Irish Republican Army (1922–1969)
The Irish Republican Army of 1922–1969 was a sub-group of the original pre-1922 Irish Republican Army, characterised as the Anti-Treaty IRA for its opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It existed in various forms until 1969, when the IRA split again into the Provisional IRA and Official IRA.
The original Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland in the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 ended this war by granting most of the island a great degree of independence, but with six counties in the north staying within the United Kingdom as the new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. The IRA units in the other 26 counties split between supporters and opponents of the Treaty. The anti-Treatyites, sometimes referred to by Free State forces as "Irregulars", continued to use the name "Irish Republican Army" or in Irish Óglaigh na hÉireann, as did the organisation in Northern Ireland, which originally supported the pro-Treaty side. Óglaigh na hÉireann was also adopted as the name of the pro-Treaty National Army, and it remains the official legal title of the Irish Defence Forces.
Split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty
The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Irish delegation in London caused an angry reaction among the less compromising elements in Sinn Féin and among a majority of the IRA. Dáil Éireann ratified the Treaty by 64 votes to 57 after a lengthy and acrimonious debate, following which President Éamon de Valera resigned. Sinn Féin split between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions, and the Army did likewise. The majority of headquarters staff, many of whom were close to Michael Collins, supported the Treaty, but opinion among IRA volunteers was divided. By and large, IRA units in Munster and most of Connacht were opposed to the Treaty, while those in favour predominated in the Midlands, Leinster and Ulster. The pro-Treaty volunteers formed the nucleus of the new National Army.Anti-Treaty officers called an army convention in March 1922, attended by their supporters, which reaffirmed their opposition to the Treaty. They repudiated the authority of the Dáil, claiming that its members had broken their oath to defend the Irish Republic, and declared their own Army Executive to be the real government of the country until the Republic was formally established. The reasons why volunteers chose pro- and anti-Treaty positions are complex. One factor was an evaluation of the military situation. Whereas Collins, Richard Mulcahy and Eoin O'Duffy felt that the IRA could not continue to fight the British successfully, anti-Treaty officers such as Ernie O'Malley and Tom Barry felt that the IRA's position was stronger than it had ever been. Another factor was the role of powerful personalities; where the leader of an IRA unit—for example Sean McEoin, who sided with the Treaty in County Longford—took sides, often the remainder of his command joined him. The same was also true for anti-Treaty leaders such as Liam Lynch in Cork, whose First Southern Division supported him in opposing the treaty.
In March 1922, the Anti-Treaty IRA captured the Royal Navy vessel Upnor off the coast of Cobh, County Cork, which was carrying arms.
Civil War
On the outbreak of civil war in June 1922, the government of the Irish Free State issued directives to newspapers that its Army was to be called "The National Army", and that its opponents were to be called "Irregulars" and were not to be associated with the IRA of 1919–1921. This attitude hardened as the Civil War went on, and especially after the killing of Michael Collins in an ambush in August 1922. Collins wrote to W. T. Cosgrave on 25 July 1922 that those on the anti-Treaty side were "misguided, but practically all of them are sincere". However, the subsequent government attitude under Cosgrave was that the anti-Treaty side were rebels against the lawful government, and were not entitled to recognition as legitimate combatants. Some of the officers of the new Irish Army, led by Liam Tobin, formed an association called the "Old IRA" to distinguish themselves from the anti-Treaty fighters. Some pro-Treaty IRA officers, such as Eoin O'Duffy, alleged that the "Irregulars" had not fought the British in the War of Independence. O'Duffy claimed that the Kerry IRA's sole contribution in 1919–21 was "the shooting of an unfortunate soldier on the day of the truce". In Kerry's case—which saw more Royal Irish Constabulary men killed than anywhere else outside Dublin and Tipperary—this was far from true; however, some areas such as County Sligo and County Wexford did see considerably more action in the Civil War than in the War of Independence. Other IRA men such as Florence O'Donoghue formed a group called the "neutral IRA", which tried to reconcile the two factions.Meanwhile, the IRA in Northern Ireland maintained its links with Michael Collins; but several Northern IRA leaders joined the anti-Treaty side – Belfast commander Joe McKelvey and Commandant General Charlie Daly. The Northern IRA launched a renewed military offensive in May 1922, in which it was aided covertly by both the National Army and the anti-Treaty IRA. This scheme was interrupted by the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. Many Northern IRA men then had to flee the North in order to escape internment or worse at the hands of the Northern authorities. Over 500 of them ended up in the National Army during the civil war.
The IRA had been expanded hugely in 1922, from perhaps 15,000 men before the truce with the British in July 1921, to over 72,000 by November 1922. Veterans of the War of Independence derisively termed the new recruits "truceileers". These were to divide in broadly the same ratio as the veterans; however, most of them did not take part in the Irish Civil War. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Free State had about 8,000 fighters, mostly pro-Treaty IRA volunteers. The anti-Treaty side could muster about 15,000 men but it could not arm them all. At the start of the war, they had just under 7,000 rifles, a few machine guns and a handful of armoured cars taken from British garrisons as they evacuated the country. The remainder of anti-Treaty IRA arms were shotguns and other civilian weapons.
