Introducing Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War

By Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry

The year 1922 marked the beginning of the final phase in Ireland’s revolution: it saw the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty; the establishment of the Irish Free State; the outbreak of the civil war; and the consolidation of partition as Northern Ireland opted out of the Free State settlement.

In collaboration with the Royal Irish Academy, and the Global Irish Revolution research project, Century Ireland’s major theme, Ireland 1922, hosts essays from 50 leading international scholars that explore this turning point in history, one whose legacy remains controversial a century on. Building on their own expertise, and on the wealth of recent scholarship provoked by the Decade of Centenaries, each contributor focuses on one event that illuminates a key aspect of revolutionary Ireland, demonstrating how the events of this year would shape the new states established in 1922. Together, these essays explore many of the key issues and debates of a year that transformed Ireland.

This introductory essay sets the Ireland 1922 major theme in context: it outlines the key political events of the year; considers how these were later remembered; and analyses how interpretations by historians of the divisions of 1922 have developed over the past century. It concludes by assessing how the new sources, methods and perspectives that have emerged over the Decade of Centenaries enable us to reconsider long-familiar narratives.

The Year of Division
The Truce that brought the War of Independence to an end in July 1921 resulted in jubilation, consternation and suspicion. Although welcomed by the public, it was clear to many Irish republicans and their opponents in Ireland and Britain that any future settlement would fall short of passionately-held aspirations. Sinn Féin leaders, such as Michael Collins, who had previously advanced an unyielding republican line – ‘compromises are difficult and settle nothing’ – now began to disclose their more flexible private positions: ‘no one has ever defined a republic’.¹

The Anglo-Irish Treaty that Collins, Arthur Griffith, and the other Sinn Féin plenipotentiaries negotiated in London between October and December 1921 split the republican movement. Although achieving substantial independence for the new Irish Free State, the settlement confirmed the 1920 partition of Ireland, made the new state a dominion of the British Empire, and ensured that Irish parliamentary deputies swore an oath of fidelity to the British monarch. It was quickly denounced by many leading republicans including the Sinn Féin president, Éamon de Valera, whose opposition to the settlement was backed by a majority of the IRA.

Cartoon by O’Raghallaigh depicting how British prime minister David Lloyd George threatened force to secure Irish acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. (Image: NLI, Ephemera collection, NLI EPH C482; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.)

Following weeks of intensive debate in Dáil Éireann, tensions over the Treaty (which also reflected broader divisions within the republican movement) were brought to breaking point on 7 January 1922 when the agreement was passed by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. Under the terms of the Treaty, Michael Collins became chairman of the Provisional Government; the Irish Free State would not take legal effect until 6 December 1922. In the interim, Collins attempted to mediate political differences with the putative Irish state, north and south. In March, he agreed a short-lived and largely unsuccessful pact with the prime minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, providing for greater protection for Catholics in loyalist Belfast and bilateral discussions on the future of the Irish border.

In May, Collins and de Valera agreed a pact to allow pro- and anti-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates to stand on a coalition ticket for the June 1922 general election. Anti-Treaty republicans were placated further with the promise of a ‘republican’ constitution. The final draft of the constitution, published on the morning of 16 June (‘election day’) following close inspection from the British government, adhered more closely to the terms of the Treaty than hoped. At the polls, pro-Treaty Sinn Féin secured 38% of the vote (58 seats) while anti-Treaty Sinn Féin secured 21% (36 seats). Contesting a general election for the first time, the Labour party secured an impressive 21% of the poll. Disillusioned by the failure to secure a republican constitution, and unwilling to swear the ‘oath of allegiance’, anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs refused to enter the Irish Free State parliament.

L: ‘The rejected suitor’; originally published in London Opinion, this treatyite handbill depicts the Irish electorate’s rejection of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin. (Image: NLI, Ephemera collection, EPH C480; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

R: ‘An oasis!’; pro-Treaty handbill conveying Michael Collins’s view of the settlement as a stepping-stone to full independence. (Image: NLI, Ephemera collection, EPH B134; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

The IRA was divided both over the merits of the Treaty, and the necessity for military action. While the core of IRA GHQ went pro-Treaty, forming the leadership cadre of the embryonic National Army, the majority of active Volunteers in Dublin and Munster were opposed to the Treaty. The evacuation of British-army barracks exposed a growing vacuum of military authority, almost precipitating the outbreak of civil war between rival factions in Limerick city in March. At the illegally assembled IRA ‘Army Convention’ held in Dublin later that month, those in attendance restored the allegiance of the Volunteers to the IRA Executive, rather than to Dáil Éireann. Anti-Treaty IRA leaders, however, differed in their attitudes to violence against the state. The Cork-based IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch worked with Richard Mulcahy to negotiate the terms of a continued truce between pro- and anti-Treaty IRA forces. Senior Dublin figures such as Rory O’Connor, Ernie O’Malley and Liam Mellows, conversely, escalated tensions by occupying the Four Courts.

