Gas grenades and anti-Treaty rebels

Sir, – “Britain sent ‘banned’ grenades to counter anti-Treaty rebels” (News, August 7th) amplifies a claim first made by former UK defence secretary Michael Portillo in an RTÉ documentary three months ago. This asserted that the Free State government “canvassed the British for poison gas” to use against anti-Treaty forces in Dublin in June 1922. I challenged that claim then (Letters, May 16th). You report now that the programme’s researchers have found evidence that the British later sent to Dublin “poison” grenades containing “liquid ethyl iodacentate, a lachrymatory (tear) gas first used by the British at the Battle of Loos in late 1915]”. But the key document remains a UK cabinet minute of July 4th, 1922, that is freely available online. This does not refer to any (as claimed) “missive from Dublin”. It does state that the cabinet was “informed” by some unnamed person that (allegedly and somehow) “the Irish Free State Government had intimated that if it could be supplied with some form of gas grenades their task in clearing the rebels out of their strongholds would be greatly simplified”.

The cabinet minute does not state that the UK cabinet was “stunned” or reacted with “horror” to the idea of using “some form of gas”, although this is now claimed. In fact, part of the cabinet minute (for some reason not reproduced in RTÉ's programme) records that the UK cabinet promptly decided to supply “lachrymatory” grenades. These were explicitly to be not “of a lethal or other injurious character” or of a kind that was “banned”. The word “lachrymatory” is from the Latin lacrima meaning tears. Tear gas was then being widely demonstrated in the US for use in civil disturbances. Its use to clear Dublin city centre of anti-Treaty forces that week might have saved lives and avoided the destruction again of buildings just six years after 1916, and was not a sinister option for the elected Irish government. The gas grenades now said to have been sent subsequently to those British army forces still in Dublin (but not to the Irish Free State Army) resembled more closely the tear gas used by police forces than what most people understand by “poison gas” in the lethal context of the first World War after 1915. According to a classic text by Lieut -Col Augustin Prentiss, of the US Chemical Warfare Service, ethyl iodacentate (used at the Battle of Loos) was on its own generally not lethal in the field and was superseded during the first World War by much more deadly concoctions including those containing phosgene.

It is possible that the entire “intimation” to cabinet and delivery to Dublin was engineered for British purposes by a predecessor of Mr Portillo’s in the UK cabinet. For the cabinet minute explicitly refers back to a recent meeting at which UK ministers decided to apply great pressure on Dublin to quash anti-Treaty forces more vigorously and to offer arms. Indeed, the new information that non-lethal gas was later brought to Dublin by British forces but that the Free State government apparently did not take delivery of even this gas tends to undermine any allegation that Irish ministers agreed to request or wished to use lethal “poison” grenades. – Yours, etc,

Dr COLUM KENNY,