On Saturday, the 18th of June 1921, at approximately 2:45 pm, a cycle patrol of Black and Tans who were stationed in Fiddown and travelling to Clogga approached Sinnott’s Cross where volunteers of the 9th Battalion, Kilkenny Brigade, Irish Republican Army lay waiting in ambush.
One Black and Tan was killed and another wounded in the ensuing engagement, and a much needed rifle was captured. The brave men who lined the ditches here at Sinnott’s Cross on that June day were taking an enormous risk. Poorly trained, in many cases not trained at all, and inadequately armed with shotguns, they were going up against a highly skilled and lavishly armed and supplied enemy who had all the resources of the British Empire at their disposal. Martial law had been declared in County Kilkenny the previous January, and any one of the Volunteers could have been executed on the spot or later hanged if taken prisoner.
The Black and Tans were predominantly English mercenaries recruited from First World War veterans to augment the Royal Irish Constabulary, although twenty per cent of the Tans were Irish born. Contrary to popular opinion, they were not a separate force but were recruited as part of the permanent establishment of the RIC.
Revisionists and apologists for the Royal Irish Constabulary like to imply they were mostly decent men doing their duty and that their reputations were sullied by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. Never forget these traitors were working on behalf of the British government to overthrow a democratically elected Irish government and to hunt down and arrest its elected representatives.
Five years before the Sinnott’s Cross ambush, on Easter Monday, 1916, a courageous band of Irish Volunteers set in motion a train of events they hoped would lead to the full measure of freedom for the thirty-two counties of Ireland.
Their leader, Pádraig Pearse, while inspecting Irish Volunteers at Vinegar Hill in Wexford in the early autumn of 1915, declared:
We, the Volunteers, are formed here not for half of Ireland, not to give the British Garrison control of part of Ireland. No! We are here for the whole of Ireland.
The aims and objectives of the 1916 leadership were set out in a stirring Proclamation, which called for the establishment of a government of national unity based upon the republican principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. It outlined the republican position that Irish constitutional authority resided exclusively within the Irish people. That ‘the unfettered control of Irish destinies’ must be ‘sovereign and indefeasible’. It confirmed the republican tradition of good government being constituted in the interests of the public welfare, guaranteeing ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities’ to all citizens and declaring its resolve ‘to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts.’ It positioned national unity and democracy as core values calling for a ‘National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland, and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women...’ It declared its intention to forge a national unity that would end British divide and rule strategies by remaining determinedly ‘…oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’ The British government executed every man who put his name to that Proclamation.
The overarching goal of Irish republicanism is to break any remaining constitutional link with the United Kingdom and to build a national democracy within an all-Ireland republic. A republic based on political equality and social justice. It aims to replace sectarian identity politics, which were fostered, nurtured, and exploited by the British, with a national civic identity.
Support for the men and women of 1916 was not apparent at first. Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, who at that time commanded the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate, declared the 1916 Rising to be treason against the Irish people. He longed for a ‘brighter day when the grant of full self-government would reveal to Britain the open secret of making Ireland her friend and helpmate, the brightest jewel in her crown of Empire’. His fellow Irish MP John Dillon told the British House of Commons, ‘It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had a majority on your side’.
But things began to change. In December 1918, the Irish people voted overwhelmingly in a 32-county general election for a Sinn Féin manifesto that endorsed the aims and objectives of the 1916 leadership. The manifesto declared that ‘the right of a nation to sovereign independence rests upon immutable natural law and cannot be made the subject of a compromise’.
On the 21st of January 1919, the First Dáil Eireann was established by the MPs elected in that contest, who now referred to themselves as TDs. On that same day, Sean Treacy and Dan Breen were among a group of dynamic and heroic young men who fired the first shots of the Tan War at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary.
There was no formal oath taken at the establishment of Dáil Eireann, but a republican pledge had been signed at a meeting on 7 January by the elected deputies present. It read:
I hereby pledge myself to work for the establishment of an independent Irish republic; that I will accept nothing less than complete separation from England in settlement of Ireland’s claims; and that I will abstain from attending the English Parliament.
