577. The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2)
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I joined the flying column in 19 and 16 in Cork with Sean Moylan in Tipperary with Dan Breen. Arrested by three staters and sentenced for to die. Farewell to Tipperary, said the Galtie mountain boy. We went across the valleys and over the hilltops green where we met with Dinny Lacey, Sean Hogan and Dan Breen.

Sean Moylan and his gallant men, they kept the flag flying high, and farewell to Tipperary, said the Galtie Mountain boy. I'll bid farewell to Auld Clonmel, I never more shall see, and to the Galtie Mountains that oft-times sheltered me. Those who fought for liberty and died without a sigh, may their cause not be forgotten.

said the Galti mountain boy. So that was The Galti Mountain Boy, written by Patsy O'Halloran and Christy Moore and delivered quite beautifully by a man we will be introducing in a few moments. And it's the story of a teenage volunteer who joins the Irish Republican cause in 1916. He fights the British in the Irish War of Independence.

But he's sentenced to death by his own former comrades, the Free Staters, in the Irish Civil War. And Tom, for me, that ticks every Irish ballad box. There's a lot of geography. There's a lot of stuff about freedom and flags. There are random names of folk heroes that mean a lot to Irish listeners, but perhaps not to British ones. And dare I say, a general air of curiosity.

Is mawkishness the right word? There speaks the voice of Dublin Castle. Yeah, exactly. Are you a fan of an Irish ballad? I love an Irish ballad and I especially love it because it's very convenient for our purposes because two of the men mentioned in that ballad, Sean Hogan and Dan Breen, will feature in the dramatic story of the ambush at Solahead Beg, which is the first engagement of the Irish War of Independence.

And this is going to be the theme of our episode today. And just to give people a spoiler alert, some of the characters mentioned, including the two that I've just named, were a bit less romantic, I think, than the song suggests. But for now, let's just remind everyone where we are, because we are in Dublin. We are in the Royal Irish Academy. So that's the RIA. And we might be using...

the same letters in a different form later on in this story, because we are telling the story of the Irish revolutionary struggle at the end of the First World War. And Dominic, we ended last time in December 1918. We tracked how over the two years since the Easter Rising in 1916, there'd been growing radicalization. Sinn Féin had won a landslide majority in 1916.

Ireland in the general election and they had won this massive majority in Ireland on a ticket of building an independent Irish Republic and they had said that they would do that by whatever means were required. Now much as I love listening to you Tom I think we should have an Irish voice so we are joined once again by Irish National Treasure

Professor at University College Dublin, friend of the show, a man described by a listener to the last Irish series we did as a pound shop Bono. It is Professor Paul Rouse. Well, Paul, to be fair, you didn't sing it. Oh, yeah. I think there would be family members warned me in advance that singing would not be a wise thing to do. The pound shop Bono line was seized on. I'm blessed with friends who...

don't really worry about the difference between insult and compliment. But they seized on the insult after the last time I appeared. Okay, so come on then, Bono. We ended last time in December 1918 with the election and Sinn Féin have won, but they're not going to take their seats in the House of Commons and they're pledged to an Irish Republic. So let's move to January 1919 and there's one day in particular where

which looms so large. It's the 21st of January because two things happen, two extraordinary events happen on the same day. Each of them in their own right would be remarkable. The fact that they happen on the same day makes it a truly singular day in Irish history. They weren't planned to happen on the same day as you will see, but the first thing is a meeting in the Mansion House right next door to us here at the Academy of the Mansion House as the official residence of the city mayor. And what happened in that room

is a remarkable moment in the Irish national story.

27 of the 73 Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the House of Commons, all of them had said they weren't going to take their seats, but they convened in the Mansion House and established what was called Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament. It should be said that one of those who was not able to be present was Countess Markievicz, who was then in Holloway Gaol, and she was the first Fianna Fáil MP

to be elected as a member of parliament in the House of Commons, although, of course, she did not take her seat. So that's another count. Her husband is a Polish count, isn't he, or was he? But she's a very glamorous figure. She's a very glamorous figure who was also, by the way, is mischaracterized, I think, a lot by history. She's one of those women who was central to the Irish Revolution over the years, but she really labored.

She was not somebody who was a leader who frittered around the margins. She did the dirty, hard organizational work. Anyone who's ever run any organization knows it's hard to do this. And she is one of the group of women who was fundamental to

to this whole story. And ultimately she will give away all her inherited wealth and die a poor woman. She died a poor woman. She died very young. She died in ill health, but deserves to be remembered as a significant historical figure. Now this meeting in the Mansion House of these elected members, 27 of them, was largely ceremonial in nature, but it saw the realisation of four foundational documents.

The first is the Constitution of Dáil Éireann, as the Irish Parliament was called. And this was a kind of a short, but it was the basic

underpinning of the state. And it's really interesting, but the cabinet that was formed had five departments, financial affairs, home affairs, foreign affairs, the presidents and defense, and it was based on the model of the British cabinet system. But that kind of makes sense because that's the model they're familiar with, I guess. Entirely. And they want people to sway from one to the other, to pretend that the other doesn't exist and to come to us. The second is a declaration of independence.

which rejects 700 years of occupation because the clock was still ticking at that stage and it only got to just over 700 and established an Irish Republic. And that's a massive thing. It established an Irish Republic. It said, we're going to pretend that your state does not exist.

And we are going to establish our own. We're going to graft it on. And this is what Griffith wanted to happen in the early 1900s. That's what he argued for. So it's kind of creating the Republic by sheer force of will almost. Yeah, making it real, making a practical thing, not just an aspirational thing or not just words, but actually putting it in place. It had a Declaration of Independence, as I say, which was there, but there was also a message to the free nations of the world.

