The Singing Flame: Ernie O'Malley's Irish Civil War by Ernie O'Malley

Author:Ernie O'Malley [O'Malley, Ernie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Ireland, Great Britain, General, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781781170823
Google: ljzBDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Mercier Press Ltd
Published: 2012-04-01T23:30:53.936183+00:00

In mid-August Arthur Griffith died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Republican rumour, always busy, said it was due to severe shock when he found that Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood had been implicated in the shooting of Wilson, former Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Many Republicans were in high spirits. Then in late August Michael Collins was killed in an ambush in Co. Cork. Those Free State people who had once glorified the ambush now spoke of it as a cowardly form of murder. The two men more than any others responsible for the Treaty were dead. Religious ladies nodded their heads in significance. ‘Yes, it was a judgement of God.’ He was now on our side.

Funerals went to Glasnevin cemetery. Soldiers in green uniforms marched, with arms reversed, after bands playing the ‘Dead March’, following their dead. Our men were buried quietly; women mostly as mourners. The Criminal Investigation Department were nosing for men. Cumann na mBan girls in uniform, some with eyes shut and faces screwed to one side, fired a volley over the graves with revolvers or automatics.

I moved my headquarters to the suburbs and remained with a young curate for two weeks, but it was an isolated house, difficult to approach.

Éamon de Valera came up from the south to Dublin early in September. He stayed with Austin Stack in a house in Upper Mount Street known as Mrs K’s, where he had contact with Republican TDs and through Stack with our Command. They had a room prepared. There was a space concealed into which they could retire in case of a raid; already they had used it successfully, and many ingenious devices were worked out.

I met Dev to talk over the general situation. His face was pale; worn lines made his jaw seem longer. He was worried. I was worried myself, but talked of the Command as cheerfully as I could. He could not see, I felt, a military win on our side, and now he had no direct say in the conduct of the fighting. All I could point out was a slow increase in sympathy and morale amongst the people even in this bad area, which would eventually yield political results. He talked of negotiations with Collins. ‘Signing the Pact was the worst day’s work I ever did for the Republic.’

I was anxious to have a full meeting of the Executive called but it had been postponed. Only when I met officers who really knew each of our areas could I rely on their intimate knowledge for an appreciation of their particular and the general situation. In the south a line had been held along the Suir by our First and Second Southern Divisions, and across the Shannon below Limerick city, with its rear and flanks in the sea. They had placed themselves on the defensive, a fatal point of view, and they were slowly being driven back. Provincialism may have induced the line, such decentralisation suiting a piecemeal guerrilla warfare, but no

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