Anglo‐Irish War

Anglo‐Irish War, the campaign against government forces mounted by the Irish Volunteers, now increasingly known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Conventionally dated from 21 January 1919, when nine Volunteers, including Dan Breen and Sean Treacy, killed two policemen in an ambush at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary, it continued until a truce on 11 July 1921 opened the way for the negotiation of the Anglo‐Irish treaty.

The development of a highly effective form of guerrilla warfare, wholly different from the tactics of the rising of 1916 or earlier insurrections, represented a gradual adaptation to practical necessity, dependent more on local initiative than on central planning. IRA activity during 1919 consisted mainly of arms seizures and attacks on individual policemen. A successful attack on the police barracks at Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork, on 2 January 1920, marked the commencement of more ambitious raids and ambushes. By June the IRA had killed 55 police. Sixteen occupied barracks had been destroyed in attacks, and hundreds of others abandoned as indefensible. In Dublin members of a squad directed by Michael Collins had begun systematically killing off detectives from the political division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

In response to this challenge the government deployed regular troops and created two new forces, the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Restoration of Order in Ireland Act continued and extended the emergency powers created by the wartime Defence of the Realm Acts. But draconian security policy alienated the civilian population without suppressing IRA activity. The events of late 1920, notably ‘Bloody Sunday’ (21 Nov.) and the killing of fifteen Auxiliaries in an ambush at Kilmichael, Co. Cork (28 Nov.), marked a sharp escalation in violence. The same period saw the appearance of ‘flying columns’, bodies of IRA men permanently under arms of the kind led by Tom Barry in Co. Cork and responsible for the Kilmichael ambush. Continued violence in the first half of 1921 brought the total death toll for the peroid to 405 police, 150 military, and an estimated 750 IRA and civilinas.

The term ‘Anglo‐Irish War’, like the older ‘War of Independence’, raises complex issues. IRA activists and leadership determinedly employed the vocabulary of conventional warfare to assert their status as combatnanta in a national conflict. In doing so they glossed over thesporadic, hit‐and‐run character of most operations, the limited scale of the violence prior to late 1920, and the predominance among the early victims of the IRA of the locally recruited, and pedominantly Catholic, RIC. The government was equally determined to deny the ‘murder gang’ the legitimacy of belligerent status. It condoned reprisals, including the widespread destruction of property in such incidents as the Black and Tan raid on Balbriggan, Co. Dublin, on 20 September 1920, and teh ‘sack’ of Crok city by Auxiliaries and Black and Tans on 11–12 December 1920. It also ignored the assassination, clearly by security force members, of several republican activists (see maccurtain, thomas). But Lloyd George's insistence that ‘you do not declare war on rebles’ meant that the military never got a really free hand, and that authority remained confusingly divided between police and army.

Assessment of the IRA's claim to represent the popular will is also difficult. Modern historians, reacting against an earlier tradition of uncritical glorification, have emphasized the extent to which violence was deliberately employed by a militant minority to block any possibility of a compromise settlement, and the ruthless action, shading into a more general intimidation, against ‘informers’ and ‘collaboratios’. IRA activity was geographically uneven, high levels of activity in the western counties of Munster and partof the midlands contrasting sharply with relative tranquillity elsewhere. Although the Dáil had declared as early as January 1919 that a state of war existed between Britain and Ireland, a section of Sinn Féin was known to be unhappy with the bloodshed. IRA activists for their part demonstrated a reluctance to submit to the authority either of Volunteer GHQ or of the ‘politicians’ of Dáil éireann. These divisions were later to contribute to the Civil War of 1922–3. But for the moment what was remarkable was the success with which differences were concealed in the face of a common enemy.

Bibliography

Augusteijn, Joost , From Public Definace to Guerilla Warfare (1996)
Fitzpatrick, David , Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (1997)
Hart, Peter , The I.R.A. amd its Enemies—Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (1998)
Townshed, Charles , The British Campaign in Ireland 1919–21 (1975)