The second part of a two part article on the fall of the House of Desmond and the apocalyptic destruction of the old order in Munster. See Part I here. BY John Dorney

In May 1570, during the first Desmond Rebellion, several Irish lords had written to the Catholic Bishop of Cashel, desiring their pleas for military aid to be sent to Phillip II of Spain against, ‘The English, our bitterest foes’.

‘No pledge’, they write, ‘can make us believe or trust such foes… The English attack people in times of peace’ They urgently wished the King of Spain to know of ‘the sufferings we endure day and night the cruel war they are waging against, so that he may defend and preserve us’.[1]

And so it was that the Second, far more bloody and destructive Desmond Rebellion was sparked by intervention from Catholic Europe. Not as it happened, from Phillip of Spain, but from Pope Gregory XIII and the instigator of the first Desmond Rebellion (1569-73) James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald.

The Annals of the Four Masters recorded that in July 1579,

James, the son of Maurice Dubh, son of John, son of Thomas, son of the Earl of Desmond, returned from France; and it was rumoured that he had comewith a greater number of ships than was really the case. He landed at Oilen-an-Oir, contiguous to Daingean-Ui-Chuis [Dangan in the Dingle peninsula], in Kerry.[2]

When he landed at Dingle, Fitzmaurice had with him about 100 Irish, Spanish and Italian soldiers and Papal banner and Papal emissary Nicholas Sanders. They read a proclamation from the Pope stating that Elizabeth I of England was ‘a tyrant’ and that her Kingdoms were forfeit.[3]

Whereas the first Desmond rebellion could be written off as an aristocratic revolt of the Fitzgeralds of Desmond against the Crown or as part of the feud of the Fitzgeralds (or Geraldines) against the Butlers of Ormonde, from an early stage, it was clear that this would be a much more serious affair.

This was a religious and ideological war on the part of many of the rebels as well as an attempt to conserve the power of the house of Desmond. It would also consciously try to rally various elements of indigenous Irish society against the ongoing English conquest of the island.

The background to the rebellion

The first Desmond rebellion had been a bloody and bitter affair, but it had ended in compromise, with the release of the Earl of Desmond and his brother John from captivity and the restoration of them to their lands.

Throughout the later 1570s, the English authorities in Munster painstakingly tried to construct what they considered to be a new ‘civilised’ order there. As well as outlawing elements of Irish culture, including the keeping Irish language poets and dressing in the native style and hanging up to 700 ‘masterless’ native mercenaries,[4] they devised a system whereby the Earl of Desmond and other lords would give up their private armies pay rent to the Crown and draw from their vassals, instead of military service, cash rent.

The province would then, the theory went, become ripe for the introduction of English civilization. In late 1578, the Earl agreed to reduce his own armed forces to mere bodyguard of 20 horsemen. [5]

The Ealr himself may have accepted such terms but there were many of the Fitzgerald dynasty (especially the Earl’s brother John, widely considered the strongman of the family) who were deeply unhappy with becoming simply landlords.

There was also a wide constituency of others left out in the cold by the proposed new order. The traditional bardic classes would be left destitute as would professional soldiers. Many Gaelic lords feared confiscation at the hands of rapacious English settlers. And of course there was the question of religion. Most native Irish were Catholics, while the Kingdom of England was becoming more deeply and viscerally Protestant as the century went on.

So despite the smallness of Fitzmaurice’s ‘invasion’ at Dingle, despite his own low standing among the Geraldines (he had no lands and few followers) and despite the remoteness of the spot where he landed, most of Munster was soon engulfed in rebellion.

The Outbreak of the Rebellion

John of Desmond, the most powerful man in the dynasty after the Earl, was the first important figure to join with Fitzmaurice, which he did by assassinating and beheading two English officials – Henry Davells and Arthur Carte in their beds at an Inn in Tralee.[6]

He went on to occupy a number of strategic sites such as Carrigafoyle and Askeaton castles and to rally important families including O’Sullivan Beare, Roche and Barry to the rebellion. By the autumn of 1579 the rebels’ strength, bolstered by hired Gallowglass mercenaries, was estimated at about 2,000 men. By way of comparison, in all of Ireland there were no more than 1,200 English royal troops, though they could also count on the levies of Irish lords allied to the government.[7]

James Fitzmaurice was killed late 1579 in a skirmish with Burkes of Connacht, while crossing into their territory to steal horses, but in November of that year the rebellion secured a far more prestigious leader, Gerald, the Earl of Desmond himself.

