Lloyd George criticised over ‘hellish policy’ for Ireland

Prime Minister condones reprisals and says partition bill to proceed

Carnarvon, 10 October 1920 - In a speech that has angered his critics in Ireland and Britain, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George has condoned the reprisals in Ireland, has promised further stern measures and has confirmed that his government will proceed with its partition scheme. 

Amongst the most controversial aspects of the Prime Minister’s speech, delivered yesterday in Carnarvon, Wales, was his defence of the acts of reprisal carried out by the crown forces in Ireland. ‘Policemen and soldiers did not go burning houses and shooting men down wantonly without provocation’, he said.

‘Therefore you must, if you are to examine reprisals, find out how they arose. I think during the last year 283 policemen have been shot in Ireland – 109 shot dead. Something like 100 soldiers, I think, have been shot, and many more have been fired at. I think about 67 courthouses ... have been burnt, and there have been attacks on police barracks. The police endured this state of things in a way that is the highest testimony to their discipline and self-restraint for two or three years. There is no doubt that at last their patience has given way and there has been some severe hitting back.’

Cartoon depicting what Lloyd George sees as the major problem in Ireland, originally published in the Daily Express (Image: Literary Digest, 14 August 1920)

The Prime Minister explained that if it was a war that the British government was involved in, then it must be a war on both sides:

‘We cannot have a one-sided war. In a war you don’t have on one side men standing up to be shot at and never firing back. In war men were in uniform, but in Ireland a harmless-looking citizen might pass a policeman in the street, and there was nothing to indicate that he had murderous weapons or to arouse suspicion. When he had passed the policeman he would pull out a revolver and shoot him in the back. Scores of policemen had been killed in that way. That was not war, but murder. If it was war, give the soldier and the policeman a fair chance, and they would give a good account of themselves. Were the policemen to stand to be shot down like dogs in the streets without any attempt to defend themselves.’

As to how order might be restored, Lloyd George signalled that sterner measures might need to be applied. The British government, he asserted, could ‘not permit a country to be debased into the condition of complete anarchy, where a number, a small body of assasins, a real murder gang, were dominating the country and terrorising it and making it impossible for reasonable men to come together to consider the best way to govern the country.’

Lloyd George's fighting talk was condemned by former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith who, in a statement to the press, responded that the ‘attempt to answer murder with murder and outrage by terrorism is not government, but anarchy.’

Asquith described the reprisals in Ireland as a ‘hellish policy’, and stated that Lloyd George’s speech amounted to a ‘declaration of insolvency’ on the part of the coalition government.

The Sinn Féin TD, Arthur Griffith, whom the Prime Minister named in his speech for his failure to call out the murder of policemen, has accused Lloyd George of being a ‘master of misrepresentation’ and has accused him of the distorting the reality of the Irish situation. The British government, Griffith says, has no authority in Ireland, as evidenced by the Irish people’s peaceful and constitutional endorsement of the principle of self-determination at the 1918 general election. ‘The rights of nations, however small, are as sacred as the rights of the biggest Empires.’

He added that if Ireland’s claim to national independence was wrong, then England should seek to disprove it, ‘not by murdering Irish civilians, sacking Irish towns, burning Irish homesteads and factories, imprisoning Irish citizens, blockading Irish ports, and torturing Irish captives but by argument before the great civilised world.’

[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]