"Unofficial" British Reprisals and IRA Provocations, 1919–20: The Cases of Three Cork Towns

Writing in 1925, General Sir Neville Macready, the commander-in-chief of the British army in Ireland during the War of Independence, made the egregiously inaccurate claim that between 1919 and 1921 "on four occasions only did the troops indulge in unauthorized retaliation." He acknowledged four "unofficial" military reprisals in 1920—at Fermoy, Queenstown, and Mallow in County Cork and at Ennistymon in County Clare. He then proceeded to minimize the significance of these four cases and to praise what he considered the remarkably high degree of discipline displayed by British soldiers in Ireland in the face of extreme IRA provocation. "As one who for many years had been intimately connected with the administration of discipline in the army," he enthused, "I can say that I was often astonished at the restraint exercised by all ranks, a restraint which I believe no other troops in the world could or would have practised."¹ Macready conceded that members of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC and some of the several thousand English recruits added to the Irish police force beginning in mid-1920 were much more prone to serious indiscipline and unauthorized reprisals, but his solution was to impose martial law (instituted in December 1920) and to have the British government itself assume the responsibility for controlled and authorized retaliatory actions by its armed agents,² as it finally did under military auspices at the very beginning of 1921, though without the benefits that he predicted for these "official reprisals."

This article seeks to demonstrate how tone-deaf army and RIC leaders and, still more, their British political masters were to the impact of military and police retaliation on ordinary Irish nationalists by examining the cases of three Cork towns that experienced severe British reprisals in 1919 and 1920—Fermoy, Mallow, and Bandon.³ (The notorious burning of Cork city on the night of 11–12 December 1920, and the torrent of violence by the IRA and crown forces against persons and property that preceded it, have been the subjects of a recent book.)⁴ This article also aims to amplify in full human detail several major arguments that other scholars have made about the double-sided violence of the Irish Revolution. Specific instances of the much-emphasized cyclical character or tit-for-tat nature of that violence are explored.⁵ In particular, this article connects IRA provocations with British retaliations and raises the question of whether the IRA instigators of the provocations actually counted on grossly excessive retaliations in order to advance their goal of political mobilization and consolidation at the extremist end of the nationalist spectrum.⁶ A related purpose of this essay is to buttress through some thick description a central point made by Michael Hopkinson (among others) that "nothing in the conflict had remotely the same effect on domestic and international opinion as did [British] reprisals."⁷ From this survey of the experiences of three Cork towns in 1919 and 1920 it becomes clear that initial revulsion or hesitancy among many nationalists over acts of brutal IRA violence tended to be overwhelmed or diffused by the excesses of the British responses, both in specific cases and in their totality. Lastly, this article shows by means of an approach different from the methods of Peter Hart's seminal work that towns and towns-people were at the center of the violence of the Irish Revolution, and not only in the county where by far the greatest violence occurred.⁸ Towns in Cork and elsewhere often became the scenes of extreme violence partly because the proximity of opposing forces within their precincts or orbits intensified the polarization and radicalization that provided such fertile soil for rival acts of murder and arson.⁹ In addition, the growing concentration of the forces of the crown in urban bases raised the level and widened the scope of state violence in numerous towns. Sitting cheek by jowl in urban space, Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and unionists, sympathetic or neutral civilians and active insurgents were easily...