Public support for the Treaty settlement and the new Irish Free State was reflected in the victory of the pro-Treaty side in general elections in 1922 and 1923. Anti-Treaty forces controversially seized a number of public buildings in Dublin in April 1922, most notably the Four Courts. Eventually, after two months and under British pressure, Michael Collins decided to remove them by force. Pro-Treaty forces bombarded the building, which surrendered after two days. Confused fighting raged for another five days, with anti-Treaty elements of the IRA's Dublin Brigade, under Oscar Traynor, occupying O'Connell Street until they were dislodged by artillery fire.
In July 1922, the anti-Treaty IRA units held most of the south and west of Ireland. However, the Republicans, under a new chief of staff, Liam Lynch, soon lost most of the territory they initially controlled. While the anti-Treaty side had a numerical advantage at the very start of the war, they were soon both outnumbered and outgunned. The Free State's National Army was quickly expanded to over 38,000 by the end of 1922 and to 55,000 men and 3,000 officers by the end of the war; one of its sources of recruits was Irish ex-servicemen from the British Army. Additionally, the British met its requests for arms, ammunition, armoured cars, artillery and aeroplanes. By August 1922, the Free State had re-taken all the major towns and territory held by republicans. The Free State's best troops were the Dublin Guard: a unit composed of former IRA men, mostly from the Dublin Brigade's active service unit who were to the forefront in the Free State's offensive of July–August 1922. They sided with the Free State primarily out of personal loyalty to Collins.
The anti-Treaty IRA was not equipped or trained to fight conventional warfare. Despite some determined resistance to the Free State advance south of Limerick by late August, most of them had dispersed to fight a guerrilla campaign.
The anti-Treaty guerrilla campaign was spasmodic and ineffective. Much of it was composed of the destruction of infrastructure such as the main railway bridge linking Cork with Dublin. They also burned many public buildings and "commandeered" supplies by force, alienating many civilians. Furthermore, without the public support that had existed during the War of Independence and facing an enemy who knew them and the countryside intimately, the anti-Treaty forces found that they could not sustain a guerrilla war such as that fought against Britain. Only in County Kerry was a relatively effective campaign fought, with the IRA units re-taking Kenmare and other towns from the Free State on several occasions. The IRA's relative popularity in this area had much to do with the brutality of the occupying Free State troops. Other areas of guerrilla activity included County Cork, western County Mayo, County Wexford and several other localities.
Despite the limitations of the anti-Treaty IRA's campaign, they still inflicted more fatalities on Free State troops in the eleven-month civil war than they had on British Crown forces, who lost about 600 killed in the almost three-year-long War of Independence. The disparity is possibly due to the Free State troops' relative paucity of training and equipment compared with British forces.
File:Ballyseedy monument.jpg|thumb|right|Memorial to anti-Treaty insurgents executed by Free State forces at Ballyseedy, County Kerry, designed by Yann Goulet.
The conduct of the Civil War resulted in long-lasting bitterness on both sides. In September special emergency legislation came into effect under which military tribunals were empowered to pass death sentences. The head of the anti-Treaty forces, Liam Lynch, responded with an announcement that Free State TDs and Senators who had voted for the legislation would be targeted. A number of members of the Oireachtas were attacked, TD Seán Hales was killed and the property of parliamentarians burnt. The day following the killing of Hales, in reprisal the government cabinet ordered the execution of four imprisoned leaders of the anti-treaty IRA: Joe McKelvey, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows and Richard Barrett were executed by firing squad. In addition, IRA men around the country burned many of the stately homes of the old Protestant Anglo-Irish landed class—a policy motivated by both class antagonism and nationalist resentment against a class traditionally seen as "pro-British". The Free State Government, for its part, officially executed 77 anti-Treaty prisoners. Government forces also carried out a number of atrocities against prisoners. This was particularly pronounced in Kerry, where the fighting was most bitter. On at least three occasions in March 1923, IRA prisoners were massacred with land mines in reprisal for the killing of Free State soldiers. Ironically, the men accused of these war crimes were mostly from the Dublin Guard, themselves IRA veterans from 1919 to 1921.
By 1923, the defeat of the anti-Treaty IRA seemed assured. It controlled no territory and its guerrilla campaign had little public support. The civil war petered out in mid-1923 after the death in action of IRA chief-of-staff Liam Lynch. Shortly afterward, on 24 May 1923, the anti-Treaty forces received an order, issued by Frank Aiken, their chief-of-staff, to "dump arms". Éamon de Valera supported this in his speech "Legion of the Rearguard":
In de Valera's words, "Further sacrifice of life would now be vain and continuance of the struggle in arms unwise in the national interest and prejudicial to the future of our cause. Military victory must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic. Other means must be sought to safeguard the nation's right."
By this time, thousands of republicans were already prisoners of the Free State government led by W. T. Cosgrave; many more were arrested after they dumped arms and returned to civilian life. By late 1923, over 12,000 anti-Treaty IRA men were interned. The prisoners were released over the following year, with Éamon de Valera the last to leave Kilmainham Gaol in 1924.
In 1924 the IRA counted 14,500 members in total, including young men aged from 19 upwards, but with just over 5,000 weapons in its dumps. By 1926 the number of members had shrunk to 5,042. By 1930 the IRA possessed fewer than 2,000 members and only 859 rifles, indicating the decline in its military potential. The casualties of the anti-Treaty IRA in the Civil War have never been accurately counted, but are thought to have been considerably more than the 800 or so deaths suffered by the Free State Army, perhaps two or three times as numerous. Significantly however, the war had not been brought to an end by any kind of agreement between the two sides. The IRA of the post-Civil War era would never accept the Free State as a legitimate Irish government and would continue to oppose its existence.