ABSTRACT

I O’Donovan was born on 3 February 1896 in Castleview, County Roscommon, the fifth child of Cork-born Daniel O’Donovan and Margaret Brennan. As a gauger in the Customs and Excise Service, O’Donovan senior had moved around significantly in the years since his marriage. The family’s census return for 1901 reveals that two of the older children had been born in Cork, another two in Dublin, James O’Donovan in Roscommon, and by 31 March 1901 the family were living in Charleville in north Cork.3 They had also lived for a time in Wakefield, west Yorkshire. This peripatetic lifestyle continued throughout O’Donovan’s childhood, and in 1904 the family relocated to Glasgow where they remained until 1913.4 O’Donovan’s social background was unquestionably that of the rising Catholic middle-classes in the fin de siècle: his grandparents came from farming and hostelry backgrounds in west Cork, but his father was a Crown official and an educated professional. From this perspective, O’Donovan adheres to the typology advanced by Tom Garvin in his study of the republican elite between 1900 and 1923: ‘non-agrarian and middle class, highly educated and socially mobile, but with very recent rural social origins’.5 Of course, Irish migration to Scotland, and particularly to Glasgow, was well-established by the beginning of the twentieth century, but O’Donovan’s migratory experience was qualitatively different from the vast majority of his peers and predecessors. Whereas the bulk of Irish Catholic immigrants in Glasgow were associated with impoverished tenements and the industrial revolution, O’Donovan’s Glaswegian stint was more privileged: the family settled in affluent Kelvinside in the West End, and O’Donovan and his brothers were educated at St Aloysius College,

a Jesuit school. Although O’Donovan dated the beginning of his radicalisation to his return to Ireland, Irish immigrant communities in Scotland were not immune to the revitalisation of advanced nationalist politics in the early Edwardian period, and the O’Donovan family’s arrival in Glasgow coincided with a period of intense activity on the part of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood: the period of 1907-08 has been described as ‘a hive of activity’, with extensive programme of social and cultural events. The strength of constitutional Irish nationalism in Glasgow should not be underestimated, and the popularity of the United Irish League of Great Britain, a grass-roots organisation attached to the Irish Parliamentary Party, was also a constant feature of the Irish immigrant landscape. These two impulses – constitutional and revolutionary – came together in the establishment of the First Glasgow and West of Scotland Regiment of the Irish Volunteers in early 1914, reflecting the paramilitarisation of Irish political life in the aftermath of the Ulster Crisis.6 It appears that O’Donovan, who turned 18 in early 1914, did not participate in any of these ‘Irish-Ireland’ activities, but they formed part of the social framework of his adolescence and early adulthood. Isolation was also part of his experience: after the family returned to Dublin in 1913, a move again dictated by Daniel O’Donovan’s transfer, James remained in Glasgow to complete his schooling, following in 1914. He later described the move home as having ‘altered the entire direction of my life, the political tenor of which became extreme nationalist’.7 This alteration seems to have come some time after the outbreak of war in August 1914, upon which O’Donovan applied to join the Royal Navy; rejected on account of poor eyesight, he received the standard printed ‘thank you’ from Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.8 It is almost certain that O’Donovan was radicalised during his time as a student in the Department of Chemistry at University College Dublin. The institution, established in 1908 as one of the three constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland, was envisaged to provide education for the native elite in the expected devolution of limited parliamentary autonomy to Ireland.9 The events of 1912-23 completely altered the planned future for the university, and the rapid succession of the Great War, Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence severely tested the sangfroid of the college authorities. Initial tensions over recruitment activities for the Irish brigades of the British Army – Ireland had been excluded from the Military Service Act of March 1916 – gave way to absolute crisis following the Easter Rising of April 1916. A significant group of staff and students from UCD participated in the rebellion, among them Thomas MacDonagh, a lecturer in the English department, who was executed on 3 May 1916.10 The placing of the Easter Rising within the rubric of the history of terrorism has been contentious, on both sides. David Fitzpatrick has observed that the rebels’ choice of strongholds in the midst of densely-populated urban slums and shopping districts raises the inference that the insurgents were intent on ‘provoking maximum bloodshed, destruction and coercion’.11 Conversely, Charles Townshend has emphasised the recklessness rather than the malign intent of the rebel strategists in planning the Rising, arguing that the leadership