Desmond had tried to stay out of the rebellion and had assured the English officials Drury – the Lord Deputy – and Nicholas Malby that he had no knowledge of Fitzmaurice’s landing. According to English sources, he was proclaimed a traitor only after repeatedly refusing to surrender the Fitzgerald castles to English troops. According to the Irish Annals however, it was an English breach of faith that sent the Earl into rebellion;

He delivered up to the Lord Justice his only son and heir, as a hostage, to ensure his loyalty and fidelity to the crown of England. A promise was thereupon given to the Earl that his territory should not be plundered in future; but, although this promise was given, it was not kept, for his people and cattle were destroyed, and his corn and edifices burned.[8]

The Earl marked his declaration of war by sacking and looting the town of Youghal, while MacCarthy Mor did likewise to Kinsale. At Youghal, the Annals record;

The Geraldines seized upon all the riches they found in this town, excepting such gold and silver as the merchants and burgesses had sent away in ships before the town was taken. Many a poor, indigent person became rich and affluent by the spoils of this town. The Geraldines levelled the wall of the town, and broke down its courts and castles, and its buildings of stone and wood, so that it was not habitable for some time afterwards. .”[9]

Notably, though the rebel forces looted the town and killed the garrison, the English believed that the civilian population had helped them enter and English forces later hanged the mayor for treachery.[10]

From Newcastle West, the strongly fortified tradition seat of the Earldom, Gerald wrote to Irish lords around the country, imploring them to join his cause in the name of religion and their own interests;

“My well beloved friend… I and my brethren are entered into defence of the Catholic faith and the overthrow of our country by Englishmen which had overthrown our Holy faith and go about to overrun our country and to make it their own and to make us their bond men. We took this matter in hand with great authority both from the Pope’s Holiness and King Phillip [of Spain][11]

Reaction in Ireland was mixed. The Annals present the rebellion as a private war of the Geraldines against ‘their sovereign’ rather than primarily a religious or patriotic venture and most Irish lordships and clans in Munster lined up on the side of their factional interests (for or against the Fitzgeralds) rather than on any ideology. In particular, the most effective and committed enemies of the rebellion were probably the Butlers of Ormonde, the Geraldines’ long-time rivals.

English Response

Nevertheless, the English military response was predictably ferocious. The Lord Chancellor ordered the mustering of all able bodied men to defend the English Pale around Dublin and ordered the execution of all, ‘harpers, bards, rhymers and loose idle people with no master’.[12]

The type of warfare that ensued was not characterized by pitched battle between large forces. Though the Annals and other contemporary sources do record some engagements between relatively large bodies (of up to 600 to 1,000 men) on either side, these were usually relatively fleeting and indecisive.

Rather, the conflict was in essence a guerrilla affair. The Geraldines and their allies controlled, apart from a small fertile area in County Limerick, secured by castles, a swathe of hilly country from north Kerry, through the Glen of Aherlow in Tipperary to west Waterford and from these remote bases, they raided incessantly the English and their allies.

The English strategy was firstly to take the Geraldine’s strongpoints which defended their fertile lowland country of modern county Limerick. This they largely succeeded in doing in early 1580, bringing up heavy guns by sea and bombarding Carrigafoyle Castle into surrender. The English proceeded to hang its Irish and Spanish garrison and thus terrorized the nearby castles of Askeaton, Newcastle West and others into abandoning their positions.[13]

English troops led by Pelham and Malby as well as the Earl of Ormonde and his levies (together about 2,000 troops) then marched through marched through the Fitzgerald’s lands, destroying their means to make war –burning their crops seizing their cattle and killing their tenants. Without this economic base the Fitzgeralds and their allies were helpless to feed or to pay their soldiers.

Much the same logic applied to the rebels’ tactics, which were aimed not so much at defeating the Crown forces in battle as taking way their means to subsist and garrison the country. As the Annals of the Four Master explain,

The sons of the Earl proceeded to destroy, demolish, burn, and completely consume every fortress, town, corn-field, and habitation between those places to which they came, lest the English might get possession of them, and dwell in them;

Similarly

the English consigned to a like destruction every house and habitation, and every rick and stack of corn, to which they came, to injure the Geraldines, so that between them the country was left one levelled plain, without corn or edifices.

So in many ways the conduct of the two sides was fundamentally similar, both preying on non-combatants, burning crops and seizing livestock. But the Annals noted a special ruthlessness about the conduct of the English towards the civilian population;

These, wheresoever they passed, shewed mercy neither to the strong nor the weak. It was not wonderful [surprising] that they should kill men fit for action, but they killed blind and feeble men, women, boys, and girls, sick persons, idiots, and old people.[14]

It is difficult to conclude other than that the English introduced a new level of brutality into 16th century Irish warfare with the wholesale killing of civlians nad use of unrestricted scorched earth warfare. The English poet and colonist Edmund Spenser, who fought in the Desmond War, was explicit that the tactics used were designed to decimate the civilian population and starve the rebels into surrender;

“Towns there are none of which he may get spoil, they are all burnt; Country houses and farmers there are none, they be all fled; bread he hath none, he ploughed not in summer; flesh [livestock] he hath, but if he kill it in winter, he shall want milk in summer, and shortly want life. Therefore if they be well followed but one winter, ye shall have little work to do with them the next summer. …

All those subjects which border upon those parts, are whither to be removed and drawn away, or likewise to be spoiled, that the enemy may find no succour thereby: for what the soldier spares the rebel will surely spoil”. “The end I assure you will be very short’[15]

