Between the years 1920 and 1922, Belfast experienced the most intense and brutal period of violence in its history. This conflict, waged against the backdrop of partition and the carnage of the Irish Revolution, was by far the most violent in Ireland during the whole revolutionary period but has been much neglected by historians of revolutionary Ireland. Unlike in the rest of Ireland, however, the violence in Belfast consisted largely of urban rioting; almost 80 percent of the victims were civilians, as opposed to members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Northern Irish security forces. Beginning with the infamous shipyard expulsions of July 1920, which saw thousands of Catholic workers forcibly removed from the yards of East Belfast, the conflict flared sporadically until June 1922. Only then did a combination of exhaustion and the changing political context in the South, with the start of civil war, bring a lasting if uneasy peace.

Belfast had a per capita death rate higher than that of any other part of the country between 1920 and 1922, including the legendary fighting areas of Munster, so famed in republican tradition.Footnote 1 Although debates continue over the exact figures involved, it is estimated that between 452 and 463 people were killed in Belfast during this two-year period, with over 1,100 wounded.Footnote 2 In contrast, approximately three thousand people have died in the past thirty years of conflict in the North, the victims of much more destructive modern weaponry. Furthermore, in 1920 in Belfast, almost 650 private houses and business premises were destroyed (the vast majority by arson), various degrees of intimidation forced some eight thousand people out of their homes, and around six thousand workers were violently expelled from their jobs.Footnote 3 Into this maelstrom of violence came the Belfast IRA.

Northern republican narratives of the twentieth century have emphasized above all else the role the IRA has played in both defending and avenging the nationalist population of Belfast. Stories of the years 1922, 1935, and 1969, all extensive periods of political violence in Belfast, remain cornerstones of republican mythology.Footnote 4 In both of these respects, the IRA has painted itself as a force whose primary responsibility is to act on behalf of a victimized and leaderless Catholic population. Danny Morrison, an IRA Volunteer, made specific reference to the importance of the 1920–22 period in the foundation myths of the Provisional IRA in the late 1960s, stating that the “people were in a hopeless situation and the IRA provided people with hope. Just its existence, just its saying, ‘We’re not having any of this. Come into our areas again and try to burn us out and see what happens. … Never Again!’”Footnote 5

Many of the assumptions about the period of violence that inspired this statement, and about the IRA's defensive and retaliatory role within it, have also been largely accepted by historians of the revolutionary period, particularly those who have explored the geographical spread of revolutionary activity within Ireland between 1916 and 1925. Until relatively recently, the Northern aspects of the Irish Revolution were woefully underresearched, and, as such, those perspectives that emerged concentrated largely on how the Northern conflict related to the development and internal dynamics of either Northern unionism or Southern nationalism. The current trend in Irish historical writing toward local and county studies has yet to make any substantial impact on the six counties.Footnote 6 With so many of these studies now complete, and with many more on the way, this historiographical gap becomes ever more noticeable, and the reasons for its existence less and less sustainable. Recent scholarship, particularly the work of Eamon Phoenix, Marianne Elliot, Alan Parkinson, Ronan Gallagher, and Peter Hart, has done much to enlighten our understanding of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland during the period of partition. While these historians have done much to address this anomaly, the specific nature of the IRA's relationship to the Catholic minority in the six counties and the IRA's distinctly Northern perspective on the revolution still require further attention.Footnote 7 These studies, although heavily critical of the IRA's role in the conflict, have still tended to attribute the Belfast IRA's failure to match stronger fighting areas in the South and West of Ireland to the constant demands on its time and resources in defending Catholic areas.Footnote 8 It is this issue in particular that this article aims to address.

Before we analyze to what extent the IRA fulfilled these roles, it is important to examine exactly what the IRA was defending the Catholic minority against. Both the nationalist population of Belfast and the IRA have characterized and continue to characterize the violence that marked the birth of Northern Ireland, and particularly their experience of it, as the “Belfast Pogrom” (interestingly, a term that is also used to describe the violence of 1969). It is characterized as a period when both Orange mobs and, more crucially, regular and auxiliary members of the police force (particularly the notorious “B” Specials) carried out a pre meditated campaign of murder and expulsion. Indeed, a cursory glance at the figures involved seems to back this up, since almost two-thirds of the victims of violence were Catholics (258 in all), despite the fact that they made up less than a quarter of the city's population.Footnote 9

Defining the violence as a “pogrom,” however, is problematic, although the reasons why this is the case are crucial in helping to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the conflict. Although there was a huge amount of anti-Catholic violence in Belfast between 1920 and 1922, it lacked many of the key characteristics that are inherent in the term “pogrom.” Rather than this violence being the indiscriminate killing of women and children, as is so often claimed, actual analysis of the figures shows that 80 percent of all Catholic victims were men, the majority between the ages of twenty and fifty. It should also be noted that many of these men died while themselves taking part in rioting against their opposite numbers in the loyalist community. It is arguable that in many cases the collusion of members of the Specials and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in these attacks, their greater numbers, and perhaps the failure of the IRA to perform a similar role for the Catholic minority ensured that Catholics would emerge as the losers in these violent confrontations.Footnote 10

Similarly, it is also clear that those forced removals that did take place were not aimed at the wholesale expulsion of the Catholic population from the city; instead, they were very limited in scope and involved the ejecting of Catholics from mixed areas. Catholics tended to move within Belfast rather than out of the city itself or out of Northern Ireland altogether, fleeing to more homogeneous areas such as West Belfast. It should also not be forgotten that over 20 percent of those expelled from their homes were Protestants expelled by Catholics. Indeed, the notion of expulsion across political boundaries is far more applicable to the Protestant population on the border, who were far more likely to leave their homes and move permanently into Northern Ireland. This was usually a response to acts of IRA intimidation, particularly during the spring of 1922. In fact, only around two thousand Catholics fled Belfast altogether during the period, and almost 90 percent of them would return soon after. Indeed, the Catholic population of the city actually grew during the revolutionary period, with that in Northern Ireland as a whole falling by only around 2 percent, despite the horrendous levels of violence Catholics experienced.Footnote 11 One must conclude, therefore, that the expulsions in Belfast were limited in their aims if not in their savagery.

The relatively small number of Northern Catholics who did not return to Northern Ireland were in part made up of IRA members who left either out of fear of arrest or to take part in the Southern civil war on either the pro- or the anti-Treaty side. In fact, many of the Belfast IRA's key leaders ended up living out their days in Dublin; Seamus Woods, the IRA commander for all of East Ulster, ended up running a draper's shop in Dublin, and Roger McCorley, the leader of the Belfast Brigade, had a successful career as a military policeman in the Free State Army.

Finally, if the violence was a pogrom, it was a curiously disjointed and badly organized one. There is certainly no evidence that there was a coherent, organized expulsion campaign by the unionist government, even though many extremist members of the police, the Orange Order, and unionist political parties were involved in what could be characterized as pogromist activities. Furthermore, the violence itself was not methodical or continuous and cannot be divided into distinct phases with identifiable causes; there were long periods, stretching to weeks and months in some cases, when Belfast remained relatively peaceful. In large part, the attacks on the Catholic minority were a response to perceived provocations, and these provocations largely resulted from the activities of the IRA. So, simply in terms of the shape of the conflict, there was no real organized plan for what would today be called ethnic cleansing. As Peter Hart has argued, the violence in Belfast was far more akin to a heavily localized ethnic civil war and was wholly unique in the context of revolutionary Ireland.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, whatever conclusions are drawn, it is undeniable that, however the conflict is defined—as a pogrom, revolution, or civil war—it was the Catholic population of Belfast who emerged emphatically as its losers and principal victims, suffering horrendous levels of violence, intimidation, and severe economic hardship at the hands of the majority Protestant population.

So what role did the four hundred or so men of the Belfast IRA play in defining this conflict, and to what extent did they act as defenders of their coreligionists in the city? The Belfast IRA grew from the activities of a small number of radical activists in the city who either survived or matured after the Easter Rising of 1916. The first companies to organize came from the homogeneous Catholic areas of West Belfast, although the level of their organization was feeble and far behind that which occurred in the South and West of Ireland. David McGuiness, later to emerge as a key IRA intelligence officer in the Belfast Brigade, described the disorganization and confusion that surrounded early efforts to reestablish the movement after the Easter Rising: “This meeting was most informal, no proper chairman, each man had apparently something to say and said it.”Footnote 13

Perhaps, surprisingly, the reason why violence flared in Belfast and in the North had little to do with the IRA. While many areas in Munster saw a growing escalation of violence during 1919 and early 1920, the city and the future six counties of Northern Ireland had been among the quietest areas in Ireland. However, the steady rise of militant republicanism in the South and West of Ireland was heralded by a string of victories for Northern nationalist candidates in local elections in the first six months of 1920, particularly in Derry City, where a short period of communal violence broke out in mid-June. This meant that some kind of large-scale violent outbreak was almost inevitable, and this outbreak would be most severe in Belfast. Against this backdrop, the “Twelfth of July” celebrations became a period of reflection in unionist circles, resulting in increasingly radical calls to defend Ulster against perceived Catholic aggression. Numerous letters warning of this impending doom appeared in the unionist press, claiming, for example, that “the Roman Catholics are pouring into Ulster and increasing rapidly in this province where Protestants are emigrating and disappearing. … The question is whether Protestants can rouse themselves to do anything apart from processions.” The symbols of siege that accompanied the celebrations acted as a call to arms for an already paranoid unionist population. Sir Edward Carson, in a notorious speech at Finaghy on 12 July, spoke to a crowd of twenty-five thousand loyalists: “We must proclaim today clearly that come what will and be the consequences what they may, we in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin—no Sinn Féin organisation, no Sinn Féin methods. … And these are not mere words. I hate words without action.”Footnote 14

