How Craig’s foresight helped win war against the IRA a century ago

The early 1920s, which witnessed the birth pangs of Northern Ireland, were violent as the IRA sought to destroy the new state.

Between June 21 1920 and June 18 1922, 428 people were killed and a further 1,766 wounded.

Over half of these deaths and incidents occurred in 1922. In that year 232 people, including two Unionist MPs, were killed, nearly 1,000 wounded, and more than £3 million worth of property destroyed. Yet by July/August 1922 the IRA insurgency had been crushed.

When King George V had opened the new Belfast Parliament in June 1921, nationalists and republicans took comfort from an anticipated early collapse of the Northern Ireland experiment. Some unionists feared the same. Both pessimistic unionists and ‘optimistic’ nationalists and republicans seriously underestimated the political acumen, skill, and the stern Ulster-Scots determination of Sir James Craig to ensure the survival of the new institutions.

In 1920 Craig had urged the creation of a special constabulary. In formal terms the creator of the Ulster Special Constabulary was Sir Ernest Clark, the assistant under-secretary in the Irish Office. Sir Ernest was persuaded of the necessity of creating an armed force of special constables to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation. Using powers available to him under the Special Constables Act (1832) he set about his task enthusiastically and energetically. Within five weeks of his appointment, on October 22 1920, he published details of the new Special Constabulary.

The effectiveness of the Ulster Special Constabulary in quelling IRA activity was acknowledged by the O/C of the IRA’s 3rd Northern Division who admitted that deployment of the USC had forced him to abandon flying columns in Antrim and Down within two weeks of a planned offensive in the summer of 1922. In west Ulster the IRA’s 2nd Northern Division had the same experience.

For reasons which are not clear, Frank Aiken’s 4th Northern Division opted out of the so-called ‘Joint IRA offensive’. Patrick Casey, the O/C of the IRA’s South Down Brigade, found Aiken’s decision inexplicable.

Therefore, Northern Ireland’s survival owed a great deal to the sterling service of the USC, a point conceded even by historians unsympathetic to unionism.

The murder of W J Twaddell, a Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Parliament, in May and the murder of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the former chief of the Imperial General Staff, security advisor to the Northern Ireland government, and MP for North Down at Westminster, in June further transformed the security position.

Twaddell’s death allowed Craig to proscribe several republican organisations including the IRA, the IRB and Cumann na mBan and, more importantly, to introduce internment which was directed at those ‘endeavouring to subvert our Parliament’.

Over the next number of weeks somewhere between 350 and 500 IRA activists and fellow-travellers (on the basis of excellent intelligence, much of it derived from a significant haul of IRA documents captured in St Mary’s Hall in Belfast) were rounded up and interned on board the Argenta, a ship moored off Larne, Londonderry Gaol and Larne Workhouse. That about half the IRA’s membership in Tyrone was lifted is testimony to the quality of the Northern Ireland government’s intelligence.

Lord Fitzalan, the lord lieutenant, was originally unhappy to countenance internment but the murder of Twaddell and the burning of Shane’s Castle on May 20 by the IRA, one of several attacks on property in Antrim and Down, persuaded him to change his mind.

Internment played a major role in bringing the IRA to its knees.

The murder of Sir Henry Wilson in London by two IRA men, probably acting on Michael Collins’ orders, effectively administered the coup de grace to the IRA in Northern Ireland.

Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, acting under pressure from Bonar Law, forced Collins and the (Irish) Provisional Government to eject the anti-Treaty IRA from their headquarters in the Four Courts in Dublin, triggering the outbreak of the Irish civil war.

With pro- and anti-treaty factions of the IRA obligingly shooting each other, the pressure was taken off the Northern Ireland government. The level of IRA activity within Northern Ireland fell dramatically between mid-May and early June and petered out by late June, July and September to a point where the RUC was able to report ‘the record of political crime for the past few weeks is practically nil’. As one Belfast IRA member succinctly put it: ‘They [the Unionists] knew they had won.’

The nationalist community had also turned against the IRA. Far from being their protectors, they only brought nationalists trouble and misfortune. Nationalists started inundating the RUC with information about the IRA and their sympathisers. In many cases informants expressed regret that they had not supplied such information two years earlier.

The families of IRA men were increasingly ostracised by their nationalist neighbours. When he was in prison, an RUC sergeant showed Charles McGleenan a bundle of papers which were all complaints from his neighbours who did not want him anywhere near them. On his release from prison McGleenan found his farm in a state of disrepair and he found that the only people willing to help him were ironically his unionist neighbours.

The death of Michael Collins in August at the hands of his erstwhile comrades removed another element of the threat to Northern Ireland’s survival. Ernest Blythe, the Ulster-Scots Irish language enthusiast who came from Magheragall, and who, as an Ulster Protestant, was the only member of the Irish Provisional Government who had any serious appreciation of what made Ulster unionists tick, had already circulated a memorandum to a five-man committee appointed to draw up ‘a coherent northern policy’. He criticised Michael Collins’ policy of duplicity and belligerency, argued it was useless in protecting nationalists (on the contrary it only endangered their lives), and contended that there was no prospect of bringing about the unification of Ireland within any reasonable period of time by attacking the North East.

Four days after Collins’ death, Blythe’s memorandum was circulated to all the members of the Provisional Government and its recommendations implicitly accepted.