The end though, was not in fact short at all in coming. English troops could not in practice plunder at will throughout the countryside, for they were vulnerable to ambushes and could only raid relatively compact areas in large numbers. The rebellion was also given a new lease of life in mid 1580 when it was joined by a Pale Lord Viscount Baltinglass and a veteran Gaelic raider, Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne of the Wicklow Mountains, who together mauled an English force under the new Lord Deputy, Grey at Glenmalure in August of that year.[16]

Perhaps chastened by his humiliating defeat, Grey dismissed some peace feelers the Earl of Desmond had sent out through his wife Countess Eleanor[17] and instead stepped up English scorched earth tactics. Such was his reputation for cruelty that he was reviled even within the English Pale as,  ‘a bloody man who regarded his subjects’ lives not more than dogs’[18]

The end of the war was not seen for four tortuous years, during which tens of thousands would die, killed directly by violence and by resulting famine and plague.

Smerwick

Ireland was only one of many countries wracked by internal conflict in late 16ht century Europe. In France, civil wars raged between Catholic and Protestant. In the Netherlands the mostly Calvinist Dutch bitterly resited their erstwhile overlords, the Catholic Spaniards’ re-conquest of the Low Countries. And Ireland too in September 1580 became a battleground in these European wars of religion.

Pope Gregory XIII had backed James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald since the early 1570s, when he fled first to France and then to Rome after his defeat in the first Desmond Rebellion. In Irlenad Fitzmaurice had been wandering swordsman but the Pope granted him men, money and the title of Marquess of Leinster in order to fight for the Catholic cause in Ireland.[19]

In 1580, after Fitzmaurice’s death, the Pope, unhappy with Phillip of Spain’s truce with the Dutch Protestant rebels, pressurized Phillip to invade Ireland as a means of ultimately invading and re-Catholicizing England. While he could not get the Spanish king to launch his own expedition to Ireland, he did get Phillip to agree to provide ships to transport about 800 mostly Italian volunteers, who had been recruited and paid for by the Papacy, to Ireland to aid the rebellion there in September of 1580.[20]

The Catholic expedition landed at Smerwick in Dingle on the 10^th of September 1580. The Geraldine forces were however slow to help them and soon the Catholic soldiers were besieged in a fort at Dun an Oir by land forces under Grey and a fleet under William Winter. Under a terrible artillery bombardment their commander Sebastiano di San Giuseppe surrendered to Grey on November 10th, ‘their ensigns [flags] trailing’. Grey first made sure they were disarmed and then had the surviving 600 soldiers as well as a number of priests and local civilians ‘put to the sword’.[21]

Grey later argued that, as they had been sent, not by the King of Spain but by the Pope they were not entitled to the rights of quarter granted to soldiers serving under a lawful sovereign. Elizabeth I, for her part extended her thanks to her troops. [22]

It was the largest single massacre of the Desmond wars, the end of any prospect of continental help for the rebels one of the factors that ultimately led to renewed war between England and Spain.

The bitter end

The war in Munster dragged on through 1581 with much bloodshed but no decision. The rebellion in Leinster collapsed early in the year, it leader Baltinglass fled to France and in May 1581 many Munster lords submitted for pardon. For the heads of the Desmond Earldom though, there would be no terms of surrender – they were specifically excluded from the terms of a General Pardon granted to other rebels.

And so the war went on. The Annals noted that, that John of Desmond, raiding from the Glen of Aherlow plundered the Butler’s country in Laois, and their towns around the Suir river, as well as MacCarthy Mor (who had submitted)’s country (in modern west Cork) while the Earl similarly concentrated on; cutting down of the Butlers by day and night, in revenge of the injuries which the Earl of Ormond had up to that time committed against the Geraldines.[23]

The English forces, at their peak 6,400 strong were too expensive to maintain and had to be drastically cut, to 3,000 in the cours of 1581, but this was not enough to contain the Geraldine guerrillas or to maintain security outside of fortified garrisons.

In early 1582, John of Desmond was killed in an ambush laid by English troops under a captain Suitsi while crossing the river Avonmore – his body was quartered and his head sent to Grey.

The greatest number of casualties however were among what one English official described as, ‘the poor people who live only upon their labour and fed by their milch cows’.

They were regularly killed in reprisals but famine and disease by 1582 was taking a much higher toll among them. In the first six months of 1582 it was reported that some 30,000 people had died of starvation and disease in Munster. Warhame St Leger reported that Munster, ‘is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by the rebels and the killings by the soldiers.’ [24]

[pullquote]By 1582, tens of thousands of deaths by famine were were being reported in Munster.[/pullquote]

The Annals report, “the whole tract of country from Waterford to Lothra, and from Cnamhchoill to the county of Kilkenny, was suffered to remain one surface of weeds and waste.’

Edmund Spenser for his part graphically described the effects of the scorched earth warfare he advocated;

“in those late wars in Munster; for notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that you would have thought they could have been able to stand long, yet eare one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same.