The situation in Northeast Ulster was extremely tense, although it was, ironically, an event far away in Cork that triggered the direct confrontation in Belfast. On 17 July, members of the Cork IRA shot dead RIC Divisional Commissioner Colonel Gerard Smyth in the county club in Cork City. Smyth, a Protestant from Banbridge County Down, had made an aggressive speech to an RIC gathering in Listowel County Kerry that was seen as so extreme that some RIC men resigned on the spot. Emotions in the North were running high, and Smyth's body was brought back to Banbridge for burial with full military honors in a local cemetery after a short delay caused by the refusal of railway workers in the South to have anything to do with its transit. His funeral, set for 21 July, coincided with the return of Protestant shipyard workers after the Twelfth holiday. The highly charged atmosphere eventually exploded in the town, and Catholics and their property were attacked viciously in Banbridge and nearby Dromore.Footnote 15

In Belfast, loyalist workers’ associations held lunchtime meetings at the yards of Workman and Clark and Harland and Wolff, with Carson's call to action still ringing in their ears. These meetings soon developed into demonstrations against the presence of “disloyal” Catholic workers in the yards, eventually leading to at first sporadic and then systematic expulsions of Catholics from the premises. The situation became increasingly violent, with some Catholics swimming part of the River Lagan to escape after being pelted with bolts and rivets. The expulsions spread to the various mills and engineering works in the city, with attacks at Musgraves, Mackies, and the Sirocco Works among others. Around seven thousand Catholics and “rotten prods” (a derisive term used largely against nonsectarian Protestant Labour activists)—approximately 10 percent of the nationalist population of the city, many of whom were ex-servicemen—were expelled.

This plunged the city into savage sectarian violence, with loyalist mobs launching attacks into the numerous Catholic enclaves in the city, where most of the expelled workers had fled. Bottles, stones, and paving slabs ripped up from the streets were hurled at fleeing nationalists in prolonged bouts of vicious rioting. The fighting in the Short Strand was particularly savage, with Catholic homes and businesses coming under sustained attack. Burning and looting of Catholic shops on Newtownards Road was reported, and it was alleged that the mob tried to cut the hoses of firemen working to quench the fires. Drunkenness was a notable characteristic of the mobs who engaged in violence in Belfast. Catholics owned many pubs and, along with spirit grocers, were visible targets. Loyalist mobs targeted them and looted their stock, getting drunk in the process, which fueled and prolonged periods of rioting. This period also saw the beginnings of a continuing campaign that targeted symbols of Catholicism, most notably churches, convents, and monasteries. On 22 July, rioters smashed windows and attempted to burn down St. Matthew's Church on Bryson Street, which was consistently targeted during the two years of violence. Only intervention by soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment eventually dispersed the mobs. Attacks were also made on Clonard Monastery, where Brother Michael Morgan was killed after being hit by a bullet fired from the attacking crowd. The following day was marked by a sustained campaign of expulsions of Catholics from mixed areas, who then crowded into the congested Catholic enclaves in the city. Nineteen people had been killed—eight Protestants, eleven Catholics—and countless others were wounded or made homeless.Footnote 16 These shipyard expulsions of July 1920 signaled the beginning of an unprecedented period of mass sectarian violence in Belfast that would continue at varying levels of intensity for the next two years.

While violence swirled around them in the summer of 1920, the response of the IRA leadership in the city to this eruption of mass sectarian violence was simply to ignore it. The IRA leaders remained aloof and resolutely opposed to any kind of participation in what they called “the usual fratricidal strife,” fearing that their involvement would detract from their elitist perception of themselves as members of the key revolutionary force in Ireland.Footnote 17 Before the shipyard expulsions, their attempts to bring the realities of revolution into the city had been of small scale and ineffectual. They attempted attacks on tax offices and government buildings in the city in the spring of 1920 but had little effect. Such low-level actions as these were the furthest that the Volunteers in the city went along the road to armed insurrection.

Considering its disdain for the mass mob violence that engulfed Belfast in 1920, the fact that the IRA would later claim the role of defender of the Catholic community is a curious one. Certainly, many in the Belfast IRA found the task of protecting Catholic enclaves in the city an exhausting distraction from the wider national struggle. One Volunteer officer recalled the reluctance of his men to take part in the usual “stone-throwing competition.”Footnote 18 Judging by the steady increase in casualties before June 1922, one can say that the organization was not very good at its defensive role. Indeed, most riots tended to end not because of the IRA's stiff resistance but rather because of the lateness of the hour, since most violence in Belfast occurred during the evenings or on weekends because of the pressures of employment and the imposition of curfews. One IRA leader in the city, Joe Murray, admitted later that, despite its efforts, the IRA was not able to stop the security forces from moving into Catholic areas as and when they wished.Footnote 19

Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that, despite later tales of the heroic defense of Catholic areas, the IRA did not suffer any notable casualties in defensive operations, which might be expected if members were on the front line as defenders. The fact is that no identifiable IRA members were killed or injured in rioting during the whole two years of the conflict. Those that were killed died largely at the hands of RIC murder gangs: extremist, secret loyalist groups within the police force. Like the IRA's Active Service Unit, they were built around a hard core of militant officers and acted covertly under a variety of names, such as the Ulster Protestant Association and the Anti–Sinn Féin Association. The targets they chose were certainly less discriminating than those chosen by the IRA, although, in the context of a secret war against a largely invisible enemy, this was a common reaction from police and auxiliaries throughout Ireland during the revolutionary period. The majority of IRA members lost their lives in this subterranean war, visited in their own homes in the dead of night, rather than in any kind of heroic last stand of the barricades.

Also notable is that the IRA also failed to establish any kind of specific organization to carry out defensive duties. Some ideas were proposed in order to win over the populace but were quickly dropped, with one leader stating that “to my mind such things were beyond our means.”Footnote 20 It is certainly true that in March 1922 Michael Collins ordered the creation of a Belfast city guard to be paid out of Provisional Government Army funds. Historians have seen this as an example of the creation of an organized body to guard Catholic areas. However, closer analysis of this organization reveals that this is not really the case, with the term “guard” being used in this sense to denote elite status rather than the anticipated role such a force was to fulfill.

One key point to make is that there were other candidates for the role of the defender of the Catholic minority. The principal group in this regard was the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a Catholic imitation of the Orange Order and the principal Catholic nationalist organization in the city. The IRA's disinterest in the sectarian violence of the summer of 1920 allowed the Hibernians to steal a march on the IRA and also made the IRA's task of taking over the role of defender a more violent and confrontational one than it needed to be. Politically, the Catholic population of Belfast remained opposed to the new movements of Sinn Féin and the Volunteers, staying loyal to the more moderate nationalist Home Rule party. Even during the darkest days of the violence, Joe Devlin, the leading nationalist member of Parliament, still managed to comfortably hold on to his seat in West Belfast, even when Eamon de Valera put himself up as a candidate there in May 1921. At least in a narrow political sense, it seems that the majority of the Catholic population did not see the IRA as representing its broader interests.

The role of the Hibernians in the conflict over partition has been largely forgotten. The IRA dismissed these groups as “mobs” and “corner boys” whose military pretensions began and ended with John Redmond's National Volunteers. Historians ascribe to them the same sense of inertia that subsumed their leader Joe Devlin during the period, but it is arguable that, in the vicious street rioting that characterized the violence in Belfast, elements of their organization did the most to protect Catholic areas and inflicted the most casualties on their loyalist opponents. The fact that the unionist authorities identified all acts of nationalist violence with the IRA—and the IRA's willingness to take credit for them—has also distorted the real nature of conflict in the city. Indeed, the Hibernians were a vibrant and often violent organization who, on many occasions, threatened to oust the IRA as the militant face of Northern nationalism. Even during the Truce, when the IRA was at the peak of its popularity, a number of IRA veterans recalled groups of young Hibernians stealing guns from the IRA to make their own independent attacks on the Specials.Footnote 21

The Hibernians certainly had firearms and used them for defensive purposes, although their weapons were more likely to be rocks, paving slabs, and petrol. When overt sectarian violence erupted in Belfast in mid-1920, the majority of nationalists still saw the Hibernians and the old structures of the Redmondite Volunteers as the natural candidates for the role of defender of the Catholic community. For example, in the autumn of 1920, Roger McCorley, later leader of the IRA's Belfast Brigade, discovered that a local priest had sixty Martini-Henri rifles in his possession that he offered to the Hibernians for the defense of Catholic areas in the city. The IRA managed to intercept this message and went along to collect the rifles in the guise of Hibernians. The priest told McCorley that he was providing them with the rifles only on the express condition that the IRA did not get hold of them.Footnote 22

Perhaps the most telling proof of the continued influence and role of the Hibernians in the conflict is the fact that the IRA consistently targeted them and their property in numerous beatings, shootings, and arson attacks (in some areas of Northern Ireland, such as South Armagh, as many Hibernian halls were torched as were Orange halls). One IRA officer recalled meeting Michael Collins in Dublin in 1921: “He questioned me about the state of things in the North, and when I told him how short we were he said, ‘Why the hell don’t you get into the barracks up there and arm yourselves?’ So I said that that was easier said than done. We not only had the British to fight, but also the Unionists and the Ancient Order of Hibernians.”Footnote 23

In a letter sent to Joe Devlin in May 1921 after his decision to join an electoral pact with Sinn Féin, one Catholic related the anger common to many members of the nationalist community at the constant IRA intimidation they had to endure. He writes, “How could you as a Hibernian speak on behalf of such cowards? They went into the house of poor Mrs Phillips … took out her poor son aged twenty … and shot him dead for no other reason than that he was a Hibernian. That's the treatment meted out to Nationalists at Sinn Féin hands. Partition is a glorious thing, compared with the rule of those boys, and I wonder how any Nationalist can stand up and defend such men.”Footnote 24 Indeed, IRA attacks on Hibernians and their property became increasingly vicious during the period, especially in Belfast and South Armagh. One IRA man summed up the organization's rather contradictory view of the role of the AOH: “The Hibernians were a menace because of their weakness.”Footnote 25

Similarly, during the truce period, Roger McCorley remembered one event that highlights the continuing vibrancy and militancy of the Hibernians and their inability to unite behind the IRA as their defenders, even at the high point of Sinn Féin popularity: “An element of Nationalists, under the control of the Hibernians, started to loot the Unionist business premises in the Falls Road area. … On several occasions during the day our men had to turn out and fire on this mob. They fired over their heads but later on in the evening I gave instructions that they were to fire into it.”Footnote 26 This statement highlights the irony of the IRA acting to defend unionist business premises; it also undermines the notion that the IRA welcomed everyone it could in its fight to defend the Catholic minority against what it viewed as a vicious pogrom. Instead, the IRA remained suspicious of other groups and individuals, such as Hibernians and British ex-servicemen, who had origins from outside the acceptable constituency of the organization, which included only Catholics or those with a long history of advanced nationalist or republican activity, such as membership in the Gaelic Athletic Association. This contradicts the bungling honesty and unity that is portrayed in republican narratives of the relationship between the IRA and the Catholic minority. Certainly in its actions and statements the Belfast IRA continued to show a certain contempt and aloofness toward the Catholic minority.

The notion that the Belfast IRA was merely the most militant element in the Catholic population of the city must be critically analyzed, and one must instead accept that it was, in fact, very much divorced by choice from the mainstream of the Catholic civilian population. Traditional nationalist historians such as Jim McDermott argue that the Belfast IRA first formed from those workers who had been expelled from the shipyards in July 1920 and only then emerged as a substantive force. This new membership transformed the overall character of the IRA and gave it its specifically Northern identity as a defensive Catholic militia force. This neat historical narrative is, however, in most respects a fiction, although one that needs to be challenged, as it lies at the heart of the assumed symbiotic relationship between the IRA and the Catholic population of the city.

The rise in numbers after the shipyard expulsions cannot be denied, with one IRA report claiming that 90 percent of the city's IRA membership was out of work in 1921. Manus O’Boyle, the captain of the Ballymacarret Company, later stated that every member of his 120-strong unit was unemployed in 1922.Footnote 27 While it is certainly true that recruitment rose markedly in certain periods, the aftermath of the shipyard expulsions and the Truce being the most obvious examples, these new recruits had much less influence on the nature of the organization than is often assumed.

First, the new men proved to be deeply unpopular with many of the older veterans. Seamus McKenna, a high-ranking IRA officer in the Belfast Brigade, angrily stated that “about two thirds of these recruits—possibly three fourths—joined the IRA for sectarian reasons only, to fight defensively or offensively against the Orange gangs. Few of them had any conception of Irish-Ireland principles. Some of them undoubtedly became Republican as the result of their association with the old type of Volunteers, but, in my opinion, the majority of these pogrom recruits were lacking in the ideals and principles which inspired the men who joined the movement in Belfast and remained in it between 1916 and 1920.”Footnote 28 These new recruits inspired mistrust and, at times, open hostility from veteran IRA members, and most were not given positions of responsibility in the organization or provided with key information, such as the names of leading officers or the location of headquarters.Footnote 29 Crucially, they were also not given guns. Veteran IRA members continued to speak of these new recruits as causing “decay in the Volunteer spirit” and a “lowering of values.”Footnote 30 Thus, for the Belfast IRA members, their extreme mistrust of any new blood and a wish to not dilute the principles of the organization remained far more important than the practical demands of defending the nationalist population of the city.

There may have been nominal changes in terms of numbers and composition. Some traditional nationalist historians have claimed that the IRA had a rigid organizational hierarchy and a large number of men with defined roles. But it is clear that the organization, as those elsewhere in Ireland, depended on an extremely small number of radical activists. The ascendancy of this pre-1920 elite in the city in the context of sectarian violence, rather than any changes in terms of new recruits, transformed the organization from the irrelevant, disorganized body it had been before the shipyard expulsions into a vicious guerilla force. Two figures in particular stand out—Seamus Woods, a trainee accountant from Ballyhornan, County Down, and Roger McCorley, an uncompromising figure who hailed from a strongly republican family in County Antrim. These unlikely allies, certainly in terms of their personalities, had an extremely close relationship, and McCorley's instinctive viciousness was matched by Woods's far more insightful flair for organization and planning. Above all else these two figures would change the Belfast IRA from the timid organization it had been in 1920.

The leadership elite had a number of distinct characteristics that differentiated them from the rank and file of the organization. The picture that emerges from studying the social background of the Belfast IRA is of a relatively small leadership elite, many of whom came from outside Belfast and gravitated to the city to indulge their shared interest in Gaelic sporting pursuits. They were also likely to be better educated and slightly younger than the Volunteers they led. Unusually, the officer class were, on average, two years younger than the Belfast Volunteers, whose average age was twenty-six.Footnote 31 This is crucial, as it is this small leadership elite who were responsible for almost all major IRA attacks; they were the ones with the guns and, for all intents and purposes, they were the Belfast IRA.

If there are questions about the IRA's ability, and also perhaps its desire, to defend Catholic areas, perhaps it is in its role as avenger, as the righter of wrongs, against the perceived authors of the “pogrom” that we may find the defining aspect of its relationship with the Catholic minority. Indeed, perhaps it can be argued that there was something in the nature of the organization and its proactive rhetoric that meant that, for the Belfast IRA, offense was the best form of defense.

First, we must briefly determine the extent of the IRA's involvement in offensive operations and, in a broader sense, just how much violence it was actually responsible for in Belfast between 1920 and 1922. In total, thirty-five members of the police and auxiliary police forces were killed in Belfast in those two years. It is not certain that the IRA was responsible for all of them, since snipers who, as discussed earlier, may have been armed Catholics rather than members of the IRA likely killed some in street rioting. However, twenty-eight can be confirmed as definite victims of the IRA, mainly because the men responsible have left detailed accounts of the killings they took part in. Crucially, the IRA was also responsible for the killing of a number of civilians, although it is difficult to discern exactly how many. A conservative estimate would put the number at thirty, although it is probably as high as fifty, so perhaps it is more than twice the number of police and Specials the IRA killed. The IRA therefore may be said to have killed almost a fifth of all those killed in Belfast between 1920 and 1922, a staggering achievement considering its small size.

When the issue is looked at from the other side, one particularly noticeable fact is how few IRA men themselves were killed in the city—at most twelve, and the membership of four of them is doubtful. Twice as many IRA members were injured in the violence. So, the first thing we can conclude about the IRA's offensive operations is that IRA members managed to inflict far more damage on their opponents than their opponents did to them. This has much to do with their activities being subsumed under broader patterns of rioting and mass violence.Footnote 32

Aside from IRA opponents in the Catholic minority—where corporal rather than capital punishment was the likeliest outcome—the vast majority of those killed by the IRA were Protestants. This might be expected when we consider the makeup of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the RIC, an organization that became progressively more Protestant between 1920 and 1922. Overall in Belfast, around one-third of murder victims were Protestant civilians (about 160 people). As historian Peter Hart has argued, since there was no real evidence of Protestants killing Protestants, apart from the expulsion and beating of so-called rotten prods in the shipyards, it must be concluded that members of the Catholic minority were responsible for causing over a third of all deaths in one way or another, even though they made up less than a quarter of the city's population.Footnote 33

It is also evident that many Protestant victims of IRA violence had little involvement in the perceived pogrom. While the Belfast IRA derided sectarian motives for violence, these IRA members themselves carried out a number of what can only be defined as sectarian killings. These included the indiscriminate bombing of trams filled with Protestant shipyard workers from East Belfast. A number of such incidents occurred in November 1921 and again in the spring of 1922. Other recurrent incidents were the shooting and beating of Protestant men who had no known involvement in violence or membership in the Ulster Special Constabulary—such violence occurred particularly in 1922, when a number of workplaces were visited by IRA gunmen and individual Protestant employees were killed in cold blood. Lone Protestant shipyard workers going to work were also singled out for attack. Added to this was a constant low-level war of intimidation against Protestant civilians. These included robbery (particularly against women), numerous beatings, and the burning of Orange halls. The IRA was also implicated in the expulsion of Protestant families from their homes in mixed border areas of the city. These overtly sectarian targets suggest a crudity in the IRA's methodology, although these crude methods were also employed against those victims (police and military) for whom the IRA was proud to take responsibility.Footnote 34

One of the great leitmotifs of the War of Independence was the IRA's ability to construct extensive intelligence networks and employ intelligence agents, which allowed it to target those who, from its viewpoint, were legitimate enemies.Footnote 35 But the methods employed by the gunmen of the Belfast IRA were often crude in the extreme. The chief force that carried out revenge attacks was the Belfast Active Service Unit, essentially the urban equivalent of the famed flying columns operating in Munster. The unit was very small and consisted of only thirty-two men at its height, eight from each of the four companies of the First Battalion, based in West Belfast; the Second Battalion, covering Catholic enclaves in North and East Belfast, does not appear to have been as militant and was under Irish Republican Brotherhood control, which, interestingly, acted as a force for restraint in Belfast. From their headquarters at Daniel McDevitt's tailor's shop in Rosemary Street, small four- or five-man patrols were sent out day and night to hunt for targets.Footnote 36

Far from being sophisticated, slick operations based on extensive intelligence, as is often claimed in IRA memoirs, their missions consisted of closely following individual suspects though the streets of the city and listening to their accents; if they were English, the men would conclude that they were Black and Tans or Auxiliaries and would send word back to Woods and McCorley, who would then set out to do the actual shooting. One example of the unit's crude methods occurred on 11 March 1921, when members gunned down a party of Black and Tans in Victoria Street. Two were killed instantly, and a third, William Cooper, died the following day from his wounds. McCorley, McKenna, and Woods were responsible for the shooting. They had followed the three men, who were laughing and chatting with two local girls, through Victoria Square toward Musgrave Street police barracks, where the men were shot down in a hail of bullets. The IRA party fled immediately after the attack, leaving the three Black and Tans and the two girls, both of whom were badly wounded, sprawled on the pavement. A passerby, Alexander Allen, a Protestant shipyard worker and father to eight children, was also killed. McKenna himself called the killings “one of the neatest shooting jobs done in Belfast.”Footnote 37 Sean Montgomery, another Belfast Volunteer, described the brutal scene: “The O/C [i.e., McCorley] put four or five rounds into one and he said it took him a long time to fall.”Footnote 38 Aside from the savagery and crudity of such attacks, it should also be noted that no members of the Black and Tans or Auxiliaries were ever implicated in the violence in Belfast and had no security role in the North (they were in Belfast waiting to head to Munster). This is a telling point if one is to judge the IRA as avengers of the pogrom.

Nevertheless, the IRA did carry out attacks against men who were clearly implicated in the pogrom—those members of the murder gangs of the RIC and Specials who terrorized Catholic areas—and it is perhaps in this sense that the IRA can be seen as the avenger of the Catholic minority. Again, however, there are problems with such an analysis, in that the IRA's attacks on RIC and Specials murder gangs often had more to do with seeking revenge against those responsible for killing IRA comrades than with a general wish to avenge the activities of murder gangs who threatened the wider Catholic community. For example, in his statements McCorley remained obsessed with killing District Inspector Harrison because of his involvement in the murder of the Duffin brothers, both IRA members, in late 1921, but hardly mentioned figures such as D. I. Nixon, who orchestrated the infamous MacMahon murders in March 1922.Footnote 39

While the IRA's offensive attacks against individuals were extensive for such a small body of men, there is one category of targets that the IRA chose more than any other: economic. Between 1921 and 1922 over £4 million of damage was caused in Belfast by the IRA in a mere eighteen months. The impetus for this arson campaign was the Belfast Boycott, instigated reluctantly by the Dail government in the late summer of 1920 and continued in various forms for the next two years. The boycott itself proved to be almost wholly counterproductive and achieved little except to further cement the commercial ties between Northeast Ulster and Britain. It also failed to have an impact on the shipyards and engineering industry, which had seen the worst of the loyalist expulsions, and thus proved a total failure in achieving its avowed aim of reinstating the expelled Catholic workers. Nonetheless, this use of the Belfast IRA to attack the economic heart of the unionist community, itself a hangover from Sinn Féin's brief flirtation in 1919 with labor agitation as a method of undermining unionist hegemony in the North, persisted throughout the period and formed the basic strategy of all militant republican activity in the city.Footnote 40

Such a campaign may suggest that the IRA was acting as avenger by hitting the perceived instigators of the pogrom—the business leaders of the Ulster Unionist party—but the arson campaign was also hugely detrimental to the already poverty-stricken Catholic population of the city. The destruction of unionist businesses deprived hundreds of Catholic employees of their jobs. Crucially, the IRA campaign continued even though church and nationalist groups complained it was destroying the Catholic population. The IRA also attacked many Catholic businesses that continued to trade with the unionist business sector. Financial gain appeared also to be one motive for these activities, with many Catholic businesses robbed by IRA gangs. In a number of reports, even some republicans complained that the destruction of these business premises undermined the defense of Catholic areas. For example, after the Catholic-owned Noble Stables in Seaforde Street were burned down, killing thirteen horses, one IRA member stated, “This brutal deed has caused widespread hostility to our forces on the part of the Catholic population.”Footnote 41 The building had not only employed many local Catholics but also offered cover against loyalist snipers, who could now fire right up the length of Seaforde Street into the heart of the nationalist district.

One thing that can be concluded about the many facets of the IRA's offensive policy is that it was almost wholly counterproductive. While the IRA had little direct influence in terms of causing the initial outbreak of violence in Belfast, its activities ensured that the violence continued. One key example of this was the assassination of District Inspector Oswald Swanzy on 22 August in Lisburn by members of the IRA from both Cork and Belfast. This action was to have dire consequences, leading in the short term to brutal reprisals against the Catholic minority and in the longer term to the reinforcement of unionist fears about the dangerous threat posed by the IRA in the six counties.

Swanzy, like Colonel Smyth, was a high-priority target for the IRA. He was allegedly involved in the murder of Thomas MacCurtain, the Sinn Féin mayor of Cork City, in March 1921.Footnote 42 MacCurtain was shot around 1 p.m., shortly after attending a church service in Lisburn Cathedral. The assassination of Swanzy, while a successful reprisal in the eyes of the IRA, proved disastrous for nationalists living in Lisburn after rampaging loyalist mobs expelled almost the entire Catholic population of the town. Over three hundred Catholic homes were destroyed before the violence fully abated. Fred Crawford, the veteran Ulster Volunteer Force leader, later recorded in his diary the scene of devastation:

The Swanzy episode highlighted what would prove to be an insurmountable problem for the IRA over the next two years. Despite the image of the IRA as an essentially defensive force, especially in Belfast, it became increasingly clear that it was its actions above all that would provoke the most brutal response from loyalist extremists. Very few of the hundreds of IRA actions did not inspire some kind of reprisal activity from extremist elements in the loyalist population. It is a telling statistic that almost 75 percent of all people killed in Belfast died within a few days of a major IRA attack of some kind. Examples are numerous. The infamous MacMahon murders of March 1922 occurred in the midst of violence that had started as a response to a number of IRA attacks on police barracks a few days earlier and to the shooting of a police officer in the area the previous day. It is no coincidence that May 1922—the bloodiest month of the conflict, with over fifty deaths—was also the month in which the IRA launched its extensive northern offensive. Similarly, the violence that occurred in November 1921 was a direct response to the IRA's bombing campaign against shipyard trams. Crucially, despite the obvious conclusions to be drawn, the IRA continued to carry out these attacks, even when the link was glaringly obvious and it was asked by church leaders and leading members of the nationalist and republican communities to desist. To a large extent, this was also true of the IRA's defensive role, where its presence only acted to confirm loyalist suspicions that these areas were under the control of IRA gunmen. Bishop McCrory, the leading Catholic bishop whose diocese encompassed Belfast, summed up the reactive nature of the violence by saying that “the Catholic population of Belfast is being punished for the sins of their brethren elsewhere.”Footnote 44

One final and perhaps most telling point to make is that, in the end, it was the Catholic minority who turned against the IRA and in many ways sealed its collapse. The Catholic population of Belfast, bearing the brunt of two years of sustained and brutal violence, finally cracked under the pressure. In June 1922, Woods reported bleakly that “practically all over the Division the Police Barracks are stormed with letters giving all available information against the IRA and their supporters. We have captured some such letters and in most cases suggestions are made to the Police as to how they could best cope with the situation. In most cases they regret they did not give this information two years ago.”Footnote 45 Seamus McGovern, the brigade adjutant, echoed these views, stating that the civilian population was “only too anxious to acquiesce” with the authorities.Footnote 46

The relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that the IRA was forced to contemplate employing desperate measures to stem the flow of information and to regain the loyalty of the nationalist population. McGovern concluded that, “were operations started on a general scale throughout the six counties and a policy of war decided on at present, I’m afraid that we would be compelled to mete out Capital Punishment amongst the Catholic Civilian population.”Footnote 47 Such an aggressive policy, however, was felt to be suicidal, as Woods grasped in the final weeks of the conflict, perhaps far too late: “Without the civil population our position is hopeless.”Footnote 48

In conclusion, how does a study of the violence that engulfed Belfast in the early 1920s illuminate our understanding of the relationship between the Catholic minority and the IRA? Certainly, the traditional nationalist view that this relationship was vital in dictating the IRA's activities, motivation, and, to some extent, its existence during the many outbreaks of communal violence in Ulster has been strongly challenged by the work of contemporary Irish historians. Rather than finding a symbiotic relationship between Irish republicanism and the nationalist community, historians such as Peter Hart have revealed the sordid realities of the Irish Revolution in the Irish localities where popular support was as likely to be maintained by intimidation as by shared political values. The work of Hart broadens our understanding of those groups in Irish society the IRA defined as its enemies, highlighting, for example, the variety of motives that dictated IRA activity and revealing that IRA violence during the War of Independence was as likely to be aimed at perceived outsiders—Protestants, Travelers, vagrants, and local notables—as at the symbols and personnel of British imperialism. In a broader sense, the work of Richard English has highlighted the enormous extent to which elitist republican dogma, rather than any prospective role as representatives of the Catholic minority, has dictated the strategy and priorities of Irish republicanism throughout its long history, from the nineteenth century to the present day. With specific reference to the early 1920s, Alan Parkinson, by use of meticulous research, has analyzed the dynamics that lay behind the communal violence, demonstrating that the IRA, far from dictating events, was very much following them and was attempting in vain to implant its own agendas into broader and deeper patterns of civil strife.Footnote 49 A study of the role of the IRA in Belfast during the years 1920–22 reinforces such interpretations. Certainly, while it may have appeared on the surface that the allegiances and aims of the IRA and the nationalist community were broadly similar, in reality they were politically disunited and, aside from opposition to partition, shared little in terms of how to articulate their political sentiments. The importance of this period to contemporary republican ideology is crucial. The enduring appeal of such myths highlights the vital part that the IRA's relationship with the Catholic minority plays in sustaining Northern republicanism, in spite of what the realities of this association may be. The nature and shallow roots of this relationship were nowhere more dramatically exposed than amid the violence of the early 1920s in Belfast. A study of the period demonstrates that the IRA entered into this relationship very much on its own terms and, as in the post-1969 period, whether in its role as defender or avenger of the Catholic minority, was not prepared to accept the implications of these roles if they conflicted with its own aims and elitist ideology.