"The inborn hate of things English": Ernie O'Malley and the Irish Revolution 1916-1923

Past & Present, May, 1996 by Richard English

Republican soldiership carried with it an expressly antipolitical attitude. Again, Liam Deasy, Deputy Chief of Staff of the I.R.A. in the Civil War, exemplified the trend. Referring to the Dail debate on the 1921 treaty which had followed the end of the Anglo-Irish War, Deasy observed that "Liam Lynch, Florrie O'Donoghue and I had received invitations to the debate and there, day after sad day, we had our first political experience which was unforgettable and most distressing". That "first political experience", notably, came after the War. Politics was held to be suspect:

From the first by-election in 1917 we were never unduly influenced by election

results. Our mission was to continue the Fenian policy, to rouse the

country and to strive for its freedom. In our generation "the voice of the

people" as expressed by the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster was a

spent force and the people were gradually but slowly coming to realize that

nationhood would never be won by talk only. It had to be fought for, no

matter what the cost.(65)

O'Malley himself had "never liked the Parliamentary Party",(66) and he clearly demonstrated a neo-Fenian distaste for politics. He claimed to have shared "the pseudo-military mind of the I.R.A. and its fear of constitutional respectability".(67) He disliked the idea of being a member of the Dail. He admitted that at I.R.A. executive meetings and the like he had "not the faintest ideas on policy or statesmanship".(68) In her recent monograph on Richard Mulcahy, I.R.A. Chief of Staff in the Anglo-Irish War, Maryann Valiulis has argued that:

The leaders of the Volunteers harboured no deep, dark sinister motives

regarding their relationship to politics and politicians. They did, however,

have a keen, if not always accurate, historical memory. In their view,

parliamentary movements had proven themselves to be weak, compromising

and ineffective. The recent history of the Irish Parliamentary Party was

just another vivid example.(69)

More recently, however, Paul flew has persuasively argued that John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party did indeed possess a plausible political strategy.(70) Neo-Fenin distaste for politics offered certain undoubted rewards, but its ultimate consequences were surely (and predictably) damaging. As George Boyce has pointed out, it is important to remember the profound limitations of O'Malley's anti-political approach:

O'Malley freely admitted that he possessed no administrative or

governmental training, no plan of how he and other republicans might use

the independent Irish state to achieve their goals. He declared that he could

never become a TD [Teachta Dala, Dail deputy] again, because of their lack of

"spirituality". But it must be confessed that, while indeed Ireland's TDs do

not strike even the most impartial observer as a spiritual bunch, they are the

stuff of which democratic politics are made. Revolvers and Eng. Lit. were no

preparation for creating a stable Ireland.(71)

Whatever its deficiencies, however, it remained the thinking of many I.R.A. men that -- in Liam Lynch's words -- "the army has to hew the way for politics to follow".(72) As we have seen, O'Malley himself had been strongly influenced by the military gesture of the Easter rebels. The 1916 events had been insufficiently dramatic to produce a national uprising, but they had powerfully changed the direction of figures like O'Malley who were later to build a formidable revolutionary movement. As one recent commentator has observed: