IRISH HISTORY: The Irish War of Independence.By Michael Hopkinson.Gill &Macmillan, 274pp. €29.99The Irish Revolution and its Aftermath 1916-1923. ByFrancis Costello. Irish Academic Press, 452pp. €45
Eighty years on, can there be much left to write about the conduct or the context of the War of Independence? Library shelves creak under the weight of memoirs, biographies and narrated diaries of the period. But there are still sources to be mined. Extraordinarily, not all known archival material is yet fully available, including some within the important resource that is the Bureau of Military History in Dublin. And apart from additional source material per se there are also changing perspectives over time. Today's young historians are three generations removed from the events which are the subject of Michael Hopkinson's new book. New interpretations will continue to emerge, some influenced in part at least, by the still-evolving story of relations between Ireland and Britain.
Hopkinson, who teaches at the University of Stirling, is best known for his masterly Green Against Green (Gill and Macmillan, 1988), arguably the most complete and certainly the least partisan account of the Irish Civil War. With The Irish War of Independence he brings the same qualities of succinctness and detachment to bear upon events from January 1919 (the first shootings of RIC men, at Soloheadbeg in Co Tipperary) to the Truce in July 1921.
For all that has been written about the period, no other historian has quite done what Michael Hopkinson has set out to do here. His aim is to provide a detached narrative, in context, of the conflict which took place over this crucial two-and-a-half year span, between nationalist forces, loyal to Dáil Éireann, and the security services of the Crown. But it is not a simple chronological treatment. First, it sets out the political and administrative framework within which Ireland and Britain moved towards the great convulsion. The narration of the hostilities on the ground is then paralleled with chapters on British policy, the American dimension, the North, the failed attempts to secure peace in 1920 and finally on the back-channels and negotiations which led to the Truce.
There can have been few "wars of independence" in which regime change - to borrow a contemporary term - was effected with such a limited campaign and with such a small casualty toll. Ireland's independence, marking the first great fissure in the empire which Britain had built over the previous century, was effected with a total loss of about 1,400 lives. The Civil War which followed was on a much more bloody scale, with something in excess of 3,000 dead. Of the War of Independence dead something over 600 were military and police while IRA and civilian casualties accounted for the rest. In contrast with the Northern Ireland "Troubles", the author points out, civilian casualties of the period were considerably less than the toll of the combatants on both sides.
Hopkinson puts the scale and extent of the hostilities in perspective. The war was sustained essentially in Dublin, in parts of Cork, Kerry, Tipperary and Longford. Outside of these areas, it comprised occasional incidents in some counties. In others, hardly a shot was fired. Yet towns and villages all over Ireland proclaim themselves heirs to the struggle. Tales of the heroic taking of the barracks will still be heard in places where the RIC simply evacuated, leaving nothing for the local IRA unit to do but burn the empty building.
He is not the first historian, of course, to challenge and lay bare the myth of the risen people, fighting the foreign occupier in town and village, mountain and farmland, across the country. He describes a war in which the IRA leadership had but a limited role in directing local operations. High levels of military activity in some areas were usually attributable in considerable measure to energetic and determined local leadership or, sometimes, to a small group connected by blood or other common ties.
He refuses to indulge some of the canards advanced in the past to explain the limited geographical spread of the campaign. "There has been considerable debate as to why particular areas were more active or inactive than others," he writes. "Many at the time and since have sought explanations in the suitability of the countryside for guerrilla fighting - the hills of North Tipperary and West Kerry were ideal for ambushes and column work, while the flat open land of Kildare militated against it. The Wicklow hills, however, saw little fighting and there are few high places in Longford."
So if the Irish War of Independence was only a little war, and one that involved a relatively small proportion of the Irish people, what was it all about? Why did it happen? Why did the Irish side succeed, more or less? Hopkinson enumerates the factors that fed into the equation, combining to force the stand-off that was the Truce and, later, the compromise that was the Treaty. He emphasises the superiority and effectiveness of the Irish intelligence system. He stresses the extent to which the threat of conscription had antagonised middle-ground Irish opinion, conditioning it to an anti-British stance. He underscores the importance of political and passive resistance during the campaign.
But he is in no doubt that the core reasons for the success of the Dáil government and the IRA were the uncertainty and weakness of British policy and the haplessness of the British administration, both military and civil. At the height of the IRA guerrilla campaign, Dublin Castle had still not put together an effective, unified security command. When Martial Law was introduced (in a limited number of districts) it was a very much diluted version of what the military chiefs wanted. For example, race meetings and other public events continued, providing ideal cover for subversive meetings and transactions.
