Book Review: Clear-Hold-Build, How the Free State won the Irish Civil War
By Gareth Prendergast
Published by Eastwood Books, Dublin 2025
Reviewer: John Dorney
The Irish War of Independence has attracted a certain amount of interest in recent decades from professional military writers and analysts, keen to learn lessons on insurgency and counter-insurgency for the then on-going ‘War on Terror’. Such works include William Kautt’s Ambushes and Armour, William Sheehan’s A Hard Local War and Joe Connell’s works The Shadow War and The Terror War, all of which focus on the development of the IRA guerrilla insurgency in 1919-21 and the British attempts to suffocate it.
The Civil War between Irish nationalists that followed the War of Independence has attracted less attention on the whole from military analysts, even from those interested in counter-insurgency and state building. This is probably because the internecine conflict lacks the direct presence of the British Empire and its forces.
And yet, the Civil War phase of the Irish revolution gives much to ponder from this perspective. Why was it that the ramshackle, rapidly created and mostly untrained National Army of the Irish Free State succeeded where the British had failed in crushing an IRA guerrilla campaign?
In this book, serving Irish Army Colonel Gareth Prendergast attempts to answer this question, applying to the Irish Civil War theories of counter-insurgency developed over the twentieth century by such theorists as Frenchman David Galula and applied, with mixed success, by US and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty first century. He summarises this doctrine as ‘clear, hold, build’ from which the book draws its title, connecting them thematically with the Free State forces’ success in forcing the anti-Treaty IRA to admit its defeat in May 1923.
The ’clear’ phase here refers to driving the insurgents from territory which they held – achieved by the pro-Treaty forces in July and August 1922, by urban assaults in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford and by means of seaborne landings into the anti-Treaty strongholds in Counties Cork and Kerry.
The ‘hold’ phase refers to their gradual spreading out control over the countryside, resisting large scale guerrilla operations from the anti-Treatyites which attempted to oust them. This required a major expansion of the National Army and some changes of its methods, such as greater mobility and use of ‘counter-columns’. ‘Build’ describes pro-Treaty forces’ attempts at rebuilding civilian infrastructure such as roads and railways and restoring civil governance.
The books is heavily based on Prendergast’s doctoral thesis, which is focussed on National Army operations in County Cork. It uses Cork as a case study from which to generalise about Free State counter-insurgency and only rarely ventures elsewhere in the country. It does not, for example often cross the county border into more controversial neighbouring County Kerry, where anti-Treaty resistance was more prolonged than in Cork and where many of the conflict’s episodes of killing of prisoners occurred.
Prendergast states that his focus in the book is about integrating the Civil War and the National Army’s counter-insurgency into a theory of military operations and not on individual atrocities, or casualties in general.
In the course of this narrative of successful pro-Treaty operations, Prendergast focuses upon force generation, dwelling particularly on the role of Irishmen who had served in the British Army, whom he credits with introducing training and discipline to the new army.
The book has been well received in military quarters, drawing praise from, amongst others, David Petraeus, the one-time commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and later the head of the CIA.
How well, though, does the thesis stand up? Can pro-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War serve as a model for counter-insurgency military doctrine? This reviewer has his doubts.
It should be acknowledged first of all, that the National Army’s achievements were not negligible. An army was created more or less from scratch and largely after the Civil War had already started. It did indeed show considerable boldness in successfully dislodging the anti-Treaty side from the territory that it held in the late summer of 1922. And it did gradually grind down the anti-Treaty IRA’s guerrilla campaign, to the extent that Frank Aiken and Eamon de Valera called it off in May 1923, by which time, out of an estimated 15,000 or so anti-Treaty fighters, as many as 12,000 were incarcerated. In the course of 1923, martial law was eventually rescinded and full control could be handed over to the civil authorities.
However, the Free State forces possessed rare advantages in the Irish Civil War – the support of the majority of the population, no real ethnic, religious or social schism that buttressed the insurgents’ support base and overwhelming military and financial aid from Britain, keen to enforce the Treaty settlement. (An interesting digression by Prendergast tells the story of how the Free State resisted paying for all the military hardware Britain sent to it and ultimately never fully paid for it).
Against them was a divided IRA, that had lost its high command, which was mostly pro-Treaty and a large number of Brigade leaders, especially in County Cork, the focus of this book, who remained neutral in the Civil War. Furthermore, their disintegration gathered pace during the Civil War, especially in Cork, where Divisional head Liam Deasy called on his forces to surrender after his own capture in early 1923 and Director of Operations Tom Barry attempted to broker ceasefires with pro-Treaty forces on his own initiative.
The anti-Treatyites possessed very limited means of waging war, in terms of weapons and munitions and had few means of re-supply. The best strategy their Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch, could come up with was a prolonged campaign of material destruction, which could almost have been devised in order to alienate the civilian population.
