Although the truce of 1921 seemed, on the surface, a simple moment of victory, as the months advanced it brought an increasing sense of confusion and uncertainty. MacBride's claim, typical of the attitude of some local commandants, that ‘we could have got much better terms by continuing for another couple of months’ was mirrored by British security forces in Ireland, who maintained that ‘if the Government had stuck it out for another fortnight, [the rebels] would have been glad to surrender’. As the wider Irish public greeted the truce with jubilation and celebratory bonfires, the republican leadership focused their energies on an extensive training and recruitment programme across the country, a policy which had the added attraction of occupying their more extreme members. But although the popular reaction to the truce was overwhelming, the cessation presented the IRA with two related problems: one linked to the indiscipline that stemmed from the arrogance of a perceived victory, the other related to the influx of new recruits or ‘trucers’, as they were derisorily tagged by seasoned veterans.

In an attempt to deal with these problems, officer training camps were established all over the country, in order to impose some level of central control on what had often been a series of semi-autonomous local struggles. Such training camps were serious affairs; a surviving record of one in Tipperary includes classes on musketry and bayonet use, theory of rifle fire, fighting at close quarters, the use of hand grenades, rifle cleaning, and report writing.