On 6th December 1922, the Irish Free State came into being, exactly a year after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Provisional Government’s duties were transferred to the new Free State, led by president of the executive council W.T. Cosgrave. Of course, the Dáil’s Treaty vote in early January 1922 didn’t matter to the British. In their eyes, the Treaty was legally in force from 6th December 1921 onwards. If the Dáil’s Treaty vote had gone the other way, be assured Collins and company would’ve rebelled against it and formed a Dominion statelet without the figleaf of majority support.

On 7th December 1922, Seán Hales was killed by the IRA in Dublin in line with the policy that any politician who voted for the Special Powers Act or Murder Bill were themselves worthy of the death penalty. Padraic Ó Maille was also shot, but survived his injuries. This was a policy dictated by chief-of-staff Liam Lynch, issued on 30 November, which followed a written warning sent to the speaker of the Dáil.

In retaliation for the attacks, the next day, the Free State government moved to execute the untried and unconvicted Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett. The men could not have had a hand in the killing of Hales, as they had been imprisoned since summer. The executions were carried out in Mountjoy Jail at 8am on 8th December and were audaciously illgeal.

McKelvey was a former chief-of-staff; Mellows a former Quartermaster-General; O’Connor a former Director of Engineering; and Barrett a former Deputy Quartermaster-General. The prominent republicans had been captured during the attack on the Four Courts on 28th June 1922.

Free State defenders like Jennie Wyse-Power expressed a pathological glee about the brutal executions: “I don’t agree with it, but glory be to God, wasn’t it wonderful?”

The executions have been referred to as an auto-da-fé. Significantly they were carried out on 8th December – the Feast of the Immaculate Conception - a feast day with great significance to a majority-Catholic country which was then only days old. Symbolism is important. Famously the Easter Rising’s timing in 1916 was chosen for reasons related to the Resurrection.

This dimension to the 8th December murders did not go unnoticed, and it particularly perturbed the Vatican. There was a suspicion by the rector of the Irish College in Rome, who was far more sympathetic to the republicans than the Hierarchy in Ireland was, that there may have been a deeper significance to the executions. It was stated outright elsewhere that the Free State government was acting under pressure from powerful groups within the emergent British Dominion.

Whether there was more to it or not, the Free State junta considered it necessary to execute the republicans. Kevin O’Higgins justified the executions policy – including of O’Connor, best man at his wedding – as “Salus populi suprema lex... The safety and preservation of the people is the highest law.” However, the unionist elite had also been rankled by the actions of the IRA.

Several notable buildings associated with the unionist elite such as the Masonic Lodge on Molesworth Street, the Kildare Street Club, and others had been occupied by the anti-Treaty Executive from April 1922 onwards. These buildings were heavily associated with the social elite of the British garrison. After the occupations, they were used to shelter Belfast refugees who had fled the pogroms in the north of Ireland.

The relevance of Freemasonry during the Civil War:

Of all the buildings sequestered, the “defilement” of the Masonic Grand Lodge by the IRA was the greatest offence caused to the unionist elite in Ireland and Britain. Although originally playing a progressive role in the late 18th century, during the 19th century Freemasonry became a central node of British imperialism. It was laced with ritual and symbolic significance which cannot begin to be described here.

The IRA’s slight against the Freemasons rippled across the Irish Sea. As the English imperialist newspaper, The Spectator, reported on in June 1922:

“Quite recently one class of Irishmen has been marked out—on suspicion only—for special attack, namely, those who are members of the Masonic Order.”

“Many Masonic Halls have now been destroyed, one of the first to suffer being that at Ballinamore. In Mullingar the Masonic Hall was raided, and all the windows and presses were smashed. Petrol was poured over the broken furniture, and the complete destruction of the place was only prevented by the intervention of the local priest. In Dundalk, which is not very far from the Ulster frontier, there were three Masonic Lodges with a fairly large membership. Their hall was raided and the books and other property seized. Many of the members received a few days' notice to leave the town, and some of them had to escape hurriedly to Belfast. As a consequence of these proceedings the meetings of these Lodges have been indefinitely suspended.

