Ireland 1921: how republicans used their whiteness to win freedom
In February 1921, newspapers in London began to publish stories about how military lorries in Ireland were carrying prisoners as hostages in the hope of deterring attacks by the IRA, the guerrilla army fighting British rule since 1919. Within a year, negotiations would lead to Irish independence and the campaign would be hailed as the first successful revolt against the British empire. But in the spring of 1921 the war appeared to be intensifying. Martial law had been imposed across the southern half of Ireland; if troops or police were shot, houses in the vicinity of the attack were demolished in reprisal.
Dublin had become as dangerous as the provinces: army lorries were ambushed with bombs and revolvers; crowds scattered when Black and Tans – demobilised soldiers recruited to the Irish police force who had gained a reputation for brutality – opened fire indiscriminately in city centre streets.
The Daily News, a persistent critic of the conduct of the war, condemned the policy of “Oriental repression” in Ireland.
In the House of Commons, Capt William Wedgwood Benn introduced a motion declaring that the government’s campaign to defeat the Irish independence movement had failed. Newspapers around the world were full of news from Ireland, he pointed out, in which the British were portrayed as the cruel persecutors of a people deserving of freedom.
As Benn spoke in the Commons, the prominent liberal journalist JL Hammond and his wife, Barbara, were travelling around Ireland to see for themselves. Barbara Hammond found conditions “simply appalling” while her husband was horrified that the attitude of the British government was to govern Ireland as if it were “Sierra Leone or Fiji”. The best description he had heard of his own government’s policy was from a French journalist, who told him that Britain was “trying to subdue a people as intelligent as any in Europe, by the means that European governments use for the correction of Berbers”.
The comparisons between Ireland and other colonial possessions were not fanciful. To many British politicians, the situation in Ireland was on a par with the postwar nationalist revolts they faced in Egypt and India. Irish revolutionary leaders themselves supported self-determination as a universal principle. But the unspoken assumption of the French journalist who impressed Hammond was crucial: the Irish merited better treatment than the Berbers fighting French and Spanish colonialists in North Africa because they were white.
Although the Irish revolutionaries worked to forge links with anti-colonial movements across the world, they were increasingly aware that proclaiming their whiteness was a clever card to play. The Irish representative at the peace conference in Versailles in 1919, Seán T O’Kelly, had been bitterly disappointed at his failure to secure a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. “It seems,” he told an American journalist, “that the blacks and yellows, all colours and races, may be heard before the conference except the Irish.”
By May 1919, Erskine Childers, the former English officer and bestselling spy novelist, who had become Sinn Féin’s chief propagandist, was amplifying O’Kelly’s theme. In Paris, Childers pointed out in a letter to the Times, Britain had set about fixing new frontiers of nations the prime minister, David Lloyd George, had scarcely heard of, while failing to deal with Ireland. Was Ireland, Childers asked, to be “the last unliberated white community on the face of the globe?”
And a year later O’Kelly was still emphasising the point in a letter seeking an audience with Pope Benedict XV: Sinn Féin’s aim was “to obtain that independence which every other white race in the world has already won”.
The Irish republican leader Éamon de Valera had also taken this theme to the US on a fundraising tour from June 1919 to December 1920. De Valera travelled around America during an upsurge in racial violence in response to new challenges to segregation in the south and the beginning of the great black migration northwards.
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