ABSTRACT
From the IRA’s initial pronouncements at the outset of the Anglo-Irish war the organisation’s status within the republican struggle appeared, at first glance, to be quite obvious. In August 1918, the newspaper An t-Oglach said that the Irish Volunteers were a ‘military body pure and simple’, mere ‘agents of the national will’. 1 Similarly, in January 1919 the paper stated that if the Volunteers ‘are called on to shed their blood in defence of the new-born Republic, they will not shrink from the sacrifice. For the authority of the nation is behind them, embodied in a lawfully constituted authority.’ 2 The implication of such announcements is that the ‘lawfully constituted authority’ resided in the elected representatives of the ‘national will’, namely, the Dail. In reality, the situation was more complicated. Far from a harmonious symbiosis, the relationship between the Dail and the IRA was ill-defined and tense because for all practical purposes the two were separate organisations following complementary, but unco-ordinated, policies. There was no better illustration of this position than the outbreak of hostilities in early 1919, which took place without approval from the Dail. The Volunteers believed that the election of the Dail and its declaration of independence had given them the right to pursue the republic in the manner they saw fit. 3 This was indicated in the An t-Oglach article of January 1919, which declared that the ‘state of war’ said to exist between Ireland and England in the Dail’s first official address was ‘a fact which has been recognised and acted on by the Volunteers almost from their inception’. 4