The article claimed that the occupation of the Grand Lodge was of particular concern because the IRA had “in their possession the register of all the members of the Order in Ireland.” The sensitivity of this information falling into the wrong hands sounded the alarm. The Spectator claimed “There can be little doubt that those members who live in out-of-the-way districts will suffer. The murders of Protestants in County Cork followed very closely on the seizure of the Masonic headquarters in Dublin.”

The IRA’s awareness of the identities of Freemasons across Ireland allowed republicans to identify the presence of Masons within the emergent Free State apparatus. In June, the Spectator warned how the IRA’s actions were in “the spirit of one phase of the French Revolution or of Bolshevist Russia”. It blamed to “a very large extent the Church of Rome in Ireland”, but claimed Catholic-infused anti-Masonry was “a Frankenstein creation which now seeks to destroy its author. No man residing in the Irish Free State whose name appears on the roll of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Ireland can, at the present time, have any sense of security for himself or his family. He can only look to his Brethren in Great Britain to use their influence with the British Government on his behalf.” [my emphasis]

The above sentence clearly outlined how English Freemasons would use their power networks to urge the English Government to act against the IRA, either directly or through the Irish pro-Treaty puppet government, in the interests of protecting Freemasons.

Even before the order came to evacuate the Four Courts, the pro-Treaty Provisional Government made its top demand that the IRA evacuate the Grand Lodge as part of army unity talks which were a stalling tactic. Their prioritisation of the Masonic Hall evacuation before even that of the Four Courts was acknowledged in the 31st August 1922 edition of the republican War News. In early June the Masonic Hall was evacuated on the orders of Liam Lynch.

However, the Provisional Government continued to be perturbed by alleged outrages against Masonic property by “Irregulars”. The Free State Army newspaper on 7th July decried the burning of the Masonic Hall in Ballinasloe.

On 26th June, two days before the attack on the Four Courts, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the British Government would be forced to regard the Treaty as having been violated and would resume “full liberty of action” unless the Provisional Government moved quickly against the occupation of the Four Courts by the IRA. Churchill was a Master Mason, having been initiated into the Craft in Studholme Lodge No. 1591 in May 1901.

The Provisional Government dutifully acted on British instructions and moved to attack the Four Courts. Notably, the “National Army” general, Tom Ennis, who issued an ultimatum to the occupants of the Four Courts at 3:40am on 28th June, was acting not on the authority of the Provisional Government, but of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. By then the IRB considered itself the legitimate Government of Ireland (according to John M. Regan), superseding even the Treaty settlement.

Once the Civil War began, press censorship reached its height. The vast majority of the mainstream press backed the Provisional Government. However, the IRA and republicans produced amateur bulletins and news-sheets to try and put their case to the people. As the counter-revolution progressed, Republican propaganda repeatedly referred to the Masonic influence over the Free State. On 27th October, the Republican War Bulletin stated that “English Masonic officials [were] in charge of Irish Finances.”

Just days after the executions of 8th December, the Free State government headed by Cosgrave appointed 30 members to the new Senate. The Senate was intended as a body which would represent the unionist interest in Ireland; however, by late 1922 no unionist party existed within Ireland. Unionists were bound together through other purportedly non-political associations.

77% of the appointees were Protestants. 60% of the appointees had something else in common – they were Freemasons. Republicans knew this information partly due to being in possession of the rolls of the Grand Lodge. This revelation prompted Irish left-wing and republican newspapers to refer to the Senate itself as “the new Freemason Lodge”.

Details of Cosgrave’s Masonic appointees can be found below:

John Bagwell – Freemason

HG Burgess – Freemason

Earl Dunraven – Freemason

Nugent Everard – Freemason

Henry Guinness – Freemason

Lord Glenavy – Freemason

Captain Greer – Freemason

Marquis of Headfort – Freemason

Andrew Jameson – Freemason

Arthur Jackson – Freemason

John Keane – Freemason

Early of Kerry – Freemason

Bryan Mahon – Freemason

Earl of Mayo – Freemason

Horace Plunkett – Freemason

Early of Wicklow – Freemason

Colonel Hutchinson – Freemason

Civil appointments in the Free State apparatus were also rife with Freemasons, particularly chief permanent officers. Markievicz queried why the supposedly Irish Free State should be stocked with Freemasons, “for Freemasons, as every Catholic knows, are under the ban of our Holy Father the Pope.” Cosgrave attempted to deflect from this by mentioning that the men who surrounded him were Catholics, implying that they ergo could not be Freemasons.

