Editing Irish War of Independence (section)

==Forces==

===British===
[[File:R.I.C. and military leaving Limerick (18442632000).jpg|thumb|left|RIC and British Army personnel near Limerick, c. 1920]]

The heart of British power in Ireland was the Dublin Castle administration, often known to the Irish as "the Castle".{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=18}} The head of the Castle administration was the [[Lord Lieutenant of Ireland|lord lieutenant]], to whom a [[Chief Secretary for Ireland|chief secretary]] was responsible, leading—in the words of the British historian [[Peter Cottrell]]—to an "administration renowned for its incompetence and inefficiency".{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=18}} Ireland was divided into three military districts. During the war, two British Army divisions, the [[5th Infantry Division (United Kingdom)|5th]] and the [[6th Infantry Division (United Kingdom)|6th]] divisions, were based in Ireland with their respective headquarters in the [[Curragh]] and [[Cork (city)|Cork]].{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=18}} By July 1921 there were 50,000 British troops based in Ireland; by contrast there were 14,000 soldiers in metropolitan Britain.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=19}} While the British Army had historically been heavily dependent on Irish recruitment, concern over divided loyalties led to the redeployment from 1919 of all regular Irish regiments to garrisons outside Ireland itself.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Murphy |first=David |title=Irish Regiments in the World Wars |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-84603-015-4 |page=28|publisher=Bloomsbury USA }}</ref>

The two main police forces in Ireland were the [[Royal Irish Constabulary]] (RIC) and the [[Dublin Metropolitan Police]].{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=20}} Of the 17,000 policemen in Ireland, 513 were killed by the IRA between 1919 and 1921 while 682 were wounded.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=20}} Of the RIC's senior officers, 60% were Irish Protestants and the rest Catholic, while 70% of the rank and file of the RIC were Irish Catholic with the rest Protestant.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=20}} The RIC was trained for police work, not war, and was woefully ill-prepared to take on counter-insurgency duties.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|pages=49–52}} Until March 1920, London regarded the unrest in Ireland as primarily an issue for the police and did not regard it as a war.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=54}} The purpose of the Army was to back up the police. In the course of the war, about a quarter of Ireland was put under martial law, mostly in Munster; in the rest of the country British authority was not deemed sufficiently threatened to warrant it.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=19}} The British created two paramilitary police forces to supplement the work of the RIC, recruited mostly from World War I veterans, namely the Temporary Constables (better known as the "[[Black and Tans]]") and the Temporary Cadets or [[Auxiliary Division]] (known as the "Auxies").{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=21}}

===Irish republican===
[[File:West Connemara Flying Column 1922.jpg|thumb|West Connemara IRA [[flying column]]]]
On 25 November 1913, the Irish Volunteers were formed by Eoin MacNeill in response to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) that had been founded earlier in the year to fight against home rule.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=24}} Also in 1913, the Irish Citizen Army was founded by the trade unionists and socialists [[James Larkin]] and [[James Connolly]] following a series of violent incidents between trade unionists and the Dublin police in the [[Dublin lock-out]].{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=26}} In June 1914, Nationalist leader John Redmond forced the Volunteers to give his nominees a majority on the ruling committee. When, in September 1914, Redmond encouraged the Volunteers to enlist in the British Army, a faction led by Eoin MacNeill broke with the Redmondites, who became known as the National Volunteers, rather than fight for Britain in the war.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=26}} Many of the National Volunteers did enlist, and the majority of the men in the [[16th (Irish) Division]] of the British Army had formerly served in the National Volunteers.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=25}} The Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army launched the Easter Rising against British rule in 1916, when an [[Irish Republic]] was proclaimed. Thereafter they became known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Between 1919 and 1921 the IRA claimed to have a total strength of 70,000, but only about 3,000 were actively engaged in fighting against the Crown.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=28}} The IRA distrusted those Irishmen who had fought in the British Army during the First World War, but there were exceptions, such as [[Emmet Dalton]], [[Tom Barry (soldier)|Tom Barry]] and [[Martin Doyle (VC)|Martin Doyle]].{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=28}} The basic structure of the IRA was the flying column which could number between 20 and 100 men.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=28}} Finally, [[Michael Collins (Irish leader)|Michael Collins]] created the "[[The Squad (Irish Republican Army unit)|Squad]]"—gunmen responsible to himself who were assigned special duties such as the assassination of policemen and suspected informers within the IRA.{{sfn|Cottrell|2006|p=28}}