‘The war of independence and the civil war were ultimately won and lost by the actions of actors in Ireland, but republicans in Britain played a noteworthy role in the drama’ (p. 328). This is the central conclusion of Gerard Noonan’s Ph.D.-based study of the 1919–23 activities of militant Irish republicans in Britain. The book is well-researched and it offers much impressive detail. Its undramatic conclusion should not be held against it, and the study valuably complements the work of scholars such as Peter Hart and Iain Patterson on this subject.
Dr Noonan concentrates mainly on the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.), although the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.), Cumann na mBan and Na Fianna Eireann also feature appropriately. Physical force Irish republicanism in Britain during this period was, unsurprisingly, greatly sustained by nineteenth-century Irish immigrants. In relation to these people, the book draws well on archival sources and on contemporary newspapers, as it traces what Irish republican activists did in Britain and how the authorities there responded to them. The tale echoes a familiar narrative, but it does so on the basis of much direct quotation from the players themselves, and it is helpful in that respect.
The numbers of people involved were not large: ‘the total membership of the I.R.A. in Britain in the autumn of 1921 was somewhere between 2,282 and 2,582’ (p. 52). Michael Collins emerges as vital for these people (‘For republicans in Britain, Collins was the most important figure in the leadership in Dublin’ (p. 40)). And – as is clear from other studies of the Irish revolution – the initiative of a small number of individuals proved to be decisive in terms of what was and was not achieved.
Echoing other studies also is Noonan’s judgement that family background, and the influence of friendship groups, could play a major role in leading people towards republican commitment. Once they were indeed committed, what many of these people focused on in practice was gun-running. Indeed, the author concludes that, ‘Gun-running – the acquisition and smuggling of weapons to Ireland – was the most important activity of republicans in Britain’ (p. 133) during these years. They also carried out some violent operations themselves, of course (often motivated in doing so by revenge). And they experienced the fractious vicissitudes of the civil war split as did their comrades in Ireland: ‘The civil war saw men and women who had seen action in the republican movement in Britain during the war of independence serve on both sides, in Britain and in Ireland’ (p. 262).
The book might have engaged more fully than it does with existing scholarly literature. The bibliography is rather thin on secondary sources. So, for example, Eugenio Biagini’s important study from 2007, British democracy and Irish nationalism 1876–1906, is ignored, even though its argument about the effects of Irish nationalist politics on British life is deeply relevant to Noonan’s work. Again, the broader historiography of British politics and society themselves during the period covered by Noonan’s book is largely missing from his discussion, despite the vital role that such phenomena obviously played in contextual terms for those whom he examines. And the brief section towards the end of the book about post-revolutionary Irish republicanism in Britain is perfunctory and very shoddy in its engagement with the necessary literature. (It also misdates the 1972 Bloody Sunday atrocity.)
But the book is valuable for its detailed demonstration that, in these years as for so many other periods, Irish nationalism ‘was not limited to the inhabitants of Ireland itself’ (p. 3).
