239. Ireland’s Fight For Freedom: The Rise of The IRA (Ep 2)

25:05You've got a striking figure in the shape of de Valera. What I found quite amusing was that the political aims at this time, even though they've got a strong leader who's going to be incredibly important, is political motives are unclear. So one journalist asks a senior member of Sinn Féin, so, you know, what is it you want? What do you want? And the answer he gets, which he prints is, vengeance bejesus. And that's it. That's it. So, you know, that is yet to develop. But they do commit themselves formally to a formal political program, which is the achievement of an Irish Republic. But there's a recognition that within the broad Sinn Féin movement, there are a variety of different opinions on the constitutional question.

25:45And even at a later stage, Michael Collins is asked in 1920 by an American journalist, what do you mean by an Irish Republic? And you know what his response was? None of us have given that very much thought. But they associated the Republic with getting Britain out of Ireland. And there was often a reference to them sorting out the finer details after that had happened. We should say that it's not only Dev who trades on his Easter Rising military uniform. I'm just looking at a whole set of photographs of our friend Constance Markievicz. And she's wearing her hat with a feather on it. She's got a sort of hunting top, which she could have used for a hunting party.

26:24She's got plus fours and putties. She's wearing putties around the bottom of her legs. And she's got her revolver out. She's being photographed in a whole variety of different shots. Some on the ground pointing the revolver and aiming it. Some standing up as if some doing a hold up at a bank. There's a very careful curating of the image and of the presentation. And we have to remember, I often remind people about the extent of the propaganda war during this revolutionary decade on both sides. You know, Britain can, of course, do its utmost in terms of the propaganda war and how it might present the Irish question.

27:00Irish Republicans become very effective at communicating the message and the images that they want to communicate. And Markievicz is very much embracing that. Absolute poster girl. While this is going on, and we should just remind people, because if you've got your focus on Ireland, you perhaps lose what is going on around it, which is World War I. and just only a matter of months after the new leadership and you've got Sinn Féin being built up into this great thing, you've got a real crisis hitting the Allied forces on the Western Front. David Lloyd George is worried about the number of men he's going to need because it has been sort of a meat processing factory on the front with young men dying in enormous numbers.

27:40So, he decides to introduce a new bill to extend military conscription to Ireland. Now, how exactly do the leaders respond to that? On the one hand, there are a fair few people who are fighting from Ireland already, and others who think, actually, this cause is just. We are fighting a world war. We have a conviction that this is the right fight. So when conscription is extended to also cover people who don't believe that and don't believe that Britain is worth fighting and dying for, what happens? There is huge anger in Ireland. And what the proposal to extend conscription to Ireland does. It actually unites constitutional nationalists who storm out of the House of Commons, the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Féin, the Labour movement who organise a nationwide Labour protest and strike, and Sinn Féin.

28:31So you have Sinn Féin, you have the Labour movement, you have the Catholic Church, you have constitutional nationalists. The Catholic Church went as far as saying those opposing conscription will be justified in using any means consonant with the laws of God. Now, you can interpret that in different ways, but it created a coalition of disgust. And of course, the British government recognised that if they were to impose conscription against the will of Ireland and the key sectors of Irish society, it would cause a lot more trouble than it was worth. There were potentially perhaps over 140 ,000 Irish conscripts who might come under this proposal, but ultimately and wisely, they abandoned it.

29:09And even there's criticism in written too about what is regarded as an act of insanity, even by the Times newspaper. So it does develop that kind of temporary coalition, but it also electrifies the volunteers. And things are rarely linear. For all of the enthusiasm for organisation after the 1916 rising and the rise of Sinn Féin and the reorganisation of the Irish volunteers, there was something of a lull before that conscription proposal. And that reignited the sense of outrage and the sense of determination to resist it, because many volunteers were really serious in declaring that they would resist enforced conscription with their arms.