He described starving figures emerging from the remote places where they had hidden;

Out of every corner of the wood and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spoke like ghosts, crying out of their graves; they did eat of the carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves;

He concluded;

A most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast”.[25]

Grey’s brutality might have been forgiven had he been more successful. As it was, he was replaced by Elizabeth as commander of English forces in December 1582 by Thomas Butler the Earl of Ormonde – hereditary enemy of the Geraldines.

With a mobile force of about 1,000 and making skilful use of local allies, he drove the Geraldines out of the Waterford/Tipperary area and into the hills of Kerry. The MacCarthy Reagh clan for instance along with some English soldiers reported they had driven the Earl, ‘into his own waste country’ where his troops could find no provisions and deserted. They also claimed credit for the killing of Gorey MacSweeney and Morrice Roe, two of Desmond’s gallowglass captains.[26]

By September 1583, Desmond’s forces had been reduced by casualties and surrenders from a high of 2,000 to mere handful. Important members of his own dynasty such as the Sensechal of Imolky and even his wife Eleanor came in to surrender.[27]

The Earl’s end when it came, was inglorious in the extreme. Hiding in a remote valley named Glenagenty, near Tralee, he was surprised by a party of the local clan the O’Moriartys, who found Desmond alone and wounded in a poor cabin. Although he begged for his life, they killed and then beheaded him. His head sent to Queen Elizabeth. His body was triumphantly displayed on the walls of Cork.

The Desmond dynasty had both literally and figuratively, been decapitated. The war was finally over. As much as a third of the population of Munster is thought to have died.

The Four Master conclude that in 1584;

A general peace was proclaimed throughout all Ireland, and the two provinces of Munster in particular, after the decapitation of the Earl of Desmond, of which we have already made mention. In consequence of this proclamation, the inhabitants of the neighbouring cantreds crowded in to inhabit Hy-Connello, Kerry, and the county of Limerick.[28]

[pullquote]The Earl of Desmond was killed by the O’Moriarty clan in November 1583 and his head sent to Elizabeth I.[/pullquote]

Fertile places such as county Limerick recovered relatively quickly. By 1587, the Solicitor General Roger Wilbraham reported that ‘this is a most plentiful year of corn…[there are] five times a many Irish inhabiting in the county of Limerick as were within these two years’. He urged the settling of more English planters there before all the land was re-occupied by the Irish[29]. On the other hand another settler William Herbert reported the following year that, ‘this province’s waste and desolate parts…[are] by reason of the calamities of the late wars, void of people to manure and occupy the same’[30].

Assessing the Desmond wars

How should we assess the Desmond rebellions?

Were they merely the resistance of a local feudal lordship to a centralizing state? There is certainly much truth in this, the Annals of the Four Masters for instance, normally vociferous in their support for Irish Catholic causes, did not take the Fitzgerald’s rebellion seriously in this regards, rather they concluded, citing the Desmond dynasty’s English origins back in the twelfth century;

‘It was no wonder that the vengeance of God should exterminate the Geraldines for their opposition to their Sovereign, whose predecessors had granted to their ancestors as patrimonial lands’.

We should not forget also that the Desmond rebellions were sparked in the first place, in 1569, by the armed rivalry between the Ormonde and Desmond lordships. And it was ‘Black Tom Butler’, Earl of Ormonde who ultimately brought the rebellion to an end.

For the English the rebellion was about destroying ‘degenerate’ militarized Irish lordships that preyed on their own tenants and replacing them, in theory if not always in practice, with the rule of law.

But it also clear that the Desmond rebellion were perceived on both England and Irish sides as an ethnic war. One of the first targets of the Geraldines had been the nascent English colonies in Munster and it id difficult to imagine the extreme brutality English forces displayed towards non-combatants had they not regarded they Gaelic Irish as an alien and uncivilized people.

The Desmond rebellion was also followed by the Munster plantation – an attempt to introduce thousands of new English settlers into the confiscated Fitzgerald lands. Some, 500,000 acres were planted with English colonists and by 1589 there were up to 3-4,000 English settlers in the province[31].

Finally also of grim importance for the future was the religious dimension. The Catholic Church recognized a number of those hanged during the rebellion as martyrs.[32] Significantly, many of these were not from the Munster Gaelic heartland of the revolt but from anglicized areas such as Dublin city and south Wexford. In January 1581, for example 45 citizens of Dublin were hanged early in the year for treason, some of them going to their deaths as Catholic martyrs, proclaiming their faith.[33]

If the Desmond Rebellion cannot be said to have been a nationalist struggle – a coherent Irish national and religious identity was arguably still unformed, it can perhaps be said to be one of the seminal events that led to its creation.

A generation later, another Irish war lord, Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone would much more successfully claim that he was fighting the English for ‘faith and fatherland’ with military aid from the Kingdom of Spain itself.

References

[1] Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p139

[2] Annals of the Four Masters, online here.