And that was all about the Paris Peace Conference and it kind of channeled that Woodrow Wilson 14 points about self-determination and anti-imperialism. And of course, the choice of French, the fact that that was publicized

published and spoken in English, Irish and French tells you the audience that that was aimed at. And the final thing is a democratic program, which is a kind of a very socially and economically leftist program, certainly influenced by socialism and with that kind of idea of what was happening in Russia in the background. It was pretty radical and it made some people in the Dáil

pretty uncomfortable, not least of whom was Kevin O'Higgins, a later minister in government who described it as largely poetry. And Endu Kors Countess Markiewicz will become the Minister of Labour, won't she? And the second woman to become a European minister. Yes, and the fact that it's seen as, the fact that it's a shadow government is sometimes used to dismiss that fact. But again, I think it's important. But this was ultimately, in short, a revolutionary assembly. And then the amazing thing is that on the same day,

in Tipperary, I think it is, there is an event that is often seen as the first armed clash of the war. And as you said, it's not meant to be, it's a coincidence. It's not designed that way. So tell us what happens at Solaheadbeg and why it matters. So Tipperary is a county in the centre of Ireland and there is a town called Tipperary Town right in the heart of that county. On a cold, damp morning,

In January 1919, the 21st of January, James Macdonald and Patrick O'Connell, who were two local policemen, were leading a horse and cart which were being driven by Patrick Flynn and Edward Godfrey. They were bringing gelignite from Tipperary Town out to a quarry at Solihed Beg to blow stones for the construction work that was happening around the place.

Now, Tipperary was a famously rebellious county. Tipperary had been the home of the 1867 rebellion and everything to do with Irish nationalism had a Tipperary strain to it. But Tipperary had not risen in 1916 and that caused deep pain to people such as Sean Tracy in particular, but also Dan Breen, Seamus Robinson and Sean Hogan. And they're among a group of eight people

volunteers this newly militarizing force who are desperate for action because they believe that unless somebody is killed there is no war of independence beginning they wish to kill somebody they wish to start a war they wish to shoot and they use the opportunity of this gel ignite being moved to a quarry because they think they can get arms off whatever police are bringing because the irish police were armed in the countryside not in

take their arms take the gelignite and you have both bomb making potential and you have guns and ammunition so the cart is going out of country lane there's an attempt to slow it down with a bicycle someone stopping with a puncture fixing a puncture it slows down

and Tracy Robinson Hogan and Breen come out and Tracy at least shoots one of them and it's not they had really poor arms in what they were doing but Tracy is said to have danced and kissed his rifle after he shot one of the policemen who was left lying on the ground Sean Hogan took off with the with the horse and cart with the gelignite and they dispersed across the countryside these are

the first shot in the Irish War of Independence. And to be clear, the two policemen who are shot, so Macdonald and O'Connell, they are Irish Catholic policemen. They're not British. They are British.

They're part of a large number of Irish Catholic policemen who are working for the state at that point. Yes. Patrick O'Connell was 30 years of age from Cork, lived locally, known locally, most likely known to the people who killed him. James MacDonald was from Belmullet in County Mayo. He was in his 50s, but he was a widower with five youngest children.

And an Irish speaker. Is there a sense, this is a terrible thing, this is a terrible tragedy? Oh, there's an outcry against it. Right. The idea that Breen and Tracy and Robinson and Hogan would somehow be celebrated in the local area for what they did is not correct. There was a revulsion locally about what had happened. The view locally was that these were well-liked policemen who were in the area and Breen and Tracy had to go on the run. And there's outrage in the papers, outrage from the pulpit.

And even people in Dublin, people who are involved in the movement, they don't like this. Because, Paul, you say that the men who do this want it to be a declaration of war. But reading about it and then the events that follow, it actually reminds me of the Wild West. It's like the kind of it's the subject of a spaghetti Western or something like that.

And it becomes even more so, doesn't it? Because in due course, the four men who have done the attack disperse. They go into hiding. They're on the run, being hunted down by lawmen. And then one of them gets captured and he gets put on a train to be taken off to trial and presumably ultimately to be hanged. And the other three...

stage a hold up. They get on the train. There's a massive shootout on the train and they managed to get Hogan free. They're all got blood spurting out of their arms and their chests and things. And then they take him off and they get a butcher's cleaver to hack through the handcuffs. And you could absolutely imagine Clint Eastwood starring in a film of this story. And it is a guerrilla war. The set piece war of 1916 is done. They know, they've learned, they're not going back into a building.

This is a hedge war and it's an urban streets war. Now in the mythology of the Irish Revolution, it's that all of this fighting happened in country lanes and...

on the sides of mountains and people melted off into the countryside and lived on the land and were fed by people and that. And that did happen. But it was also an urban guerrilla war as well, which spread to the cities, but not yet. 1919, in terms of the War of Independence, is really quiet. But Breen and Tracy are at the heart of it and they're on the run immediately. And just on those men, we mentioned, Tom said, you know, they're maybe not as romantic as the ballad makes them.

I mean, these are quite, these are hard men. These are men who like a fight. So Dan Breen was a hard, violent man who was utterly unrepentant about killing people. And you can see that in the interviews that were recorded with him, for example, in the 1960s. And it was glorified in his book, My Fight for Irish Freedom. It was a wanted poster for Breen. It was very Wild West. Yeah, and it was a reward of £1,000.

for anyone who hands him in. But he's described on the Wanted poster, there's a picture of him kind of in, you know, relatively well-dressed, but there's a picture of him describing him as having a sulky bulldog appearance and looking like a blacksmith on his way home from work. It's kind of remarkable that people would put that on a poster. But Paul, I guess see why...

to the British authorities, this does seem a law and order issue rather than the declaration of a war, right? And the fact that it was so slow to get going, if you look at what happened, the slow incremental rise in violence, particularly in the first half of 1919, it got a little bit quicker later in 1919. But what it really was was assaults

