Kilmichael Ambush Commemoration 🪶 24 November 2024

John Crawley 🎤 I would like to thank the Kilmichael commemoration committee for inviting me to speak today

I consider it a great personal honour to be given the opportunity to join with all of you in paying homage to the valiant men who fought and died here for the complete freedom of Ireland.

Sunday, the 28th of November 1920, would cap a tumultuous month in the struggle to achieve Irish independence. On Monday, the 1st of November, 18-year-old IRA volunteer Kevin Barry was hanged in Mountjoy prison. On Sunday, the 21st of November, IRA units in Dublin killed 15 members of the British Crown Forces in a highly coordinated operation, many of them intelligence officers. Later that day, British soldiers and constabulary retaliated by killing 14 civilians and wounding at least 60 others at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park. That same evening members of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary would torture and murder IRA commanders Peadar Clancy and Dick McKee in Dublin Castle. They also shot to death Conor Clune, who was not involved with the republican movement.

The Auxiliary Division of the RIC was an elite mobile counter-insurgency strike force. Composed exclusively of former commissioned officers from the British armed forces who had fought on one or more fronts during the Great War, they were a qualitative step up from the ordinary Black and Tans who had served primarily as enlisted men.

The Auxiliaries numbered no more than 2,300 men throughout Ireland during the conflict. 150 of them had been based at Macroom Castle since August 1920. Previous to this, they had been causing havoc in the Leinster area.

About a fifth of the Auxiliaries had been awarded medals during the First World War, including three Victoria Crosses. Intelligent, brave, and ruthless, they would as soon have killed an Irishman as stepped on a bug. And here is a critical point to remember: until the late afternoon of 28 November 1920, the Auxies, as they came to be known, hadn't suffered a single casualty while raiding and patrolling the countryside.

The Auxies were only sent to where the conflict was hottest for the Crown. And no place in 1920 was hotter than County Cork. Here in West Cork, the true nature of the conflict was fought at its starkest. Here, it was a war between an Irish army and the British armed forces. This area was a propaganda nightmare for a British government determined to portray the conflict as a criminal campaign of murder carried out by faceless cowards.

On that fateful Sunday, 18 men of No.2 Platoon, 'C' Company of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary based in Macroom drove into a well-prepared ambush position at this spot. They were seated in 2 Crossley-Tenders, travelling at approximately 40 miles per hour and about 50 yards apart.

Waiting for them were 36 IRA volunteers from the Third West Cork Brigade led by Tom Barry. Only two of the volunteers had previously seen action, and most had never fired more than four shots at a training camp.

Revisionists and apologists for the Royal Irish Constabulary like to imply they mainly were decent men doing their duty and that their reputations were sullied by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. Never forget these traitors were armed and paid by the British government to overthrow a democratically elected Irish government and to hunt down and arrest its elected representatives. Acting as the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle, they were the backbone of British rule in Ireland.

Criminalising the Irish struggle for independence has always played a major role in British policy on Ireland. That is why police primacy remains important to them to this day and why, in 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary was augmented by paramilitary police forces like the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and not the British army wherever possible.

Four years before the Kilmichael ambush, on Easter Monday, 1916, a courageous band of 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 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...' The British government executed every man who put his name to that Proclamation.

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 UK general election encompassing all 32 counties of Ireland for a republican manifesto that endorsed the aims and objectives of the 1916 Proclamation. 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 Teachtaí Dála or TDs. 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 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 consent principle 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.

Since then a narrative has taken hold, and has been powerfully reinforced of late, that the struggle for Irish freedom is fundamentally about ending partition. If our goal as Republicans is simply to end partition, what was our goal before partition? There was no partition in 1916 when Pearse, Clarke, and Connolly were placed before British firing squads. The boys of Kilmichael were not fighting to end partition. Britain's Government of Ireland Act would not receive Royal assent until a month after the Kilmichael ambush in December 1920, and partition would not come into force for another two years. Partition was not an issue for these men as they lay waiting in their ambush positions. Neither was it an issue for the Auxiliaries, who were an all-Ireland police force determined to keep Ireland united under Crown jurisdiction.