[3] Falls p 126

[4] Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland the Incomplete Conquest, p216

[5] Lennon, p221

[6] Falls p127

[7] For the impact of John’s joining of the rebellion, Lennon p 223 and estimate of insurgent strength, Falls p128

[8] Annals of the Four Masters

[9] Annals of the Four Masters

[10] Falls p 130

[11] Cited Anthony McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship, p

[12] Falls p 127

[13] Lennon p225

[14] Annals of the Four Masters

[15] Edmund Spenser, a View on the Present State of Ireland, online here.

[16] Lennon, p 225

[17] Falls p135

[18] Lennon, p227

[19] Falls p 126

[20] Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King, A New Life of Phillip II, p 272-273

[21] Vincent Carey, Grey, Spenser and the Slaughter at Smerwick, in The Age of Atrocity, Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, p83-86

[22] Ibid, p91-92

[23] Annals of the Four Masters

[24] Lennon, p227

[25] Spenser, View

[26] Florence McCarthy to Burghley, 29 November 1594, Daniel McCarthy, Letter Book of Florence McCarthy Reagh, Tanist of Carberry, p.121.

[27] Lennon p228

[28] Annals of the Four Masters

[29] Wilbraham to Lords Commission for Munster Causes, September 11, 1587,  CSP 1586-1588 pp. 405-406

[30] Herbert to Burghley June 1588, Ibid. p532

[31] Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British p154-155

[32] They were Bishop Patrick O’Healy and Father Cornelius O’Rourke, Franciscans: tortured and hanged at Kilmallock 22nd August 1579

2. The Wexford Martyrs: Matthew Lambert and sailors – Robert Tyler, Edward Cheevers and Patrick Cavanagh: died in Wexford 1581
3. Bishop Dermot O’Hurley: tortured and hanged at Hoggen Green (now College Green), Dublin, 20th June 1584
4. Margaret Ball: lay woman, died in prison 1584
5. Maurice Kenraghty (or MacEnraghty): secular priest, hanged at Clonmel on 20th April 1585

[33] Annals of the Four Masters.

Gerard Shannon on Arthur Griffith’s long and often tortuous relationship with the Irish Republican Brotherhood up to 1916.

By 1905, the journalist and radical Irish separatist Arthur Griffith was keen to use his influence in advanced nationalist circles to present an alternative to the militant Irish republicanism that he had been sympathetic to in his youth.

Griffith’s proposed alternative – first, presented in a public speech and later published[1] – was a political theory that aspired towards a more passive resistance to British rule in Ireland. It became known as the ‘Sinn Féin policy’.

Drawing on his own reading of the historical example of Hungary within the Austrian Empire, Griffith proposed that Irish politicians should withdraw from the British parliament of Westminster, and re-establish ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ that had sat in Dublin and was dissolved with the passage of the Act of Union in 1800.

Though Ireland would now have its own (restored) parliament, the British monarch would remain the head of this Irish state – a concept referred to as ‘dual-monarchy’. In addition, Griffith also proposed economic ideas of protectionism and self-sufficiency for Ireland, mainly inspired by the German economist Frederick List.

Privately, Griffith had come to doubt the Irish public would ever truly be united in support of separatism, but felt his ideas presented a practical means of separation from Britain that could unite public opinion in Ireland.[2] Most importantly, it could potentially satisfy Irish unionists, who could point toward a symbolic connection to Britain through the reigning monarch there.

There is some evidence from his own writings that for a number of years Griffith had been slowly departing from a belief in more traditional forms of Irish republicanism. In 1899, in the pages of The United Irishman, he praised the Hungarian physical-force republican, Louis Kossuth. And yet, in the same publication, by 1903, in the midst of a published book review, Griffith remarked: “For our part, we care little whether our government be republican or monarchial so long as it be Irish, independent and just.”[3]

His policy ran counter to the beliefs of who leaned more towards the physical force tradition whose adherents made up the ranks of the secret society known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Key individuals in this organisation he would associate within the movement inspired by his ideas, the Sinn Féin political party, and yet over time would become greatly opposed to Griffith and his leadership.

What is little appreciated however, is that Griffith maintained a close association with the IRB from within and without its ranks during the decade prior to the 1916 Easter Rising; be it through funding of his various newspapers, not to mention the development of several important advanced nationalist organisations.[4]

The IRB by Griffith’s time

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the secret society known as the IRB, founded in 1858, was very much on the wane. The IRB was dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland by force, and was inspired by the secular republicanism articulated by the United Irishmen of the 1790s. Nonetheless, the organisation had experienced continued failure with physical force methods nearly half a century on from its own failed rebellion and its winding down of a bombing campaign in London in the 1880s.

The IRB’s diminished fortunes in this period came about as a result of continued splits in the 1890s amongst its sister organisation in the United States, Clan na Gael, and the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party in this decade, with whom it had been previously aligned with during the Land War of the 1880s. As a result, it had “entered into a phase of decline and became a shadow of its former self.”[5]

Further setting it outside the political mainstream was the IRB’s refusal to support the newly resurgent Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond, at a time when the IPP seemed certain of achieving its legislative goal of Home Rule – a domestic parliament for Ireland within the British Empire.

