It is incongruous, therefore, that, at the very moment when control was most in demand, GHQ itself was experiencing difficulties coping with the sheer pace of the struggle. In particular, Mulcahy felt challenged to devise other workable variations on the Carrigtohill tactic. For instance, at a meeting between GHQ and the commanders of the Munster brigades on 1 August 1920, he, with Brugha’s backing, put forward another politicised plan. This plan requested officers to use ‘general ambushing as the principal form of attack against the enemy, but in all cases the enemy should be first of all called upon to surrender’. In addition, the enemy was to be confined to quarters by a series of manned circles around its bases. He suggested radii of two miles, four miles, etc. But both of these suggestions were rejected outright, the former because surprise was considered a great asset against a better trained and better equipped force and the latter because there were simply not enough arms and ammunition to operate it.31
In the end, it was the Volunteers’ own local initiatives which prevailed, leaving Mulcahy with the image of being out of touch with provincial realities. There was a modicum of truth to that image. Without doubt the members of GHQ rarely, if ever, visited the outlying troops, least of all for inspection purposes.32 Furthermore, the breadth of their knowledge might have been limited: ‘[Knowing] little or nothing about training and operations, their strong points were organisation and administration.’33 Likewise, their principal methodology, especially that of Mulcahy, was to amass information and to send either exhortative or censorial despatches down the line, leaving, for example, the Munster Volunteers to regularly complain of their own feelings of isolation and of the necessity of travelling to Dublin in order to personally intercede on some issue, usually concerning the deficiency of arms and ammunition or the allocation of same.34
Apart from these types of complaints, however, Mulcahy never lost his reputation for hard work: ‘he was all business’.35 Also, he was noted for a depth of self-control and forethought: ‘I always felt that the C.S. could not be flurried or rushed. He had a quiet strength that was impressive. He had thought out each area in his mind. He could summarise a brigade quickly.’ And he had acquired an aloof self-confidence: ‘He was always calmer than Cathal Brugha, less taut and more impersonal. His lean jaw seemed to prevent emotion; his eyes seemed to avoid it. One always felt a quiet insistence, a tinge of something that was no human warmth, but there was always confidence.’36 But, more importantly, in particular after January 1920, a month when he, along with Collins and Oscar Traynor, planned the elimination of District Inspector Redmond of the DMP,37 and when, maybe as a direct consequence, he, Mulcahy, was forced to go on the run,38 he drew closer to the nerve-racking world of the gunmen.
Drawing closer to the activities of the gunmen became spectacularly obvious when, with the official sanction of the Cabinet and scrupulous examination of the evidence against each man by Brugha, Mulcahy helped Collins carry out, through the medium of the Squad and some handpicked members of the Dublin brigades, especially members of the Second Battalion, the tracking down and execution of fourteen suspected British agents on the morning of 21 November 1920, a date soon referred to as Bloody Sunday.39
Of course, given the escalating trend of the war, reprisals would have been expected for such a dramatic intervention and these came about in the form of the following incidents. During Sunday afternoon, fourteen people were shot dead and sixty were wounded when Crown forces went on a rampage at a football match between Dublin and Tipperary at Croke Park and, during the early hours of Monday morning, McKee, Clancy and Clune, who had been captured on Saturday evening, were beaten to death while under interrogation in Dublin Castle.40
In such tense circumstances, therefore, it is likely that the Volunteers, or rather the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – a title by which the Volunteers were then becoming popularly known41– were unable to hold their national convention at that particular time.42 However, a postponement43 might have been the very thing which Brugha did not want. This was because, on 15 August 1919, when de Valera was trying to cover up the Brugha/Collins difficulties, he, Brugha, offered the following general reasons for wanting the Volunteers, along with TDs, to swear an oath of allegiance to the Dáil and, just as significantly, for wanting a new Volunteer constitution to give full recognition to same at the next Volunteer convention (i.e. the 1920 one):44
The object aimed at was to unify the whole body in this country. The present Constitution governing the Irish Volunteers prevented them from being subject to any other body but their own Executive. At the next Convention they [the members of the Cabinet] proposed to ask them as a standing army to swear allegiance to the Dáil, and it was but fair and just that all Members of the Dáil, and all officials of the Dáil, should likewise subscribe to an Oath of Allegiance.
In response, Liam de Róiste pointed out that TDs had already been required to sign a pledge at the first Dáil session. Cosgrave was unenthusiastic also. But Griffith was not: ‘The Army and the Government of a country could [should?] not be under separate authority.’ The vast majority of the TDs agreed, resulting in the motion being passed by thirty votes to five.45
Seemingly, Mulcahy was among the naysayers. As he explained many years later, his attitude was that Brugha’s oath, unlike an IRB oath, for example, would be compulsory, thereby ‘pinning something constitutionally or morally on the people’.46 This is yet another one of his convoluted, latter-day comments. But, with thought, the message becomes clear: right up to the declaration of the Truce, he disliked the fact that Brugha continued to push for parliamentary control over the army. As far as he was concerned, Brugha was thereby distracting GHQ from its primary purpose, namely to keep the fight at a controlled high intensity, as was already encouraged by the Dáil itself the year before. But, in emphasising that particular grievance, he ignored another important aspect of Brugha’s proposal, namely that, in the words of Liam de Róiste, ‘a new moral situation [concerning the civil–military relationship?] has been created in Irish governmental affairs’.47
At all events, from Brugha’s perspective, a certain amount of progress had already been made before November 1920. For instance, on 2 June, Seán McGarry, who after Ashe’s death had occupied the office of president of the IRB and was now secretary to IRA GHQ, contacted Florrie O’Donoghue requesting his vote in favour of the oath.48 Also, Mulcahy, Collins, Béaslaí, along with twenty-three other TDs, took the oath on 29 June49 and a general order of swearing in was issued to the troops on 23 July50 with the objective of completing its administration by 31 August. The following is the wording of their pledge:
I, A.B., do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I do not, and shall not, yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government, Authority, or Power within Ireland, hostile or inimical thereto; and I do further swear (or affirm) that to the best of my knowledge and ability I will support and defend the Irish Republic, and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann, against all enemies foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.51
Maybe the reference to ‘any pretended Government’ was a cryptic allusion to the IRB as much as to the Castle regime. But, because the IRB SC had already decided in September 1919 to recognise the Dáil as the legitimate government of the new-born state, it is unlikely that Mulcahy, Collins and Béaslaí would have been bothered by that. However, what did bother them, and this seems to be implicit in Mulcahy’s explanation above, was the following clause of the new constitution: ‘The Minister of [sic] National Defence, in consultation with the Executive Council [Cabinet], shall appoint and define the duties of the Headquarters staff.’52
Therefore, unfortunately for Brugha, getting the oath safely across the line was not going to end his difficulties with GHQ. The reason was that the real bones of contention – power and authority – were now exposed for all to see and to continue to squabble over. To make matters more sensitive still, Brugha did not become Acting President of the Dáil when, during the military sweeps of Bloody Sunday, Griffith was apprehended