They were looking, they didn't have rifles. They didn't have guns. They didn't have ammunition. They didn't have much bomb making equipment. So what you have are the volunteers raiding for arms, raiding houses for arms, raiding police stations for arms, trying to find guns wherever they can get them, organising boycotts,

assaulting the police and loyalists and resisting arrest. So for the first swathe of the Irish War of Independence, the level of violence is really small scale. So in 1919, a lot of the story is about boycotts, isn't it? So you mentioned the importance of boycotts, and it's boycotts particularly of people who are like these policemen, people who are in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and it's about not selling them. You wouldn't sell them milk, you wouldn't sell them eggs. You would basically, in England we would use the expression, you'd send them to Coventry, you'd basically...

sort of push them to the margins of life and make their life intolerable. And that works, doesn't it? I mean, people feel, the people who are still in the police feel they can't understand it, but they're being pushed out and it's harder to recruit policemen and people start dropping out and whatnot. Yeah, so the numbers who are, people over time begin to leave the police at a fairly significant rate and that becomes, and this is really important for the story as we'll tell it later on, but it leads to recruitment issues

from England of the black and tans who would become, and of the auxiliaries who become notorious in Irish history. But the fundamental place of the police in Irish society was destabilized through 1919, through that boycotting that you were talking about, but also when attacks, and it shouldn't be dismissed, I suppose, as well. I say the violence was low scale, but there were still 10 policemen shot through the rest of 1919. And then by September, there were attacks and the fire

soldiers are being shot. So there's a group of British soldiers on their way to a Methodist church. They're Welsh, aren't they? They're from Shropshire. They're Shropshire Light Infantry. Yeah, and they go to the church to Methodist service.

And they're ambushed by an IRA unit led by Liam Lynch and George Power. There's about 30 attackers, but they have six guns between them. So the rest of big sticks. So it said that what they were trying to do there, they were going to take the men's rifles, not shoot anyone, not kill anyone.

They arrived in two cars. There was an exchange of, there was a conflict emerged. Yeah. And one of the soldiers was shot and four were injured. So do you know what? I looked him up yesterday and it reminded me of two things. So his name was Private William Jones and he was from Carmarthen. So actually, Tom, you're right. Some of them were Welsh. And he reminded me of two things. One, he'd just got out of a prisoner of war camp. He'd been held in a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

And the second thing, he was only 20 years old. And almost all the people that we'll be talking about in this story are remarkably young. And we'll see that when it comes to the IRA and who's involved in the IRA on these things. And I think another point to make about what happened down in Firmoy with that incident is the fact that the local coroner's jury declined to record a verdict of murder because they said that they hadn't intended it.

to be killed, that they were just there to take the arms. And that led to members of the British military coming in and wrecking the shops of some of the people who had served on that jury. Paul, can I just give a shout out to anyone who wants more detail on these incidents to the Irish History podcast presented by Finn Dwyer, which I've been listening to in preparation for this. He has a huge series on the War of Independence and I highly recommend it. I can't believe someone's recommending a rivalry.

on this. It's not a rival, it's a compliment. This is literally Tom's last appearance on the show, to be clear. Right, so let's move on into, well, let's look at the politics. So you mentioned the foundation of Dorle Aaron beginning in 1919. And the shadow government is

I mean, they are really doing stuff and they're gaining legitimacy throughout the course of the year, aren't they? Because they're doing things like they've staffed the government, they're raising money, they are dispensing justice. So just give us a quick overview of what they're doing there. So what they actually try and do is to put into operation a state, despite the fact that they are continually harassed,

particularly in the summer of 1919, and then suppressed, just as the Irish Volunteers then renamed the Irish Republican Army, Tom, which gets you your IRA initials. Yeah, yeah. And Sinn Féin. So these are suppressed at that point. But...

So De Valera is back as president. That's an amazing story, isn't it? Because he's been sprung from Lincoln jail by, among others, Michael Collins in person. And it's an extraordinary story of how he gets, there's a single key that opens all the doors and he makes a copy of the key, sends it off on a design to people outside. They then make the key, send it in, and there are kind of various attempts. They put it in a variety of cakes.

And finally, De Valera gets out. Very hair-raising stuff. And again, in Finn Dwyer's podcast, excellent account of that. And you can see it in... So I should say, by the way, if you're doing shout-outs, the Royal Irish Academy here, if people are interested in Irish history, all of the main characters that we're spoken about here, short biographies of them are available on the Dictionary of Irish Biography, which is housed here at the Royal Irish Academy. It's free online and you get brilliant, brilliant...

brilliant descriptions of people's lives from Craig and Carson, which is done by Alvin Jackson onward. So really... And you'll be very modest here because you've written 99 of these yourself. I don't want to think for the better ones, I have to say. But I have to say there were brilliant ones by people like Ronan Fanning and Alvin Jackson, which are utterly superb as pieces of historical scholarship in their own right. But these people who are written about...

De Valera and Collins and Griffiths and Owen McNeill and Constance Markievicz they now head up ministries who are trying to do stuff they have a

A secretary to a Dáil committee called Dermot O'Haggerty, who is the clerk of the Dáil as well, and they keep records and they organise cabinet meetings and they have exchanges and they do actually do stuff around. They raise a loan, for example, of half a million pounds. And it's Collins who's doing that, isn't it? Yeah, it's Collins. Because he's got this background. He worked in the post office and then an accountancy office. So he's...

kind of good at this thing. So he's the finance minister, but he's also at the same time kind of in charge of intelligence, isn't he? And there's a brilliant description of this by Charles Townsend in his book, The Republic, that he's a finance minister with the unusual advantage of running a death squad.

Yeah, and there's a brilliant note actually in the margins where Collins was a really organized mind and really, really brilliant at administration. So he raised the money from the loan with 150,000 people. There were pilot schemes and fisheries and that, but he got exasperated.

when people weren't able to live up to the operations of these things and he cut loose. And De Valera has a great note in it where he says, Michael, not everybody has the same structured mind as you do. So he was really well organized. And so what you say there about the gun squad is important because this money was needed to fund the army and to run the pilot programs in fisheries and land and housing.

