The first serious act of reprisal took place at Balbriggan,
county Dublin, on Sept. 21, when District-Inspector Burke,
an exceedingly popular officer, and another constable were
shot dead in the bar of a public-house. The murderers used
expanding bullets, and when the disfigured corpses of the two
constables were carried into the police barracks the men " saw
red," and that night the houses and shops of the Sinn Fein
leaders in the town went up in flames. Similar scenes followed
the ambushing and murder of six constables at Rinneen, county
Clare, on the 29th. The infuriated police descended on the
neighbouring towns of Miltown-Malbay, Lahinch and Ennisty-
mon, set fire to certain houses and shot two men. 1 Continued
murders of police led, at the end of Oct., to a renewal of these
reprisals, armed men invading and causing much destruction
in the towns of Granard, Tralee, Ballymote, Tipperary, Athlone,
Killorglin, Miltown-Malbay, Longford and Templemore. 2 The
discovery of five constables lying on the high road, with their
brains battered out, led to similar reprisals at Tubercurry
(Oct. 2). In vain their officers tried to restrain the enraged
men; they turned savagely upon them and threatened to shoot
them if they interfered. 3 The ambushing of a party of auxiliary
police at Dillon's Cross, Cork, on Dec. 18, was followed by
incendiary fires in Cork city, in the course of which the City
Hall and the Carnegie Library were destroyed, but there is no
information as to jwho was responsible, though public opinion
fixed responsibility upon the police. But though, in these
other cases, the discipline of .the police gave way, the cases were
far more numerous in which it stood the awful test. No reprisals
followed the treacherous massacre of the young officers in Dublin
on Nov. 2 1 . No reprisals followed the horrible affair of Macroom,
county Cork, when (Nov. 29) 17 auxiliary cadets were lured into
an ambush of 100 Sinn Feiners disguised as British soldiers,
and 15 of them murdered, no quarter being given and the dead
savagely mutilated. 4
The irregular reprisals, moreover, were not all the work of the police. When Inspector Swanzy was murdered at Lisburn on Aug. 8 1920, the Protestants, who were in a great majority in the town, doubly, enraged by this outrage in evangelical Ulster, rose and in spite of all the efforts of the local clergy to stop them burned many Catholic houses. The murder of a policeman in Belfast was followed, on Sept. 25, by attacks of Orangemen on Sinn Feiners and a renewal of the sectarian riots which in July had kept the city in a turmoil and now again necessitated its occupation by the military. 6
The temper of the constabulary placed the Government in a delicate position. To approve of irregular reprisals was impossible, to condone them was dangerous, and worse. Yet to take stern and drastic measures against them was equally impossible in view of the general feeling among the troops and the police, for this might easily have led, either to their resigna- tion en masse (which was what Sinn Fein was aiming at), or to their getting utterly out of hand and sweeping with fire and sword through the country. Above all, to have shown the slightest sign of a disposition to " let the police down " again, would have been almost certainly disastrous. It is not the present writer's intention either to attack or to defend the apparently equivocal attitude at first assumed by the Govern- ment towards this question of reprisals, which was bitterly criticised, but merely to state the conditions by which it was determined. It is certainly true to say that Sir Hamar Green- wood-, by his consistent championship of the forces of the Crown against their critics and detractors, succeeded in winning their confidence and thus in re-creating the essential conditions for
1 The fires were put out by the military, assisted by police.
1 Irish Times, weekly ed., Nov. 6 1920.
' Private information. All these reprisals up to Oct., were the work of the old R.I.C., not of the " black-and-tans."
- It was reported at first that Macroom had been burned, but
this was contradicted next day. One fire broke out, but was ex- tinguished with the aid of the soldiers and auxiliary police.
6 During 1920 the partisan war had been assuming more and more a " religious " character, many outrages on Protestant churches and murders of Protestant farmers being reported from the South.
the restoration of effective discipline. One lesson, moreover, the irregular reprisals had taught the Government, namely, that fear will open the lips that fear has sealed. On the very night of the Balbriggan reprisal, for the first time, men came to the police to denounce the murderers, moved by fear that their own houses might be burned.
In view of the refusal of people to come lorward except under pressure of this kind, the Government decided to make certain areas collectively responsible for the murder of soldiers and police. Where ambushes were elaborately prepared for days beforehand, telegraph wires being cut, and the roads for miles round being made impassable by trenches or felled trees, it was assumed that these treacherous attacks must have been delivered if not with the connivance, at least with the acquiescence, of the people. While, then, irregular reprisals were to be sternly repressed and punished, Gen. Macready issued an order that houses in the immediate neighbourhood of an ambush were to be burned, not as a reprisal, but as a punishment for the failure of the inhabitants to give information which by law they were bound to do. This was the origin of what were known as " offi- cial reprisals," which began to be carried out early in 1921.
Such was the condition of things in Ireland frankly recog- nized as " a state of war " when, on Dec. 23 1920, the new Government of Ireland bill became law. It had few friends even in Parliament; it had been debated in empty Houses; it received no welcome outside, except in Ulster, where it was welcomed as an ark of salvation from worse things. It gave, it is true, greater powers to the Irish legislatures than those given by the Act of 1914; it provided machinery for safeguarding the essential unity of Ireland in spite of " partition," and for securing corporate unity whenever the dissevered halves of the Irish people should arrive at an understanding. But the' machinery for conciliation is useless without the driving force of the spirit of conciliation; and to the mass of the Irish people, who do not know the meaning of the word compromise, it seemed but a cumbrous device for burdening their shoulders with a responsibility which was not theirs. In the North preparations at once began to put the Act in force whenever " the appointed day " should be named, Sir James Craig for this purpose taking over the Ulster leadership from Sir Edward Carson. In the South nobody believed that the day would ever be named, at least so far as Ireland outside Ulster was concerned; for it was thought improbable that sane men would try inflammatory constitutional experiments in a political powder magazine. In this, however, the South was mistaken; for in April the Government fixed the appointed day, and on the zist instruc- tions were sent to Dublin to make all the preparations necessary for the elections. At the same time it was announced that the lord lieutenancy had been accepted by Lord Edmund Talbot (created Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent), a brother of the late and uncle of the actual Duke of Norfolk, who, as a Roman Catholic, had become eligible for the office owing to the removal of the last remnant of Catholic disabilities by the Act. 6 The attitude of the Government at this stage on the question of " reprisals " can be best explained by quoting from a letter written on April 19 1921 by Mr. Lloyd George to the Bishop of Chelmsford, who with 19 other English Protestant prelates and ministers had addressed to him a strong remon- strance against " the whole reprisals policy " and a plea for negotiations for a " truce." 7 The Prime Minister wrote:
That there have been deplorable excesses I will not attempt to deny. Individuals working under conditions of extraordinary personal danger and strain, where they are in uniform and their adversaries mingle unrecognizable among the J, he ordinary civilian population, have undoubtedly been guilty of unjustifiable acts. A certain number of un- " m desirables have got into the corps, and in the earlier days discipline in the novel and exacting conditions took some time to establish.
There is no question that, despite all difficulties, discipline is improving, the force is consolidating, and that the acts of indisei-
- Hitherto the Lord Lieutenant had by law to be Protestant.
' It may be noted that no such remonstrance came from the Protestant bishops or Presbyterian ministers of Ireland.