The Boer War in South Africa, from 1899 – 1902, united all strands of advanced nationalist opinion in Ireland, with a major anti-recruitment campaign in Ireland throughout the conflict. The IRB dispatched a brigade to aid the Boers led by John MacBride, and the anti-recruitment movement also brought Arthur Griffith to the fore in advanced nationalist politics.

Griffith’s Journalism

Griffith, the son of a printer family, had been a youthful admirer of the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, who inspired his activism.[6] Griffith quickly became a member of the IRB at some point in this period, the organisatiation funding his very first self-published paper, The United Irishman, in 1899; forging an important business relationship that would continue for over a decade.

As he refined what became the ‘Sinn Féin policy’, Griffith was determined to promote these ideas in his many publications. Griffith would never be deterred by obstacles, such as the outright banning of his newspapers by British authorities, or adverse financial circumstances.
In 1906, Griffith began publishing a newspaper entitled Sinn Féin (though this confusingly was not the official organ of the similarly named movement, the Sinn Féin League, in this period). In this newspaper’s very first issue, Griffith cemented his political theories on Austria-Hungary and Grattan’s Parliament to what he felt was the definite form of Irish separatism, writing:

“The policy which Sinn Fein is born to advocate needs no lengthy exposition… It’s essential is faith… a nation’s faith in itself. It is because England has disarmed this country, because she has impoverished it, because she is strong that we write ‘humbug’ to the policy of trusting in England’s sense of justice.”[7]

Griffith as an IRB member

Griffith himself was a member of the IRB, though as befitting the difficulty of documenting a secret society, one cannot determine the exact time, being at some point around 1900. One also cannot be certain as to when he left its ranks or when his first serious rupture with the IRB began, though undoubtedly the latter was at some point prior to 1910.[8]

In a posthumous portrait, Griffith’s friend George Lyons wrote that Griffith was approached around the time of his activism for the anti-recruitment campaign in Ireland during the Boer War of 1899 – 1902. Griffith seemed to take a few months to decide whether to join – being uncertain of certain individuals who were members – but eventually did so.[9]

Whatever doubts he had, Griffith clearly demonstrated a respect for the Fenian tradition and senior figures in the movement; something he was keen to emphasise when it came to the movement funding his publications. For example, an interesting exchange that took place in 1904 is recorded between Griffith and the veteran Fenian John O’Leary, whom he had known, and revered for several years.

If the account of the conversation is to be believed, O’Leary suggested to Griffith that Griffith’s idea of Irish separatism could only be achieved by violent revolution.

Griffith’s response is worth noting: “I have counted on that sir. The spirit of Fenianism, the soul of the historic Irish Nation, will respond at the right moment: It never failed yet.”[10]

However, Lyons felt that the “personal shyness” of Griffith, along with that of his close friend and political soul mate William Rooney (who also joined the IRB), “rendered them helpless as organisers, many whom they inspired [through their articles] becoming extremely energetic in this respect.”[11]

Lyons provides further details that Griffith was never enthusiastic about being a member of the IRB due to Fred Allen’s influence over the organisation. Allen, though Secretary of the IRB Supreme Council, was himself a member of the Dublin Corporation that welcomed Queen Victoria with a lavish reception in 1900. Though not a prominent member, Griffith appeared to share the vocal minority view within the IRB Supreme Council that this tainted Allen’s republican credentials as a result.[12]

The turning point appeared to come later when a request came from the IRB for Griffith to submit his United Irishman articles for censorship to an IRB committee in return for funds to keep the paper going. Griffith of course refused, and was nearly expelled from the organisation as a result. Lyons felt he personally prevented this at a rather dramatic meeting of the IRB Centre pointing out it was only Allen’s allies that desired Griffith’s expulsion, whereas the matter was then apparently dropped.[13]

It was likely this one incident that propelled Griffith to leave the IRB at some point before 1910, likely disturbed by this threat to the independence of his writings, but also how his membership may affect being in the leadership of a burgeoning political movement.[14]

It has also been suggested that by the time of the departure Griffith cared little for the lack of political programme on the part of the IRB, and the fact its stance on a independent republic had little traction with the general public. Moreover, with the approaching possibility of a Home Rule parliament, he was keen to exploit the possibilities of Sinn Féin as a parliamentary force there.[15]

Lyons cites a specific incident that was the final break between Griffith and his own IRB Centre. During an internal election for Lyons’ successor as Officer of Centre, Aindrias Mór Ó’Broin, was elected when Ó’Broin at the time was General Secretary of Sinn Féin. However, the Supreme Council ultimately vetoed his election. Though Lyons himself felt it was Griffith’s annoyance at this disruption of a democratic vote that was the issue rather than which individual was nominated.[16]