What were Wolfe Tone and the 27 other Protestant founding fathers of Irish republicanism determined to achieve when they formed the United Irishmen in 1791? What did they mean by a united Ireland? There was no partition in 1791. Their objective, of course, was to break the connection with England and to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide.

That objective was echoed over a century later by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation, who declared their determination 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 signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should never be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.

In contrast, those who support the two nations' Shared Island' concept are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. A shared island means we share in Britain's analysis of the nature of the conflict as a domestic dispute between sectarian factions. According to this analysis, to achieve permanent peace, we must amicably share Ireland with 'the other' nation in our country. That other nation in the Six Counties that is represented by the British Crown and the Crown forces. Some nationalists argue that by welcoming British royalty on Irish soil, they are reaching out to unionists as a gesture of reconciliation. This ignores the fact that the primary reason the Crown means so much to unionists is because it symbolises the twin pillars of plantation Protestantism, confiscation, and sectarian supremacy. Why would anyone claiming to be an Irish republican attempt to reconcile an Irish citizen with that? The Irish Republican Army did not risk life, limb, and liberty to share this island with others but to unite our country for all.

While their claim to be British is, for many unionists, heartfelt and sincere, so too for many is their anti-Catholicism. That's why their British identity has often proven to be conditional upon England maintaining their sectarian supremacy. The Orange Order was set up in 1795 to support 'the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy.'

For a Republican, reaching out to unionists does not mean reaching out to them as foreigners who happen to live here. Foreigners are born in another country. The vast majority of Ulster unionists were born in Ireland and live their entire lives here. They must not be treated as the civil garrison of an alien state. That is not pluralism; that is submitting to the social and political modelling of colonial conquest. Robert Emmet did not request his epitaph be withheld until his country had taken its place as two nations among the nations of the earth.

The British and their allies in Ireland hoped that the referenda on the Good Friday Agreement in May 1998 would decisively undermine the legitimacy of the republican position by trumping the result of the 1918 election, which led to the formation of the First Dáil Eireann. What many forget is that these referenda took place in different jurisdictions, voting on separate questions. The North voted on the all-party agreement, while the South voted on amending Articles 2 and 3 of their constitution. Britain's Northern Secretary Mo Mowlam made it clear that if any dispute arose, only the vote in the North of Ireland would count with the British.

Many republicans were critical of the campaign to demote Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution from a territorial claim to a notional aspiration. The Brits and the Unionists protested that the existence of Articles 2 and 3 were the real impediments to peace and stability in Ireland, not partition. Rollover nationalists accepted that these articles were archaic and aggressive and needed to be diluted.

Republicans recognised the strategic mistake in diminishing these constitutional provisions and placing London's claim to jurisdiction in the north of our country on a higher moral plane than Dublin’s. As a former member of the IRA, I, along with many others, disagreed profoundly with those who scorned Articles 2 and 3 as little more than political posturing by Éamon De Valera. They argued these Articles could be effectively discarded as they had never been of any practical use to an IRA volunteer on hunger strike or on active service in the North.

Many of us saw beyond the shallow rationalisations for weakening the Irish State's claim to Ireland. We believed that Articles 2 and 3, in their original format, were an attempt to address the injustice of partition by declaring that Ireland is one nation. Ireland had been treated as one nation by England for hundreds of years. Diluting Dublin's claim to the six north-eastern counties of our country gives a veneer of democratic legitimacy to partition. It confirms that Dublin has partnered with London in declining to acknowledge Ireland as one democratic unit and has conceded that fact in an international agreement. It was another of the many steps designed by the Brits to draw Republicans deeper into a constitutional funnel from which they could never again turn around and get out of.

It is a credit to the negotiating skills of the British government, and the political clumsiness of the so-called pan-nationalist front that weakening the Irish territorial claim to Ireland was the only binding constitutional change required by the Good Friday Agreement.

Under the present political dispensation, the future of the Northern state rests securely in a political and legal framework of terms and conditions comprehensively safeguarded within an intricate web of constitutional constraints controlled exclusively by the British government. No Irish citizen, elected or otherwise, can call an Irish unity poll in Ireland. That decision lies firmly in the hands of the North's Secretary of State, an English politician belonging to a political party that doesn't organise in Ireland and who personally hasn't received a single vote in Ireland; so much for the unfettered control of Irish destinies being sovereign and indefeasible.

