How Collins Approached Northern Ireland

Welcome to the History of Ireland. In today’s episode, we’re going to try and unpack Michael Collins’ approach to the north of Ireland in the months before he died. It’s an approach that is complicated, contradictory and very hard to pin down. Throughout 1922, when it came to the north, Collins spent his time promising different things to different people and saying one thing and then doing another. It’s impossible to know what he was thinking. Instead, all we can do is look at how he acted, what he said to people and try to uncover his approach.

To do that, first, we need to look briefly at the Second Craig-Collins Pact. The MacMahon murders had left the north of Ireland shaken and proved that peace in the area would not be as simple as first hoped. This, though, didn’t stop Churchill and Lloyd George bringing Craig and Collins back together less than a week after the MacMahon murders to try again to reach some kind of agreement. And so, on March 29th, Craig and Collins met in London to hash out what would become known as the Second Craig-Collins Pact. Craig was very reluctant to attend, especially considering the southern Irish government still had in custody a number of B Specials. Collins, though, was more than happy to rock up, believing that by acting as a good sport he could highlight how unreasonable Craig and the Unionists were being.

Of course, the big topic up for discussion was the B Specials. Remember, this is just a week after what had happened to the MacMahons. It was agreed to reform the unit and even to recruit Catholics into its numbers. On top of reforming the B Specials, a number of other things were agreed. For example, IRA activities would cease in the six counties. Another attempt would be made to bring Catholics back to the shipyards. And Westminster would even provide a grant to support the area, with one-third going to Catholics and two-thirds to Protestants, which reflected the population at the time. And then there would be a joint Catholic-Protestant committee set up to divvy up the $500,000 grant. Finally, it was quote affirmed that the two governments unite in appealing to all the concerned to refrain from inflammatory speeches and to exercise restraint in the interest of peace. Basically, come on lads, be nice and play fair.

The Irish News, a Catholic Belfast paper, described the announcement of this pact saying, The statement reads like an unexpected avowal that a miracle has been performed. There are thousands who will think this morning that the news is too good to be true. And to be honest, sadly, they were bang on the money. The whole thing was a complete failure, with really, again, nothing coming of it.

Craig refused to release the majority of Republican prisoners in the North. And work to reform the B Specials, well, it just never really gained traction. The police committee, which was meant to be working on changing the force, dragged on for months. And by the end, one civil servant wrote that, It was agreed by all that the committee had accomplished practically nothing. As well as this, it proved impossible to hire any Catholics into the force. As one prominent Catholic businessman put it at the time, Not a single Catholic would now join the Specials, who had come to be regarded as a sectarian force. If they joined, they would be in danger of their lives, probably from the Catholic extremists. And just to make things worse, it was never agreed on how to use that grant money.

From the Unionist side, most of Craig’s cabinet didn’t support many of the concessions he had offered. And therefore, Craig had to walk back on many of them. This meant that Collins wrote to Churchill saying that Craig was being much too inflexible. And that due to this, the agreement was, quote, a dead letter. And admittedly, Craig was dead set in his ways and working with an uncooperative cabinet. And he was generally slow to compromise. But at the same time, to put it mildly, Collins’ approach to Northern Ireland in the months before his death was all over the shop. And you can’t really blame Craig for not trusting him.

Some view Collins’ tactics as a clever balance of peaceful solution and violence. The carrot and the stick. Others see it as a duplicitous, ill-thought-out mess. As ever, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. Though personally, I lean slightly more to the idea that it was a mess than anything else. But anyway.

One historian, Cormac Moore, writes that Collins’ strategies on the North right up to his death in August 1922 were bizarre, contradictory, and counterproductive. On the one hand, he pursued political and passive opposition tactics. And on the other, he sought a military to stabilize the North. With an ultimate aim of ending partition. So let’s try and break that down and dig into it a little bit.

There are a few things going on with Collins and the North in 1922. First of all, obviously Collins did believe in the treaty. And as we know, he was a proponent of the Boundary Commission. Though we also know he saw partition as very much a necessary evil. And a temporary one at that. So he did clearly see a peaceful way to obtain a united Ireland. And that’s what he was going for. However, we also know he was never one to shy away from violence. And it seems he was happy to approach the problem of Northern Ireland in a two-pronged manner. Political with the likes of Craig Collins Pact and militarily through the IRA.

