Select document: the Prescott-Decie letter W hat was the nature and extent of the British government’s responsibility for reprisals in the summer and autumn of 1920, during the Irish War of Independence? The government’s public position at the time – that they were doing everything possible to prevent reprisals, which were infrequent and exaggerated – is widely discounted. The question is rather: did the government initiate reprisals, or merely tolerate them? Did they make reprisals happen, or only let them happen? At the time, Irish revolutionaries were convinced that reprisals were official policy: the Irish Bulletin said ‘there is a definite Governmental policy of settling England’s difficulties by a campaign of terrorism directed indiscriminately against the Irish people as a whole.’ 1 Since the 1970s, by contrast, most historians have accepted that the initiative for reprisals came from below. ‘Reprisals were not, in the first instance, a “deliberate act of government policy”,’ says D. G. Boyce. ‘They were to the Irish police a means of retaliation against a ruthless and elusive enemy who, they alleged, was enjoying “the usual advantages of guerrilla warfare without suffering any of the penalties attached to it”.’ 2 And aside from occasional suggestions that the government may have done more than just condone reprisals, 3 historians have generally agreed that the British government sinned more by omission than by commission. But in their recent article ‘Smoking gun? RIC reprisals, summer 1920’, John Borgonovo and Gabriel Doherty have challenged this consensus, by providing ‘indisputable evidence’ that ‘Dublin Castle had authorised an assassination campaign against its republican opponents’. 4 This indisputable evidence consists of passages from a ‘newly discovered’ document 5 – a secret letter from a senior 1 ‘From martial law to martial lawlessness’ in Irish Bulletin, 5 Oct. 1920, p. 1. 2 D. G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish troubles: British public opinion and the making of Irish Policy, 1918–1922 (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 54. See also Charles Townshend, The British campaign in Ireland 1919–1921: the development of political and military policies (Oxford, 1975); Joost Augusteijn, From public defiance to guerrilla warfare: the experience of ordinary volunteers in the Irish War of Independence 1916–1921 (Dublin, 1996); D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford, 2011). 3 See, for example: David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish life 1913–1921: provincial experience of war and revolution (Dublin, 1977); Tom Bowden, The breakdown of public security: the case of Ireland 1916–1921 and Palestine 1936–1939 (London and Beverly Hills, 1977); Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal, Kingston, and Ithaca, 2002). 4 John Borgonovo and Gabriel Doherty, ‘Smoking gun? RIC reprisals, summer 1920’ in History Ireland, xvii, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 2009), pp 36–9, at p. 39. 5 Borgonovo and Doherty, ‘Smoking gun,’ p. 38. 511 Irish Historical Studies, xxxviii, no. 151 (May 2013) IHS vol 38 no 151 may 2013:IHistS7.qxd 23/04/2013 12:35 Page 511 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021121400001620 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.242.23.230, on 16 Jan 2022 at 11:56:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at