Hunger strike: The last act of the Civil War

One hundred years ago, the largest hunger strike in Irish history began. With the Civil War lost, it was Republicans' best chance to plunge the Free State government back into crisis.

The baton caught Dan Breen right across the chest, directly above the heart.

The force of the blow sent him staggering back, to fall hard on the stone-flagged floor.

He passed out.

Around him there was chaos.

Inmates fought with prison guards, army officers and military police.

They fought in the cells, they fought on the landings and they fought on the stairs.

Mountjoy Jail, Friday 14 September, 1923. Morning.

One month until the start of the largest hunger strike ever in Irish history.

It would be the 30th hunger strike since 1918.

The standoff

By September 1923, all the conditions that begat the hunger strikes were in place.

The Civil War was over since the previous May, but nearly 10,000 men and women remained in custody, in prisons and detention camps across the country.

No release date was set for the bulk of the prison population, even for those against whom no criminal proceedings were contemplated.

The government could point to one crucial fact, in defence of its policy of detention without trial.

The Civil War was effectively, but not officially, ended. There had been no actual surrender, no formal agreement that either side could point to as proof the conflict was over.

The wording of the instructions to IRA units to cease operations that May had made it clear that weapons and munitions were to be hidden in secret arms dumps, until the leadership deemed the time was right to return to armed hostilities.

The government offered release to any IRA men who would sign a pledge to abide by the law and not take up arms against the State again.

Many refused to sign. The government's position was that that left the authorities with no choice but to insist on keeping former combatants in custody indefinitely.

The weapons, ammunition and explosives were still out there, hidden in hundreds of secret places.

What was to stop a mass unconditional release of prisoners from reigniting the entire conflict if they swarmed back to those secret places to take up those weapons again?

Why would a government victorious at great cost against internal enemies throw away the advantage by releasing such men?

Against that possibility, Republicans pointed to the words of their president Éamon de Valera back in May as giving an effective guarantee that the armed conflict was over. The government believed that his words were laced with enough vagueness to render the so-called guarantee worthless.

The Minister for Defence and Army Commander in Chief Richard Mulcahy claimed that captured correspondence proved that some elements at least of the IRA were only biding their time and waiting for the right moment to resume the war.

Women prisoners lead the way

If the continued detention of prisoners was the major factor in triggering what was to unfold, another factor was how hunger strikes had succeeded in forcing prisoner releases, only a few months earlier.

In the spring of 1923, long before the IRA order to cease operations in the Civil War, women prisoners were staging hunger strikes in protest at conditions in the prisons, and the imprisonment of Republicans without trial.

February saw 23 members of Cumann na mBan go on strike. Strikers included Sheila (Sighle) Humphreys, Mary MacSwiney and Lily O'Brennan. After 34 days, the strikers were released.

A month later, nearly 100 women prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol went on hunger strike in protest at the loss of inmate privileges. Within the month, the privileges had been restored.

The outcome of the women's hunger strikes presented the government with a new dilemma; had it created a precedent whereby the way for a prisoner to get early release was to go on hunger strike?

Would one event make the other inevitable?

The implications for the fate of the thousands of IRA prisoners were obvious, and huge.

In the Dáil, a month after the end of the latest women's hunger strike, the government sought to draw a line, before it lost the argument for imprisonment without trial.

A motion was proposed in the House calling for prisoners then on hunger strike to be released to help end the Civil War.

The government faced it down, and succeeded in replacing it with a motion declaring that, in effect, no prisoner could secure release by going on hunger-strike.

In other words, a prisoner could not expect to be released just because they were at death's door on hunger strike.

An International Red Cross team had visited camps and prisons in the spring, and found conditions acceptable. Republicans believed the delegation had been restricted to selected 'show camps'.

By early summer it was becoming clear to the government that whatever willingness had been there by prisoners to sign the undertaking to foresake armed opposition was evaporating.

And yet, the desperation inside the prisons and prison camps at the prospect of indefinite detention was mounting too.

The Mountjoy powder-keg: Anatomy of a prison riot

It was perhaps inevitable that Mountjoy Gaol would be one of the flashpoints that led to the October hunger strikes.