29:45You have an armistice in November 1918, which sort of puts a full stop on the crisis that is inevitably building and it sort of saves the British government, really, the fact that the war just runs out and stops. But what you do have as a result of all of this, the churn that's been going on in Ireland, is that in December, just a few weeks after the armistice, you have an election where Sinn Féin, in the words of the times, the Irish times, swept the board. And the defeat of the Nationalist Party is crushing and final. So Sinn Féin wins a total of 73 seats and none of them for the present at any rate will attend the Imperial Parliament.

30:23In other words, it's sort of a precedent that lives to this day where Sinn Féin MPs will not take their seats. And I mean, they campaigned on abstention and abstention was a new concept for many of those who were observing politics in Ireland. Sinn Féin had quite a task in explaining why this was the wisest course of action. What Sinn Féin was promising in its manifesto of 1918 was to set up an alternative parliament in Dublin, that they would not attend the British Parliament. Parliamentarianism becomes almost a term of abuse for Sinn Féin, and they really criticise the Irish Parliamentary Party for being ineffective in addressing Irish concerns in Westminster, and the Irish Parliamentary Party is duly crushed.

31:00It should also be remembered that this was the first general election in the UK since 1910. And the electorate has expanded dramatically, including in Ireland, where the electorate, it actually increases from roughly 600 ,000 to about 1.9 million. So there is a very substantial increase in the electorate. Women over the age of 30 with the requisite property qualifications can vote for the first time, and Sinn Féin goes after that new constituency. So there is fertile ground there for those who are engaging in Sinn Féin politics and campaigning. And of course, it's a highly unusual election for Sinn Féin in that a number of their candidates are imprisoned or are on the run.

31:36And there were many constituencies where they didn't face any opposition, such as the momentum behind them. But the key question after the election is, is that mandate going to be recognised? If they have campaigned on the basis of the achievement of an Irish Republic and abstention from Westminster, is Britain going to recognise that? Of course it's not. And it's what happens then a couple of weeks later in January 1919, when Sinn Féin does indeed organise the sitting of an Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, as we refer to it. And we, to this date, still date our parliaments from that first parliament, the Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament in Dublin in 1919.

32:11And what was communicated at that time was a message to the free nations of the world. Let's internationalise this question. Sinn Féin even sought representation at the Paris Peace Conference. I mean, the door was slammed on them. But they are determined to internationalise this question. And there are many journalists present at this first parliament in the Mansion House in Dublin City Centre in January 1919. But crucially, what happens on the same day is that Irish volunteers, impatient with the lack of military activity, decide that they are going to begin their own campaign. And this was not something that was authorised by HQ.

32:45There were restless Irish volunteers in different parts of the country, who again, as I mentioned, are quite cynical about politics. They want to see military action and they fire the first shots in what becomes the war of independence. And it's at this point that the Irish Volunteers is really evolving into what we know as the Irish Republican Army. It is a dramatic place to take a break. Join us after the break where we find out what happens after the rise of the IRA. Der Insolvenzantrag ist gestellt und plötzlich läuft alles im Alltempo. Für unsere Protagonistin begin now the hardest phase.

33:19In Folge 4 of our series Endstation Insolvenz we show why Offenheit is the most important Währung is. Why a Insolvenz-Way is not a Gegner and how a Betrieb stabilizes or gets established. In the podcast channel Gute Geschäfte von Kreditreform. Everywhere, where it's Podcasts.

33:47So welcome back. We saw at the end of the last half how the IRA are now rising up. And at the centre of that is our friend Michael Collins. He'd been a relatively fresh face in the Easter Rising, but now he's really getting his genius of organisation at work in the military sphere. Tell us what he's involved in, Demet. What's he up to at this point? Do you know what he was up to mostly? Sitting at his desk. We often think of Michael Collins in military uniform. The most famous images of him are of Collins in military uniform at a later stage. But Collins was primarily a desk man. He was a very effective organizer.

34:29As I mentioned before, he had worked in the post office in Britain and he had honed his administrative skills. And he was skilled in that way. And he got very impatient with many of his colleagues. Eamon de Valera wrote to him at one stage during this period and said, Michael, God did not give everyone the ordered mind he gave you. And he used that ordered mind to great effect because let's think of both the political wings and the military wings of the Republican movement. And there was crossover between them, but there was also tension between them. Michael Collins is Minister for Finance within the underground Sinn Féin government.

