Frank Aiken
Francis Thomas Aiken was an Irish revolutionary and politician. He was chief of staff of the Anti-Treaty IRA at the end of the Irish Civil War. Aiken later served as Tánaiste from 1965 to 1969 and Minister for External Affairs from 1951 to 1954 and 1957 to 1969. He was also Minister for Finance from 1945 to 1948, Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures 1939 to 1945, and Minister for Defence from 1932 to 1939.
He was a Teachta Dála for the Louth constituency from 1923 to 1973, making him the second longest-serving member of Dáil Éireann and the longest-serving cabinet minister. Originally a member of Sinn Féin, he was later a founding member of Fianna Fáil.
Early life
Early years
Frank Aiken was born on 13 February 1898 at Carrickbracken, Camlough, County Armagh, Ireland, the seventh and youngest child of James Aiken, a builder from County Tyrone, and Mary McGeeney of Corromannon, Beleek, County Armagh. James Aiken built Catholic churches in South Armagh. Aiken was a nationalist, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a county councillor, who refused an offer to stand as a member of parliament. James was Chairman of the Local Board of the Poor Guardians. In 1900, on her visit to Ireland, he told Queen Victoria that he would not welcome her "until Ireland has become free".Frank Aiken was educated at the Camlough National School and in Newry by Irish Christian Brothers at Abbey Christian Brothers Grammar School, although he had only a 'vague' recollection of school.
Revolutionary period
Irish Volunteers and IRA
He was elected a lieutenant in 1914 when he joined the Camlough Company of Irish Volunteers and the Gaelic League. But the northern nationalists split so they took no part in the Easter Rising. He became secretary of the local branch in 1917 and joined Sinn Féin. His sister Nano Aiken organised Cumann na mBan in Newry, setting up a local branch at Camlough. While working at the Co-Operative Flax-Scutching Society, Aiken committed to speaking Irish, which he learned at the Donegal Gaeltacht and Omeath Irish College. His sister, Nano, married Phelim Magennis a Newry stockbroker, and was the last female republican prisoner to be released in Northern Ireland at the end of the Civil War. Magennis, himself was active during these years.He first met Éamon de Valera at the East Clare election in June 1917, riding despatches for Austin Stack. During a rowdy by-election at Bessbrook in February 1918, Aiken was elected a captain of Volunteers, stewarding electioneering. As secretary and chairman of the South Armagh district executive it was his job to be chief fund-raiser for the Dublin Executive, responsible for the Dáil loan masterminded by Michael Collins.
In 1917, making an outward display of defiance, Aiken raised the republican Irish tricolour, opposite Camlough Barracks in Armagh, a move designed as deliberate provocation.
In March 1918 he was arrested by the RIC for illegal drilling — an act of open defiance that provoked a sentence of imprisonment for one month. On release that summer he joined the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood fighting Hibernianism in the area. By 1919 Aiken's clandestine activities mainly consisted of arms raids on dumps of the Ulster Volunteers who had imported weapons to resist Home Rule in 1913–14. As well as UVF dumps, Aiken and the Newry Brigade also raided prominent local unionist barracks at Dromilly, Ballyedmond Castle and Loughall Manor. Although they failed to capture many weapons the raids gave experience to newly recruited Volunteers. Aiken was also responsible for setting up GAA Club, Gaelic League branch, a Cumann na mBan Camogie League. Within a few years he was Chairman of Sinn Féin in Armagh, and was also elected to Armagh County Council. During the First Dáil Election he headed a team from South Armagh who went to Carlingford to assist the Sinn Fein candidacy of J.J. Kelly in Louth where they were attacked by members of the local Ancient Order of Hibernians.
War of Independence
Operating from the south Armagh/north Louth area, Aiken's unit was one of the most effective IRA in Ulster during the Irish War of Independence. This success is attributed primarily to Aiken's leadership and training methods.In May 1920, he led 200 IRA men in an assault on the RIC barracks in Newtownhamilton, attacking the building and then burning it with paraffin sprayed from a potato sprayer; however, the garrison did not surrender. Aiken himself led a squad which blasted a hole in the wall of the barracks with gelignite and entered through it, exchanging shots with the policemen inside.
At a sports event in Cullyhanna in June 1920, Aiken led a group of three men that demanded that three RIC men hand over their weapons. Shooting broke out and one man on each side was killed.
In July, he was almost killed at Banbridge. While riding a motorcycle to Lurgan he was chased by an angry mob.
In December 1920, he led another assault, this time abortive, on the RIC station in his home village of Camlough. In reprisal, the newly formed Ulster Special Constabulary burned Aiken's home and those of ten of his relatives in the Camlough area. They also arrested and killed two local republicans. From this point onward, the conflict in the area took on an increasingly bitter and sectarian quality. Aiken tried on a number of occasions to ambush USC patrols from the ruins of his family home.
In April 1921, Aiken's men mounted an operation in Creggan, County Armagh to ambush the police and Special Constabulary. One Special constable was killed in the ensuing firefight. Some accounts have reported that Aiken took the Protestant Church congregation in the village hostage to lure the Specials out onto the road. However, Mathew Lewis states that both Catholic and Protestant churchgoers were held in a pub to prevent their getting caught in the crossfire. Nevertheless, sectarian bitterness deepened in the area. The following month, the Special Constabulary started shooting Catholic civilians in revenge for IRA attacks.
