Dáil courts

Irish republicans challenged British legislative, executive and judicial control over their country.

They challenged British legislative control when they held the inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann on 21 January 1919. With the election of the Dáil’s first Ministry the following day, they began to challenge British executive control over Ireland. It is perhaps surprising that some time was to pass before systematic efforts were made to supplant the third arm of the British state on the island – the judicial. But when steps were taken to address this deficiency, remarkable progress was made in a very short space of time. The success in this field energised the entire separatist movement precisely at the time when the British response to the military threat posed by the Irish Volunteers was moving into a high gear.

Agricultural unrest

This achievement was all the more creditable given the circumstances in which the courts came into existence, most notably the wave of agricultural unrest in the west of Ireland unleashed at the end of the First World War. Again, there were several causes for this. The most important was the fact that the British authorities had suspended the land purchase scheme in order to free up funds for the war effort.

Under the land purchase scheme, the British state provided funds to Irish tenant farmers to purchase their holdings from their landlords. The farmers were to repay the loans to the state over the following decades. The scheme had proven very popular with such farmers. When the war drove food prices up, they reaped the benefit themselves. This made the suspension of the scheme for the duration of the war all the harder to bear for those tenants who had yet to acquire their land and hungered, in many cases literally, to do so.

Once the war ended, many tenants took the law into their own hands, and began putting pressure on landlords to sell-up immediately and “voluntarily”. They did this by rent strikes or more direct means, including attacks on property and threats to the person. Where landlords agreed, spontaneous local tribunals were established to decide upon “fair” terms. Not surprisingly, the sale price was frequently far lower than a given landlord’s asking price.

The process began in 1919 but expanded very rapidly in 1920 following the evacuation of the many vulnerable Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in rural areas that were susceptible to attacks by the Irish Republican Army. With the removal of the principal instrument by which British law and order had historically been enforced, a juridicial void had been created. The Dáil courts stepped into this void, and stepped very successfully indeed.

Tribunal of choice

Almost immediately these courts supplanted their British equivalents as the tribunal of choice for most litigants. They frequently had packed schedules when they met, while the British courts were virtually empty when they convened. All the while, the British Government was presenting Ireland to the world as having descended into anarchy. Especially galling for Dublin Castle was that many of those who had recourse to the Dáil courts in their heyday of the summer and autumn of 1920 came from the landed, unionist background traditionally associated with inveterate hostility to Irish republicanism.

Landlords from Connacht in particular had become thoroughly alarmed at the rise in agrarian crime during the spring of that year, with their holdings being the target of most of the animus. They were the targets of cattle driving – the forced removal of herds from the large ranches common in the region to distant areas, during the course of which animals frequently died. They were subject to the associated practice of land seizures, when landless families simply moved in to occupy the vacant land. These had become endemic in the area, and threatened to bring ruin on this class. In desperation they appealed to the Dáil courts for protection. To their evident surprise, they frequently received it, with many decisions being made in their favour and against those of landless claimants.

There have been several explanations for this apparently counterintuitive outcome. It has been suggested that it should be attributed to the superior standard of legal training of the arbiters in the Dáil courts when compared to those who staffed the de facto courts of the previous year. It has also been attributed to the fact that many influential republicans in rural areas came from the owner-occupying class, and were thus sensitive to the rights of property. It has also been argued that these same local figureheads, and their political superiors in the Dáil, wished to be seen to be impartial. It may have been a combination of these and other explanations.

It is difficult in any given case to be absolutely certain as to the explanation why the verdict went one way or the other. The undoubted consequence was a propaganda coup for republicans at a most opportune moment. For it was during these months that the forces of the Crown were seen by the world to be perpetrating, not preventing, many of the illegalities in Ireland. The reason for this was the deployment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. The contrast between their behaviour and the decorous, generous conduct that characterised the proceedings of most Dáil courts could not have been more marked.