In December 1918 the unarmed Irish electorate, in the most emphatic exercise in self-determination established a democratic republican parliament and government. In 1920 the electorate confirmed their faith in their choice in local government elections. And in 1921 they established the Second Dail Eireann.
Throughout that period they supported the institutions they had established, including Republican Courts and Government Departments. They refused to recognise or collaborate with the British Government which they saw as usurpers, and were attacked by British Agencies which burned their houses, farms, businesses. The Irish Volunteers who resisted British aggression were virtually unarmed and a single British “Tank” festooned with machine guns had more firepower than the best equipped IRA Flying Column.
Yet Brian Maye in “The Zeal of The Convert” a (sympathetic) profile of Erskine Childers (An Irishman’s Diary 22 June in the Irish Times) tells us that Childers “threw in his lot with the violent struggle to end that (British) presence.”
What success the independence struggle had was helped by legitimate armed action by the IRA but would have got nowhere without the fountain pens of Erskine Childers. Desmond Fizgerald, Frank Gallagher, Lawrence Ginnell, Robert Brennan and others in the preparation. And dissemination overseas of THE IRISH BULLETIN, Dail Eireann’s official newspapers. The British spared no effort to suppress it, in vain at the time. But THE IRISH TIMES, Irish Universities, and the Trustees of the Decade of Commemorations have effectively banned mention of it today.
The idea that the IRA was superabundantly supplied with weapons I first found in a book by A.J.P. Taylor. Taylor is an authority drawn on by Andrew Marr, whose remarks on Ireland in his much vaunted “The Making of Modern Britain” are in addition to being pitifully ignorant, contemptuous of the concept of the self-determination of nations.
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