From the spring of 1921 pro- and anti-Treaty IRA were also united in a covert campaign, under the guidance of Collins, Lynch and O’Connor, to destabilise the Northern Ireland regime. Through this endeavour, the leaders of both IRA factions vied for the loyalty of the northern IRA in anticipation of the outbreak of civil war in the south. Between April and June a series of joint IRA offensives by republicans (armed with weapons supplied by Britain to the Provisional Government) were carried out, leading to clashes with members of the Ulster Special Constabulary along the border around Belleek, Co. Fermanagh and Pettigo, Co. Donegal. Hundreds of IRA suspects in Northern Ireland would be interned under a new Special Powers Act. The repercussions of organised violence were most clearly felt in Belfast, wherein IRA attacks prompted loyalist reprisals on nationalist communities; over 250 civilians (mostly Catholics) were killed in the city between February and June.

On 22 June, meanwhile, Sir Henry Wilson, security advisor to Craig’s Cabinet, was assassinated by two IRA Volunteers in London. While Collins was suspected of involvement in the assassination, the British Cabinet focused its attention on the anti-Treaty IRA. Under severe pressure from the British government to confront the rebellious Four Courts garrison, the Provisional Government seized on the anti-Treaty IRA’s kidnap of National Army Deputy Chief of Staff J.J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell as the basis for its ultimatum that the IRA evacuate the Four Courts, delivered to Rory O’Connor at 3.30 a.m. on 28 June. Forty-five minutes later, on Collins’s orders, the artillery bombardment of the Four Courts began.

The fighting at the Four Courts would last three days, before O’Connor surrendered his garrison to the advancing National Army. The explosion at the Irish Public Record Office in the west wing of the Four Courts on 30 June was perhaps the defining event of the civil war in Dublin: historical records spanning over a thousand years would be destroyed in the blaze. Sporadic street fighting in the weeks that followed saw the deaths of prominent republicans such as Cathal Brugha and Harry Boland. The forces of the anti-Treaty IRA, led by the redoubtable Liam Lynch, largely retreated south of the Shannon, towards the self-styled ‘Munster Republic’. The National Army, led by Collins as commander-in-chief, used a combination of air, ground and naval forces to take the major anti-Treaty IRA strongholds of Waterford, Limerick, and Cork.

IRA guerrilla attacks on National Army forces would continue throughout the year. Despite the setbacks experienced by anti-Treaty forces, the loss of the two leading figures within the pro-Treaty government threatened to undermine the political authority of the nascent Free State. On 12 August, Arthur Griffith died of a brain haemorrhage. Ten days later Michael Collins was killed in a guerrilla-style ambush at Béal na mBláth, Co. Cork. His funeral in Dublin was attended by over 500,000 Irish citizens.

An enormous crowd on O’Connell Street observes the funeral cortège of Michael Collins en route to Glasnevin Cemetery, 28 August 1922. (Image: NLI, Independent Newspaper (Ireland) Collection, INDH303; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.)

‘The Provisional Government was simply eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole.’  Kevin O’Higgins’s vivid portrayal of state-building in 1922 captures the enormous political challenges faced by the leaders of the Irish Free State. In the aftermath of Collins’s death, the newly installed chairman of the Provisional Government W.T. Cosgrave, prosecuted the civil war with rigour and severity. On 27 September a resolution was passed by the newly assembled third Dáil, granting the Provisional Government emergency powers, including the establishment of military tribunals with sanction to impose the death penalty for a number of military offences.

A series of state executions followed, notably that of Erskine Childers, who was shot by firing squad on 24 November for having in his possession a pistol gifted to him by Michael Collins. Eighty-one republicans would be officially executed by the National Army during the civil war, among them the tragically ill-placed Mountjoy internees – Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joseph McKelvey – executed on 8 December. O’Connor, had been best man at Kevin O’Higgins’s wedding only one year earlier. Such reprisals would haunt the reputation of the pro-Treaty Fine Gael party for decades.

