Ireland in Travail

by Joice NanKivell Loch; Sydney Loch

The Dublin universities illustrated how opinion and class went together. The students of Trinity as a rule are gentlemen of birth, and as a body they were loyal to the Crown; the students of the National University, who are drawn from the middle classes, to a man declared for Sinn Fein.

I have tried to be free of prejudice as I tramped the Dublin streets, yet I say out of my heart if one met a prosperous person, a spruce person, such person, nine times out of ten, proved a loyalist.

After a month in Ireland I could pick out the Irish Volunteer. He wore a dirty velour hat, a shabby raincoat, and generally had his hands in his pockets. There was a youthful, cheeky type, belonging to the National University, and there was a dirtier, rather more prepossessing type, drawn from the errand boy and working classes. There was a better type still, which came from the country.

One had only to notice the Republican Volunteer rubbing shoulders in the street with the British officer, to comprehend these people belonged to two poles, which could never meet. Barriers of class, education, and standards were between them—it was Capital and Labour over again. The British officer, from his stupendous height, regarded the Sinn Feiner through the big end of the telescope, classed all connected with Sinn Fein as “Shinners” and valued them as such.

The Irish struggle did not develop along the lines of an ordinary war. It was not the late European war on a smaller scale. It was the case of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man.

The Republican Army had no uniform, or more correctly found it impolitic to wear uniform, and the volunteers were on and off active service as a man puts on and off a coat according to the change in weather. Your butcher, your baker, the man who cleaned your boots might be an Irish Volunteer, and when orders came, and opportunity, might make an end of you. A franc-tireur I understand this type of soldier to be; but in reality the I.R.A. had many of the strengths and weaknesses of a numerous and hastily built up secret service.

The British Government had to contend with another difficulty—it could not make a straight ahead attack, it could not level every house in a row. The Government had the power to do this; but not the opportunity. They were fighting only the shadow of a man. In every row half the houses might be friendly ones, and who could say which were which? For it was only in the winter of 1920-21 that the nation became welded, and that one could count on most people in the street being followers of Sinn Fein.

On the one point of uniform the British Government was able to stigmatise the Irish Volunteers as murderers, and this stand it took up, applying the phrase “murder gang” to them. The Irish Volunteers had to pay the penalty of being termed murderers, of being hanged as murderers when caught red-handed instead of getting the treatment of prisoners of war; but more than balancing these disadvantages was the boon of becoming this shadowy foe, which could not be brought to bay.

Unless the country was flooded with troops and artillery—and such a plan had many difficulties in the peculiar circumstances—the affair was likely to be long drawn out. A long-drawn-out campaign was all to the advantage of Sinn Fein. In the first place the world must gradually come to notice the Irish resistance, and the “murder gang” cry of the British Government would hardly ring true if operations were drawn out to the length of a war. Again, time was to the advantage of Sinn Fein in recruiting its strength. As, month after month, raid and arrest went on, and the cities and country places were patrolled by troops not of the country, and wrongs and injustices followed one upon another—wrong houses were raided, wrong arrests were made—friend after friend, neutral after neutral became foe. The impartial observer could see the nation laid on an anvil as it were and welded into a blade of defence.

The shoot-and-run murders continued in the country places, from the country murder found its way into the cities; and the phantom enemy continued to move round and about but would not come into the open. I heard an exasperated soldier cry out, “Let us give them ten days to get uniform and then declare war properly. Let us treat every man taken in uniform as a prisoner of war, and let us shoot out of hand every armed man caught out of uniform. Their war, as they call it, will be over in a week.”