But there was an experienced policeman from the land war called Alan Bell. And Alan Bell was coming after this money and going after it and going after it. And Collins knew that he was going after it. And Collins had a unit that had him shot when he was coming in on a tram to the centre of the city. So this is the thing. So I think the other thing worth noting on this is, yes, it's important what they did with land and tried to do a small bit of land distribution. Yes, it's important, the local government stuff. But the key thing...

thing in this is the courts. They established a court service, which were four tiers, parish courts, minor crimes, district courts, and actually a Supreme Court, a two-member Supreme Court. And they issued fines in local areas, excluded people from being around the place, confiscated things like poutine stills, which were making illicit whiskey, particularly in rural areas. And what this is, it's symbolic of the withdrawal of

of allegiance. And the delegitimizing of British rule. Enormously important. So there's this comment in the Daily Herald in London that refers to this invisible republic with its hidden courts and its prohibited volunteer troops exists in the hearts of the men and women of Ireland and wields a moral authority which all the tanks and machine guns of King George cannot command. And that's the key, isn't it? Because they...

They can't hope to win a military victory. It's about persuading the Irish that this republic is real. It's real. But also persuading the British that they can't hope to win. I mean, you could argue that's the whole strategy. The whole strategy is to basically show the British that they can never win. Because they can't defeat the British by shooting them, but they can make the British lose heart in the whole enterprise. Exactly. And crucial to this as well is to show what's happening in Ireland in front of the world. So this takes us to the Paris Peace Conference.

which you really think matters? Oh, it does. It matters because what isn't realised through it as much as what it was. Now, I didn't really understand at all in depth the symbolic importance of what was happening around the world to this idea. So there was a brilliant exhibition last year in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, led out by Dr Lisa Moran, among others, which brought in these artistic works that

from all across Eastern Europe, from Europe, from Poland and Ukraine and everywhere along that thing to show all of those small nations that were establishing states in the years between 1917 and 1919. Every single one of them was being built

from broken empires. Yeah. They're from the Habsburgs. They're from the Russian Revolution. And that's why it's so important to situate this story of Ireland in the broader European context of the post-war world. But what makes the Irish story different than the Habsburgs and the Ottomans and the Russian post-empire states?

is that Ireland was looking for its independence from a state that had won the war, from an empire that was winning, that was now at the greatest extent of its power imaginable. And it went to Paris. It sent Sean T. O'Kelly, who I said had come in on the boat in December 1916 on the morning. He went there with his wife and wrote to Georges Clemenceau looking for a seat at the table and couldn't get one. And went through Wilson and said, listen,

We feature 14 points, get us a seat at the table. And it just doesn't happen. Because the implication for Britain, if Ireland leaves the United Kingdom, is that the United Kingdom, one of the victors in the war, will end up with a greater loss of territory than Germany, which has been defeated. And it's not just that, but one other thing.

I mean, I think a massively important thing in the British minds is if we lose Ireland, then Egypt and India are next. Because in all this period, if you look at the headlines in British newspapers, often Ireland is actually dwarfed by what's happening in Egypt and India, by risings there. And so Lloyd George and co are thinking, if we concede on this, then India is next. 1919 is also the year of the Amrit Samarkand. Exactly. And America then becomes the focus. Yes.

So, Eamon de Valera goes to America in June 1919. Paris hasn't worked out. All the promises of Sinn Féin from the election that they would use Paris is now gone. So,

So they go to, De Valera goes to America. He stays most of the time in New York's Waldorf Astoria, but he's basically on a mission to advance recognition for the new Irish Republican to raise money. 50,000 people go to the great baseball stadium, Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox play to hear him. He does a bond drive, which raises $5.5 million.

But money was really the only real success out there because neither Democrats nor Republicans ultimately supported the Irish cause at the conventions that were held in the year. Because of course, Irish America, as Irish America always is, was divided. There were personality disputes and power struggles and also a dispute over strategy while all the while there were local people advancing themselves. So De Valera goes there, raises some money, but really cannot drive the recognition from America to get the British to say, okay,

We need to give these guys an independent... And in terms of the personalities, does de Valera's absence in America enable Collins and other figures to...

attain a greater kind of leadership role. Yeah, while he's away, it's Collins and Griffith, but particularly Collins is growing in stature and importance. And of course, Collins straddles the two worlds in a way that De Valera now doesn't anymore. De Valera is much more on the, even though he had been out with a gun in 1916, that world is, he's now back in the politics side of things where Collins is

absolutely straddles both sides of the movement. So with the failure to get a seat at the Paris Peace Talks, it's pretty obvious that if the struggle is going to be won, it's going to be won in Ireland. Yeah. And there's obviously the propaganda, but there's also the Labour movement, which plays a big part in this. There's a series of strikes, strikes and boycotts, I guess. Well, there's the limerick Soviet, isn't there? There is, which is kind of a term which is bandied around a little bit. The key thing is...

The strikes that took place at various stages, four key strikes, I think one in support of conscription that we've talked about already. In 1919, a general strike in Limerick against the imposition of a special military area where permits needed to come in and out. In the third one, a two-day strike

in support of political prisoners and railway munition strike, which ran from May to December 1920, an enormous strike. And then you have Dublin dockers who refused to handle war material. So all of this had a huge impact later on the British ability to combat the IRA. I should say, by the way, that there was the prospect of recognition from the USSR for the new Irish Republic. And it was, what ended up actually happening was the Dáil got,

kind of recognition from the International Socialist Conference in Bern in February 1919, but it didn't move quick enough to secure the agreement with Moscow and left it too late. And instead it was Britain who actually smoothed over its relationships with Moscow, which stopped

that recognition coming in the end. Ophidius Albion. So before we get to the break, you mentioned the IRA a couple of moments ago. So the IRA, that's the term now being used for the Irish volunteers. But it never becomes official, does it? It's a term that's used always by 1920. It is the term, the Irish Republican Army, that's pushed out. The thing that struck me reading about this was, I mean, this is a slightly, it might seem an odd and indeed heretical comparison to Irish nationalists,

but how similar the people who joined the IRA are to people who joined paramilitary groups, let's say in Eastern Europe, or indeed, the very famous one, the Freikorps, the German paramilitary groups fighting in the Baltic at the same time.