Wedding of Bridget Cole and Kevin O’Higgins. Also pictured are (left) Éamon de Valera and (right) Rory O’Connor, 27 October 1921. (Image: NLI, Independent Newspaper (Ireland) Collection, INDH359; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.)

Five months after the legislative establishment of the Irish Free State, and Northern Ireland’s formal decision to opt-out of the polity, the IRA finally brought the civil war to an end. In a message to republicans accompanying the order to ‘dump arms’ in May 1923, Éamon de Valera declared: ‘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.’

Remembering
How have these formative events been remembered? That the Irish Free State emerged from a tainted treaty, which negated the republic proclaimed in 1919 and triggered a bitter civil war, explains why Ireland remains one of few states without an independence day. Pro-treatyites never convincingly demonstrated that the new state embodied, as W.T. Cosgrave had claimed, an ‘almost unlimited measure of freedom and independence’.  Although their role in founding the state, and defending it from republican violence, would become an important part of their political identity, treatyite politicians proved more reticent than their opponents in commemorating the civil war, for whom it provided a rallying cause and a refuge from demoralisation.

With the civil war recalled, even by its victors, as a source of disillusionment, and the gradual abandonment of Collins’s vision of the Treaty as a ‘stepping stone’ to full independence, the legacy of the Easter Rising initially appeared to offer greater potential to construct a unifying identity for the new state. In contrast to the legalistic text of the Treaty, which codified the state’s formal links to the empire, the 1916 Proclamation’s idealistic rhetoric symbolised the emancipatory potential of independence. Boycotted by anti-Treaty republicans, however, ceremonies marking Easter 1916 would form part of the ‘chronicle of embarrassment’ that characterised political commemoration in the Irish Free State. 

Faced with similar challenges, state-builders in Northern Ireland adopted much the same commemorative strategies. The pre-war struggle against Home Rule, centring on a foundational declaration that rivalled the Proclamation—the Ulster Covenant—offered a more usable history on which to focus than the pragmatic calculations that saw unionists in six Ulster counties prioritise their interests above those of kith and kin in the rest of that province and throughout the rest of the island. Like their southern republican counterparts, northern unionists identified their state with a mythologised blood sacrifice in 1916, rather than with the less heroic violence that shaped its formation between 1920 and 1922. The collapse of the northern IRA, many of whose members fled south, and a sense of abandonment by the Irish Free State ensured that 1922 was recalled by northern Catholics as a traumatic year. Although frequently instrumentalised for political purposes on both sides of the border, partition itself was rarely memorialised by any political organisation.

A Chronicle of Disappointment?
Consigned to a forgetful public remembrance, the formative events of 1922 were long neglected by historians. Until recently, most writing on the Irish revolution focused on the struggle for independence, with a much smaller body of work analysing state-building, partition and civil war.  Few accounts focused on the revolution in Ulster. Northern republicans, unlike their southern counterparts, were not keen to write the history of a struggle that ended in failure and loss. In contrast to the southern state, which established the Bureau of Military History to preserve republican testimony, the northern state made little effort to record loyalist experiences.

Addressing the challenge of fashioning a narrative to legitimise a state that they had never sought, early unionist histories, such as Ronald MacNeill’s Ulster’s stand for Union (1922), depicted Northern Ireland as the inevitable consequence of the Ulster Planation which had laid the foundations for ‘two nations in Ireland’.  The more scholarly accounts of northern state-formation that emerged from the 1970s were more critical, however, often locating the roots of the Troubles in the sectarian violence, discrimination, and majoritarian rule that accompanied partition and the birth of Northern Ireland. 

The early historiography of the Irish state was also grounded in division and disappointment. Much of it was written by revolutionary veterans seeking to attribute blame for the civil war. There was plenty go round. Early accounts such as P.S. O’Hegarty’s treatyite account, The victory of Sinn Féin (1924), and Dorothy Macardle’s anti-treaty The Irish Republic (1938) embedded Civil War divisions within broader historical narratives of the revolutionary period.