moved towards surrender in order to avoid further civilian casualties.12 The British state did not emerge with an entirely unblemished record either: although the execution of 16 rebel leaders was arguably a measured response to a treasonable insurgency in wartime, the subjugation of civil to military government and the massacre of civilians by British soldiers in North King Street raise difficult questions about the balancing of civil liberties with an effective counterinsurgency strategy. The perceived severity of the British suppression of the Rising, exacerbated by the widespread arrests and deportations, transformed Irish public opinion towards the insurgents and their political ideology.13 O’Donovan had not participated in the Rising, but he was not immune from its after-effects, particularly in UCD. Evidence of O’Donovan’s hardening political opinions can be gleaned from his evident opposition to proposals to extend conscription to Ireland in the winter of 1916; by the following year, having graduated with a B.Sc. in Chemistry, O’Donovan’s postgraduate research, sponsored by Nobel’s Explosive Company, had brought him to the attention of the regrouping Irish Volunteers, soon to be redubbed the Irish Republican Army. O’Donovan’s elder brother Dan was also a Volunteer, but it appears to have been university connections which recruited O’Donovan. Thomas Dillon, a lecturer in Chemistry; Rory O’Connor, an engineering graduate but habitué of the department; and Richard Mulcahy, a drop-out medical student who maintained an office in the chemistry corridor at the university buildings – all three veterans of the Rising – were O’Donovan’s immediate contacts in his first work for the Volunteers.14 Professor Hugh Ryan, under whom O’Donovan studied, was also a closet republican, although he kept his sympathies from his employers: he did, however, turn a blind eye to O’Donovan’s early weapons experiments on behalf of the IRA.15 The connection between radical politics and universities has frequently been observed, from the student-led revolution of 1905 in Russia to Islamist extremism on British campuses in the twenty-first century; Irish universities, particularly UCD, are no exception. Although Peter Hart’s detailed statistics on the composition of the Dublin metropolitan units of the IRA between 1917 and 1923 reveal a striking absence of students, anecdotal and individual evidence would suggest a far more extensive involvement of the student body with the ‘national struggle’.16 Two UCD students were executed for their part in IRA attacks upon Crown forces, the first of these prompting widespread protests among the student body, and the well-known figures of Todd Andrews, Seán MacBride, Michael Rynne and Niall MacNeill were all IRA members as students. The execution of Kevin Barry, a first year medical student, and the subsequent raid of university buildings by a large group of Crown forces, prompted a wave of intense anti-English feeling among the student body.17 By and large, university authorities across Ireland – with the possible exception of Trinity College Dublin – attempted to steer as quiet a path as possible through the political and security upheavals of the revolutionary period, and by 1923 had adapted seamlessly to the new political dispensation. Back in late 1917 and early 1918, O’Donovan was availing of UCD facilities to conduct explosives work. This predates the outbreak of the violence associated

with the Irish War of Independence, which is commonly held to begin with the killing of two policemen accompanying gelignite to a Tipperary quarry in January 1919. In 1918, after the release of the majority of Rising prisoners and internees, the Volunteers were regrouping, recruiting and preparing for a resumption of hostilities. It was expected that this latter would stem from the expected British attempt to impose conscription in Ireland in the spring of 1918. Under Dillon, O’Donovan was tasked with attempting to secure a reliable native source of explosive production, principally for use in detonators. He also focused on what appears to have been an early IRA flirtation with the possibility of chemical and biological warfare: O’Donovan’s statement to the Bureau of Military History in 1957 included details of attempts to manufacture poison gas (in order to take pre-emptive safeguards against its expected use in the imposition of conscription), glanders (destined for use against British cavalry, possibly inspired by German use of the same infectious agent against Russian troops),18 and botulism toxin.19 None of these efforts came to fruition, although O’Donovan was injured when liquid poison gas exploded in his face: blistered and temporarily blinded, he was, he dryly remembered, ‘the first poison-gas casualty in Ireland, if not the only one ever recorded’.20 Biological and chemical warfare was never embraced by the IRA in any of its incarnations; O’Donovan was understandably cautious in discussing these possibilities in his witness statement, emphasising the preliminary nature of the experiments and their defensive character. Republican iconography centred on firearms – the popularity of the Thompson sub-machine gun and ‘Peter the Painter’ revolvers testifying to their appeal – but explosives were also an essential component, particularly handgrenades. O’Donovan was behind republican attempts to replicate the popular Mills grenade, with a great deal of success: by the end of hostilities, he maintained that ‘our final grenade was really superior to the Mills’.21 The tempo of violence throughout the War of Independence to a large extent governed the pace of O’Donovan’s activities: on a mostly preparatory footing until the spring of 1919, the spread of IRA activities thereafter meant that there was a much more acute need for a steady supply of explosives from 1920 onwards. This increased dramatically in the second half of the year, as the spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal resulted in a conflict that was ‘widespread, brutal and ruthless on both sides’.22 The conflict in Ireland between 1919 and 1923 has frequently been heralded as a model of anti-colonial guerrilla warfare: yet, as Charles Townshend has argued, this was arrived at ‘by instinct rather than theory’.23 Instinct largely governed the ‘men of the country’, and local initiative was at the root of much of the IRA’s early activities. Conversely, as the conflict progressed, the theory and formalities of waging war – broadening and formalising hierarchies of command, imposing uniformity of structure across IRA units and, especially, demanding regular reports from all commanding officers – became an increasingly important part of GHQ’s positioning of the IRA as a ‘regular’ and legitimate military force. This tension, between the centre and the peripheries of IRA activities was exacerbated by the extreme imbalance in the geographies of violence across the country: so long as the

‘rebel south’ of Cork, Clare and Tipperary was perceived to be setting the pace of the guerrilla war, instructions (or diktats) from Dublin were sometimes unwelcome. A further complication was the extent to which GHQ simultaneously sought to extend its own control of the overall shape and direction of IRA activities while continuing to insist that local units should be essentially self-sufficient in the realm of weaponry. Even the manufacture of explosives was not an entirely centralised operation: local units often arranged for their own importation of materials, in some instances directly competing with GHQ buyers, and frequently sent their most talented ‘chemists’ to Dublin to learn bomb-making.24 By late 1920, this was increasingly under the direction of O’Donovan. He was brought onto the staff of GHQ in April of that year by Richard Mulcahy, possibly following his authorship of a number of instructional articles on the manufacturing and storage of explosives in An t-Óglach, the IRA’s in-house magazine. Whereas his previous activities had been as an attaché to the Dublin Brigade, his recruitment to GHQ signalled his rise up the ladder of the IRA. This was partly attributable to his undoubted skill as a ‘chemist’, but also directly connected to the need to reorganise GHQ in the wake of the events of Bloody Sunday, 20 November 1920. In the aftermath of the IRA’s elite ‘Squad’ shooting dead 12 British intelligence and military personnel that morning, along with two bystanders (a fifteenth died later of his wounds), retribution on the part of the Crown was swift: a Gaelic football match in central Dublin was visited by police and Auxiliary units, who opened fire on the crowd, killing 12 civilians.25 From the IRA’s perspective, more serious reprisals were to follow: that evening, two senior IRA officers, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy – commandant and former vice-commandant of the Dublin Brigade respectively – along with an unfortunate civilian, Conor Clune, were ‘shot while attempting to escape’ from custody in Dublin Castle.26 These apparently extra-judicial executions were the closest the British came to decapitation during the conflict with the IRA and were the result of a chance arrest, rather than the fruits of a deliberate decapitation strategy.27 The nature of the British counter-insurgency campaign in Ireland has been the subject of much scholarly attention, both from historians of the Irish revolution and from counter-insurgency specialists. The dual-headed nature of the British response to the conflict in Ireland reflected Ireland’s split status as a constituent part of the United Kingdom with heavy colonial trappings. Thus the British government permitted a dangerous policy of drift to embed itself, insisting that this was criminal disorder to be dealt with by the civil administration. The effective paralysis of normal policing structures made this impossible, as the IRA’s assassination of RIC officers accelerated, exacerbated by a severe drop in recruitment and a spike in retirements. Morale was further dented by the breakdown of British justice through 1920, with Sinn Féin courts arguably the most successful marker of the republican counter-state.28 By the summer of 1920, the Crown writ scarcely ran in large parts of the country. A divided cabinet – Lloyd George led a coalition government – and an administration similarly split between hawks and doves produced a policy of confusion: the Restoration of Order in Ireland