Nevertheless, whatever his doubts over its internal procedures, it seems Griffith saw a need for the IRB’s continued existence. In a 1900 issue of The United Irishmen, Griffith commented on secret societies that: “I do not believe [they] are in themselves good things, but I do believe they are very often necessary.”[17]

As George Lyons summaries thusly, for Griffith, when it came to the IRB: “that if their objects were not criminal, and their methods not sinful, secrecy in itself could not damn them.”[18]

Griffith and Clarke

Tom Clarke was a veteran Fenian, who had been jailed and later exiled in American for his part in a bombing campaign in England in the 1880s. His return to Ireland in 1907 would have a profound impact on the future direction of the IRB, particularly with the aid of his two chief allies in its revival, Bulmer Hobson and Sean Mac Diarmada.

The newer, younger membership that would emerge from the IRB ranks in this period would become increasingly confident in the subsequent years at challenging Griffith’s preferred strategy of political activism through the Sinn Féin party.[19] In time, it became clear that Clarke and his allies favoured a much more militant approach to Irish self-determination.

Clarke and Griffith had been firmly acquainted prior to the former’s arrival in Ireland. In 1900, Griffith through the pages of The United Irishman – in keeping with his healthy respect for the Fenian tradition – had pushed Clarke in an ultimately failed election bid to a position on Dublin Corporation. Clarke meanwhile, had acted as a selling agent for The United Irishman in New York, and in 1901, arranged speaking tours for Maude Gonne and John MacBride at Griffith’s personal suggestion.[20]

In 1909, Clarke had become the chairman of Sinn Féin in the North Dock Ward constituency of Dublin city. Given he was a lifelong physical force republican, it should not be surprising that Clarke doubted the validity of Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy. The journalist and republican activist Sydney Gifford, in arguing with the Fenian in his Parnell Street shop, recalled Clarke as saying that he felt it was “too plodding for the Irish temperament.”[21]

Though Clarke demonstrated an appreciation for Griffith’s talents, there would at certain junctures be conflicts between both men. At one point, MacDiarmada objected to making Griffith the editor of a new IRB publication in 1915, Nationality, to which Clarke overruled him. Clarke felt Griffith’s skills proved he was best for the task, and seemed to feel Griffith would adhere to more typical IRB ideals. However, it would appear Griffith proved difficult to control, and though continuing to fund Nationality, both men were forced to create a new publication under their stewardship, The Spark.[22]

Griffith and Hobson

Griffith would have an even more troubled working relationship with the key IRB figure, Bulmer Hobson, within advanced nationalist circles. The Belfast-born Hobson was key to the formation of the Sinn Féin party in 1907, which saw several key organisations in advanced nationalism merge under the one banner.

Hobson had developed the Dungannon Clubs organisation in 1906. Though very much a recruitment front for the IRB, it claimed inspiration from the ideas laid out in Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy. The group soon became an increasingly bitter rival of the National Council, a protest body that Griffith had founded in 1903. This rivalry intensified when the Dungannon Clubs merged with Cumann na Gaedhael – an umbrella nationalist grouping Griffith had previously been involved with – to ultimately form the ‘Sinn Féin League’.[23]

With the growing popularity of the Sinn Féin policy amongst advanced Irish nationalism, Clan na Gael hoped to authorise a speaking trip of US cities for Griffith in early 1907. However, when the trip was already set in motion, IRB stalwart Patrick McCartan, writing to John Devoy, pushed instead for Hobson to be nominated instead, citing the younger man’s better public speaking ability.

Once the original plans were cancelled, Griffith rather petulantly issued a public statement from the front page of Sinn Féin saying Hobson’s trip to the US was not authorised by the executive of the National Council; indicating his own organisation could best articulate the Sinn Féin policy to the masses. Hobson, however, was completely unaware of Griffith’s anger at the situation until he met him in Dublin prior to his departure and regretted spoiling Griffith’s original plans.[24]

Nonetheless, from this juncture, a personal estrangement set in between both men, Hobson in particular feeling Griffith was no longer a true separatist.[25]

Patrick McCartan, a close ally of Hobson’s in the IRB, wrote to the Clan na Gael leader, Patrick McGarrity, to explain Griffith’s jealousy of Hobson. McCartan betrayed some of his own dislike for Griffith, likely summing the attitude of many in the IRB ranks when he wrote: “Griffith is a newspaper man. Take him out of that and he is useless… He wants men who will run to him to see what they should say… he knows Hobson would not do.”[26]

Hobson, on his return from his successful speaking tour in the US, nonetheless felt keen pressure from Irish-American backers for all advanced nationalist organisations to merge under the Sinn Féin banner. Intense discussions with the National Council, led to the latter’s merging with the Sinn Féin League by the August 1907, under the banner of Sinn Féin. Hobson and Griffith would serve as co-vice-presidents of the Sinn Féin party in 1908 and 1909, Griffith still receiving more votes then the younger man.[27]

However, the IRB stalwart, Dennis McCullough, was of the opinion that personality flaws of both Griffith and Hobson were ultimately to blame for their troubled relationship: “Hobson was a very headstrong and somewhat egotistical person, and being much younger than Griffith, the latter naturally resented Hobson endevouring to force his or our opinions on Griffith and his friends.”