On the 20th of August 1919, a formal oath was proposed by Cathal Brugha and seconded by Terence MacSwiney containing the words:
I will support and defend the Irish Republic and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Eireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic…
Field Marshal John French, Britain’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who had always styled himself as an Irishman, described the proceedings as ‘a ludicrous farce’.
The Irish Independent newspaper did not publish the Dáil’s declaration of independence and declared their belief that continued association with Britain was in Ireland’s best interests.
The Irish Times viewed the events in the Mansion House as both ‘futile and unreal’ and a ‘grave warning to the Irish people’. As for the TDs of the First Dáil, the Times declared that ‘the more quickly Ireland becomes convinced of the folly which elected them the sooner her sanity will return’.
Dáil Eireann was promptly banned by the British government and declared an illegal assembly. From that day to this Britain has never permitted a 32-County national parliament to exist in Ireland.
Britain’s military response to Soloheadbeg began two days later when they declared South Tipperary a Special Military Area under the Defence of the Realm Act. Martial law would rapidly spread to other parts of Ireland.
Britain’s constitutional response to undermine and subvert Dáil Eireann was the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which partitioned Ireland and formally legislated for the fact that the British government rejected the concept of majority all Ireland opinion. Britain made it clear that the principle of consent did not exist for the Irish nation as a whole, and the only principle they would recognise was the Unionist veto in the Six Counties. The 1918 General Election was the last time the British government would permit the national will to be tested in an Ireland comprising one political unit.
Criminalising the Irish struggle for independence has always played a major role in British policy on Ireland. That is why police primacy is so important and why the Royal Irish Constabulary was augmented by Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and not the British army where possible.
The Royal Irish Constabulary was organised as an All-Ireland police force whose jurisdiction covered the 32 counties. Its members were almost exclusively Irish born, and the vast majority were Catholic, with many native Irish speakers among them. Despite this Irish veneer, they were, in fact, an all-British police force. They stood in British paid and British armed opposition to the democratic principles of the 1916 Proclamation, the democratic outcome of the 1918 General Election, the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, and that Dáil’s Declaration of Independence. They opposed, with British arms, every democratic and republican principle we cherish. Principals for which the IRA volunteers at Sinnott’s Cross risked life, limb, and liberty to uphold. Principals republicans today are not about to abandon.
The police are a crucial cornerstone of state power in any society. The issue of policing has long been at the heart of Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy - a strategy designed to legitimise the British state in Ireland and keep the British gun at the heart of Irish politics. The Brits know that if they can’t police us, they can’t govern us.
Contrary to the belief of those who have come to love foreign law in the northeast of our country, it is impossible to de-politicise British policing in Ireland. Every facet of a Crown constable, from the English gun swinging on his hip to the King’s schilling jingling in his pocket – is a political statement. A peeler’s provenance is irrelevant. Their nationality or religion a distraction. The RIC, at 80% Catholic, was the backbone of British rule in Ireland.
At the start of 1919, IRA leaders writing in the Volunteer’s newsletter, An tÓglach, broadly outlined a strategy they would follow:
All those engaged in carrying on the English administration in this country must be made to realise that it is not safe for them to try to ‘carry on’ in opposition to the Irish Republican Government and the declared wishes of the people. In particular, any policeman, soldier, judge, warder, or official, from the English Lord Lieutenant downwards, must be made to understand that it is not wise for him to distinguish himself by undue ‘zeal’ in the service of England in Ireland, nor in his opposition to the Irish Republic.
There is a popular narrative, bolstered by the ubiquitous rebel songs, that the Irish people fought bravely for their freedom over the course of many centuries. Tom Barry, the legendary IRA leader of the West Cork Brigade during the Tan War, disputed this:
I have always attacked people boasting about it, that we had a seven-hundred-year struggle for independence. We had not. We had every sixty or seventy or a hundred or a hundred and twenty years an effort made by a small handful of men. And these handful of men, the real patriots … were a very, very, limited crowd. They weren’t more than twenty thousand of our nation.
The brave Volunteers who fought at Sinnott’s Cross represented that handful of men who were prepared to risk life and liberty to achieve the full freedom and independence of Ireland. Not just talk the talk but walk the walk. We honour them today and pray the cause they fought for will one day be fully realised in the achievement of a 32-county Irish republic.
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| John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank. |
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