consequence, he, Mulcahy, was forced to go on the run,38 he drew closer to the nerve-racking world of the gunmen.
Drawing closer to the activities of the gunmen became spectacularly obvious when, with the official sanction of the Cabinet and scrupulous examination of the evidence against each man by Brugha, Mulcahy helped Collins carry out, through the medium of the Squad and some handpicked members of the Dublin brigades, especially members of the Second Battalion, the tracking down and execution of fourteen suspected British agents on the morning of 21 November 1920, a date soon referred to as Bloody Sunday.39
Of course, given the escalating trend of the war, reprisals would have been expected for such a dramatic intervention and these came about in the form of the following incidents. During Sunday afternoon, fourteen people were shot dead and sixty were wounded when Crown forces went on a rampage at a football match between Dublin and Tipperary at Croke Park and, during the early hours of Monday morning, McKee, Clancy and Clune, who had been captured on Saturday evening, were beaten to death while under interrogation in Dublin Castle.40
In such tense circumstances, therefore, it is likely that the Volunteers, or rather the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – a title by which the Volunteers were then becoming popularly known41– were unable to hold their national convention at that particular time.42 However, a postponement43 might have been the very thing which Brugha did not want. This was because, on 15 August 1919, when de Valera was trying to cover up the Brugha/Collins difficulties, he, Brugha, offered the following general reasons for wanting the Volunteers, along with TDs, to swear an oath of allegiance to the Dáil and, just as significantly, for wanting a new Volunteer constitution to give full recognition to same at the next Volunteer convention (i.e. the 1920 one):44
The object aimed at was to unify the whole body in this country. The present Constitution governing the Irish Volunteers prevented them from being subject to any other body but their own Executive. At the next Convention they [the members of the Cabinet] proposed to ask them as a standing army to swear allegiance to the Dáil, and it was but fair and just that all Members of the Dáil, and all officials of the Dáil, should likewise subscribe to an Oath of Allegiance.
In response, Liam de Róiste pointed out that TDs had already been required to sign a pledge at the first Dáil session. Cosgrave was unenthusiastic also. But Griffith was not: ‘The Army and the Government of a country could [should?] not be under separate authority.’ The vast majority of the TDs agreed, resulting in the motion being passed by thirty votes to five.45
Seemingly, Mulcahy was among the naysayers. As he explained many years later, his attitude was that Brugha’s oath, unlike an IRB oath, for example, would be compulsory, thereby ‘pinning something constitutionally or morally on the people’.46 This is yet another one of his convoluted, latter-day comments. But, with thought, the message becomes clear: right up to the declaration of the Truce, he disliked the fact that Brugha continued to push for parliamentary control over the army. As far as he was concerned, Brugha was thereby distracting GHQ from its primary purpose, namely to keep the fight at a controlled high intensity, as was already encouraged by the Dáil itself the year before. But, in emphasising that particular grievance, he ignored another important aspect of Brugha’s proposal, namely that, in the words of Liam de Róiste, ‘a new moral situation [concerning the civil–military relationship?] has been created in Irish governmental affairs’.47
At all events, from Brugha’s perspective, a certain amount of progress had already been made before November 1920. For instance, on 2 June, Seán McGarry, who after Ashe’s death had occupied the office of president of the IRB and was now secretary to IRA GHQ, contacted Florrie O’Donoghue requesting his vote in favour of the oath.48 Also, Mulcahy, Collins, Béaslaí, along with twenty-three other TDs, took the oath on 29 June49 and a general order of swearing in was issued to the troops on 23 July50 with the objective of completing its administration by 31 August. The following is the wording of their pledge:
I, A.B., do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I do not, and shall not, yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government, Authority, or Power within Ireland, hostile or inimical thereto; and I do further swear (or affirm) that to the best of my knowledge and ability I will support and defend the Irish Republic, and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann, against all enemies foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.51
Maybe the reference to ‘any pretended Government’ was a cryptic allusion to the IRB as much as to the Castle regime. But, because the IRB SC had already decided in September 1919 to recognise the Dáil as the legitimate government of the new-born state, it is unlikely that Mulcahy, Collins and Béaslaí would have been bothered by that. However, what did bother them, and this seems to be implicit in Mulcahy’s explanation above, was the following clause of the new constitution: ‘The Minister of [sic] National Defence, in consultation with the Executive Council [Cabinet], shall appoint and define the duties of the Headquarters staff.’52
Therefore, unfortunately for Brugha, getting the oath safely across the line was not going to end his difficulties with GHQ. The reason was that the real bones of contention – power and authority – were now exposed for all to see and to continue to squabble over. To make matters more sensitive still, Brugha did not become Acting President of the Dáil when, during the military sweeps of Bloody Sunday, Griffith was apprehended and confined sine die in Mountjoy Jail. (He was not released until 30 June as part of the Truce settlement.) Instead, in the event of such a happening, it was Collins who was appointed.53
Even though Griffith had already indicated a preference for Collins, Brugha was still given first choice; he declined the offer, however. Even so, typical of his conflicted ways, he could not help feeling anxious that Collins’ promotion, even though it lasted a mere five weeks, was an added complication to the civil–military question, a sentiment he voiced to de Valera on his return from the USA on 23 December. In response, while he accepted the reasoning behind Brugha’s anxiety, especially when Brugha’s reasoning was a contributory factor in his own unexpected return home, de Valera felt that Brugha, having refused the offer, had little grounds for complaint.54
Nevertheless, in the most violent circumstances of the winter of 1920, Mulcahy was perhaps far too worried about the issue of security to give such matters his full attention. Naturally enough, like all of his comrades, he was intent on protecting his own skin: ‘the civilian worker – the Dáil Minister or official, the Irish Volunteers’ Headquarters’ Executive, for instance – cooped up in Dublin, felt the strain’.55 Besides, he strongly held the view that the members of GHQ, himself included, would be very difficult to replace. For that reason, he systematically rearranged GHQ’s working routine in order to conform to a code of optimum safety:
I arranged that the staff would never meet as a whole. A schedule was made out grouping the members of the staff into groups of three, for various activities, one person being starred as the spearhead of these activities and the membership generally of the groups being such as to echelon in such a way that there never was any group that didn’t understand what the other groups were doing – so that there was a common mind.56
Furthermore, he, as CS, must have been acutely aware of just how precarious the entire military venture was, because at no time did the IRA’s numbers exceed much more than 3,000 in active service from a willing panel of 15,000.57 For instance, by mid-March 1921, while Tom Barry’s West Cork flying column had 104 men, there were 5,000 British troops in the same area and they usually travelled in units of not less than 300.58 One could surmise that morale in that situation would have depended greatly upon ruthlessly successful operations.
Yet this was not entirely true because success brought its own problems in the form of an insidious retreat by some of these self-same activists. Bear in mind the following. In July 1920, nearly three months after the arrival of the Black and Tans and at roughly the time when the Auxiliaries entered