Men who've either spent a couple of years in the war or perhaps have just missed it and are eager for action and there's a kind of cult of manliness and heroism and bravado. Is that a fair comparison, do you think? So there are a lot of different groups of people who are involved in the IRA and its ancillary organization and coming them on men and women who are involved in the war of independence.

And they were dismissed at the time and condemned as a rabble, as corner boys and gurriers. Gurriers. Gurriers is just this phrase that's used to describe the rabble of every town and city with a few intellectuals thrown in at the top of the movement. That was the idea of it.

And it really missed the point of what was happening. This is a huge generational shift. And I agree. I can see the parallels with those organizations that you're talking about. These are men and women in their late teens and in their 20s, most of whom had been born in the 1890s. They were, in very many cases, they were literate, they were educated, they were skilled.

They had a group of people who were denied emigration, which was the great Irish safety shoot since the famine was to go to New York, to go to London, to go ultimately to Australia and later times in South Africa and Argentina, actually a huge focus of Irish things. But that was denied them during the war. So they stayed around.

But they span people from farm labourers and farm workers up to medical students. Again, it's age often that binds them together. Many had been through a Christian brother school education. We should actually have spoken about this, the importance of radicalisation and how history is perceived and how it was taught in various places. There was a brilliant Methodist conference in Belfast after the rising where this guy turned up, he was a commissioner of education and he says he worried about Ireland because there didn't seem to be enough education

to go around to solve or to base every cause on it. In other words, there was a shared history here which people wished to pull apart and the nature of the teaching of history was a contested space here. So it was said in the commission on the rebellion and repeatedly

by people like Mahaffey, who is the Provost of Trinity, and by British castle officials that a huge problem here was the history of rebellion and of rejection of Englishness and of Britishness that was taught in the Irish national schools and then by its Christian brothers.

So that's lurking there in the background. There are the ballads that we started with. Now, that wasn't a ballad at the time, but before that you had stuff like A Nation Once Again. It's A Nation Once Again that's sung when Markovits comes back. And Paul, can I bowl you up a half ollie, to use an English phrase, at the sport, isn't there? There is. We'll probably, in the third episode, talk a little bit about sport when it comes to Bloody Sunday and what happened in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. But what it is, is...

an Irish imitation of the English sporting revolution. The English sporting revolution which saw the construction, people have always played sport, we know that across every society and in

the English sporting revolution, what you have is the formalisation of games and they're squeezing them into a modern playing field. And you get the spread of cricket, most popular field game in Ireland in the 1870s and in the 1880s. We'll be doing an episode on exactly this. Well, rugby and soccer, rugby and soccer as well spread. But the GAA turned that revolution on its head. And by founding the Gaelic Athletic Association,

for the cultivation and preservation of the Irish national pastimes and founded a game, invented a game which it called Gaelic football in opposition to others and reimagined the game of hurling for a modern era. I should say before I finish on the GAA, why the GAA matters in this context of revolution is there are people like Michael Collins and Harry Boland and JJ Walsh who learned their administrative skills and come to prominence and confidence in

true leadership within the Gaelic Atlantic Association and it gives them a status which they can then use elsewhere. And Paul, one other thing before we come to the break. You talked about men and women. Yes. And to pursue Dominic's analogy with the situation in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, example of the way that women in the aftermath of the war are stepping forwards and taking a much more prominent role in revolutionary movements than they would ever have done before the war. And the same thing is happening in Ireland, isn't it? We've talked about Countess Maltrowitz, but there's

There are others as well. Okay, so women matter in the Irish War of Independence in multiple ways. They are, it is true, the victims of violence at various stages from both sides. You have women who get their head shaved and are also the victim of rapes during this period. There is degrading treatment on both sides, it should be said. There are women who are involved in the IRA. It is so important to remember when you talk about the IRA, the majority of members of the IRA didn't fire a gun.

They were there for logistical support. They may be involved in espionage. They may be involved in the trafficking of guns, in the provision of intelligence, all the ancillary supports that are involved in that. And women did all of those things during those years. And they were also fundamental supporters

to propaganda. So you see people like Marion Muriel McSweeney, whose brother in Mary's case and whose husband in Muriel's case, he died on hunger strike while he was Lord Mayor of Cork. So they went to the United States after the death

of Terence McSweeney and they went on a fundraising campaign through 19th century. Mary spoke to 300 meetings in 58 cities and again, the most recent biography of her or the biography of her written by Leanne Lane does this brilliantly as a series of she comes on from people, after people like Rosamund Jacob who are all women who are central to this world

of kind of the construction of a nationalism which goes way beyond just those boys who are in their late teens and early twenties. All right, well, let's get back to the narrative. We're still in 1919. So as we've heard, the Doyle is raising money, the IRA recruiting all these young men, there are women in the organization, the propaganda,

making converts, the strikes have gained momentum. But so far, if you've been through the fighting on the Western Front, this does not look like an all-out war by any means. And that's all going to change when we get through into 1920 and the death toll begins to mount. So we will do that side of the story after the break.

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We opened with a misty-eyed and, in the opinion of Dominic, mawkish ballad about freedom fighters on the run. But actually, Paul, so far in this episode, we've had very little fighting. It's basically been Wild West shootouts. So how does the pace start to pick up? When do the British start to realise they are in a war? By the time you get to early 1920, the war is beginning to get much more fierce.

So the IRA go after police barracks and by the Easter 1920, there are 350 barracks

police barracks around the country which have been destroyed. And the RIC, the Irish police, basically have to withdraw to just the larger towns. On top of that, there was about 30 courthouses which are demolished, destroyed, and local taxation offices too. And they kept at this from the rest of the war. So this is the retreat of the British state. But here's a question. Tom said, when does the British ever, you know, when does it strike them that it's a war?