L: ‘This is the kind of “Freedom” the Treaty gives you’; anti-Treaty handbill depicting the British crown above the Irish harp. (Image: NLI, Ephemera collection, EPH B8 / ILB 300 p [Item 51]; courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

R: Anti-Treaty cartoon by Grace Gifford Plunkett depicting Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins struggling to keep the Irish Free State afloat. (Image: Irish Newspaper Archives, courtesy of National Library of Ireland)

During the 1970s and 1980s revisionist accounts of state-building by academic historians such as F.S.L. Lyons and Tom Garvin were broadly sympathetic to the treatyite position, arguing that the Free State’s violence had been necessary to preserve democracy in 1922.  Much of the blame for the civil war was attributed to anti-Treaty republicans for repudiating popular support for the settlement, particularly de Valera whose inflammatory rhetoric had undermined efforts to seek compromise and offered political cover to IRA diehards. This historiographical consensus reflected the strong democratic credentials of the pro-Treaty position. But, given that de Valera had proved that Collins was right to argue that the Treaty would lead to full independence, it was also shaped by hindsight. More contentiously, sympathetic accounts of the treatyite position were influenced by contemporary sensitivities as a new generation of republicans set about killing for Ireland during the Troubles.

In recent years the idea of 1922 as the triumph of Irish democracy has given way to more nuanced interpretations. The role of British coercion, real and threatened, in shaping the settlements of 1920-22 has received more attention. The impact of Britain’s actions in 1922 – not least by frustrating Collins’ efforts to seek compromise by demanding strict adherence to the terms of the Treaty – as a factor in the slide to civil war has been more widely acknowledged.  Disturbing revelations about the conduct of the conflict also undermined interpretations of the civil war as a clear-cut clash between the forces of law and order and an unaccountable republican minority. Greater awareness of the state’s conservatism has also taken some of the gloss off the legacy of 1922. Noting ‘the sharply conservative aftermath of the revolution’, Roy Foster has outlined how, after the revolution, ‘nascent ideas of certain kinds of liberation were aggressively subordinated to the national project of restabilization (and clericalization)’.  More recently, though, Anne Dolan has asked whether the emphasis in recent accounts on the disappointments of early independence reflected a frustration with the failure of independence to live up to contemporary expectations.  Whatever their shortcomings, it seems fair to acknowledge that the state-builders of 1922 saw themselves as implementing revolutionary ideals as they understood them, and that many politicians and people on both sides of the Treaty divide shared conservative values that now elicit less admiration.

Stories of the Other: New Perspectives
The earliest histories of the revolutionary era, which reflected and reinforced the polarisation resulting from a decade of violence, served the needs of the nationalist and unionist states that emerged from that conflict. The majoritarian politics of partition, and of state-building, reinforced narrow conceptions of identity that marginalised minorities and overlooked the many ‘varieties of Irishness’ in existence.  Shaped by very different political circumstances, including the remarkable if still fragile achievements of the Good Friday Agreement, the more inclusive remembrance that characterises the current Decade of Centenaries has seen the retrieval of previously neglected historical experiences.

A large influx of Catholic refugees from Belfast had arrived in Dublin by June 1922. Many were housed in unionist-owned properties, such as the Freemasons’ Hall, that were commandeered by the anti-Treaty IRA. (Image: Hulton Archive, Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; © Getty Images)

This openness to reconsidering aspects of the past also reflects broader impulses than the success of the peace process, not least the erosion of Catholicism as the most visible marker of Irish identity. The liberalisation of Irish society, by generating new identities, has created an appetite for stories that reshape how the past is understood by the public. In that spirit, Ireland 1922 explores the events of this tumultuous year in a manner intended to reflect greater awareness of the diversity of Irish experiences foregrounded by the Decade of Centenaries.

Its fifty contributors, who differ in their approaches and interpretations, were asked to identify particular episodes that would make accessible some of the new interpretations of this era that have resulted from recent scholarship. Spanning cultural studies, heritage, history, design, film, gender, law, literature, memory, political science, and visual culture, their expertise grounds analysis of the political transformation of Ireland within its broad social, economic and cultural contexts. Innovative methodologies, such as those applied in the history of emotions, postcolonialism, and gender analysis, shed new light on familiar topics, as does the rich selection of accompanying illustrations, which enable consideration of visual and material culture alongside archival sources. Political change is assessed not only through consideration of landmark events such as the Treaty split or the outbreak of the civil war, but also by evaluating how these were moulded by social factors such as class and gender.

For contemporaries, 1922 marked something more disorienting and unfathomable than the end of the revolution, the dawn of a conservative era, or some other retrospectively imposed interpretation. Whether it be enmity, disappointment or hope, Ireland 1922 aims to convey something of the diverse emotions experienced by those who lived through one of Ireland’s most dramatic years.

Extracted from Ireland 1922 edited by Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry and published by the Royal Irish Academy with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Click the image below to visit the RIA website for more information.