Richard Mulcahy

Mulcahy, Richard (1886–1971)
Chief of Staff IRA, Commander-in-chief National Army, Minister for Defence

Extract from RIA Dictonary of Irish Biography by Ronan Fanning

Mulcahy supported the treaty from the outset because of his conviction that, while the IRA might resist for six months or so, they could not defeat the British; they had ‘not been able to drive the enemy from anything but from a fairly good-sized police barracks’, as he famously told the dáil on 22 December. ‘We have not that power’; there was ‘no alternative to the acceptance of this treaty. I see no solid spot of ground upon which the Irish people can put its political feet but upon that treaty’ (Dáil Éireann . . . debate on the treaty . . . 1921, 142–3). His position became pivotal when he succeeded Brugha as minister for defence following the dáil's ratification of the treaty on 7 January 1922. Aware that the recruitment of the forces that became the national army and the Garda Síochána had only just begun, he met anti-treaty IRA officers on 18 January without reference to either the provisional or the dáil government. Playing for time, he at first accepted their demand for an army convention to reaffirm the IRA's allegiance to the republic and to appoint an army executive independent of the dáil. But there was no equivocation about his advice, endorsed by the dáil cabinet in mid March, that the convention must be prohibited as ‘tantamount to an attempt to establish a military dictatorship’; the dáil was ‘the sole body in supreme control of the army’ (Fanning, 11). Yet, unlike Griffith and Kevin O'Higgins (qv), he backed Collins's efforts at conciliation in the talks with de Valera that led to the pact election agreement of 20 May, which eased his own task of prolonging talks about army unity with anti-treaty IRA officers while simultaneously endeavouring to ‘have the British cleared out of the Curragh, Cork, and part of Dublin’ (Hopkinson, Green against green, 103). Mulcahy had meanwhile also supported Collins's aggressive northern policy of arming the IRA; he organised the payment of £3 a week to sixty Volunteers in Belfast to protect catholic areas during rioting as early as 24 February, and he was also involved in arming the IRA for their Northern Ireland offensive in May 1922. But he knew nothing of the plans for the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (qv) on 22 June, and, incensed when told by Liam Tobin that ‘it was “our lads” who did it’, he threatened to resign (O'Regan, 63, 71). With the outbreak of civil war, and the subsequent formation of a war council on 12 July 1922, Mulcahy again became chief of staff as well as remaining as minister for defence, and he urged Collins to ‘change their northern policy to a peace one’ (Hopkinson, Green against green, 248)....

Collins's death, on 22 August, pitched Mulcahy, who succeeded him as commander-in-chief, into the limelight when he filled the leadership vacuum with a morale-raising funeral oration against reprisals. His instincts for conciliation again surfaced in his secret but unsuccessful meeting with de Valera on 5 September without the knowledge of his cabinet colleagues, who saw it as a breach of collective responsibility; Kevin O'Higgins was particularly critical, as he regarded Mulcahy's simultaneously holding the posts of minister for defence and commander-in-chief as corrosive of civilian authority over the army. But this marked the end of Mulcahy's quest for compromise, and he backed the public safety act (28 September) establishing military courts empowered to impose the death penalty. He was ever afterwards pilloried as the principal architect of the draconian policy of reprisals for IRA atrocities; it was on his recommendation, for example, that when one deputy, Seán Hales (qv), was shot dead and another wounded on their way to a meeting of the dáil on 7 December, an emergency cabinet meeting unanimously agreed that four IRA leaders, jailed in Mountjoy since the summer, should be taken out of their cells and shot next morning without legal process of any kind....