the war would be wound up in a few weeks and at first all went well. Anti-Treaty forces were driven out of most towns and villages with seaborne landings being a prelude to decisive offensives in Cork and Kerry. Large numbers of prisoners were taken and there were many arms seizures. Michael Collins privately intimated that modest punishments might be handed out for possession of arms and his Chief of Staff Mulcahy agreed.
But as the weeks wore on, the anti-Treaty campaign began to develop into guerrilla warfare. For the National Army, there were no bases to attack and no set piece battles to be fought against an elusive enemy. In the weeks before his death, Collins’ attitude began to shift. He went down to west Cork for a requiem mass for National Army soldiers killed in action and that night he wrote to his fiancé about the mothers and widows ‘weeping and almost shrieking’.1 The people were ‘splendid’ wrote Collins, but the country was also beset by the looters and carpet baggers that ride on the coat tails of every revolution. A few days later, he wrote a memo to his director of intelligence that ‘any man caught looting or destroying should be shot on sight’.2 He still could not countenance summary executions of captured anti-Treaty fighters.
The hard fighting in Cork and Kerry was driving Collins onwards. Only two weeks before his death, Collins wrote to the provisional government in Dublin suggesting ‘special punishments’ for those found in arms in areas designated special military areas.3 He did not stipulate the nature of the punishment, but no one was in any doubt what was implied. It was a poisoned chalice and it was batted back and forth in meetings and memos. In response to a note from Cosgrave, Collins wrote: ‘I am against shooting down unarmed men.’4 Such a decision, he told Cosgrave, was for the government not the army. In the emerging six county state in the North, possession of arms by anti-Treaty fighters was already being dealt with by lashes with the cat and a long term in prison.5 South of the border, policy was developing more slowly but into a much more draconian response.
A pivotal event took place in late July. Just outside Abbeyleix on a bend in the road a National Army convoy was ambushed. Reinforcements soon arrived led by National Army Commandant Jack Collison and Divisional Commandant McCurtain: both officers died in a single volley. Very quickly their attackers threw up their hands and all twenty-eight were taken into custody.
The next day at the old courthouse at Maryborough, the inquest jury heard evidence that the officers had been killed by expanding bullets. ‘Wilful murder’ was the verdict of the jury who added a rider, condemning the use of expanding bullets.6 The funerals followed soon after and at the graveside Executive Council member Joe McGrath praised the survivors for the ‘extraordinary forbearance they had shown after their much loved officers had been shot down’. In terms of how the conflict was fought, that quality of forbearance would soon dissipate and in the months that followed there were many well-grounded complaints of ill treatment of prisoners.
For the provisional government, the ambush resonated of all that was wrong. Collison and McCurtain had fine records in the recent war and both were now dead, but the prisoners had gone off for internment without trial. They were mostly young – too young to have fought in the recent war but raised in an era when fighting for country was everything and there were many more like them still out there. Ernest Blythe seized the moment and suggested the surrender should not have been accepted. It was the first time the argument had been made in public and no one dissented.
August became the month of ambushes. The anti-Treaty fighters were still well organised and not at all short of ammunition and the National Army suffered fifty-eight killed and many more wounded. A significant number of casualties were high-ranking National Army officers. Among these was Colonel Frank Thornton who led a convoy out into Tipperary to make contact with the enemy with a view to negotiating a peace. Thornton’s convoy was ambushed and only he survived, gravely wounded. His brother, Colonel Hugh Thornton, died at Clonakilty and Michael Collins was killed at Béal na mBláth and the attackers once again disappeared into the hinterland.
After the death of Collins, General Richard Mulcahy became commander in chief and was immediately under pressure from his generals to permit the execution of captured anti-Treaty fighters. In Cork, Major General Dalton was sustaining heavy casualties and wrote to Mulcahy at GHQ asking for permission ‘to shoot without trial men caught in possession of arms’.7 The request was echoed by General O’Duffy in Limerick. Permission was refused, but events were boiling over and the first execution by firing squad soon went ahead. National Army Private ‘Barney’ Winsley was a chimney sweep from Cork. After a spell in the British Army, he came back to Cork and ended up in the National Army: semi-literate, still living on his wits and the only breadwinner for his widowed mother. Like other National Army men in Cork, he was selling guns to the anti-Treaty forces and he was singled out for court martial. Major General Emmet Dalton had him shot by firing squad and that put an end to selling guns to the anti-Treaty faction, in Cork at least. Commander in Chief General Mulcahy was informed and replied: ‘I approve’. All the while, however, there was the continuing guerrilla action and a tide of gunpoint robberies. On the Executive Council all ministers had now come round to the view that executions were necessary, but the final straw was unexpected and mundane: the economy.
The Economic Crisis
The strategy of the anti-Treaty faction had begun to morph into making the country ungovernable and seizing a republic from the wreckage. That policy was pursued by guerrilla action and also by degrading the transport and communications infrastructure: roads were trenched, bridges and railway lines torn up and engines destroyed. Telephone wires were cut and as soon as they were fixed cut again. The big houses were burned out and the old ascendancy was forced out of the country by degrees and their money went with them.8 The provisional government had been warned months before by Churchill, the minister in England with responsibility for implementing the Treaty: ‘Capital is taking flight.’9
People were taking flight also: the protestant exodus in 1920–2 had damaged the country financially and young people were still leaving Ireland as they always did when times were hard.10 Economic migration was damaging the new state. The turning point in this growing crisis came in September when the institutions of the state began to pull in the same direction. In a habeas corpus motion brought by one of the thousands of anti-Treaty prisoners the High Court upheld internment during the emergency.11 From the pulpits, the bishops put out a strong message that had the approval of the government: ‘stay and live in the land of your birth and work for the good of the country’.12 Cosgrave’s big cabinet shuffle and his address to the Dáil promised decisive action: ‘life and property must be respected and the laws of the country must be obeyed.’
Cosgrave had financial experience as a minister for local government in the recent war and balancing the books quickly became the central plank of government policy. In his budget statement he told the deputies that revenue from taxes stood at £27 million but projected expenditure was £40 million. He attempted to calm speculation by adding that there was ‘no immediate cause for concern’. Cosgrave was rather understating the position; he was one of a number of cabinet ministers not drawing pay. In Ireland, agriculture was the main source of revenue, but the country lacked any significant mineral resources and industry, fishing, forestry and tourism were all at an embryonic stage of development. There was also a growing urban population to sustain.
Unlike established states elsewhere, this new Ireland had no gold reserves, assets or bonds to fall back on in bad times. The provisional government was operating on a loan from Westminster that was fast running out because of the cost of fighting the war. In that year, the army bill exceeded seven million pounds: one quarter of government revenue. That figure would continue to rise sharply the following year.13 The army and public-sector wage bill had to be paid or the new state would simply unravel. Everything depended on people paying taxes and doing so promptly. The anti-Treaty faction was alive to this weakness and would soon begin to try and drive the government into bankruptcy.
It was at this stage that the two prongs of government policy emerged. First, to rid the country of arms and second, to build the confidence of the business
