Loyalism in Development

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

In 1919, the Irish Volunteers were officially renamed the Irish Republican Army – quickly to be known as simply, the IRA. According to the IRA and republican ideology, British forces in Ireland, which included the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), were now viewed as an occupying force, a force that the IRA intended to wage war against. Michael Collins, who after surviving the Easter Rising became a military commander within the Irish Volunteers, was made the IRA’s Adjutant General and Director of Organization of Intelligence, essentially giving him the position of commander. With this high-ranking position, and his post as the Minister of Finance in Dáil Éireann, Collins became the principle strategist and financier for the IRA. The first shots of the War of Independence were fired on 21 January 1919, the same day as the opening of the new Irish assembly in Dublin. On that day, an IRA unit shot dead two RIC constables, who were escorting a cart of explosives near a quarry in County Tipperary. The attack provided Collins with the model for the IRA’s ‘Flying Columns’ which were used to antagonize the RIC and British auxiliary forces throughout the war. In the eighteen-month long war over 500 soldiers and policemen and over 700 IRA members were killed. By the spring of 1921, both sides recognized that victory was unlikely and that the high losses and horrific violence had to end.

7