Cathal Brugha: ‘An Indomitable Spirit’ — a sympathetic if not uncritical reappraisal

One of the central assertions of this succinct biography is that Cathal Brugha, who died 100 years ago this month as the first high-profile casualty of the Civil War, “fought and died in a civil war that he opposed”.

It is a conclusion that sits uncomfortably alongside the perception of him as an unmovable diehard driven by contempt for compromise, encapsulated in the reaction of The Irish Times to his death: “Of all Ireland’s many extremists he was the most extreme.” He was not. Certainly, on numerous occasions, he spoke in unyielding terms but this fresh centenary look at Brugha seeks to present a more nuanced character.

One of his colleagues who shared his trenchant opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty was Austin Stack, a fellow Sinn Féin cabinet minister, who remarked in 1929 that Brugha was “not sufficiently known to the Irish people”, a reminder that the hierarchy of remembrance was evident from the early post-Civil-War era. There are many reasons why Brugha should not just be remembered for his defiant last stand in 1922, including his involvement in the 1916 Rising during which he was severely injured, his role in reorganising the Irish Volunteers, later the IRA, after the Rising, and his position as minister for defence during the War of Independence, but Brugha left little behind in the way of a personal archive.

[ Cathal Brugha remembered 100 years after his untimely death in the Civil War ]

As a result, the chronicling of his life is largely done through documenting the impressions of others, and the authors somewhat oversell the extent to which this book is a “multilayered reappraisal” based on “exhaustive research”. In truth, much is still left hanging or unresolved. Nonetheless they clearly and often cleverly marshal what is available to provide a very sympathetic portrait, while acknowledging Brugha’s tendency to misjudge some crucial issues.

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Born Charlie Brugess in 1874, the 10th of 14 children, his father had a thriving furniture business, destroyed by overreach and the betrayal of two of his sons. A formidable athlete, abstemious, pious, focused and devoted to the Irish language (he met his wife Caitlín through the Gaelic League), Brugha joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1908. He briefly studied medicine before becoming a travelling salesman, a useful cover for evangelising and organising. A stickler for financial probity, no doubt a legacy of his father’s economic wounds, he apparently vetoed Patrick Pearse’s entry to the IRB because of Pearse’s financial slovenliness, but there is little elaboration on this. Brugha carried a heavier load than some of his peers due to growing family responsibilities (he became a father of six) and involvement in Lalor Ltd., a successful candle-making business.

He was “fiercely denunciatory” of Eoin MacNeill’s attempt to call off theRising but he “left no trace of his interior standpoint” in relation to the possible consequences of his involvement in the fighting as vice-commandant with the 4th Dublin battalion of the Irish Volunteers. He was described as a “composed and contented” sniper and received 25 bullet wounds in the South Dublin Union. He was so badly injured that he escaped trial and the death penalty, though again, this is something that could be elaborated on; was there any British assessment of him or his influence? What was apparent, and this remained acute, was his growing disdain for the secretive IRB and its botched planning in 1916.

He was regarded as permanently incapacitated but defied his physical discomfort to continue his republican crusade. He also demonstrated his capacity for rowing with the keepers of the IRB flame including Kathleen Clarke, widow of 1916 leader Tom, who responded to Brugha’s insistence that the IRB must go by suggesting “you’re a very small man to make such a big decision”. During 1918 Brugha was adamant about Britain being forced to face the consequences of threatening to impose conscription on Ireland through a plan to assassinate British cabinet members. His lack of appreciation of the consequences of such action “seems astonishing” but again, we are not, through no fault of the authors, privy to enough of his thinking about this. He was in London for three months with an assassination team; that he “arranged for each man to draw the name of a cabinet minister from a hat” would suggest little in the way of sophisticated preparation; in any case, the plan was abandoned and Brugha was elected a Sinn Féin TD for Waterford in December 1918.

Ernest Blythe later suggested Brugha was of “limited intelligence”. This is not probed enough, a reminder that the authors can be overly deferential towards their subject, also captured in the far-fetched assertion that “Brugha was too obsessive a patriot for personal vanity”, through they do refer to an occasional “unedifying display of petulance and ego”.

Authority undermined

Some of the most illuminating material in the book relates to the depth of the personal tensions and clashes within the underground Sinn Féin government and between Brugha as minister for defence and the IRA from 1919-21. Brugha was at odds with Michael Collins due to the IRB issue and frequently felt his ministerial authority was undermined. Real power remained outside of his influence and he also fell out with chief of staff of the IRA Richard Mulcahy, who described Brugha as having “a staccato way of thinking”. His letters to Mulcahy were “sarcastic and ruthless in equal measure” and he was no great wordsmith. He insisted on greater financial accountability in government spending, with Liam Mellows cruelly if amusingly suggesting he would “sit all night with his mouth like a rat trap over half a crown”.

Brugha is often remembered for his venomous contribution to the Treaty debates and castigation of Collins; this book provides the broader context for that and also a reminder that he made more emollient Dáil contributions after the Treaty debates, accepting that the Treaty signatories “thought that they did the best thing for Ireland”. De Valera won him over to his alternative to the Treaty through the idea of “external association” of Ireland with Britain, as a way to, in Brugha’s words, “pull the ships off the rocks upon which it has been driven by incompetent amateurs who had seized the helm”.

While on the election trail in 1922 he appealed for toleration of different viewpoints while also maintaining he was “absolutely sick of politics” but the anti-Treaty IRA seemed to have had little regard for him in early 1922 as he was seen as a politician more than a soldier. Throwing in his lot with the militants seems to have given him an inner resolve by June 1922 and he believed his death might even jolt others into a recognition of the catastrophe of Civil War, an indication of both self-regard and the tumult of emotions this time a century ago.

Of Brugha’s sincerity and bravery there is little doubt; shot in the thigh after emerging from a blazing Dublin hotel having refused to surrender, he died a few days later: “Our Lion Heart is gone”, de Valera, who disapproved of his last stand, recorded in his diary. At least this book prompts us to think of the complex and sometimes contradictory impulses that went through that heart, and it concludes with a sobering reminder of the implications of his death for his widow and six children. Caitlín Brugha fought on with Sinn Féin and was disgusted at the “gross impertinence” of Fianna Fáil invoking Cathal’s name and image in the 1930s, a reminder that even for those on the same anti-Treaty side, the fault lines of 1922 endured.

• Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History in UCD. His book, Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War was published in paperback last month by Profile Books.