The Irish Underground and the War of Independence 1919-21

Abstract

Our subject, the evolution of revolutionary warfare in Ireland, is not solely concerned with the military sphere. It is in fact part of the wider field of politics-the subrosa politics of assassination and reprisal in the guerrilla war of I919-21 between the British security forces and the Irish Volunteers or IRA, who were the military arm of an underground Irish government. There was, in the period between the end of the 1916 Easter Rising and the onset of the revolutionary war in I919, a gradual change of political allegiance on the part of the Irish. The legitimacy of the incumbent British administration dwindled in almost inverse proportion to the growing support in favour of the underground government of the Irish Republic proclaimed on the steps of the Dublin General Post Office, Easter 1916, and endorsed through a series of elections culminating in the Dail Eireann elections of 1918. Primarily, however, this paper is concerned with the fighting arm of the revolutionary government-its nature, operations, and tactics, and in noting some of the antecedents of the revolutionary war which provided the politico-military womb in which the embryo alternative government grew. On 20 November 1920, in the quiet of a Dublin Sunday, six groups of IRA gunmen began the systematic assassination of a group of specially trained and recruited secret servicemen, mostly MI5 and SIS specialists.' This unit had been recruited in the summer of 1920 in London and placed in charge of a Major C. A. Cameron. In all sixty agents were trained and despatched to