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  David Fitzpatrick paints a different picture. Writing about the sack of Balbriggan in September 1920, he condemns the reprisals of the RIC, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries when they went on a rampage, destroying properties of suspected Sinn Féin supporters in the town:

  Episodes such as Balbriggan undermined Britain’s credentials as a liberal democracy, negated the gains from decades of reconciliation and reform, persuaded nationalist doubters and many former unionists that Irish terrorists were less arbitrary and malign than the forces of the Crown, and conferred moral legitimacy on the emerging republic.93

  One wonders who Fitzpatrick had in mind when including ‘many former unionists who post-Balbriggan thought Irish terrorists were less arbitrary and malign than forces of the Crown’? The IRA had killed 66 members of the RIC by September 1920, wounded 79 and destroyed 351 barracks and 33 courthouses. The behaviour of the Crown forces between 1919 and 1921 was perhaps often ‘arbitrary and malign’, but it was the IRA who took the guerrilla war to the RIC and the British response of maintaining law and order through the RIC, the RIC Special Reserve sent to bolster the regular RIC, and the demonised Auxiliaries became inevitable. Attempts at ‘reconciliation and reform’ had not brought peaceful negotiations post-1918 for a settlement. The RIC, their families and friends became the main target. The subject is controversial, but Fitzpatrick’s interpretation is perhaps questionable. Southern unionists were under siege by the IRA in many parts of the country by September 1920 and most would have wished for the suppression of the IRA. The evidence for their malign treatment is to be found in the files of the Irish Grants Committee and, to some extent, in the Shaw-Renton awards.

  Some records of the Shaw-Renton Commission have been destroyed, though there is a possibility that there are copies in the National Archives in London.94 However, a substantial number of awards were regularly published in Iris Oifigiúl, the Dublin Gazette. Many were very small. But it seems that the large amounts were paid for by Westminster covering the burning of Cork, the sacking of Balbriggan and Granard.95

  The IGC in London in its second report recommended that further and larger compensation should be given to people who had fled from Ireland and did not wish to return, even though peace had been restored with the ending of the civil war. There was ‘a need for more permanent compensation, which had not been satisfactorily provided for under the Free State’s Damage to Property Act, the Shaw Commission and land act of 1923’.96

  Both lobbying groups, the ICCA and SILRA, brought the British Government’s attention to the inadequate compensation paid to loyalists by the Free State. They forcibly argued that most, if not all claims were substantially reduced by the Shaw-Renton Commission. Carson gave details to the House of Lords of some hardship cases and Northumberland, the chairman of SILRA, informed Amery, the Colonial Secretary, that much more had to be done. Amery was initially reluctant to act but he was eventually prevailed on by Salisbury and appointed a committee to look into what might be done. The chairman, Lord Dunedin, recommended that loyalists who had supported the British in the period before the Truce ‘should be compensated for the hardships they had endured “beyond the inevitable dislocation” resulting from the change of regime’.97

  Thus the British Government eventually accepted responsibility for the losses suffered by its supporters who had received inadequate compensation from the fledgling Irish State. The Irish Grants Committee was formed in 1925 and first met in January 1926 under the chairmanship of Wood-Renton, who had gained experience of Irish cases in Dublin when acting as chairman of the Compensation (Ireland) Commission. Sir James Brunyate was appointed to the committee: he had been secretary of the Finance department in the Indian Civil Service. The third member was Sir John Oakley, ‘a past President of the Surveyor’s Institute’.98 Major Reid Jamieson acted as secretary. He wrote thorough reports and recommendations for the attention of the committee, being fair and often demanding more information from referees and back-up material from claimants where detailed accounts were required.