Well before the Craig Collins Pact broke down, Collins had established the Ulster Council of the IRA. Which Liam Lynch described as a shadow body. Its job was to organise attacks in Ulster to destabilise the Northern Irish state. And as Collins told nationalists in the North, when it came to Ulster, there are only two policies. Peace or war. And arguably for the first three months of 1922, Collins was kind of vying for peace. However, at no point did he give up on the IRA.

You see, whatever about the politics between the Unionists, Westminster and the Irish Free State. At this point, Collins was also contending with politics within the fast splintering nationalist movement. Collins saw the idea of an assault on Northern Ireland as a means to keep the Northern Irish IRA on his side in the Irish Civil War. The last thing he wanted was for the Northern IRA to side with the anti-treaty forces against him. In fact, it seems like he hoped an attack on Northern Ireland might keep all sides of the IRA together and avoid a full on civil war. As historian Mary Coleman puts it, a huge part of his thinking was to retain republican unity. And that as the IRA splintered in March, right as the Craig Collins Pact was collapsing, Collins quote, heightened his efforts to use the North as a ploy.

On one hand, Collins is trying the Craig Collins approach, he wants the pact to work, but clearly it stops working. And just as it stops working, the anti-treaty IRA really start to act up. And so to solve both problems, it seems like Collins gave up on the peaceful solution and just put all his eggs into the idea of the North as a ploy. But other historians argue that it was more than a ploy, that he was very committed to this aggressive Northern policy.

Regardless of his motivations, from March through May he did support an offensive, which involved a mix of pro and anti-treaty factions. As one Northern IRA leader put it, the goal was to bring about the downfall of the six-county government by military means. Historian Robert Lynch writes that, while the pro-treaty side would be largely responsible for supplying the arms and equipment, the anti-treaty IRA would provide the leadership. It was left to the Northern IRA to supply the majority of the actual manpower to carry out the attacks. So anti-treaty IRA leading the battle, pro-treaty side giving arms and the Northern IRA being the main body.

With this in mind, Collins ensured thousands of weapons made it up to the North. And the way he did this is nuts. The British at this point had provided the Irish Free State Army with a whole heap of weapons. The idea being that these weapons would be used to curtail the anti-treaty IRA. Now obviously, Collins couldn’t just give these weapons to the Northern IRA, the British would have fanned out and gone crazy. So instead, Collins swapped weapons with the anti-treaty IRA, giving them the British guns, and then took the anti-treaty IRA’s weaponry and delivered it to the Northern IRA. Now the civil war was not quite in full swing at this point, but it’s a pretty ballsy move to be giving weapons to the people who, though they had once been your comrades, were soon going to be the people you’d have to shoot. Civil wars, they’re messy, ain’t they?

Regardless, this meant that from March through May, the Northern IRA were relatively well armed and ready to launch an offensive throughout Northern Ireland. But as we know, the anti-treaty IRA and pro-treaty forces moved further and further apart over this period. And the Northern offensive became a complete shambles. For example, in Donegal at the beginning of May, pro and anti-treaty IRA forces began fighting each other rather than the Unionists. Meanwhile, a full scale attack was repeatedly pushed back and then eventually given up on. Which meant that the few IRA divisions that were doing anything in the North were left without any real support. And because the various different IRA factions failed to work cohesively, the Unionists were able to just basically pick them off one by one.

And it is also important to remember something we’ve discussed before. The Northern IRA was actually fairly weak and poorly organised. And they never really proved a real threat to the Northern Irish government, protected as it was by the B Specials and the backing of the British. It seems that what the Northern IRA managed to do at this point was just annoy Craig and Unionists enough that they cracked down even harder on Catholics, Nationalists and extreme Republicans in the area. Without ever doing enough to destabilise the region at this point in time.

So that’s a very broad look at the IRA’s approach in the North in this period. And I hope it gives you a sense of how confused it was and how Collins was really trying to play from various different angles. Next week we’ll look at how Craig and the Unionists combated the IRA in this period. I know I thought we’d get to the Special Forces Act this episode. But I think it makes sense to try and unpack what was going on with the Northern IRA and Collins. So that’ll have to wait till next episode. Where we’ll see how the Craig government not only failed to reform the B Specials, but instead cracked down even harder.

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The History of Ireland was written and produced by me, Kevin Dole. With music by Liam Doyle and additional help from assistant producer Aoife Murphy. This podcast was recorded in the lands of over a hundred people of the Cuman nation. Sovereignty was never ceded.