Act of August 1920 was martial law without the discomfiting title, overlapping British intelligence agencies appeared to duplicate each other’s work, and, most problematically of all, the reinforcement of depleted police ranks with two specially-recruited British units, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary division, made the pretence at normalcy even more hollow. The arrival of these latter units, along with a fundamental lack of clarity around who was actually in charge of them, inflamed the Irish situation even further: by the summer of 1920, the increasing prevalence of Crown reprisals against suspected republicans and the wider nationalist population was fundamentally undermining British efforts to stifle the insurgency. The ‘sacking’ of towns across Ireland, culminating in the burning of Cork in December 1920 by Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British soldiers, was a public relations disaster for the British state, relentlessly publicised by an extremely able Sinn Féin Department of Propaganda.29 The strain of pretending this was ‘normal’ disorder to be dealt with by ordinary legislation and institutions could not be sustained: martial law was eventually proclaimed in eight counties by the end of 1920, and military reprisals were officially sanctioned by Nevil Macready, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, in January 1921, apparently as a means of restoring discipline and channelling ‘the retaliatory instincts’ of his troops.30 Although Dublin Castle disapproved of police units running amok among the general population, targeted assassinations of the ‘murder gang’ responsible for the criminal rebellion engulfing Ireland were another matter; as Mark Sturgis, a senior civil servant confided to his diary, ‘indiscriminate burning is idiotic, and a little quiet shooting [is] equally effective’.31 But quiet shootings, like those of republican prisoners ‘attempting to escape’ or the assassination in his bed of Thomas MacCurtain, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, essentially amounted to the same thing: the widespread feeling that law and order had entirely broken down in Ireland by late 1920. State terror, such as it existed in Ireland in 1920 and 1921, did not, of course, operate within a vacuum: the republican campaign had included shocking assassinations in broad daylight of policemen, magistrates and civil servants who had previously been respected members of local communities, as well as similarly brutal action against suspected informers.32 Although Crown forces had secured a significant coup with the executions of Clancy and McKee, the attrition of senior leadership within the Dublin IRA did not produce the desired effect; instead, GHQ embarked on a systematic reorganisation, bringing O’Donovan and others (including Seán Russell) onto the staff, and significantly expanding the scope of the weapons-related departments of Engineering, Purchases and Chemicals, the latter of which O’Donovan was named as Director.33 This, as Jacob Shapiro has pointed out, is a common feature of promotion strategies within violent organisations: ‘while high-commitment people are less likely to survive, conditional on surviving, they are more likely to be chosen as leaders’.34 O’Donovan was certainly high-commitment: although he was forbidden from participating in ambushes, he considered himself something of a strategic thinker, presenting proposals to the Chief of Staff for broadening the IRA campaign into economic warfare, and apparently advising

Michael Collins on intelligence activities.35 Moreover, O’Donovan’s formal promotion in March 1921 was, he later pointed out, merely a reflection of the expanded role he undertook through the winter of 1920:

even before I was appointed Director of Chemicals I had already drafted the organisation of such a Department and rendered such other services as put me on a basis superior to that of merely the executive head of the department and were acceptable to the highest officers such as the Chief of Staff and the Director of Organisation.36