Loyalists’ quiet resistance in Cavan

LECTURE Life immediately after partition for Cavan loyalists

Stranded by partition in a State they opposed, Cavan’s loyalist community practised ‘quietism’, contends a leading historian of the era.

Dr Edward Burke will this week give his lecture ‘A Toothless Hound of Ulster? Loyalist Paramilitarism in Cavan, 1920-1922’ in the third of this latest series of Decade of Centenary lectures hosted by Johnston Central Library.

Speaking to the Celt ahead of Thursday’s talk, the UCD lecturer surmises that the local loyalist community kept a low profile in these early years of the nascent Free State to prevent attracting unwanted attention from local IRA battalions.

“You don’t want to provoke more intense violence against you by overtly mobilising and going on the offensive against the IRA - so they don’t,” explains Dr Burke of his term “quietism”.

He believes that Cavan loyalists came to this policy due to a less aggressive IRA presence in the county, in marked contrast to the experiences of their brethren in County Monaghan.

“The IRA in Cavan tends to focus a lot of its energies around ‘lawfare’, which is essentially taking over the court system, taking over the running of local government, getting people to pay tax to the Dáil, to the Republic, rather than pay tax to the Crown. That’s very effective in Cavan.

“When there are raids for arms against prominent members of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force, and there is resistance, what’s interesting is you don’t see groups of IRA volunteers going back and taking people out of their houses and shooting them dead; that does happen in County Monaghan - there is this retribution for resistance, which is often quite lethal. There is a contrast there with Cavan which has a much less violent revolution than Monaghan.”

While this is typically the case for the IRA campaign in south and east Cavan, allowing for exceptions, Dr Burke says the volunteers in west Cavan were quicker to employ lethal force - most notably with the “shocking” killing of retired clergyman, John Finlay in June 1921 at Brackley House by Corlough Battalion, which followed the IRA killing of loyalist John Harrison in Garadice, just across the Leitrim border a few months earlier.

“You do see in Bawnboy, Ballyconnell, Ballinagh area - there are more aggressive IRA units operating there.”

“Loyalist activities, particularly around Cavan Town itself tends to be quite defensive - they are trying to stop the Sinn Féin boycott of Belfast goods, for example, and they are trying to protect loyalist homes but because a lot of IRA violence against loyalists is not lethal - very few people are killed, that also means there is a less pressing need for loyalist defence organisations. Whereas in Monaghan, we see a lot of that, after the killing of a number of a number of loyalists there is this response [in the formation of loyalist groups].”

Dr Burke attributes this difference in response between the neighbouring counties to the greater concentration of protestants in Monaghan in places like Drum, Glaslough and Smithborough, which facilitates greater defence efforts. He further notes that Protestant populations are more removed geographically from the Six Counties, giving the example that protestants living in Ballyjamesduff know that the Boundary Commission is not going to redraw the border to include them in the North, whereas that hope remains for protestant towns in north Monaghan - “so there is a puncturing of political morale which is important,” he says of Cavan’s loyalists.

Regardless, they did offer resistance when faced with attack.

“If there are raids on houses, neighbours cooperate to try to fight that off, so there are quite a few instances where IRA raids are resisted, and even IRA volunteers are shot, and sometimes very badly wounded, so loyalists are resisting.”

Where resistance networks are established in Monaghan, British military figures, such as Royal Irish Fusilier veterans are pivotal to their organisations. Such expertise was missing from the most notable example of loyalists resistance in Cavan, which occurred in Ashfield District, which includes Rathkenny, near Cootehill.

“There is an attempt there to organise larger groups of loyalists in a defence network, but I haven’t found any evidence of anybody in that group having any background in the British Army - I think that lack of military experience is quite a weak point for them, and so a number of those loyalists are targeted by the Cootehill Battalion of the IRA and are shot - that’s quite disastrous.”

The IRA claimed responsibility for shooting three “Specials”, as they termed them at their base at Rathkenny School, including a 14-year-old boy. Similar overt displays of loyalist resistance in Billis in the south east of the county were also attacked, and led to the shooting of RIC man William Rooney.

He also notes a “counter-current”: “‘Hang on, we need to preserve what we have, what we have worked very hard on’, which are these good neighbourly relations. So when Constable William Rooney is shot, there is the sense that this is unpopular in the area, and the sense that this is regrettable,” he says adding that such regret isn’t apparent amongst republicans when similar incidents occur in Monaghan where community relations are deeply ruptured early on. “There’s these regional subtleties that are quite interesting whereby something that happens in Castleblayney would be not only tolerated by the local IRA, but actively advocated, whereas in somewhere like Ballyjamesduff you have a sensitivity to community relations and a reluctance to do things - be more aggressive, more lethal, more violent against loyalists.”

There is “substantial” migration north of the border, particularly from West Cavan in this period.

“In terms of percentage of non-Catholic population for Cavan - in 1911 you have 18.5%, in 1926 we have 15.9% - that is a shift, it’s not catastrophic, clearly some people are leaving, but this is not a stampede,” he says noting some would have been leaving, such as British army and RIC due to the end of British administration in Ireland.

“Fast forward to 1961, it’s now 11.7%,” says Dr Burke noting both the “dire” economic conditions in Cavan and also the State’s departure from the British Commonwealth in 1949.

“It is a thing for them - they feel now they can no longer express any identity in terms of their Ulster identity, their ties to Northern Ireland and they do have an element of Britishness that is important to them.”

Dr Edward Burke will give his lecture at Johnston Central Library on this Thursday, October 19 at 7.30pm.

This is a free event but booking is advisable on: 049 4378500 / 01.