Quotes from Tim Pat Coogan

De Valera had also been active. He subjected deputies who announced their intention of voting for the Treaty to inquisitions for their threatened lèse-majesté.

Cosgrave as Minister for Local Government may have taken a hand in inducing no less than twenty County Councils to pass resolutions of support for the Treaty proposals outside the Dail.

Your Government would soon find itself regarded as a tyrannical junta which having got into office by violence was seeking to maintain itself by a denial of constitutional rights.

The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 —John Boyle O'Reilly

The reference to himself in the third person is indicative of the state of de Valera's ego at this period.

He then led his party into the Dail and took the Oath. Asked once28 how he could square taking the Oath with his civil war position, he replied, 'I didn't really take an Oath. My fingers didn't touch the Bible'.

Once in power, taking advantage of Britain's preoccupation with the Abdication crisis, de Valera introduced a more sectarian, but republican-sounding, Constitution which abolished the Oath and the Governor General, and stands to this day.

Denied the status of belligerents, the Volunteers knew that they fought in the likelihood of execution if captured under arms, or even without them, depending on whose hands they fell into.

What is that curling flower of wonder As white as snow, as red as blood? When Death goes by in flame and thunder And rips the beauty from the bud.

But they put up such a fight, particularly in Cork, Clare, Tipperary, Longford, Limerick and Mayo, that they tied up well over 50,000 troops and drove the RIC out of all but the most strongly fortified barracks in the larger towns.

This, though subsequently temporarily abandoned in favour of a resumption of the policy of frightfulness, meant that the unthinkable became first thinkable and then ultimately do-able.

against my struggling conscience, I found myself behind the barrel of a gun in Upper O'Connell St'.2

After the Four Courts bombardment he made his way through the tunnelled buildings to the Gresham Hotel where he found Art O'Connor, de Valera, Robert Barton, Countess Markievicz, Austin Stack, Oscar Traynor and Brugha, 'all apparently without purpose'.3 The anti-Treaty leaders were courageous, but woefully bad tacticians, disorganised and lacking any overall strategy.

Most of the group escaped the fighting, de Valera getting away in a Red Cross ambulance

There was Brigade Major Montgomery, later Field Marshal Montgomery of El Alamein, who wrote of his Irish experiences: 'My whole attention was given to defeating the rebels. It never bothered me a bit how many houses were burned.

I submit it is not in the competence of the President to choose his own procedure. This is either a constitutional body or it is not. If it is an autocracy let you say so and we will leave it.

success in governing depends on well-contrived antagonisms in the economic and social structure of the state.

Dealing with police and politics were the pivotal props of the system...

Colonel Woodcock obviously belonged to the 'stiff upper lip' school of army behaviour: after shouting at his wife to keep watching at the window, he got shot himself and staggered back into the bedroom, telling her, 'It's alright darling, they have only hit outlying portions of me.' Woodcock, in fact, had been hit four times - but he subsequently recovered.

During his training his vanity, ignorance and intelligence were each subjected to the treatment designed to make the British Government his servant and his God. The RIC had something to do with every phase of governmental activity.

Freeman's Journal next morning (5 January) for his 'criminal attempt to divide the nation' by his Document No. 2 which the Freeman found 'much worse' than the Treaty.

The road to the Castle is paved with anonymous letters, deriving from the besetting Irish sin, jealousy.

De Valera concerned himself with four issues during his protracted stay in America: the raising of money; the securing of recognition of the Irish Republic; the defeat of the League of Nations; and the recognition of himself as the supreme spokesman and arbiter of policy on Ireland by the leaders of the existing Irish-American organisations.

Of course, had the British Army been used in a more all-out fashion, concentration camps, air raids, artillery bombardments and the rest of it, the result might have been different.