Government ministers, most notably Kevin O’Higgins, asked not how the National Army had brought the Civil War to an end, but why it took so long and cost so much money, nearly bankrupting the infant Free State. He eventually had an Army Inquiry convened in 1924 in which he accused the Army high command of incompetence and the Army itself of bungling and indiscipline. If O’Higgins’ complaints were in part motivated by frustration and personal animosity against Army Commander in Chief Richard Mulcahy, they still contained a grain of truth.
A not untypical report, for instance, of National Army operations in in the South West Command (comprising parts of Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Clare), in November 1922, stated that they were losing, not gaining, public support after three months of presence there, possibly due to the common practice of ‘holding up congregations’ at Mass and searching for suspects. Furthermore, they had too few men to ‘take more strenuous measures against the Irregulars’. Writing back from Dublin, command staff noted than many ‘senior ranks’ were inefficient’ and bemoaning that many patrols returned with ‘nothing to report’. “What exactly are these patrols doing?” wondered D.O Cochlan of the office of the Commander in Chief. He speculated that their ‘billets are too comfortable for active service’.[i]
By March 1923, the Army had been expanded to over 55,000 men and the IRA campaign was on its last legs, but the National Army’s tactical performance does not seem to have notably improved. A report of a sweep through county Limerick pointed to ‘serious faults’ in the operation, which ‘resembled more an excursion into the country than a warlike expedition’. Troops stopped to visit friendly houses for refreshments but ‘hiding places [of the enemy] are untouched’ and searches were ‘not thorough’.[ii]
J.J. O’Connell, the Army’s Director of Inspections, found at the end of the Civil War that most soldiers were virtually untrained. Among those manning posts in Dublin, for instance, many ‘could not perform simple evolutions’, some had only five rounds of ammunition on them, while others had none at all and the weapons themselves they carried were so dirty and uncared for that some could not be fired.[iii]
While in Cork, Prendergast’s focus, National Army posts generally fought stubbornly when attacked, it was not uncommon elsewhere, well into the Civil War, for whole garrisons to surrender with minimal resistance when attacked, as at southeastern towns Carrick on Suir and Thomastown and others in December 1922 or Ballinamore, County Leitrim in January 1923.
Leaving aside, as Prendergast does, the question of the killing of prisoners, of which there were over 100 documented cases, the discipline and performance of the average National Army unit was generally very poor.
While it is true, as Prendergast maintains, that the National Army was ‘a learning organisation’, in that it found ways to overcome its own limitations, it won the Civil War mainly through weight of numbers and good intelligence, based on local support, rather than any tactical military excellence or innovation. That, and a certain dose of terror, via executions, both sanctioned by the government and not. Prendergast does cover executions but perhaps downplays their terrorising effect, especially given than by the end of the Civil War some 400 men had been condemned to death and those guerrillas still in the field knew that they would be shot if armed actions continued in their localities.
This may all seem a little ungenerous, given that the National Army did actually win the war it was created to fight, but it is doubtful if the force could serve as a model for military best practice.
This review must finish, unfortunately, with two notes of minor frustration, the first is the failure to use the data assembled by the Irish Civil War Fatalities Project by University College Cork in which this reviewer was involved. This initiative, whose findings were published in 2024, would have qualified and clarified a number of Prendergast’s arguments.
Deaths through firearms and other accidents in the National Army, for example were much higher than he states. He lists about 100, in fact ther were well over 200, or about a third of their fatal, non-disease-related casualties, indicating the very poor level of training in the Army. Anti-Treaty IRA deaths, which he speculates may have been ‘in the thousands’ were in fact much fewer- about 430.
Former British Army servicemen may well have formed half of the National Army’s personnel by its close (there has been no definitive study on this) but comprised only 17 per cent of the Army’s fatal casualties, fewer than the 23 per cent who had served in the pre-Truce IRA. Which indicates that British ex-servicemen’s role in the Civil War, particularly in its most bloody ‘kinetic’ phase at the start, may be exaggerated. They may indeed have brought training and discipline to the National Army, but pro-Treaty IRA figures were more prominent in hard fighting and the average recruit had no previous military service.
The second frustrating absence is that of an index, which makes looking up particular topics and themes within the text unnecessarily difficult.
This is not to denigrate the efforts of Gareth Prendergast, or this book, which is a refreshing attempt to apply military theory to the study of the Irish Civil War.
Notes
[i] Military Archives, Civil War Operations Reports South Western Command November 5 1922 CW/OPS/09/04
[ii] Military Archives Civil War Operations Reports, Limerick Command, 29 March 1923, CW/OPS/09/06
[iii] O’Connell report to Army Inquiry 1924, Mulcahy Papers UCD P7//C/9