And as we'll find out, there are people all through this story who basically dispute that it is a war. There are kind of British hardliners, diehards, who say we're facing a murder campaign. This is a criminality, pure and simple. And these people are, you know, this is what we're facing. It's a law and order issue. Just to follow up on that, British power is being projected through the police force or through the army?

Through the police force, but then the police force proves unable to do it and the army is around the place as well, always. So I wouldn't separate one from the other. I think you look at it all in the round as Crown Forces. But it's seen as a policing issue. It's seen as a policing issue and that's the problem as well because what happens with the policing issue is that the police are unable to cope

as you mentioned earlier, Dominic, they are leaving the organisation. There are about 50 policemen a week leaving by the summer of 1920. You need to get recruitment somewhere. So what they do is they recruit unemployed soldiers from Britain. And they do that at a rate about 100 a week until June 1920. And these

or these new policemen wear distinctive khaki and green, dark green uniforms and they become famous in Irish history as the Black and Tans. And this is one of the terms that is used for this war of independence is the Tan War because in the popular mind it's remembered some of the things that they did. They are joined also in the summer of 1920 by another crucial group who were involved in, again in policing, called the Auxiliaries. And these are mainly former officers

Officers within the British army. And between both of those forces, you're looking at possibly around 10,000 people and they are famous within Irish history. And in reality, from the reports at the time for their brutality, for their drunkenness and for the unrestrained violence, which characterized some of their behavior in some places. So here the parallel I would say is again with what's happening in Eastern Europe, where

where you have large numbers of ex-servicemen joining paramilitary groups, basically often because they're unemployed, because there's been a massive economic downturn at the end of the First World War. So they need a job. They want regular pay. They like having a uniform. They like carrying a gun. But also, I mean, this is a thing that I think is always underappreciated in all these stories. For a lot of these men,

It's fun. It gives them a sense of, I mean, rather like joining any paramilitary group. It gives you a sense of brotherhood and belonging and excitement and all of these kinds of things. And they say this. They say this in interviews which were recorded later in the 60s for various television documentaries where, for example, there's one who was on his way to join the French Legion.

in early 1920 for a really small sum of money. And then he goes, the pay here is good. I'm going to join this. It'll put me into fellowship again. That world which he had lived in, in the army for years, is now recreated in a different context in Ireland. Now, you're right in what you said earlier, Tom. This is not the battlefields of the Somme or Verdun. This is the complete opposite and it drives...

people crazy that they do not know where the enemy is coming from, that they're coming from hedges, they melt from the population, they come from it, they kill and they go back into it. And is this a new kind of warfare? In the Irish context, yes, it is. It is a new kind of warfare. It is seen and it is seen as kind of a prototype guerrilla warfare, which is then taken on in different countries afterwards. I'm not enough of a military historian to say that this is some sort of a pioneering way of

But the way in which it's kind of joined in with the ballads and everything else that we've been talking about, there is a sense, isn't there, that the British are confronting a form of combat that no militarized army has faced before. And...

This in part must be why they struggle to get a handle on a strategy for coping with it, because no army has had to deal with something like this. Yes, but it's more than that as well. They are singularly failed by the quality of the leadership in Dublin Castle and in the Viceroy. So Lord French was the field marshal at the time. Now, he wasn't helped by the fact that his sister, Charlotte Despard, was actually in full swing with the Republican movement initially.

He failed to take the Republicans seriously until it was too late. And he was shot in December 1920, or shot at in December 1920 and almost killed. But you had people like Ian McPherson and Edward Scott and people like that who were just overwhelmed by the nature of their task. So much so that the head of the British Civil Service, Sir Warren Fisher, was sent to Dublin Castle to have a look at how the castle was run. And he wrote a report, which is savage,

on the nature of the castle. He said it was almost woodenly stupid how it did, how it conducted its affairs. So you have a situation whereby you have a creaking administration and then you don't have a unified military command because the police and the army are separate and they, it's not quite clear. And then you have at the top of this a government who does not know what to do. Yeah. And they've oscillate between, oh, we'll,

Allow for reprisals if someone's killed in an area, but we're not going to go down the route of absolutely going after everybody here and raising the place.

So it gets caught in a swinging boat ways. So this is one thing that strikes me, that if you're criticizing the British strategy, the British are either you don't do any reprisals, I would say, and you try to kill with kindness, or you're sort of, you know, the Russians in Chechnya, and you just go in and say, listen, we're just going to kill as many people as it takes. We'll get this done. And we have far more force than you do. And actually, the British completely fall between those two stools.

They're never going to go for the sort of utterly brutal raise everything to the ground. They can't, Dominic. They can't. They don't have the legitimacy. They don't have the support at home. You know, they're inhibited, I think, from doing it even if they wanted to. They can't do it with America apart from anything else. And they can't do it

Because of British public opinion. Because there's enough people in Britain who are appalled at what's going on. The Labour Party sends over delegations. The Manchester Guardian is filled with articles of people opposing what's happening. But they're still doing enough reprisals to turn opinion against them in Ireland. And really kind of localised, brutal acts happening.

the destruction of Cork, the sacking of Balbriggan, various other places, Boyle in County Roscommon, Lahinch in County Clare, the towns of Tralee and Lestall in Kerry. You get these, you get these havoc wrought by the Black and Tans or the auxiliaries when they arrive in. There's a magnificent comment by Sir Neville McCready who gets appointed Supreme Military Commander in Ireland in early 1920 and

And he is comically pessimistic. The whole way through this campaign, he's kind of saying it's all awful. He says, whatever we do...