The British have taken great pains to ensure that ending partition and uniting Ireland is not the same thing. Ireland cannot and will not be united under the auspices of the Good Friday Agreement because the sectarian dynamic and conflicting national allegiances are baked into it.

The GFA states that the parties to the agreement:

…recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland.

In a nutshell, an Irish citizen born in any of the six north-eastern counties in a future non-partitioned Ireland can be considered a British national. So much for being 'oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.'

The British government has a long tradition of shaping Irish democracy in their interests and co-opting the political classes that emerge. They have displayed a remarkable capacity to channel Irish political trajectories in a particular direction, harness Irish leaderships to drive the strategy and make the Irish believe it was their own idea. James Connolly called it 'ruling by fooling.'

Ending the partition of the country while sustaining the partition of our people, giving it constitutional legitimacy, and imprinting that division with a democratic mandate is a dream come true for the Brits. It makes us willing accomplices in our national discord. It guarantees that the political malignancy through which Britain historically controlled and manipulated Ireland will endure in this 'New' Ireland predicated on all the old divisions.

How have so many nationalists been lured into swallowing the narrative that the British government is neutral in Ireland? That they are patiently awaiting the day that intrinsic character faults in the Irish people can be resolved so that London can benignly hand Ireland back to the Irish when it is safe for the Irish to do so.

The British state is, at heart a sectarian state. It was England that injected the sectarian dynamic into Irish politics by declaring a Protestant kingdom in which no Catholic could be head of state. It made Protestantism the test for loyalty and patronage for centuries. In May of last year, Britain's King Charles, head of the only monarchy in Europe still conducting a religious coronation, took three oaths - the Scottish oath to uphold the Presbyterian church in Scotland; the Accession Declaration oath to be a faithful Protestant; and the coronation oath, which includes promising to uphold the rights and privileges of the Church of England.

The Brits are in no position to lecture the Irish on the constitutional model of a united Ireland based on liberty, equality, and non-sectarianism. They are primarily and overwhelmingly responsible for political violence in this country as a result of their divide and rule strategies. Had England respected a genuine consent principle in any meaningful way at any time in our history, the Irishmen who fought and died here at Kilmichael would never have picked up the gun.

How did the narrative that the onus is on nationalists to persuade unionists to end partition gain such traction? Unionists did not partition Ireland - England did. Nor can unionists initiate the mechanisms to end partition; that is a decision exclusively for the British government. Of course, it suits the Brits to place all the blame for the national divisions they planted and sustained on Irish shoulders.

How has the British counter-insurgency machine so thoroughly changed the narrative and co-opted so many Irish nationalists to its policy of validating and perpetuating the civic disunion of Irishmen and women in the deferred hope of achieving territorial unity in some vague and distant future determined exclusively by the British government?

Unionists are pro-British for deep historical reasons that cannot be glibly dismissed, but they are not the British presence and must not be made so. The British presence is the presence of Britain's jurisdictional claim to Ireland and the civil and military apparatus that gives that effect.

Ulster unionists vow they will not be forced into a united Ireland. Yet, they lived in a united Ireland for hundreds of years. A united Ireland they were not forced into, but their ancestors forced themselves upon during the plantation of Ulster. An Ireland united in the sense that until the early 20th century, England treated our country as one political unit. Unionists never had an issue with a united Ireland per se. The Orange Order is an all-Ireland institution. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches are all-Ireland ministries. And, of course, the Church of Ireland is not the Church of Northern Ireland. Their real objection is becoming subject to the majority decision-making of a national electorate that contains a Catholic majority. The sectarian bedrock at the heart of unionist objections to even the most benign and insipid form of Irish self-government was summed up by their slogan 'Home Rule is Rome Rule'. A key component of unionist dogma is that they inhabit a unique and entitled position in Irish politics. A national democracy rooted in non-sectarianism and civic equality holds no allure for this mindset. That is not a valid justification for partitioning our country.