35:03He's also Director of Intelligence for the Irish Republican Army. And there's quite a lot of tension between the Department of Defence within Sinn Féin and the leadership of the IRA. We shouldn't think of the War of Independence as involving an overall master plan for the entire country. It was difficult often to control everything that IRA units were doing in different parts of the country, but it was Collins' job to try and direct that as much as he could. Just to clarify this, obviously some of the leaders of the IRA are already in prison and figures like Constance Markievicz are still locked up.

35:37Is Michael Connors on the run? Is he hiding in people's attics? Or how is he able to be Minister of Finance? He hasn't got an office he can go to. And we should remind people why they're in prison. It's part of this German conspiracy. So before, you know, the end of the war, they are these nationalist leaders, Sinn Féin members, are accused of trying to import arms from Germany, and therefore assisting the enemy, and that somehow they are traitors. And so, you know, when Conn Markowitz is actually elected as the first woman MP in Westminster, she's in Holloway prison at the time. That's why it was such an unusual election.

36:06I mean, there were basically trumped up allegations that there was treasonable communications with the enemy and contact with the enemy, Britain's enemy being, of course, Germany. And over 70 of those Republican leaders were incarcerated. Some of them regarded it as a great advantage at the time and didn't go out of their way to try and avoid imprisonment. Dev actually welcomed it, didn't he? He was warned he was going to be picked up and allowed himself to be arrested. Yeah, and an opportunity, of course, to win the propaganda war. And even campaigning on the basis that you were imprisoned for your politics as a political prisoner didn't do you any harm either in terms of the profile.

36:41So that certainly was a factor. But Collins is, of course, associated with being on the run too, not just because of his IRA involvement, but because he is a minister in what is an underground Sinn Féin government, which can't operate as a normal government. And it has some successes associated with it. There were a number of different government departments they met in secret. They communicated in secret. Collins becomes very adept, I suppose, at developing networks, as do his colleagues, in relation to how they might communicate during the War of Independence. But he is on the run. You know, Collins famously has a number of close shaves when it comes to escaping arrest.

37:16And there was a very significant price on his head, of course. There's a very nice story I read. Is it true that they set up courts, Sinn Féin? And at one point, they sentence people to imprisonment, but they obviously haven't gone to jail. So they ship them off to an island off the West Coast and they're put on the island and the British hear about this and come to try and rescue them and they refuse to be rescued. They started pelting them with stones saying, we are prisoners of the Irish Republic. You have no jurisdiction here. What they were trying to do was supplant the British administration in Ireland.

37:46And that's why they set up their own courts. Now, most of those courts were designed to settle more mundane disputes that wouldn't necessarily involve imprisonment. But of course, these courts had to meet in secret, and it was a highly dangerous activity. So you've got Michael Collins pretty much out on his own because all the other leadership is in prison by their own choice. I mean, they did have intelligence that they could flee arrest, but they chose to be arrested so that they could have this powerful showing in the election. You mentioned right before the break, and I feel like we need to discuss it more, that the first shots that are fired in what will become an out-and-out battle in Ireland are not sanctioned by leadership.

38:25Just tell us about how this becomes, rather than a parliamentary and a political fight, a fight of guns and bullets. There were members of the Irish Volunteers, which is evolving into the Irish Republican Army and becomes known as the Irish Republican Army really from this point, who are very keen to resume military action. And they're somewhat sceptical, if not even cynical, about politics. And you've got to try and picture, I suppose, their impatience in relation to what they're watching. They've seen the general election, the success of Sinn Féin. What does it actually mean to them as volunteers who want to be seen to be proactive?