We are sure to be wrong. And I mean, he's right. But the world had changed. Like their world had changed. And the British state was also incredibly sick of war and it was in financial turmoil as well. And it was really clear that if you want to keep a really major army in the field here, it's going to cost you a lot of money that you don't necessarily want to spend. And all the while,

there's no obvious political solution. And also there are, as Dominic said, colonial situations in Egypt and in India, which may actually be prioritised. Yes, and you can't be seen to lose Ireland significantly while those situations are ongoing.

are unravelling or unless you get to a certain point with them. They're in the horns of a dilemma. They don't know what to do. Their legitimacy has been utterly destroyed in large sections of the country. So let's go through to the summer of 1920. We started with that mention of, I joined the flying column in 1916. You couldn't have joined a flying column then because they didn't have them.

But they do have them from summer 1920. Why do the flying columns matter? Why do they change things? So, of course, the great thing about ballads are that they don't have to be slavish to history. They create an atmosphere and an idea. We create an atmosphere, but we're also slavish to history. That's why podcasts are better than ballads. So...

Are they changing their tactics? Is that what they're doing? Yes, they are changing their tactics and they go on the run and they're getting more arms. Their arms have been run in from around America. They tried to get Tommy guns from America, which come across through Liverpool,

The IRA in England and in Scotland are sending arms over and there's money coming through, so there's a little bit more there. The army is, its intelligence is much better than it was previously run by Michael Collins and Intel War, which was really, really important. He managed to get four junior members of the detectives in Dublin Castle, basically the turn, notably Ned Broy and David Nelligan, and they gave him

names and inspiration and disintelligence were always vital because there were women in this as well. And they're typists aren't they? Yeah, they're typists and there's people who work in Dublin Castle more generally and there are typists in the GPO, Nancy O'Brien, who was a cousin of Collins and people who work on the trains are passing

information and a special unit is set up in Dublin in mid 1919 in which they kill various people and that really is flourishing through the 1920s and this is an army which is developing its power it runs flying columns around the place now what has to be said is

that it was very localised, the violence, where there were some counties where it was extremely potent and successful and other counties where there was no real action at all during these years. And is that just because the movement is a kind of bottom-up?

movement rather than top down. Yes, it's impossible. Dublin does not run what's happening in the IRA around the country. What the IRA does locally, there is communication and there are weapons flows, but broadly speaking, it's up to local commandants to run them. And that's not a straightforward operation. So talking about the IRA and its activities on the ground brings us to probably the single most controversial question of

this whole subject. This is the issue of whether the violence is sectarian. And I know probably the most contentious book ever written about Irish history by Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies.

He published this groundbreaking book. It's got a lot of criticism in which he said, this is an aspect of the fighting that has been undervalued and kind of erased, which is there's a lot of sectarian violence and Protestants are the victims of it in some areas. Of course, there's an awful lot of, we should say, there's an awful lot of sectarian violence undoubtedly in the North in which both sides are carrying it out by Catholics and predominantly the victims. But just on the IRA and its violence, do you think there's a sectarian edge to it?

I don't think you can make the point that religion is central to Irish identity and to broader identities 100 years ago. I don't think you can make that point and then pretend that there is no sectarian element to what happens in the Irish War of Independence. I am not for a minute saying it was a sectarian war and I wouldn't want that to be mischaracterized.

But to imagine that there were not people in the IRA who were sectarian, who disliked Protestants intensely, who were excluded

from land ownership or from positions of power and wealth who had inherited a history in which their people and their religion had been stripped of the land as against others who won't. I think it is a denial of reality to imagine that there is no sectarian element in it. I think the question is, and it has to be posed on an individual basis, to what extent somebody was motivated by sectarianism or by other

by other impulses in causing them both to join the IRA and then to kill. You'll notice in a lot of Irish ballads, it's all about dying for Ireland. Nobody really wants to talk about killing for Ireland, but killing is massive in its impact on the lives, obviously, of the people who also do the killing. And it's an extremely difficult conversation for people to have. And Peter Hart, so I was on a train to Belfast, Ireland,

It's 20 years ago now, more or less. And I ended up talking to somebody across from me in the time when people used to talk to each other on trains before phones really got going. And I had this great chat with this Canadian bloke. And after about half an hour, really, because I'm obviously not the greatest detective of all time, I realized it was Peter Hart. And we're going to a conference in Belfast, which I was talking at as well. And in the way of these things,

He was a really, really nice fella. We went for a pint on the way to the conference, which softened the blow. Belfast at lunchtime is most enjoyable. And we walk around the corner into the conference and there's people protesting about him outside. They've set up a table. They're handing out material against him and his book and his reading of history. And so they view the work as being a scurrilous assault on

on the legacy of the IRA, particularly in Cork. So what Peter Hart did was he wrote a study of the IRA in Cork during the War of Independence. And it's a brilliant book in large measure. It gives a study of social class. It gives a statistical basis around the violence and everything, a really, really formidable original piece of scholarship.

The two controversial parts of it, largely speaking, are a Kilmichael ambush, which was a major ambush run by a man called Tom Barry. And we'll come to in the next episode. We will come to Tom Barry. And so Tom Barry...

And the second part of it is the murders of 13 Protestants in the Bandon Valley after the truce. And Peter Hart charted all of those and he did so. I think the mistakes he made in them, and he did make mistakes in them, and they are significant and serious mistakes in that his footnoting, first of all, of interviews was inadequate. Right.