The previous September, the government had refused to accord Republican prisoners the status of prisoners of war.

No prisoner-of-war status meant that when the inmates in Mountjoy attempted to re-create IRA hierarchies and drills from outside, trying to control freedom of speech, movement and assembly inside the walls, there could only be one outcome.

Such conflicts were not unique to Mountjoy, but to add to the powder-keg atmosphere there, the prison included among its inmates no fewer than 11 TDs, more than the rest of the prison network combined.

On the morning of 13 September, the Governor and eight Military policemen were driven from the Central Circle by inmates trying to conduct military drills.

Six days of rioting and destruction followed, before the authorities regained control of the prison, with the help of the Army.

The violence was unprecedented.

Prisoners alleged that in the first moments of the riot, the Governor had drawn his pistol and threatened to shoot the nearest prisoners.

Over the next few days, control of parts of the prison shifted from one side to the other. Cells were cleared one by one, firehoses were used to drive prisoners out, missiles rained down on officers from landings above, warning shots were fired from at least one machine gun mounted to cover the rioters.

It was during one of those clashes that Dan Breen took the blow from a baton that felled him to the stone-flagged floor, the fall knocking him unconscious.

Prisoners claimed their bedding, possessions and books were deliberately destroyed; officers claimed the prisoners broke up the cells to make them unuseable, used the broken remnants as missiles, and set fire to furniture they had piled up in the exercise yard.

The day after the riot, TDs in the Dáil were pressing for an inquiry into conditions in the prison. Defence Minister Richard Mulcahy stonewalled, declaring that the only issues in Mountjoy were disciplinary.

The mood among the prisoners, back in their soaked and patched-up cells, festered. The desperation was the same across the prison system.

'Immediate hunger strike for unconditional release'

The IRA leadership knew all that summer that pressure for a mass hunger strike was growing. In August, IRA GHQ sent messages in to the prisoners. The leadership would not issue a general order to strike. That decision would be left to senior officers in the prisons.

And so it began.

On Sunday 14 October, prisoners at Mountjoy prison refused breakfast. They served notice on the Governor that they demanded unconditional release, and declared they were on hunger strike until their demands were met.

The strike began in 'D Wing'.

Michael Kilroy, the commanding officer of the prisoners in Mountjoy, wrote:

"Immediate hunger strike for unconditional release was unanimously called for."

All the issues from the fallout from the September riot – the flooded cells, saturated bedding and clothing from the hosing – were cited as grievances.

Ernie O'Malley recalled the mood among prisoners in the first hours of the strike.

"We laughed and talked, but in the privacy of our cells, some, like myself, must have thought what fools we were, and have doubted our tenacity and strength of will. I looked into the future of hunger and I quailed".

The strike spreads - and peaks

A few days later, prisoners in the camp known as Tintown A in the Curragh went on hunger strike.

Then the strike spread rapidly to the other camps in the Curragh, to Kilkenny, Castlebar, Cork, Hare Park, Tralee, Newbridge and Dundalk.

By the end of October it was reported that over 8,000 were on strike, out of a prison population of nearly 10,000.

Frank O'Connor refused to join the strike. The President of the underground Republican government Éamon de Valera, imprisoned in isolation in Kilmainham, did not even know a strike was underway, and condemned the plan when he found out.

The peak of the strike was reached in late October.

Republicans claimed that 8,200 men and women were on hunger strike in camps and prisons across the Free State. The government figure was 7,750.

But within days, the worst fears of some veteran IRA prisoners began to be realised; large numbers of men were already coming off the strike. By the 28th, the government claimed that nearly 1,500 men had gone off the strike. Before the month was out, that figure had risen by 500.

The delusion and the disillusion

The massive flaw in the logic of the hunger strike as a weapon of mass protest was now revealed.

It perhaps explains why the IRA Executive, while aware that some prisoners were pushing for a hunger strike, was so reluctant to issue a formal order.

In the summer, the IRA Executive had left it up to individual prisoners to go on strike or not, with a warning:

"Any prisoner who goes on hunger strike should realise that he must stick it to the end ... a number of them will very probably die in the fight."

