The Partition of Ireland: 1918–1925 by Robert Lynch

Author:Robert Lynch [Lynch, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Ireland, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, American Government
ISBN: 9780521189583
Google: Am2MDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0521189586
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-04-10T23:00:00+00:00

6

Ireland’s Other Civil Wars

As Ireland entered the year 1922, it appeared to many that through the device of partition, the Irish question was well on the way to finally being answered. The two new Irish states had been established and were moving tentatively towards consolidating their positions, while a mechanism of sorts had been fashioned for the settlement of any outstanding financial, political and territorial disputes between them. Certainly, few could have predicted the disaster that was to follow.

With hindsight, however, it was clear that the potential for future conflict was an almost inevitable end result of the nature of the agreements and the bad faith and wildly differing expectations of their participants. Both of the Irish states suffered from a crippling lack of legitimacy and both faced aggressive political and religious minorities whose primary goal was to undermine and eventually destroy the states themselves. Both new partition states would be engulfed in damaging civil wars, while a further proxy civil war would be launched between the governments themselves. Hotheads like Crawford even suggested as much:

My plan is a simple one. Take all the soldiers out of Ireland, give Ulster their weapons, rifles, machine guns, etc., and let us fight it out ourselves. We are prepared to take on the job.1

While Tallents was to report that ‘Ulster is preparing herself to meet graver demands than that of the mere maintenance of internal order behind a shield of British troops.’2 More generally, the populations of the two states had become highly politicised over the preceding years. They had been fed on a diet of extremist propaganda and irredentist rhetoric, much of which was directly contradicted by the partition plan. Protest and anti-state activity had become normalised by 1922 and large parts of the island had already experienced intense periods of violent upheaval. Murder, rioting, martyrdom and expulsion had all become common currency in Ireland by 1922. Now elements of the very same armed militias on both sides of the border who had fuelled this confrontation were to be called upon to make the transition to becoming the responsible police and military forces of the new and cripplingly weak partition governments.

Perhaps most concerning for the future stability of the new Ireland was the withdrawal of the British army. During the early months of 1922, 40,000 troops in sixty-eight infantry battalions were evacuated and shipped back to Britain. Despite the very public handover of Beggar’s Bush Barracks to the provisional government on 31 May 1922 and the images portrayed on newsreels of British soldiers marching out of Ireland in the full light of day to cheering crowds, the reality was that the bulk of departures took place late in the evening with very little fanfare. However, the British drawdown, while subdued, was prohibitively expensive. Along with the regular army, the 6,000 men of the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans were also withdrawn, and the RIC disbanded in stages and its members pensioned off. Along with over £200,000 of local government arrears to pay,

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