38:59And what is done in Tipperary in January 1919 is that the Royal Irish Constabulary are targeted. Now, the Royal Irish Constabulary had been policing Ireland since the 1820s. And the Royal Irish Constabulary, again, was quite a respectable force. It was regarded as a very respectable profession. And what happens in Tipperary in January 1919 is that two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary are targeted because they're transporting Jellignite to a local quarry and they are shot dead. It causes horror in Tipperary. And we know that by the contemporary response. and the Royal Irish Constabulary now in the firing line again is a pivotal development.

39:39There are about 14 ,000 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary at that point. Ultimately, 400 of them lose their lives during the War of Independence. It becomes a very dangerous mission, but they are seen as enemies of the Irish Republic and agents of the British state. Are they all Protestant? No, they're not. No, no. Far from it. One of the individuals who was shot in January 19 was an Irish-speaking Catholic. And again, this was seen as a very wise career to get involved in policing because of the security that it offered, but also the status that it offered. And many of those had been policing a relatively peaceful Ireland prior to this.

40:15So they certainly weren't used to this. And it raises the stakes, but it also causes consternation in GHQ, the headquarters of the IRA, because they have not authorised this. and they want to control the pace. So, you know, there's a lot of tension around that. You know, when we think of the War of Independence, it's not linear, it's not straightforward, it's difficult to try and manage the various IRA units as they are developing around the country. And they're also conscious of how these things might be reported outside of Ireland, because one of the traditional British dismissals of Irish Republican activity was that there was no discipline, that there was no proper hierarchy, that there was no proper leadership, that these were just unruly corner boys, effectively.

40:56Hotheads. Hotheads is what Michael O'Dwyer used to call them, you know, just unruly hotheads. So, you know, there's a determination to try and streamline this and to make the IRA an efficient and well-controlled organisation, but that's never straightforward. There are an awful lot of tensions. Like Richard Mulcahy, who was the commander-in-chief of the IRA, was a stickler, as he would have seen it, for discipline and proper procedures. But he also clashes with the Sinn Féin Minister for Defence, Cahil Abrua, who wants to control the IRA. So, who is in charge of the IRA remains a question throughout the War of Independence.

41:27But what happens is, I mean, you know, they may be describing them or characterising them as hotheads, but the British are worried enough about this to actually send an enormous number of recruits, newly freshly minted recruits, to go and support the Royal Irish Constabulary. And we're talking about 8 ,000 mainly ex-servicemen who are sent from England to serve in Ireland. And this is interesting too. I mean, their uniforms, you know, they had khaki uniforms with a very distinctive black belt and a green cap, and they become known as the dreaded black and tans. And they become then a very visible enemy where the nationalists can then, you know, sort of get themselves together, if you like, a bit, because there's a huge enemy visible there on their doorstep.

42:09And they develop a reputation for immense brutality and lack of discipline. Part of that had to do with their frustration because they're used to open warfare. You know, these veterans of the First World War. Their soldiers have just come back. But they're not used to attack and retreat. They're not used to the guerrilla tactics of the IRA, and they feel very vulnerable as a result. But they're the black and tans. There's also a more senior group, the ex-officers, the auxiliaries, as they are known. They're paid more, and their mission is to take the war to the IRA. And again, questions about control of them and discipline.

42:42And I suppose we have more of awareness now of what some of them would have been through in relation to their experiences during the war and what that did to them. But there were also many who didn't know where they were. They weren't familiar with Ireland. They didn't obviously understand the nuances of what was going on and what their actual mission was, given that it was a different type of warfare. And again, the IRA becomes quite adept at honing this ability to attack and retreat so that even though they have smaller numbers, because ultimately, you know, by the end of the War of Independence, there are over 40 ,000 British crown forces in Ireland.

43:17The IRA numbers are much smaller, but they're able to inflict considerable damage. I have a question, because you've been looking into archives and some of which have only been newly released. There is this idea that terrible things happen in Dublin Castle at this time when the Black and Tans are exceeding their remit, that there are summary punishments, tortures, floggings going on behind closed doors. And how much of that is true and And how much of that is propaganda? A lot of it is true. I mean, there's no doubt that there were vicious beatings. There were intimidatory tactics. There was huge resentment at the Irish as a race, you know, and you can see this as well, that they're carrying on that tradition, you could argue, of considerable ignorance about Ireland, but also a belief that, well, all the Irish are wild and all the Irish are uncivilised and all the Irish are rebels.

