomed constitutional nationalism? What were the significant differences between the IPP and Sinn Féin? In Borgonovo’s book these questions are considered again from the perspective of the country’s third largest city.

The answers to these questions are complex and the entire review should be read; but here is the bottom line:

In Borgonovo’s view it was the failure of the Irish Party and British ineptitude, together with the Easter Rising, that swung public opinion. The rising certainly provided a banner for Sinn Féin to campaign under. In 1924 PS O’Hegarty wrote that it was the 1916 Rising not Sinn Féin which won voters. Borgonovo comments that “the Easter Rising planted a seed in many young minds that eventually blossomed into physical force republicanism”. He also notes that the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Cork used the Volunteers as an instrument to advance men who believed in physical force, because the brotherhood was unsure if Sinn Féin would support physical force.

So, there is more to it than the 1916 executions of a relatively few revolutionaries; but that was the spark that Collins et al were able to use in igniting the dry wheat field a couple of years later.

Regards

Mike