Irish Volunteers

The Irish Volunteers were one end of the result of the splitting of the Irish Volunteer Force, the other being the National Volunteers. The Irish volunteers were an organisation who strongly opposed John Redmonds plea for Irishmen to go and fight for Britain in World War I. Although only a tiny minority of the Volunteer force overall, the Irish volunteers were paramount in the Easter Rising of 1916 and many of the rebels involved in that campaign played an important role in the Irish war of Independance.

Role in the Easter Rising

The official stance of the Irish Volunteers was that action would only be taken if the British authorities at Dublin Castle attempted to disarm the Volunteers, arrest their leaders, or introduce conscription to Ireland. The more militant Irish Republican Brotherhood, however, was determined to use the Volunteers for offensive action while Britain was tied up in the First World War. Against the will of Mc Neill, its Chief-of-Staff, the IRB's Military Council successfully infiltrated this force, intending to use it in a wartime rising. Their plan was to circumvent MacNeill's command ordering a ban on military procedure on Easter Sunday, 1916, instigate a rising, and hope to get Mc Neill on board once the rising was inevitable. Pearse (who had been an IRB member throughout) issued orders for three days of parades and manoeuvres, a disguised order for a general insurrection. MacNeill soon discovered the real intent behind the orders and attempted to stop all actions by the Volunteers. He succeeded only in putting the Rising off for a day, and limiting it to about 1,300 active participants, virtually all within Dublin (The Irish Citizen Army supplied slightly over 200 more).

Role in the War of Independance

The Easter Rising was a failure, and large numbers of the Irish Volunteers were arrested, even ones that did not participate in the Rising. In the meantime, public support for the Rising was growing consistently and some of its members began making active preparations for a renewal of military action. Closer links had also been fostered with the increasingly republican Sinn Féin party. The increasingly repressive measures taken by the British government after the Rising drove the remaining Volunteers underground. With the election and establishment of the First Dáil, individual units of the Volunteers began, on their own initiative, to target members of the Royal Irish Constabulary in their vicinity, thereby invoking in a slapdash manner the War of Independence. The volunteer commanders never fully accepted the central authority either of their own GHQ (established in March 1918) or the political control of the Dáil government, though most took an oath of allegiance to the latter in August 1919. By then, the organisation was increasingly known as the Irish Republican Army, having in effect merged with the remnants of the IRB. This new force, its successors and its competitors retained the name of the Irish Volunteers by means of its title in Irish - Óglaigh na hÉireann.

Bibliography

• Fitzpatrick, David and Hopkinson, Michael; Frank Henderson's Easter Rising: Recollections of a Dublin Volunteer
• Townshend, Charles; Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion
• Augusteijn, Joost; The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923
• Fitzpatrick, David; Harry Boland's Irish Revolution, 1887-1922 (Biography)