  Jamieson’s reports were generally supportive and generous in their recommendations for claimants but he was quick to dismiss excessive claims not supported by accounts or reports from valuers. In cases where there was contention or doubt, the claimant was invited to an oral hearing, generally with his or her solicitor. Major White of SILRA was often called on to comment on claims that had been sent to him before the IGC started and his network of Irish informants in Ireland proved useful. Details of any awards made by decrees in Irish courts or by the Shaw Commission had to be given, and often claimants asked for compensation for inadequate awards made by the Irish courts, the Shaw Commission and indeed the Land Commission. Land sold in Co. Tipperary at a loss to the Land Commission was often referred to the IGC.

  Dunedin had made it clear in his report that ‘all claimants under the new committee must be able to prove that they had first explored all possible avenues under the 1923 act’.99 In many cases, claimants from Co. Tipperary had looked to the Shaw Commission for compensation. However, they became aware that the new Damage to Property Act gave less compensation than was available in Ireland under the old acts before the Treaty and that the IGC tended to look sympathetically at consequential losses and looting where the claimant could not prove that the culprits were Irregulars. Furthermore, ex gratia payments were not permitted by the Shaw Commission, unlike the IGC, which paid a number of these to Tipperary claimants.

  Initially, compensation was limited in full for awards up to £250 and 50 per cent on awards ‘between £250 and £1,000 and 30 per cent on awards above £1,000.’100 This was ‘the policy taken up by Lord Sumner’s commission for sufferers from air-raids during the Great War.’101 SILRA protested, pointing out that ‘much of the suffering had been caused by the British Government’s swift withdrawal of the army and police, “leaving the countryside at the mercy of rough bands”.’102 Eventually, following further lobbying by some peers and MPs, including Howard-Bury, an MP from Tullamore, the government gave way in February 1927, fearful of defeat. Amery announced that payment in full would be made on all recommendations. A limit of £400,000 was agreed in December 1927. When the IGC finished its work in March 1930, its awards amounted to £2,188,549. However, in the words of Sir William Davison, Conservative MP for Kensington, it was a matter of ‘a debt of honour … recognised by successive governments of all parties in this country for years past.’103

  The IGC processed 4,032 cases between October 1926 and November 1930. Most came from Cork, Tipperary and Clare. Of these, 2,237 were compensated, 895 were deemed outside its scope, 840 were given an oral hearing, and 900 were refused. A wide range of cases was considered, including claims from landlords, shopkeepers, farmers, disbanded RIC men and their dependents, ex-servicemen, shopkeepers, business people and some Church of Ireland clergy. In many cases money was paid in advance. It is not possible to know how many of those compensated stayed on in the Free State to build new lives but, from reading a cross-section of some 400 files, it seems a quite small minority left. The main outflow occurred in the spring and summer of 1922, as mentioned, when the Irish Distress Committee came into being to help Irish refugees and other victims of violence and intimidation.

  In the following chapter, a cross-section of IGC claims will be looked at throughout the 26 counties, with particular emphasis on County Tipperary, during this period of turmoil, intimidation and often brutal attacks on the Protestant community.

  2

  Personal Stories: 1919 to 1923

  There is a growing awareness among Irish historians that many Protestants left the 26 counties as involuntary emigrants between 1920 and 1923. My estimate is some 40,000, as detailed in the previous chapter. The files of the Irish Grants Committee, the applications for financial assistance sent to SILRA and cases submitted to the Shaw-Renton Commission in Dublin in the 1920s show the real terror expressed by many Protestants. These reports detail widespread attacks on southern Protestants. While targeting sou
thern Protestants was never government policy, claims by the IRA that they were non-sectarian appear to have been a fig leaf to cover complacency. Peter Hart has suggested that there was a sectarian thread running through the harassment and murders of Protestants. Had the IRA been non-sectarian, might it not have dealt with their sectarian-motivated members who killed thirteen Protestants in the Bandon valley in 1922? Might not the Free State have been more generous to those Protestants who applied for compensation to the Shaw-Renton Commission, as highlighted in the previous chapter by Terence Dooley? Indeed it is likely that the weakening of the unionists in the south was a motivating factor for advanced nationalist Catholics during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we have seen, these centuries saw a major exodus of Protestants, who increasingly felt homeless. Today they form a tiny, quiet minority: a former people.

