Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion and Communities during the Irish Revolution, by Brian Hughes

Abstract

Brian Hughes here seeks to examine the means by which non-state militants, primarily the IRA, attempted to establish and maintain control over their communities during the Irish war of independence. He is also much interested in the forms of response which local people offered to address, and (at times) counter, these ambitions. His general idea is to map a rarely explored part of the landscape of revolutionary Ireland—that encompassing the large majority of the population who found themselves caught between the relatively small numbers of separatist guerrillas (perhaps no more than 3,000 at any one time) and the retreating forces of the United Kingdom state. In essence, he posits that this community, otherwise diverse, was united by a desire to avoid absolute commitment, by a willingness to elide loyalties where necessary and by a general desire to look out for itself. The book is meticulously researched, but is particularly effective when combining papers from the Bureau of Military History and the records of the Irish Grants Committee. Collating these Irish and British materials has enabled Hughes to expose the complex ways in which ordinary citizens, caught in the cross-fire of revolution, interpreted the course of events around them, as well as their own loyalties. A strikingly emblematic case is supplied by an egg-dealer from Arva, County Cavan, James McCabe, who simultaneously applied to both the Irish Free State and the British authorities for compensation arising out of the struggle of 1919–21. McCabe, a (long-) retired officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary, looked to the British Treasury-funded Irish Grants Committee for financial relief on the grounds of his service to the Crown; but he was also an Irish nationalist, who had a son active in the IRA, and he turned, too, to the Irish Free State authorities for financial redress, citing the family’s record in the revolution. Few were as bold as McCabe in seeking to milk the two competing jurisdictions for personal benefit; but his story does illustrate crisply the kind of ambiguous, alternate or sequential loyalties which characterised many at this time.