44:05Therefore, the only language they understand is the language of brute force. An awful lot of that went on. There's no doubt about that. So when we're talking about sort of raids in homes and sort of turfing out women and children, there are stories about house burning. Oh, there's no doubt about that. I mean, that is very well documented. You know, Sinn Féin were very adept at propaganda too. They had what was called the Irish Bulletin, which is a summary from their perspective of what's going on in Ireland that they sent to hundreds of newspapers around the world. So the propaganda war is an important part of that.

44:31Erskine Childers, who we mentioned before, was a part of that. So at times, of course, it's exaggerated for particular audiences. But you also, I suppose, have to recognise the extent to which the War of Independence causes huge upheaval for ordinary people in relation to curfews and them going about their business and being victims of house raids and so on, because they are looking for rebels. And there are rebels who are doing them great damage, as you say, the guerrilla tactics. And while all of this is going on, you've got de Valera in an English prison. But, but, but, in February 1919, and I really want to know the truth of this because it's so fantastical, he manages to escape.

45:10Now, is it true that he manages to escape because he quite blatantly draws a cartoon of the key that he needs on a postcard of a key, a giant key going into a door. and then his supporters outside fashion it, you know, they sort of mould it in clay and they make a key and he can get away. Is that right? It is right. Oh my God, oh my God, it's so good. He escaped while dressed as a woman. But, you know, this was a very serious development in relation to what de Valera was going to do next, you know, nevermind the drama of the escape. And de Valera, of course, goes to America. Now, what was he going to America for?

45:49he was going ultimately to gain recognition for the Irish Republic. The US House of Representatives is very sympathetic to the cause of the Irish Republic. The presidency isn't. Woodrow Wilson isn't. But he thinks he'll walk in. He thinks he can either meet Woodrow Wilson or the opposition and he will have some kind of high table setting. He has an immense sense of his own stature. He is styled now as the president of the Irish Republic. Some recognise that, of course, many don't. And if you go to somewhere like Fenway Park in Boston, for example, you'll see this extraordinary crowd responding to de Valera and East Coast America.

46:21It can become more complicated when he embarks on the wider tour. He does raise a lot of money in the region of$5 million, and he does make an awful lot of speeches in which he invokes Wilson and Wilsonian rhetoric and the rights of small countries. But I mean, Wilson was never going to complicate his relationship with Britain. I mean, there's a sort of the realpolitik of all this, but just a little bit more on the kind of thing. It is extraordinary the number of people who come to de Valera in America. It's such a successful tour. So, in March of 1920, he's in New York and he sees this greatest parade of unity where, and I'm just reading from the accounts in the newspapers, Protestants, Indians, and the Scotch march together.

47:02And here's a little bit of it. A band of dark-skinned Hindu men and women, their ranks literally entwined in the booming folds of the stars and stripes and the tricola of Ireland, their proud bearing endorsing emblem, 315 ,000 in India are with Ireland to the last. I've done a lot about this period of time because it is straight after the massacre in Amritsar. There is a movement of rebels in America at this time, Punjabi who are fleeing British rule and British prisons who wash up in San Francisco called the movement. And they managed to find their way to de Valera and say, you are our hero. And in Sikhism, you know, there's nothing, no higher accolade than giving one of these Dalvaars, you know, a sword and they give it to de Valera.

47:45And from that moment on, there begins this very, very important relationship between the Irish nationalists and Indian nationalists, where they are watching everything to the point where, you know, sort of in 1920, you have a mutiny in India, an Irish contingent decide that they're going to mutiny. And the Indians are watching this and go, you know what, they're our brothers. We could do something together. We could learn from this. And every time, and particularly after 1990, you get Irish Republican publications, Young Ireland and so on, saying, you know, this is what they're like, the British.

