Moss Twomey

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Moss Twomey
Muirgheas Ó Tuama
Chief of Staff of the IRA
In office
1926 – June 1936
Preceded byAndrew Cooney
Succeeded bySeán MacBride
Personal details
Born
Maurice Twomey

(1897-06-10)10 June 1897
Clondulane, near Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland
Died1 October 1978(1978-10-01) (aged 81)
Military service
Branch/serviceOriginal IRA
Anti-Treaty IRA
RankChief of Staff (Anti-Treaty IRA)
Battles/warsIrish War of Independence
Irish Civil War

Maurice Twomey (

chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).[1]

Early life

Twomey was born in 1897 in

flour mill in the town, Twomey went to work there at the age of 14 where he rose to the position of works manager. In 1914 he became active in the Irish Volunteers.[2]

Character

Twomey was a dedicated and well respected Irish Republican who successfully dealt with factions within the Irish Republican movement. "He was dedicated to Irish freedom and nothing else mattered to him. Compromise was not in his vocabulary."[3]

War of Independence

By 1918 he was adjutant of the Fermoy Battalion and a year later became an adjutant of the Cork No. 2 Brigade. He took part in an ambush of British troops in Fermoy in September 1919, one of the first attacks on British soldiers in Ireland since the 1916 Easter Rising and one of the first of the Irish War of Independence.

During 1920 he helped direct IRA

Dick Barrett
, Tom Crofts and Bill Quirke.

Civil War

Twomey opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, although he was critical of the tactics adopted by the anti-Treaty forces headquartered in the Four Courts. He was influenced by Oscar Traynor's opinion that the garrison would destroy the Republic during June 1922.[4] The Four Courts episode had showed the leadership that it was out of touch with the reality of the awesome power of artillery. Twomey concurred with Liam Mellows that if a government was to be formed in the interest of labour, it must be a republic.[5]

During the

imprisoned
in the same month in Dublin.

IRA Chief of Staff

During 1924 he became involved in the reorganisation of the IRA, inspecting its southern divisions that summer and its northern units during 1925. First elected onto the IRA Executive at the November 1925 IRA General Army Convention, he became a full-time IRA activist. He disguised this by describing his profession as "

IRA chief of staff in the absence of Andrew Cooney
, and in 1927, he was confirmed in that position.

In the summer of 1925, the anti-treaty IRA had sent a delegation led by Pa Murray to the Soviet Union for a personal meeting with Joseph Stalin, in the hopes of gaining Soviet finance and weaponry assistance.[6] A secret pact was agreed where the IRA would spy on the United States and the United Kingdom and pass information to Red Army military intelligence (GRU) spymasters in New York City and London in return for £500 a month.[6] The pact was originally approved by Frank Aiken, who left soon after, before being succeeded by Cooney and Twomey who kept up the secret espionage relationship.[6]

Twomey was not himself an ideological

chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army" to the Soviet GRU.[6]

Twomey was considered a

Socialist, albeit one who put practicality before ideology. Twomey considered himself a moderate, had a deep sense of history, and the belief that Ireland had the resources to provide a good living for all of its people.[9] His policy as chief of staff was to allow individual members of the IRA to join left-wing groups, but not to let the IRA itself become attached to any political party. He simultaneously feared undermining support for Fianna Fáil and thus handing power back to Cumann na nGaedheal; but he was also apprehensive about the IRA being seen as attached to Fianna Fáil.[10]

In 1930, Twomey married Kathleen MacLaughlin of Donegal and had two children in the early 1930s.

Saor Eire and Fianna Fáil

IRA, and the IRA to Stalinism
.

In 1931 Twomey tried to quell different factions within the IRA (those seeking to establish a social programme vs those against it) by permitting IRA members to create

Saor Eire, a far-left political party. However, Saor Eire quickly found itself under attack from both Cumann na nGaedheal and by the Catholic Church in Ireland for being a Pro-Soviet organisation, with the IRA painted as guilty by association. Simultaneously, the Cumann na nGaedhael government gave itself emergency powers and began arresting IRA members. Both Twomey and the IRA decided that in order to hold off Cumann na nGaedheal, they would need to rally around Fianna Fáil.[10]

In February 1932, Cumann na nGaedhael called an early election, hoping to catch both the IRA and Fianna Fáil on the backfoot. However, Fianna Fáil were able to secure victory. To the surprise of many, Cumann na nGaedhael choose to respect the result of the vote and stood aside to let Fianna Fáil into power. Initially, many Republicans and members of the IRA were overjoyed with the result. At first Fianna Fáil seem to signal goodwill to the IRA by releasing many IRA prisoners. However, it quickly dawned upon the IRA that Fianna Fáil were not going to declare a Republic, and this put them in an awkward spot. A week after Fianna Fáil came to power, an internal document produced by the IRA leadership asked two fundamental questions: "can Fianna Fáil’s methods and policies achieve the Republic?", to which they answered No, and "can the IRA launch a successful revolution against the Fianna Fáil Government?", to which they also answered No. Both Twomey and the IRA were unsure how to proceed. In Twomey's own words "nobody had visualised a Free State which Republicans were not supposed to attack".[10]

Following the election of Fianna Fáil, Tom Barry and Twomey clashed over the direction going forward. Barry wished to see Saor Eire ended (believing its policies never gain mass support, and in fact, this made Saor Eire an undemocratic concept) and for the IRA to reconcile with Fianna Fáil. Twomey instead thought that the social programme of Saor Eire could and would gain democratic support.[10]

On 21 May 1936 Twomey was arrested in his house in Dublin under Article 2A of the

newsagents and confectioners in Dublin's O'Connell Street
.

Post IRA life

Following a crackdown on the IRA by

Bodenstown in 1971. He never claimed an IRA pension from the Irish government or gave an account of his record to the Bureau of Military History
, set up to record the recollections of participants involved in the struggle against British rule.

He was badly injured in an accident in 1971 and was deeply affected by the death of his wife Kathleen Twomey in April 1978. Twomey himself died in October of that year. The presence at his funeral of members of

Provisional Sinn Féin, the Irish labour movement
and old IRA comrades from the 1930s was evidence of his enduring popularity.

Twomey's papers from his period as IRA chief of staff, consisting of 28 boxes, are now kept at the Archives Department of University College Dublin.

References

  1. ^ MacEoin, Uinseann (1997), The IRA in the Twilight Years 1923-1948, Argenta Publications, Dublin, pg 429, ISBN 0951117246
  2. ^ a b "TWOMEY, MAURICE ('MOSS')". UCD Archives. Retrieved 11 September 2012.
  3. ^ MacEoin, pg 773
  4. ^ Twomey to Liam Lynch, 3 July 1922, UCDA pp. 69–77.
  5. ^ C Desmond Greaves, "Liam Mellows", p. 209.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "The secret IRA–Soviet agreement, 1925". History Ireland. 8 February 2015.
  7. Cork City
    . Pages 253-262.
  8. Cork City
    . Pages 264-273.
  9. ^ MacEoin, pgs 843 & 856
  10. ^ a b c d O'Neill, Timonthy (2014). "An Eviction in Kinnitty: Republican Social Agitation and the New Fianna Fáil Government, 1932-1933". Études d'histoire et de civilisation. 39 (1): 105–117. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  11. ^ MacEoin, pg 13
  12. ^ "Dictionary of Irish Biography | Dictionary of Irish Biography".
  13. ISBN 978-0-692-04283-0
    .

Bibliography

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