  In the context of the period between 1916 and 1924, Irish Protestants, with few exceptions, were seen by many nationalists to be the embodiment of the English in Ireland. They were its supporters, who had played a major part in building the Empire with their Catholic fellow countrymen, staunch supporters of the Crown, enemies of romantic Catholic nationalism, and upholders of the Reformation with its emphasis on individualism.

  Irish Protestants were subjected to widespread attacks and persecution, from Cork to Sligo to Monaghan, led by local IRA battalions and commandants. It is clear that these Protestants, who saw themselves as Irish – as Irish as Theobald Tone and Davis and Mitchel – had come to be regarded as a foreign race to be harassed, boycotted and even murdered in many parts of the country. Charles Townshend argues when writing about the republicanism espoused by such national icons as Irish Protestants Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis:

  Though the rhetoric of Irish republicanism was (and remains), secular, yet the actual behaviour of the IRA in 1919–23 was fairly nakedly sectarian … Thus the War of Independence was to some extent a religious civil war … Even if we do not go the full distance with Peter Hart in characterising the IRA campaign as systematic persecution and massacre, it is clear that the automatic identification of Protestants as actual or potential enemies of the republic had repeatedly deadly results … It was inevitable that the revolution would generate a settlement in which, in Fitzpatrick’s words, ‘the victors self-consciously embodied the religion as well as the political ideology of the majority’; in the Free State ‘the new rulers blatantly identified Catholic with national values’ … It may indeed be that the central function of the Irish revolution was to give political embodiment to the ‘devotional revolution’ of the nineteenth century.1

  In order to survive, Protestants needed to keep quiet during the War of Independence; the penalty for giving information to the British and RIC security forces could be – and was – execution by the IRA, as happened to Mrs Mary Lindsay in 1921, and James Clark, her Protestant chauffeur, from Broadstreet, Cork. This story is well known to historians. Mrs Lindsay overheard a conversation about an IRA conspiracy to ambush British troops. To prevent lives being lost, she alerted the British Army, but she also entered into an agreement with Father Shinnick, a local priest, who soon told the IRA that the British forces had been alerted about their planned ambush. However, the local IRA commander ignored this, the ambush went ahead, a member of the IRA was shot, while others were captured and put on trial. Mrs Lindsay and James Clark were captured and held as hostages. Following the execution of some of the IRA insurgents, both were shot and Mrs Lindsay’s house was burnt. Their bodies have never been found. Her chauffeur had had nothing to do with the plot and Peter Hart suggests that ‘his death was purely revenge’, as he was an Ulster Protestant.2

  What is revealing is that Fr Shinnick was spared, though he was ‘virulently anti-republican’. Mrs Lindsay and James Clark ‘were more vulnerable because they were outsiders’. As Wall rightly makes clear, these vulnerable outsiders, ‘ex-soldiers and retired RIC men formed a large proportion of those accused of “informing” … Tramps and vagrants were also vulnerable, as were Redmondites and Hibernians who remained politically active’.3

  There was a widespread ‘sense of insecurity of life and property’ and ‘with the Anglo-Irish war none could consider themselves safe’.4 The case of the de Burgh family of Drumkeen, Co. Limerick is typical of the treatment suffered by some Irish Protestant landowners. The de Burghs were driven out in 1924 and found a new, fulfilling life in Canada on Prevost Island off the coast of British Columbia. I use this case as it is well documented and their descendants have given me the historical background; also because their suffering and intimidation covered both pre-Treaty and post-Treaty periods.