It was well-known that many prominent people involved in the governance of the Free State were both Catholics and Freemasons, even if they may have been baptised in the Catholic religion and attended the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Republicans pointed this out, and they had proof in the form of the secret membership rolls. To argue that because an individual is known to the outside public as a Catholic that he cannot be a Freemason is tantamount to the fallacy that in a sum in division the divisor multiplied by the quotient equals the divided.

Even the very name of the Dominion, the “Irish Free State”, was perhaps somebody’s joke. I’m well aware that it’s a translation of Saorstát Éireann, but there can be more than one reason for something. By any token, would it not have been more accurate to call it the Irish Freemasonic State?

Conclusion:

Criticism of Freemasonry can often be dismissed as mere conspiratorialism, and a high percentage of it is indeed that, but the Masonic Order should be criticised by socialist-republicans. Whatever else about its belief system and rituals, it was and remains a powerful garrison of British imperialism in Ireland. It was at the heart of the Free State apparatus in the early days of its creation , a fact which should be recognised and considered.

In popular culture and historiography, there are boundless claims of secretive groups which “ruled the roost” in 20th century Ireland. But they aren’t the Freemasons or ex-unionist associations, rather they’re often Catholic groups.

Take for example, Tom Garvin’s Preventing the Future. He refers to an esoteric power struggle between the Department of Justice and the Knights of Columbanus, which he calls “the Catholic secret society”. Or take Emily O’Reilly’s sensationalist and conspiratorial book Masterminds of the Right: “this very Irish coup” was orchestrated by “the Knights… a patriarchal, secretive, catholic, fundamentalist network of influential men who seek to exert power and influence through infiltration of hostile groups and organisations, anonymous lobbying, and the targetting of individuals hostile to their orthodoxy.” (p. 20)

20th century Ireland is depicted as “Dev’s Ireland”, a “Catholic theocracy” from day one and a state with an oppressive, smothering, censorious culture. That’s certainly the image the Irish Times would like to cultivate, a newspaper which was rightly regarded as a hotbed of unionism since its inception.

Why do our so-called republican and anti-revisionist historians and cutting edge commentators never cast their eye on the powerful influence of unionism through networks like Freemasonry during the Irish Free State period? Is it just more convenient and acceptable to focus all one’s attention on running scare stories about Catholic groups? If so, that’s certainly congenial with a British imperialist caricature of Irish republicanism and Irish independence as being “Rome rule”.

In the same vein, why is the Orange State never held to the same standard by liberal journalists? Why is it that the Free State is termed a “Theocracy” but seldom the Northern statelet a Protestant Theocracy? People who claim the mantle of republicanism and left-wing politics are often the first to heap praise on the “northern Protestants”, and invent a false narrative of it is a great progressive force. This could be seen in Tomás Mac Giolla’s 1988 WP ard fheis speech, where he praised the “principle of private conscience” as the “foundation of Protestantism” in its struggle against the “authoritarianism and the dogmatism of Rome”. “The fact that they couch their anti-Romanism in rough and obselete language should not blind us to their purpose, which is to defend liberty and personal freedoms”, he said. But is that really true or is he not just carrying water for loyalist fascism and mindless sectarianism which holds to the same Baasskap ideology which demands that Protestants should always be of higher rank than Catholics in this colony of theirs.

The relevance of Freemasonry as the yeast which enabled the unionist and Dublin Castle elite to retain power and influence in the “Irish Free State” shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. Attempting to portray Catholic groups like the Knights of Columbanus or, more fashionably in recent years Opus Dei, as the “power behind the throne” is endorsing a false narrative promoted by unionist revanchists, and is aiding in deflection and projection to disguise the captive and neo-colonial nature of the Free State.

This gives us something to reflect on over Christmas…