Britain's claim to be in Ireland to protect the democratic wishes of Ulster unionism is a feeble alibi. England's conquest of Ireland began centuries before the Ulster plantations. There was no Union, and there were no unionists when England's sword first cut its genocidal swathe through Ireland. Britain won no argument in Ireland. It achieved no legitimate mandate for its presence. In the words of Roger Casement, 'Conquest has no title.'

Just as unionists were awarded a veto on Irish unity in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act before the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks even began, there is a campaign to grant unionism a veto over the identity and symbols of a non-partitioned Ireland before it is even legislated for. The Plantation of Ulster was an act of ethnic cleansing intended to change the national character of Ireland. Some hope to use the descendants of these planters as allies in expanding that agenda by sabotaging the ethos and symbols of an All-Ireland polity in order to downplay and degrade any concept of civic unity based on republican principles.

It is increasingly suggested that the 26 Counties should re-join the British Commonwealth as a gesture of reconciliation toward unionists. That is a dangerous revisionist trap because London will portray this to the world as the Irish people acknowledging that there is, and has been for centuries, an essential Britishness about Ireland and those who struggled against it were on the wrong side of history. Far from breaking the connection with England, there are powerful and influential forces attempting to deconstruct the concept of Irish nationhood and lure the whole of Ireland more fully into a British orbit. In March of last year, Lord David Frost, a former British diplomat and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office, told a gathering in Lisbon that 'In time the Irish will be part of our British future'.

Republicans who remain loyal to the aims and objectives of the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 and ratified by the First Dáil in 1919 must be critical of the fundamental political premise fuelling the Good Friday Agreement. Those who extol the concept of a dis-united Ireland rooted in British/Irish identity politics are undermining republican principles by striving to ensure that differences that would become incidental in a genuine Republic remain fundamental in their 'Shared Island'.

Republicans are often asked, 'What's the alternative'? The alternative to the two nations Shared Island in the one nation Republic. The alternative to embracing differences in national allegiances for the sake of peace is to end those differences for the sake of peace.

Abraham Lincoln put this best while struggling to overcome divisions within his own Republic when he said:

…a house divided against itself cannot stand…I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

It has always been the republican position, and remains so, that crucial to beginning a genuine process of national reconciliation is ending British jurisdiction in Ireland; this includes Britain's entitlement to act on behalf of Ulster unionists in a future 32-County state.

Britain was awarded no right to represent Ulster unionists in the three Ulster counties incorporated into the Free State in 1922. Many of these unionists in Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal had signed the Ulster Covenant and were as loyal to the Crown in their day as their brethren a mile up the road in Fermanagh or Tyrone are today. Many still attend Orange Lodges and Orange marches. Yet, they are now equal and valued citizens of the Irish State and, since the Ireland Act 1949, have no claim to British citizenship or a British passport.

While no one suggests a British government withdrawal from the Six Counties would lead to a sudden unionist reappraisal of their identity, the fact remains the Union is existential to unionism. Within ten years of a British military and police evacuation from the 26 Counties, a unionist party no longer existed in the Free State. You cannot be a unionist without the Union, but, unfortunately, you can be a nationalist without the Republic.

Unionist fears about the potential for a 32 County state emerging from the Good Friday Agreement confirms for many nationalists that the political tide has to be moving in the right direction, so why, they ask, would Republicans criticise this process, and why else would unionists so strenuously object? Unfortunately, the sectarian zero-sum game that passes for politics in the Six Counties ensures that for many nationalists, the alarm raised among unionists obscures the hidden agenda of England's deep state strategists who have their own reasons for implementing and sustaining partition and their preconditions for ending it, that transcend the supremacist agenda of many loyalists.

Powerful forces in the British military, intelligence, and security establishments have no desire to undermine the political and territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. Ireland is an important strategic landmass on Britain's western flank. The North of Ireland affords rapid access to areas of the North Atlantic vital to British defence interests. Ireland has been rated as a place of vital strategic importance to Britain since Elizabethan times. It remains so.