Hopkinson is withering of Lloyd George. His Irish policy was maladroit and without coherence. The so-called Welsh Wizard miscalculated profoundly not once but twice. In late 1920, had he seized the moment decisively, he might have had peace on terms no less unpalatable than those which were agreed something more than a year later. And with a lack of any political astuteness, he put his plan for partition in place before attempting to settle with the nationalists of the South. The consequences have been with us since.
Francis Costello's The Irish Revolution and its aftermath 1916-1923, as its title indicates, has a longer time-frame and a somewhat wider focus. It describes a continuum between the two great Anglo-Irish compromises of the 20th Century - the Treaty of 1921 which followed the War of Independence and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Costello's previous work includes an excellent life of Terence MacSwiney and an instructive collection of Michael Collins's words and writing, Michael Collins in His Own Words.
There can be a temptation for historians to place brackets around that phase of Irish history which ended with the Civil War or perhaps with De Valera's accession to power in 1932. It is sometimes treated as a topic or series of topics which may be almost self-contained and cut off from what Ireland is today. In contrast, Costello describes a revolutionary process up to 1923 and then traces the evolutionary pathway to late 20th-Century Ireland. It is a free-flowing narrative from the Home Rule crisis to the enlargement of the EU and to the Belfast Agreement.
Some analysts have queried the extent to which the events of 1916-1923 may properly be described as a "revolution". The mercantile values of early 20th-Century Britain were not upturned or rejected in the new state. Much of the apparatus of public life was adapted without change from the ancien régime. The classes which had been advancing economically and socially prior to the War of Independence, were, by and large, those which did well in the new state, at least in the 1922-1932 phase. Even a moderateMarxist might not have noticed the difference.
But Francis Costello does not hesitate to describe what happened in Ireland in the period 1916-1923 as a revolution and not merely a change - however complete - of political structures. The revolution he describes is one of changing loyalties. Anti-Britishness grew from many sources. As with Hopkinson, he cites the conscription issue. He places much significance on the extent to which the population embraced the Republican Courts, which in time, metamorphosed via the Glenavy Committee into the courts structure that we have today. There is only a passing mention of the new, unarmed police - the Civic Guard - whose appearance in the towns and villages, signified perhaps more clearly than anything else to the general citizenry, that the old order had gone.
The chapter on the Republican Courts is perceptive although it does not bring forward any information that is strictly new. There is also a penetrating and comprehensive survey of the relationships between the independence movement and organised labour. The labour movement was an important support in the struggle for independence. But that support was not much reciprocated. Those who drove the Irish War of Independence were generally cold towards the aims of the labour movement. Costello cites instances where IRA muscle was used in support of bourgeois or landowning interests against those of labourers.
Historians have long argued over whether the Treaty gave Ireland more freedom than it might have secured if the Government of Ireland Act 1920 been brought into operation simpliciter. Michael Hopkinson juxtapositions the opposing stances of Ronan Fanning and Roy Foster on this question. Coincidentally, Costello also picks Fanning and Foster to represent the opposing arguments. He is with those who maintain that the campaign of violence brought gains that political action alone would not have secured. He comes down firmly on the side which argues that Britain was willing to concede what it did only in the face of continuing violence.
But as with Hopkinson, Costello is clear that the revolution which broke British authority in southern Ireland was not merely a military affair. The "war" was sporadic and had reached stalemate by the time of the Truce. (Had the Treaty negotiations not been successful, of course, the war would almost certainly have moved into a new phase, with a much greater military commitment by Britain and with unknown consequences). There were other significant causative factors in the Irish revolution which had nothing to do with the campaign of violence; the support of the labour movement, the existence of rudimentary structures of self-government and the transfer of loyalty to these by a disaffected populace.
Costello's book is an impressive drawing together of many detailed strands. His American background gives him an unusual perspective, enabling him to conjoin events and to interpret influences in a somewhat different way from Irish historians. He has, perhaps not surprisingly, placed considerable focus on the American dimension of the Anglo-Irish struggle. He devotes a sizeable section of the book to the contest between Sinn Féin and the British administration to influence American public opinion. Much of this centres on de Valera's presence in the US but he also describes the impact made by the public appearances of the widow and sister of the martyred Terence MacSwiney. He breaks new ground in drawing on the records of the US legations in Ireland (including the consulate in Cork) during the period as well as on the records of the American Commission which organised public hearings on events in Ireland during the conflict.
There are editing infelicities which should not be there in a book of this stature. His Irish editors ought not to have allowed him to use the terms Viceroy, Lord Lieutenant and Governor General as if they were interchangeable. There are several references to "the Dáil Éireann", incorrectly placing the definite article before the proper noun. These and some other solecisms do not undermine the value of this intelligent, painstaking analysis of a process that has been too often presented in untenable simplicities. But a conscientious author deserves better.
Conor Brady is a journalist and was formerly editor of The Irish Times
Conor Brady