Outbreak of the Irish War of Independence

On 21 January 1919 two things happened in Ireland which only later came to be told as a single story. Around midday in County Tipperary (PL) republican volunteers shot dead two policemen escorting a cart of explosives. In the afternoon Dáil Éireann (PL), a parliament set up by the Sinn Féin MPs, met for the first time in Dublin and declared Ireland’s independence. The shots at Soloheadbeg are traditionally regarded as the start of the Irish War of Independence, although nobody in Dublin had ordered them.

The ambush at Soloheadbeg

Volunteers of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the Irish Volunteers had learnt before Christmas that in mid-January a supply of gelignite, an explosive used in quarrying, would be taken from the barracks in Tipperary town to the quarry at Soloheadbeg. For several days they waited for the consignment. On 21 January, about three hours before the meeting in Dublin, a horse-drawn cart with the load, driven by two workmen and escorted by two constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell, reached the quarry gate. Eight volunteers were lying in wait, among them Séamus Robinson, Seán Treacy and Dan Breen. They ordered the policemen to hand over their weapons. Treacy fired first, followed by Breen and Robinson. Both constables were killed on the spot. The men of the ambush later claimed that they had fired in self-defence, but their accounts changed over the years, and the workmen could not say whether the policemen had resisted. The attackers made off with the rifles and the gelignite.

The operation was carried out without orders from Dublin. The Volunteers’ chief of staff, Richard Mulcahy, condemned it as murder and advised the men responsible to leave the country, although Michael Collins quietly approved of it. Breen said years later that he had wanted to start a war, because the organisation was turning into a purely political movement. Some of his comrades, however, believed it was simply a raid for explosives that had got out of hand. A few days later the British declared South Tipperary a special military area and offered rewards for the capture of those responsible.

The First Dáil

In the December election Sinn Féin had won 73 of the 105 Irish seats, and as promised its MPs did not go to Westminster. At 3.30 p.m. they gathered in the Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Only 27 of them came. According to the record of the sitting, more than thirty were in prison, “imprisoned by the foreigners”, among them Éamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith, arrested in May 1918 over an alleged plot with Germany. Several others had been deported. The names of the 26 unionist MPs and six of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who boycotted the assembly, were also read out. The name of Edward Carson was greeted with laughter.

The deputies elected Cathal Brugha as their speaker and passed a short provisional constitution. They then read out the declaration of Irish independence and the “Message to the Free Nations of the World”, which called on every free nation to recognise the Irish Republic and its right to be heard at the Paris Peace Conference. They also adopted the Democratic Programme, a social policy document agreed with the Labour Party, which in return had not stood in the election. The assembly wanted to show the world that Ireland already had its own serious government, and nobody in the hall spoke of war.

A war that started slowly

In Paris the Irish were not heard. The British were opposed, the Americans did not care enough, and the French did not want to cross London. The war itself got going slowly. In 1919, according to various counts, 17–18 people died in Ireland from political violence, roughly as many as the year before. Ten days after Soloheadbeg, however, the Volunteers’ paper An tÓglách wrote that every volunteer was entitled to use all legitimate methods of warfare against the soldiers and policemen of “the English usurper” and to kill them if necessary. In the course of the year the Volunteers took an oath of allegiance to the Republic and the Dáil, and they were increasingly called the Irish Republican Army (PL). In September 1919 the British authorities banned the Dáil, Sinn Féin and a number of other organisations. The real guerrilla war began early in 1920, when the IRA turned on the police barracks. By April some three hundred of them had been burnt, and the British administration began to retreat from the countryside.