There has been a steady correspondence on this page recently, wrongly entitled "Shooting of Sgt Cronin". The correct term is, as it was, and ever more shall be, "murder of Sgt Cronin". That there can be so much discussion about this single foul deed 80 years after it occurred reveals, yet again, the deep culture of ambivalence towards violence which pervades this country.
I am especially grateful to John Clarke of Tullamore for his recent letter about this affair, written in response to a letter from P.H. Cronin, a descendent of the murdered officer. "He [P.H. Cronin] confesses to being almost totally ignorant of the political conditions in Ireland in the period 1919 to 1921 - and it shows. If he did read my letter it is remarkable that he neither denied not attempted to justify the actions which brought Sgt Cronin to the attention of Michael Collins."
Justified homicide
Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. In these few words, John Clarke classically displays the symptoms of the syndrome, "If he was shot, he must have deserved it." Such words have been unfailingly intoned by others over virtually every dead body found in a heap beside a hedge in South Armagh or crumpled in a doorway off the Falls or buried in a bog in Cork: every murder has a apologist, and for the murder of poor Sgt Henry Cronin, aged 46, shot on October 31st, 1920, we have an assurance from John Clarke that it was a justified homicide.
Let us go over John Clarke's words again: P.H. Cronin "neither denied nor attempted to justify the actions which brought Sgt Cronin to Michael Collins's attention." Marvellous; absolutely marvellous. There are more presumptions here than one can shake a stick at. The first is that Cronin was engaged in particular actions which attracted Collins's attention - but we know from a previous letter that even John Clarke doesn't know what they were: "We can safely assume that it wasn't because of the over-zealous apprehending of petty thieves and brawling drunks that Cronin came to attract the attention of Collins. One wonders what his `notes' contained."
One wonders? Yet in that state of wonderment, John Clarke can justify the taking of a man's life. So even though John Clarke doesn't know what Henry Cronin's "actions" were (if indeed there were any), whatever they were, they apparently justified his murder. Yet despite his own ignorance on the matter, John Clarke finds it remarkable that P.H. Cronin neither denied nor attempted to justify these mysterious actions (whatever they were).
The clinching argument for John Clarke is that, according to his father, who carried out the murder, Michael Collins had ordered it. Ah, I see. That makes it all right, then, does it?
Order from Collins
So where does this leave us? Firstly, Henry Cronin was shot by the IRA, which proves he was up to no good. Secondly, we can safely he wasn't shot for being a zealous apprehender of pretty thieves. Why? Because we just can, that's why. How may we do this? Safely, is how. Finally, according to one of the killers, the order came from Collins, which rather seals it. Nice job, what?
Placing the killing in a broader context, John Clarke remarked: "Of course, it all resolves around whether or not the IRA campaign of 19191920 was a just war."
Good point. One of the conditions of a just war is that one must have a reasonable chance of achieving one's war aim. What was the war aim of the IRA? A united Irish Republic. And war is as efficacious a means of achieving that end as herding cheese or lassoing fish.
Instead of the violence of 1916-22 being remembered as a calamitous and counter-productive experiment in a morally and politically bankrupt methodology, it is still regarded by many as "necessary". It wasn't. Nothing was achieved by the talks in 1921 that could not have been achieved by talks in 1919. But of course the IRA didn't want talks in 1919. It wanted an all-Ireland republic, without negotiation or talks or unionist consent, even though Sinn Fein had managed to gain just 47 per cent of the votes cast in the 1918 election. Worse still, many in the IRA wanted war for the sake of war.
Among that number was Michael Collins, the man who evolved the technique of systematic assassination of policemen for being policemen. To be sure, he crippled the RIC using these means, but like every generation of gunmen since then, he was not able to convert his ability to murder into achieving the goal of a united Ireland. The ability to deliver violence, as the IRA has repeatedly discovered (but has then with dreary predictability forgotten) is unrelated to political achievement, much as a skill with watercolours is only of marginal assistance in building the space shuttle.
Costly failure
Michael Collins and his generation embarked on war and failed. That failure would have been bad enough anyway; but their great achievement was failure at a calamitous price. Thousands died; economic ruination was visited on almost the entire island; there was ethnic cleansing north and south; and the Protestant population of southern Ireland was catastrophically reduced. Ireland was not unique in experiencing self-inflicted wounds - Turkey, Greece and Finland and others engaged in their own forms of tribal madness at the same time. But do newspapers in Athens or Ankara or Helsinki today have letters justifying the murder of a man outside his home 80 years ago?