48:21We've seen it, and now the Indians are seeing it. But like us, the Indians are going to win one day. That was also part of that mission I mentioned to internationalise the Irish question and develop ties and allegiances and affinities in relation to other oppressed people within the empire. And you also, of course, have the endurance of those ties. I mean, Eamon de Valera, decades later, is visiting Prime Minister Nehru. And again, the reiteration of the idea that there is a particular affinity or bond between them. But there's also the scale of the Irish-American community. Two out of every five Irish-born people lived abroad by 1890 as a result of the developments in the 19th century.

48:59Some of them now have very deep pockets, and there is an opportunity to do that. But we also need to acknowledge what was behind the headlines in these marvelously successful marches and speeches, and that was infighting amongst the Irish-American groups. Because de Valera arrives over as the saviour, as the high-profile figure, but there are well-established Irish-American groups who resent his prominence and his determination to try and fashion the Irish-American organisations around himself. So, you know, we do have an awful lot of tensions as well. And Arthur Griffith is looking after the stable at home and he's writing to Irish-Americans saying, you know, would you stop all of this infighting?

49:37You know, you're undermining the President de Valera's visit and so on. So, you know, there are difficulties. And Harry Boland was a Sinn Féin member who travelled with Eamon de Valera. He was like his bodyguard and his butler and his councillor. Oh, he's Aidan Quinn in the movie. I mean, let's just shortcut it. the beautiful Aidan Quinn plays him in the Michael Collins. Harry was a handsome man himself and had been a former athlete. But again, he writes very revealingly in his diary about De Valera and how frustrated he gets with him. Because one of the things that this visit does to De Valera is it increases what is already a considerably sized ego.

50:13Think of the adulation and the fame and the profile that he has. And it does mean that De Valera is not necessarily open to other ideas or other people's views. And Harry Boland also got tired of carrying around all these books that Eamon de Valera was reading because, of course, he retained that sense of the schoolmaster. So, there's an interesting mix there. Dermot, let's take it back now to Dublin and what Michael Collins is up to while Dev is in America. Now, the British have got their intelligences all over Dublin and all over Ireland, the G-men, who are keeping files on all the revolutionaries, on all the potential enemies, as they see it, out in the streets of Dublin.

50:57And Michael Collins is learning from them and beginning to accumulate files himself. And he's beginning to spy on the spies. Tell us about this. Yeah. And I mean, that is a crucial development. That also involves, of course, getting people on the inside over to your side. If you can get some people to break ranks who have access to British intelligence information. In other words, if you have spies in the castle, you will be assisted in that process of developing a serious intelligence network. And the intelligence war, of course, is a very important layer of the Irish War of Independence. The Irish had considerable successes in relation to that, but also setbacks.

51:39Yeah, tell us Bloody Sunday. This is November 1920. You know, there was a determination to try and take out those who were regarded as secret agents. Not all who were shot on Bloody Sunday. Some 14 of them were indeed secret agents. Most of them were. And the logic was to wipe them out before they got to us. It was that brutal. And then there was the reaction to that. That's an extraordinary and unprecedented moment that they're sending out assassins in a coordinated fashion. They've got the addresses of these people, they're knocking on the doors or getting in the back gardens, jumping over walls, going up and shooting them as they're getting up in the morning.

52:15Yeah, and sometimes shooting them in their bed. It was a really brutal and bloody business. Many of those who shot the guns on bloody Sunday morning were also very young. I mean, little children. There's a great book by Tim Coogan I've been reading about, the Twelve Apostles, you know, that they are sent out to create mayhem. That is their sort of credo. And some of them are no more than children. When I grew up in the 1980s, we used to look at Robert Key's television history of Ireland and And because of the time that was made, he was able to interview some of the veterans. And Vinnie Byrne, who was one of the apostles, for example, he was only a teenager.