And that left the door open and we can pass that off as the fallibility of historical scholarship, which we are all prone to. And to imagine that any of us escape from that is not right. The sense was that Peter Hart had kind of used interviews in a way, however, that were not accurate and that he had invented interviews.

with people who were dead. Now, I think that's subsequently been proven not to be the case, but that argument still continues. The second point is a much more important point. And that is the point that he used language to describe what happened in West Cork

and in the Bandon Valley in a really loose way, in a way to be provocative, not almost. He used language around ethnic cleansing in some of the stuff that he wrote and so on and so on. It was very much of the time of the Balkans and Rwanda and you can see how this happened and it is also the work of, um,

a historian who's trying to make his name in a field and you can see it when you do a PhD and you turn it into a book that you can get lured into over into a use of language and he got stuff entirely wrong in my view and he did not entirely but he significantly walked back some of that language. Could I I mean just going back to the war itself could I frame the question in a slightly different way which is to ask

The ideal that dates from the Napoleonic period of Protestants and Catholics as part of a single island, which of course is expressed in the tricolour, the green and the orange are both there. Is that starting to fade over already in 1920? Through the 19th century, the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism was something that gathered momentum through history.

through that century. It was given a huge amount of momentum by Daniel O'Connell and his campaigns in the 1820s and onwards. The identification, the growth of power in the Catholic Church and the kind of deal around education and health that they did with the British government to allow them a sort of a pastoral role and much more is vital in all of this. And the increasing identification of Irishness with Catholicism was well underway.

by the time there was a revolution in 1916. And you can see that in the poetry that was written and in the beliefs of other things. But there is also a strand of republicanism which utterly rejects the Catholic Church and believes in secularism. And it's starting to go into shade in this period. It is well into shade, that spirit, as the nationalist movement expanded, particularly before 1919. So just as we move towards the end of the episode, let's remind ourselves that we are in 1920 now.

The British have been flailing around. They've got a divided command. They don't really have a clear strategy or clear instructions from London, where David Lloyd George is still leading this coalition, this wartime coalition that he has managed to perpetuate after the end of the war, which is reliant on the Tories in particular. And they, of course, are very close to the Ulster Unionists.

So the British finally pass the Government of Ireland Act and this is they hope this is going to somehow magically fix the whole issue and the key thing here is that you're going to have two new Home Rule parliaments one in Dublin and one in Belfast and this is massively important because this is what effectively establishes Northern Ireland which is going to be six counties

three of which, well, two and a half of which are overwhelmingly Catholic. So if you have six counties...

Ulster was historically a nine-county province, but the number of Catholics in the nine counties in the 1911 census was about 43%, which was a little bit close to the 50% rule, which would have left things tricky for the future Northern Ireland. If you went with six counties, you had a 34% Catholic population, which was still seen as a big enough area to be viable.

But there was enough of a majority basis, a Protestant majority on which to do it. So that was chosen. But what this meant, and this is the deep irony of all of this, is that the one thing that Ulster Unionism had been founded on initially was the rejection of the idea of home rule. Any home rule. It wanted only to be ruled from London. And now...

They're left with the situation whereby they must take, as they see it, their own parliament on a permanent basis to keep them out of an all-Ireland, 32-county, home-ruled parliament. Right. But they gladly take this, gladly take it, and in the context of the situation. And you're left then, on the other hand, with a 26-county home-ruled plan. The Government of Ireland Act, a reheating of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act, which

which is nowhere near enough for Sinn Féin. Right, so this is not going to fix it at all. I mean, it might fix it in the north while leaving a massive Catholic minority, but in the remainder of Ireland, the Government of Ireland Act is kind of irrelevant. Oh, it's entirely irrelevant. Right. So we've reached the autumn of 1920. The conflict's been going on for almost two years.

We began with a misty-eyed ballad, but there's a real edge to the story now. You've described the reprisals of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, houses being burned down, families being driven from their homes and so on. And now we're going to come to the 21st of November, 1920, the most controversial day of the entire conflict, the game at Croke Park between the Dublin and Tipperary Gaelic football teams.

And that day will go down in history as Bloody Sunday. And Tom, we will be moving now to Croke Park.

for the next part of the story. And can anybody, is there any way that people desperate to hear that episode with Paul, is there any way they can do that? Well, Dominic, it will stun you, it will stun Paul, and it will stun all our listeners to learn that there is, because members of the Restless History Club can hear that episode right now by signing up to therestlesshistory.com. Oh, that's brilliant news. And that is a website that no one has ever heard before, therestishistory.com. Go there and you can hear...

all about the most notorious episode in the entire history of the Irish Revolution. For everyone else, people who don't want to do that, we will be back on Monday and we will see you then. Bye-bye. Thanks so much, Paul. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Hey, everyone. Here's that Jaws clip that we mentioned during the break. You can listen to the whole episode for free on therestorsentertainment.com.

There's no cast at this point as well. The cast is so last minute for this. It was nine days before principal photography was due to start. Two of the three main parts, Quint and Hooper, still hadn't been cast. Nine days before. So everyone's ready. Everyone's ready to go. You know, the whole unit is... Who are eventually played by Robert Shaw and Richard Rofus in the movie. And...

those two have a massive feud. There were so many other different people that they considered. Now, Brodie, who was actually played by Roy Scheider, it's a brilliant performance. He's so sort of, it's an amazing performance. so put upon and like every man, but yeah, I mean, the other people consider were Paul Newman, Charlton Heston,

Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, like definitely the last two of those could have done it. Yeah, so I think Charlton Heston was desperate to be in it. And Spielberg, again, you know what? He was smart right from the beginning, Spielberg. He said, the thing about Charlton Heston, he's too big a star. Why is he too big? Because you know Charlton Heston always wins. That's the problem. You know Charlton Heston is going to defeat the Sharks. You don't know what Roy Scheider is going to do. You just don't know. So it's really important. Roy Scheider has the look of a man who could

be eaten. He could definitely be eaten. You'd be like, yeah, I can see it. I don't know if his agent is going to be saying he's going to be in it, but he can't be eaten. He could definitely be eaten. Charlton Heston eats sharks. Charlton Heston eats sharks. Again, another great title for the book. Roy Scheider actually heard Steven Spielberg talking about it at a party and Steven Spielberg was saying he'd had this idea for how he could get the shark to jump onto a boat. Roy Scheider thought,

I'd like to be in that movie. That sounds good. I like this kid. And he said, I would like to be in this movie. Anyway. Charlton Heston, by the way, vowed never to work with Spielberg after that. Hi, everybody. You're still here. Right at the end of the episode, I'm very impressed by your commitment. But listen, I have a question for you. I want to ask you something in confidence. Do

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