In June 1921, Aiken organised his most successful attack yet on the British military, when his men derailed a British troop train heading from Belfast to Dublin, killing the train guard, three cavalry soldiers and 63 horses. Shortly afterwards, the Specials took four Catholics from their homes in Bessbrook and Altnaveigh, shooting them dead.
After an IRA reorganisation in April 1921, Aiken was put in command of the Fourth Northern Division of the IRA. The cycle of violence in south-east Ulster area continued the following year, despite a formal truce with the British from 11 July 1921. Michael Collins organised a clandestine guerrilla offensive against the newly created Northern Ireland State. In May 1922, for reasons that have never been properly determined, Aiken and his Fourth Northern Division never took part in the operation, although it was planned that they would.
He was quickly promoted through the ranks, rising to commandant of Newry Brigade and eventually commander of 4th Northern Division from spring 1921. The IRA units he would eventually command extended from County Louth, southern and western County Down, and from March 1921 the whole of County Armagh. Aiken was named by Eoin O'Duffy as head of the newly formed IRA Ulster Council Command which was tasked with coordination of attacks and preventing the new northern government from functioning effectively.
Nonetheless, the local IRA's inaction at this time did not end the bloodshed in South Armagh. Aiken has been accused by unionists of ethnic cleansing of Protestants from parts of South Armagh, Newry and other areas of the north. In particular, Aiken's critics cite the killing of six Protestant civilians, on an incident called the Altnaveigh Massacre, on 17 June 1922. The attack was in reprisal for the Special Constabulary's killing of two nationalists near Camlough on 13 June and a sexual assault on Una McGuill, the wife of one of Aiken's friends, James McGuill. As well as the six civilians, two Special Constables were killed in an ambush, and two weeks later a unionist politician, William Frazer, was abducted, killed and his body secretly buried. It was not found until 1924. Aiken himself led an ambush against some of those who partook in the assault on McGuill's public house on the night of the Altnaveigh ambush. However, it appears that the Specials were alerted to their arrival and this attack did not end in success as the patrol escaped unharmed. At the same time the attack on Altnaveigh and Lisdrumniska was carried out. Robert Lynch, in published research, has documented the deaths of several single Catholic youths whose bodies were dumped on roads approaching these areas on the weeks prior to this assault killings that were attributed to B-Specials who operated from the area. Aiken was quoted on his Divisions retaliatory attacks: "They never hit a nationalist but we hit back twice as hard. We had them cowed in our area." Aiken claimed that at least 60 Specials were killed by his 4th Northern Division in the period from Christmas to June 1922.
Civil War
After the IRA split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, Aiken ultimately became aligned with the anti-Treaty side in spite of personal efforts to prevent division and civil war and by remaining neutral at first. After fighting broke out between pro- and anti-Treaty units in Dublin on 28 June 1922, he wrote to Richard Mulcahy on 6 July 1922 calling for a truce, the election of a new reunited IRA army council and the removal of the Oath of Allegiance from the Free State constitution. Mulcahy was evasive, however, and said he 'could not see a way to advise the government' to agree with Aiken's proposals. Subsequently, Aiken travelled to Limerick meet with anti-Treaty IRA leader Liam Lynch, and urged him to consider a truce in return for the removal of references to the British monarch from the constitution. At this time Limerick was occupied by three Armies, Pro-Treaty, Anti-Treaty and British Troops. Aiken was attempting throughout to avoid Civil War from breaking out and urging that all military remain together to push north to re-take the Six-Counties of Northern Ireland, territory which made up his homeland and counties of his own Army Division. Aiken later felt that without the sterling work done in support of the Treaty by Eoin O'Duffy, aided by Mulcahy and Eoin MacNeill, civil war would have been avoided.Despite his neutrality and pleas for a negotiated end to the Civil War, Aiken was arrested by pro-Treaty troops on 16 July 1922, under Dan Hogan, on the orders of Mulcahy and Collins, and imprisoned at Dundalk Gaol along with about 200 to 300 of his men. After just ten days imprisonment, he was freed in a mass escape of 100 men from Dundalk prison on 28 July. Then, on 14 August, he led a surprise attack of between 300 and 400 anti-treaty IRA men on Dundalk. They blew holes in the army barracks there and rapidly took control of the town at a cost of just two of his men killed. The operation freed 240 republican prisoners seizing 400 rifles. While in possession of the town, Aiken publicly called for an end to the Civil War. However, knowing he could not hope to retain Dundalk militarily he retreated north of the town. In Man of No Property Todd Andrews who accompanied him on the assault stated that: "Had it been carried out against a British garrison under arms it would have been the most successful amphibious assault carried out ever by an IRA Commander." While celebrated in the Anti-Treaty IRA publications it was clear Aiken was not interested in an offensive campaign just taking back what had been his before. For the remainder of the conflict he remained at large with his unit, carrying out no major attacks on Free State forces. Aiken was to remain unenthusiastic about the internecine struggle.
His son Frank Jr. recalls "I did ask him about the Civil War a little bit, but he wouldn't answer. He'd give me an answer like terrible things happen in wars and worse in civil wars."