  The family was descended from Anglo-Norman stock, who had acquired land in 1420 in Dromkeen, Co. Limerick, when John de Burgh of Shrule defeated The O’Brien and married his sister. By 1920, they had only 230 acres, on which there were two fairly large houses and some farm buildings. No doubt their once considerably larger landholding had been reduced by various land acts, especially the Wyndham Act of 1903. The owner in 1920 was John Digby Hussey de Burgh; his eldest son, Ulick, born in 1900, was an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

  In September 1920, some fifty armed IRA men came to find Ulick. However, as he was in Sandhurst at the time, the men missed him. In Digby’s own words in the application he made to the Irish Grants Committee:

  Immediately afterwards your Suppliant applied to Your Majesty’s police officer at Pallas Green, Co. Limerick, who was in charge of the district in which Drumkeen is situated for protection and offered to defend himself and the said premises if he were given either two soldiers or policemen to assist him. The police officer said he could not give protection or even the two soldiers or policemen and advised your Suppliant to leave Drumkeen and take his family away. About the same time your Suppliant got a letter threatening to shoot him if he did not clear out immediately and accordingly he left Drumkeen on or about 24th September 1920.

  By reason of the failure of Your Majesty’s forces to give your Suppliant any protection, his losses were greatly increased by a conspiracy which had been developing to seize all your Suppliant’s property and said conspiracy was in progress during 1921 and until the events hereinafter mentioned.

  Your Suppliant with his wife returned to Drumkeen in February 1922 but he had been disarmed along with all other Irish Loyalists by orders of your Majesty’s Government and could only get one revolver for which the Irish Government refused him a licence [the Irish Free State came into being in December 1921 which no doubt motivated de Burgh to return to clear up his affairs]. During the Spring of 1922 an attempt was made to seize your Suppliant’s lands but your Suppliant managed to keep possession. The conspiracy to take your Suppliant’s land was actively supported by one Clancy a member of Dáil Éireann. When your Suppliant sold part of his lands in April 1924, armed men threatened to murder the purchaser and he was prevented from completing the purchase. On your Suppliant complaining to the police at Pallas Green, they promised to guard him but in fact gave no protection. On the morning of 10th April 1924 your Suppliant’s house at South Dromkeen was set on fire in two different places and the stables were also set on fire. The damage done on this occasion by the fires was proved to be £1,600 in addition to which £500 worth of property was looted and on your Suppliant applying to the Irish Courts for compensation the Judge there refused to hear the evidence as to the damage and in view of the Damage to Property Compensation (Ireland) Act 1923 only allowed the Suppliant the sum of £750.5

  On 5 September 1924, the IRA returned. Hubert, Digby’s second son, then aged 17, described what happened in an account kept by his granddaughter, Susan de Burgh in British Columbia, Canada:

  Dad was fixing the fence in front of the house across the ditch. He had a hammer, staples and nails in a can … a loaded .45 Colt in one pocket of his coat, extra bullets in the other. James McCarthy had left to go to the farmyard for tea. The dogs had barked but he did not see anyone. As he got
to the monkey tree near the corner of the house, two men rushed at him, one behind the other.

  Tim O’Donnell shouted – give up the gun. Dad just got his hand in the pocket of his coat and pressed it against O’Donnell and pulled the trigger. At that moment, a man standing to the South on the lawn fired at Dad and hit him across the chest. Dad fired at him but missed. The man behind O’Donnell did nothing. Dad ran to the garden gate, the laurel trees gave him cover. When about twenty feet inside the gate he was hit twice in the left arm, flesh wounds. He fired again and hit a man named Troy in the hand. He then ran across the top of the garden and out into the orchard field. He was almost down to the sunken ditch when he heard a shot. Turning round, he saw Ryan standing about 60 yards away, trying to work his gun … Dad fired and knocked him cold. That was the last shot. He left his white hat on the top of the ditch for them to fire at. He walked along under cover till he got to Philip Berkery’s farm. Then into McCarthy’s workshop. I had stayed there later than usual talking to Paddy in the shop … Mick was outside and told me afterwards that he heard the shooting and did not know what to do. When he saw Dad and old Philip he rushed in and told me. We got him in the house and wrapped a big towel around him. He was not bleeding hardly anything and luckily nothing serious was hit … We got Dad to Dr Fogarty and then to hospital for three weeks.