Consolidating Free State Military Forces

The eventual creation of a distinct, pro-Treaty military organisation was a process that began shortly after the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This new entity, commonly referred to as the National Army, was formally created in early July 1922 under the proviso of General Order No. 1, which set out the new superstructure of the military organisation. However, the process of creating a ‘new’ military from the assorted pro-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) units across the country is one that has been largely occluded from studies of the civil war period. The impression has often been given from prior scholarship that the National Army was created solely in response to the outbreak of civil war in late June 1922; however, there were earlier plans for a peacetime military which was to be markedly different from the civil war structures and which were apparent in some of the later structures of the Defence Forces established in 1924. Therefore, the process of creating the National Army should be viewed as part of a larger ‘professionalisation’ of the largely part-time paramilitary structures of the IRA.