52:45And he spoke about, as an older man, about plugging these individuals. He spoke about it in a very heroic way. But we know that for some of those involved, it caused them deep trauma. Now, that's no comfort, of course, to those who were killed and their family members. But there was a narrative that developed afterwards that simplified an awful lot of what was involved. But the reaction then to Bloody Sunday, the killings, were revenge killings at a Gaelic Athletic Association matching Croke Park that became known, of course, as Bloody Sunday. Now, in the movie, this is one of the most criticised scenes because it turns it into something on the scale of Amritza, where you have armoured cars entering the football match and opening fire with automatic weapons.

53:31And blocking the exit so you can't get out and firing on people who are peaceably going around their business. Yeah. What actually happened? It was mayhem. And I mean, it was all over very, very quickly. It was revenge. And it was a mixture of those British forces I mentioned, as well as the Royal Irish Constabulary and those who were augmenting them. They were hell-bent on revenge. There was carnage, and it was referred to in contemporary press coverage in those terms. But it was also something that didn't have that degree of orchestration that you might get on screen depictions of it. What are the scale of the casualties at the football match?

54:07There were 14 that were shot dead. And then there were others, obviously, who were very badly injured. Some of those who killed, of course, again, this comes back to the civilian casualties and the toll that it took, who were just there as spectators as a match. They weren't making a political statement. But there were women and children in their number. And I mean, some of those who were involved in the GAA did have Sinn Féin links, but that indiscriminate shooting, which is what it was, that's what it results in. And again, the question that is being raised internationally in the aftermath of this is, what is British government's strategy in Ireland?

54:40Because David Lloyd George's British Prime Minister had famously said, we have murder by the throat. Well, an event like Bloody Sunday did not suggest that they were in control of the Irish situation. So it did increase the pressure, but it was also an indication of how things could go badly wrong for the Republican movement in terms of the toll that it was taking on the civilian population. So there are pressures on both sides as a result of Bloody Sunday. The British authorities were never able to quite completely crush the Irish Republican intelligence effort, but there were limitations to it as well.

55:14And I don't think it's any coincidence that towards the end of 1920, there is reference in the British Foreign Office to the slender links that had been established with Arthur Griffith, who was regarded as one of the more moderate of the Sinn Féin leaders. And clearly, there is a possibility of opening up some kind of dialogue or channels of communication. Such was the scale of the impact of the war by the end of 1920. So tell us how the war begins to boil down to a ceasefire and a truce towards, what, 1920, 1921? There was a very interesting senior British civil servant, Warren Fisher, from the British Treasury, who was charged with the task of reviewing the operations from Dublin Castle.

56:00And he did this in the spring of 1920 and suggested that the approach of Dublin Castle was almost woodenly stupid and devoid of imagination. And what he was suggesting was that too many officials in Dublin Castle did not understand the Irish situation that they were dealing with, that they didn't recognise what was propelling Irish Republican sentiment, and they didn't recognise the nature of the conflict that they were engaged in because they were too blinded, perhaps, by their own snobberies or their own prejudices. Now, that, I think, remains relevant. How do you read the Irish Republican as a broad movement?

56:34Are they all of the same ilk and of the same attitude? Is there a possibility that some of the more moderate voices, that we could open up channels of communication. How long can the IRA last? Does it have access to enough arms? Do we still, as a British government, want to keep deploying British troops? It's estimated the War of Independence was costing the British government £20 million a year. Was that justified in terms of the return? And you also have a British government, you know, was Lloyd George going to listen to the more moderate voices? What were his instincts? All of these factors are swirling around.

57:06Michael Collins, too, and others in the IRA are wondering, whilst they have had some successes, how long can they sustain this? So there's a variety of different elements that are relevant there. And by the end of 1920, there is a sense perhaps a turning point has been reached, but it doesn't develop sufficient momentum in early 1921 because of a fear of being seen to compromise. Well, that's a question we're going to answer in the next episode. Thank you again for just being such a stellar guest. But if you want to listen to that next episode right now, you know what you have to do. EmpirePodUK.com EmpirePodUK.com is where you'll be able to hear it right now if you're a member of the club.

57:46But if you're not, that's okay. We'll see you at the usual time. Till we meet again, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durimple.