Anyone who believes the British government will simply leave Ireland when the unionist population dwindles to an unsustainable level and close the door behind them is mistaken. The Brits play the long game and are working now, as they have been working for years, to shape the strategic environment and set the conditions for the constitutional future of an Ireland that will work to their benefit. London can live with a non-partitioned Ireland within the British Commonwealth and NATO. It will not tolerate a sovereign Republic immune to its influence. At the heart of the so-called Irish peace process lies the hidden agenda of a British war process.

In February of this year, Policy Exchange, the most influential Think-Tank in the United Kingdom, published a document called Closing the Back Door. This document, which is forwarded by two former UK Secretaries of State for Defence, states that:

…the UK quite obviously has a strategic interest in Northern Ireland by territorial definition, and per the contours of geopolitical rivalry…the interests of the island of Great Britain and the territories of Northern Ireland are indissolubly intertwined…Northern Irish and British strategic interests are one and the same…Northern Ireland is therefore the key to addressing the UK's security concerns…preserving the strategic unity of the Union is an inextricable component of British grand strategy. In doing so, the strategic indivisibility of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – which, despite subsequent interpretations, the Downing Street Declaration did enshrine – must be rediscovered.

The Brits see what they have always seen in Ireland. A geographical, material, and human resource to be exploited and one that must never be encouraged to become a cohesive democracy that could conceivably develop policies for the benefit of the Irish people that might potentially conflict with Britain's strategic interests.

A non-partitioned Ireland rooted in British/Irish identity politics can be neither united nor a genuine republic. That is why the British government is all over this. It is their best opportunity to retain maximum influence with a minimum footprint when the demographics eventually prove incontestable. No one has been preparing more diligently to shape the strategic architecture of a future 'Shared Island' than the British government.

When Tom Barry was asked why the people of West Cork supported the IRA, he replied, 'Because they knew we were right'. But he knew not everyone was with them. The evolution from colonial status to that of a sovereign republic is never straightforward and often tarnished by elements of civil war. There is always a percentage of the population that remains loyal to the old order and wants no part of independence. The Cork IRA executed 78 informers during the Tan War, and you can be sure far more than that escaped justice. There was no shortage of unionists in County Cork, both Catholic and Protestant.

The American loyalists who supported the British during the American Revolution didn't want an American republic. The Afrikaners didn't want a democratic South Africa. Zionist settlers don't want a Palestinian state. The French Pied Noir settlers didn't want an independent Algeria. The Southern Confederacy didn't want to let go of slavery. Ulster unionists don't want a national republic. Ideologies and political cultures based on imperial conquest and colonial expropriation are, in the words of James Connolly, 'crimes against human progress'. Sometimes, for humanity to progress, certain belief systems must be jettisoned and leave the historical stage. Unfortunately, under the present political dispensation, it is Irish republicanism that is being jettisoned and dumped on the trash heap of history.

A relentless campaign is being waged to encourage the Irish people to accept and legitimise a British political component as an essential ingredient of a 32 County Ireland. To inculcate in the Irish people a herd immunity against republican principles and replace it with the concept of an 'Agreed Ireland' where the differences carefully fostered by an alien government are preconditioned into future constitutional arrangements, and the Irish agree to it.

Tom Barry and his men did not join the Irish ‘Equality' Army or the Irish ‘Nationalist' Army, not the 'Agreed Ireland' Army, the 'New' Ireland Army, or the 'Shared Island' Army, but the Republican Army. They believed and had every right to expect that the term 'Republican' was not merely a notional aspiration but a resolute declaration of intent.

The courageous men who fought and died here, and those Cork men who fought at Toureen, Crossbarry, Rosscarbery, and countless other engagements against British Crown forces, were not fighting for Cork alone but for all of Ireland. It is just as important for us to remember that, and it is for us to remember them.

We remember with pride Volunteers Mick McCarthy, Jim O'Sullivan, and Pat Deasy, who were killed in action here as the result of a treacherous false surrender ruse by the Auxiliaries.

We remember the IRA volunteers from all the Cork Brigade areas who played a pivotal role in the struggle for freedom. The women of Cumann na mBan and the brave republican people of West Cork and beyond, without whose support the Irish Republican Army wouldn't have stood a chance.

Long live the memory of the Boys of Kilmichael! Long live the memory of what they fought for!

Up the Republic!

John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank.