From Fermanagh to the Tottenham Court Road

The year 1919 must have been very frustrating for Frank Carney. In most of Ireland, it was a year of excitement, change, momentum and military action, but not in the north, and not in Fermanagh.

In January there was the very first sitting of the new Dáil in Dublin, following Sinn Féin's landslide victory in the elections the previous December. The War of Independence began that month, and in April the Irish Volunteers were declared to be the National Army of Ireland. They were renamed the ‘Irish Republican Army’. The IRA was active in many counties in late 1919, carrying out the order of the new President, Éamonn DeValera, to remove the police from all communities in Ireland.

 

Members of the First Dáil at 2nd meeting, 10 April 1919

First row, left to right: Laurence Ginnell, Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Arthur Griffith, 

Éamon de Valera, Count Plunkett, Eoin MacNeill, W. T. Cosgrave and Ernest Blythe. 

In the north the situation was very different.  Frank Carney was now Commandant of the Fermanagh battalion of the Irish Republican Army. He had eight companies of men in 1919, in Enniskillen, Tempo, Arney, Cavanacross, Irvinestown, Belcoo, Wattlebridge and Lisnaskea, but none of them had been active.¹ There were major problems preventing Frank, and indeed all of the other northern Commandants, from taking their first actions in the War of Independence.

 

Irish Volunteer Companies in Fermanagh in 1919

Most of the population in the south supported, or at least tolerated, the IRA. In the north there was a large Protestant population who were adamantly against any talk of independence under Dublin. Many of these folk held arms, some from their membership of the well organised Ulster Volunteers, and they would not hesitate to use them if they felt threatened.² 

 

Edward Carson inspects a group of armed Ulster Volunteers in 1914

Equally, any IRA action would often draw down a violent backlash from the more extreme Protestant activists, resulting in direct attacks on the local Catholic population. As a result of this many Catholic areas turned against the IRA blaming them, as much as the Protestant activists, for their misfortune. The upshot of this was that support for the IRA was minimal.² 

Another major problem was the lack of weapons. Frank Carney’s troops had very few guns and most were doing field training with wooden replicas or other substitute implements.  The few guns that they had came largely from ex-soldiers returning from the war but there was a limited supply of these. In the south, IRA Companies were attacking police barracks and stealing supplies of weapons and ammunition. An attack on a northern police station would require a great deal of weapons, which the Fermanagh battalion did not have, and it would also risk the predictable backlash.

Michael Collins 1919

Frank Carney needed more guns, and the man in charge of gun supplies in Dublin was Michael Collins. During 1919 Michael Collins became Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government and in the Irish Republican Brotherhood he was made President, a title he kept until his death. From mid-1919, he pulled back from his hands-on work  with the Army to focus on his crowning role, that of Director of Intelligence. As part of this role, he retained total control of gun running.³

Frank Carney must have knocked at his door many times during the long months of 1919, without success. All Commandants countrywide were short of arms, and the queue was long. Those from Wexford, Cork and Kerry would take precedence, for these counties would use the weapons immediately on highly productive raids on Police Barracks, thus releasing even more arms.

It took until the beginning of the next year for Frank to finally reach the head of the queue. And that is why, on that January day in 1920, Frank Carney was walking down the Tottenham Court Road in London.

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References:

¹ Bureau of Military History 1913-1921, WS Ref #: 654 , Witness: Francis O'Duffy, Captain IV, Enniskillen, 1913; Chairman Monaghan Dail Courts, 1919 - 1921

² “The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920 -1921”, Robert Lynch, Irish Academic Press, 2006

³ “Collins and Intelligence 1919-1923, From Brotherhood to Bureauracy”, Eunan O’Halpin, in Michael Collins and the Making of the Irish State, Mercier Press, 1998