The IRA leadership's abdication of responsibility for the strike, and failure to control it when it began, meant there was no selection process, no control over the numbers who began the strike, no winnowing out of those not considered to have the mental and physical strength to endure what was coming.

The idea that entire prisons of random inmates of varying degrees of courage and strength, physical and mental, could embark on a mass hunger strike and stick to it together, was delusional.

Todd Andrews, former Adjutant to IRA Commander Liam Lynch, had already been on hunger strike during the War of Independence. From what he endured then, he said later, he knew that most men would not be able to take the self-inflicted punishment, and that he himself should have refused to join the 1923 strike because it was doomed to fail.

In the sprawling Curragh 'Tintown' camps almost 3,400 inmates went on strike. Two senior officers, Jim Foley and Joe Harrington, sought to limit the number joining the protest to 700 picked men. The request was denied, for fear of losing momentum while the choice was made, and of causing bitterness among the prisoners when one man was picked over another.

The science of starvation

The pitiless logic of starvation was not long in asserting itself.

The longer a hunger strike went on, the closer it got to slow-motion suicide. Agonising, lonely, and very boring. It took a special kind of single-minded dedication to start a hunger strike, then to stick to it while the body and mind shut down.

Within days of starting a hunger strike, the body begins consuming fat to compensate for the loss of nutrition. Once that source is depleted the muscles and vital organs are targeted. At that point, long-term and often irreparable damage is done to the human body.

Medical science puts the period of greatest danger of death as from six weeks into a strike, but underlying conditions, including the effects of previous hunger strikes or physical wounds, can bring that moment sooner.

Within three weeks the brain is so deprived of vital vitamins, memory and vision become impaired.

After a month, up to 20% of body weight will have been lost, leading to hearing and sight loss, and organ failure is not far behind.

Ernie O'Malley's doctor was a veteran of the 1914-18 war. He had seen the effects of starvation on the human body. He warned O'Malley that when muscle wastes beyond a certain point, it can never be repaired, and believed O'Malley had already gone beyond that point. O'Malley stuck it out.

The hunger affected men in different ways. Some read voraciously, others found their long-term memory failing. Many reported the hunger pangs retreating then coming back with renewed intensity.

The rapid fall in the number of strikers demoralised and undermined those left on strike, just as they were realising the implications of what they had undertaken.

Peadar O'Donnell said later that the strike should have been called off once it was obvious that it was breaking up.

To the government, it was propaganda gold. There was no need to dress up the story, the numbers of men reported to be coming off the strike every day would tell their own story.

In early November, Sinn Féin claimed that many of the prisoners coming off hunger strike had been offered their freedom, a claim repeatedly denied by the government.

The authorities stuck to the line they had held all along: no prisoner would be released because they had gone on hunger strike; the only prisoners that would be released were those that had signed the undertaking to cease all armed resistance to the Free State.

A few days later, the government claimed that only 550 prisoners were still on strike.

'Men, mad with hunger, armed with knives'

After 35 days, only a few hundred men were left on hunger strike.

Tadhg O'Sullivan, Brigadier of the West Cork IRA, later described what he saw as the strike broke down in one of the camps.

"Men, mad with hunger, armed with knives, had rushed the Quartermaster's stores in the dark, slashing and hacking at raw meat and flitches of bacon, fighting to get at food. They did not wait to cook but gorged it on the way back to their huts."

Death

The deaths of two IRA officers on hunger strike in late November seemed like a foretaste of things to come.

On the 20th, Denis 'Denny' Barry died in the Curragh Hospital after 35 days on strike. The verdict at his inquest recorded his death as from heart failure.

On 23 November, Mountjoy prisoner Andrew O'Sullivan died in St Bricin's Military Hospital in Dublin, after 40 days on strike.

At the inquest into O'Sullivan's death, his brother testified that he saw him the day before he died, unconscious and scarcely recognisable.

The Catholic church picks a side, and makes a move

The Catholic hierarchy had supported the use of hunger strikes during the War of Independence.

Terence MacSwiney took daily Communion during his hunger strike in 1920, and four bishops visited him.

