The Republic: the fight for Irish independence 1918-1923

The history of the Irish revolution, once the preserve of its combatants, has been transformed over the past 40 years. The wider conflict within Northern Ireland at the end of the twentieth century provided both a stimulus, as well as a set of constraints: the need to understand the more recent Troubles helped to propel historians back to the political settlements in Ireland earlier in the century, while (in the opinion of some) the bloodiness of the years leading to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 simultaneously provoked too blinkered an attitude towards those fighting for Ireland’s independence between 1916 and 1921. It has certainly been the case that, blinkered or not, historians have delivered an elaborate patchwork of local studies of the revolution, a minute understanding of the evolution of British and (to a lesser extent) Irish policy, together with an array of penetrating biographies of the main protagonists. Overviews of the conflict, however, remain relatively scarce, particularly those which genuinely seek to represent the entire struggle, both in terms of the situation “on the ground” in Ireland as well as in the corridors of power in Dublin and London.

Charles Townshend’s monumental work, bold in ambition, scope and execution, supplies such an overview. The timing is propitious: we have now had 15 years of rela­tive tranquillity in Ireland, creating at least the possibility of cooler perspectives on separatist struggle. Townshend himself is ideally well placed to deliver a volume of this kind, since one of the motifs of his long academic career has been an engagement with the history of political violence in Ireland. And, indeed, in a sense The Republic is both a natural extension to his 2005 work on the 1916 Rising as well as a return to his starting point as an historian: his doctoral study, published in 1975, was on the then still unfashionable theme of the British campaign in Ireland between 1919 and 1921.

The result is a volume which has very clear strengths. This is determinedly a work of broad and confident understanding, characterised by a uniform care in its approach to complex and controversial materials. Unsurprisingly, given Townshend’s doctoral anchorage, the work is strong – critical but unpolemical – on the often confused and bloody conduct of the British campaign; but it is equally probing, comprehensive and calm in dealing with the revolutionaries and – after 1922 – the Free State and republican combatants. Probity is not achieved at the cost of lucidity or personal interest – nor does it smother some occasionally bleak humour in Townshend’s approach: Michael Collins, for example, was “a finance minister with the unusual advantage of also running a death squad”. Collins, in fact, comes out of the narrative well – “good at everything”, “a prodigiously quick learner”, a “phenomenal” networker: “nobody did more to make the Republic a reality than Michael Collins”.

Townshend is particularly good on the complexities of the struggle. This was of course a confrontation between a predominantly Catholic Irish separatism and a largely Protestant British state; but the frontiers of the conflict were sometimes blurred. Other historians (most recently, Ronan Fanning) have identified the importance of a continuing undercurrent of anti-Catholicism within British high politics throughout this era. Townshend himself describes the anti-Catholic violence which scarred Belfast and the North of Ireland during the revolution. On the other hand, the struggle of 1918-23 was partly a fight within Catholic Ireland, not just in the obvious sense of the Civil War, but also because – certainly before the spring of 1920 – the main agency of British law enforcement, and the main target of armed Volunteers, was the predominantly Catholic Royal Irish Constabulary. Some of the most dangerous opponents of the separatists were Catholic policemen – men such as Head Constable Eugene Igoe, leader of the “Igoe Gang”, a group of police intelligence officers in Dublin. A Catholic RIC officer, John Regan, speaking generally of state reprisals, recorded that “the police quickest to avenge the death of a comrade were Irishmen”.

Inevitably, not everyone will applaud the volume, not least because (despite the passage of the years since the Good Friday Agreement) the convictions which it explores remain alive and raw. Celebratory accounts of the revolution depicted an Irish nation united in struggle against the British: Townshend suggests that “there was more public ‘neutrality’ than the republican leadership found entirely comfortable”. His appraisal of the intelligence war between 1919 and 1921 – for example, his juxta­position of republican successes in Dublin with weakness beyond – is convincing, but runs against the grain of the IRA’s legendary capacities in this area (he quotes the IRA GHQ assessment in March 1921 that local units had “a ‘very faulty grasp generally’ of the key value of intelligence”). His calm ­dissection of the violence meted out by the IRA against Cork Protestants in 1922 is unlikely to persuade the most convinced ­disputants in this controversial area. Townshend has tough things to say about the quality of British political and military leadership, including the “dangerously provocative” Winston Churchill, who (in 1922) was cajoling the newly created Provisional Government in Ireland towards Civil War.

It is also the case that a great deal in the volume is already familiar, not least from Townshend’s own, earlier, studies. In 1975 Townshend defined the main stages of the IRA’s struggle, from isolated attacks on policemen in 1919, to arms raids on police barracks and other targets, through to larger-scale violence, culminating in substantial military operations such as the (disastrous) raid on the Dublin Customs House in May 1921: this picture of growth and formalisation remains largely unchanged. The high politics of the negotiations which produced the Truce in July 1921 and the Treaty in December 1921 are also familiar, as are the politics of the “split” within Sinn Fein and the Volunteers which delivered the Civil War of 1922-23.

The strength of the volume rests not in a fundamental alteration of the main outlines of the conflict, nor in a single Big Idea, but rather in the careful reworking of some of its component parts, the systematic synthesis of a range of complex materials – and above all in the application of rich new detail. The result is an intensely compelling and often discomfiting narrative, which candidly explores four years of very personal and intimate violence, and which stands as a warning to those who might be overly complacent about the integrity (in every sense) of the British state.