During the Civil War, the church's support for the Free State was unequivocal, as was its condemnation of the 1923 hunger strikes.

That condemnation manifested itself in bitter, deeply personal ways.

The Chaplain at Mountjoy refused to give Absolution to the hunger strikers in the prison, on the grounds that continuing the protest was courting suicide.

When Peadar O'Donnell's parents went to the local parish church to pray for him, they were refused entry.

Those who sought to bring the body of Denis Barry back to Cork to lie in state were refused entry to St Finbarr's church, on the personal instructions of the Bishop of Cork Daniel Cohalan, one of the bishops who had visited Terence MacSwiney when he was on hunger strike in 1920.

Bishop Cohalan also barred any priests from the diocese from conducting Barry's funeral.

Ending the strike

But the Catholic church also leveraged its support for the government into making moves to end the strike.

Cardinal Michael Logue, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, wrote a letter to be read at all masses in his diocese on Sunday 18 November. He pleaded with the remaining strikers to abandon the strike, this "dangerous and unlawful expedient", but also called on the government to immediately release all prisoners except those convicted of crimes or facing trial.

Cardinal Logue went further. He and Dr Patrick O'Donnell, the Bishop of Raphoe, went back and forth between the government and the leaders of the strike in a bid to end it, formally and without equivocation.

By the 40th day, 176 men were recorded as still on hunger strike, out of the thousands who had begun the protest.

The deaths of Barry and O'Sullivan had yielded no response from the government.

Michael Kilroy, the commanding IRA prisoner in Mountjoy, gathered the senior officers in the prison on 23 November. They decided to end the strike.

Kilmainham Inmates Tom Derrig, a strike leader and one of the most senior IRA officers in custody, along with fellow officer David Robinson, were given passes by the Governor to tell the strikers face-to-face in the other prisons that the protest was over. Derrig himself was still on hunger strike. Word was passed to each prisoner that they would all end the protest that day.

The end of the strike left the government with a headline victory. It had broken the strike with no concessions. But also a dilemma.

Thousands of sick and vulnerable inmates in various stages of malnutrition now crowded the prison system. Even as the strikers were being nursed back to health, the government could not rule out the possibility of epidemics, particularly influenza, sweeping through the prisons and then out into the general population.

The Catholic church had thrown its considerable weight behind negotiating an ending of the strike but had made it clear that the government's side of the agreement should be the release of most prisoners.

Release

As Christmas 1923 approached, the releases began. Over 3,000 prisoners, including all the women, had been set free by the end of the year.

The government needed to move on from the hunger strikes.

On the very day the strike ended, there was less interest in the country in the fate of the prisoners than there was in the issuing of the terms of the new £10 million National Loan, by which the government sought to finance the running of the country.

Away from the headlines, the prisons were not emptied. 240 men were still in custody by June, over a year since the end of the Civil War. TDs like Austin Stack, Gerald Boland, Ernie O'Malley and Patrick Smith were kept in custody until July.

For all the headline drama of their beginnings, the mass hunger strikes of 1923 failed to put the Free State government under real pressure at any stage.

There was no Terence MacSwiney moment in the 1923 strike. MacSwiney lasted 74 days in 1920, other hunger strikers in the War of Independence lasted even longer, up to 94 days. No hunger striker in 1923 lasted longer than 41 days.

There were strikers who would have carried on past the 41 days, had they not been ordered to end the protest on the agreed date.

But the agreed date was only decided when it was obvious that the strike could not go on, because of how quickly it was evaporating, after too many unvetted prisoners had been allowed to join it at the start.

What would have happened had the strike been more carefully planned, had lasted longer, and more men and women had died? Would the public mood have changed, and the pressure intensified on the government to empty the prisons unconditionally, with unknowable consequences?

Inside the Republican movement, there were recriminations, arguments and attempts to learn lessons from the hunger strikes of 1923. Lessons that would be applied again more than once in the 20th century.

Autograph and Scrap Book Souvenir from the Tintown camps, the Curragh. Click here to view a digitised copy of this book on the Cork Public Museum website.