Though McCullough felt that whatever conflicts existed between the two did not interfere with the strength of the Sinn Féin movement, at least during this initial period.[28]

Decline of Sinn Féin

Despite this new found unity, uneasy relations continued to endure in the Sinn Féin party between IRB figures and the more moderate grouping around Griffith. In 1909 – 10, Hobson and other key IRB figures in the party became disenchanted when Griffith almost influenced an internal party debate that could have seen Sinn Féin embrace participation in the Westminster parliament.

In early 1909, the dissident IPP MP, William O’Brien formed the All-for-Ireland League, in which he hoped to create a coalition of forces against the IPP and extreme unionism. O’Brien was interested in Sinn Féin support for contesting Dublin-based seats for a future general election, and Griffith seemed to contemplate cooperation and abandon the abstentionist policy of the party. Despite heated debate however, the proposal ultimately went nowhere.

In the end, Sinn Féin would never contest either general election in 1910, a move Griffith strongly supported. Though Griffith held little respect for John Redmond and the IPP, he did not want to disrupt the seeming inevitably of Ireland being granted a Home Rule parliament in which his party could perhaps play a part. Also, he recognised public support was on the upsurge towards the IPP. [29]

Though Sinn Féin had seen some success at a local level in the intervening years, it had yet to secure a Westminster seat that – true to the party’s policy – any successful candidate would not take up if elected, true to its abstentionist policy. While Sinn Féin had lost the heated North Leitrim by-election in 1907, its success had taken many by surprise, including the party itself. From this, Griffith began to recognise the need for the Sinn Féin party to have a wider appeal to the masses, and this also led to the Sinn Féin paper briefly becoming a daily.[30]

However, Griffith’s pragmatic stance towards party policy and electorialism throughout this period ultimately resulted in the departure of the more radical, IRB rump in the party centered around Hobson, who by then already took issue with other aspects of Griffith’s autocratic style of leadership. This final break came in late 1910, as a result of the continued political and personal clashes with Griffith that now sent the party into a continued downward trend.[31]

Interestingly, Eamon Ceannt, an active member of the IRB – and future signatory of the 1916 Proclamation – would defend Griffith from these detractors. Writing in Irish Nation, Ceannt felt Griffith should be commended for trying to heal the divisions between nationalists over Home Rule; also pointing out that Griffith’s position made sense given the great public support for the Irish Parliamentary Party.[32]

When Griffith was finally elected leader of Sinn Féin in 1911, he would try to imitate the autocratic leadership of his hero, Charles Stewart Parnell. However, embracing these methods came with controversial results, mainly as Griffith lacked Parnell’s talent in this area.[33] The party would now become more of a pressure group as Griffith devoted himself to his writings.[34]

Meanwhile, Hobson and his IRB allies began to devote their energies towards the republican themed-paper, Irish Freedom, funded by the IRB, which had begun publication in 1910 as a counterpoint to Griffith’s publications. An editorial in the publication in 1912 accused the Sinn Féin party for pandering to the middle classes, and forcing the removal of separatists from the party to the detriment of the movement itself.

Though the strong criticism directed towards Griffith’s Sinn Féin in the pages of Irish Freedom may have been rooted in ideological concerns, it is worth noting that Sinn Fein’s activities and membership continued to dwindle in the years 1912 – 13, demonstrating its diminished fortunes under Griffith’s leadership during this time.[35]

The general IRB disenchantment with Griffith and the Sinn Féin party by this point was indicative overall of the direction the IRB had been heading as overseen by Clarke. Combined with an upsurge in new recruits, the IRB deemed it vital to return to its roots of a militant brand of republicanism and devoted towards physical-force methods against British rule then its erosion by constitutional means.

Not too surprisingly, this new direction for the IRB occurred during a time when we can see relations between Griffith and IRB figures cooling considerably from 1910, but that changed by the outbreak of war on the European continent in 1914.[36]

The Irish Volunteers

Despite whatever clashes were occurring on the fringes of nationalism, the Irish political scene was however transformed in 1912 – 13 over the seemingly inevitable implementation of Home Rule.

The founding of the paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteers, by Edward Carson and Ulster Unionists in January 1913, which had been set up to resist Home Rule, proved a decisive turning point in Irish politics. The prominent cultural nationalist Eoin MacNeill, writing in An Claideamh Solais that November, pushed for the founding of a similar nationalist body in an article entitled ‘The North Began’. Of course, the IRB had already begun planning for such an initiative for several months.

The Irish Volunteers were formed at a public meeting at the Rotunda in Dublin on 25th November 1913, with thousands enrolling. With MacNeill elected as chief-of-staff, the Volunteer executive itself included more notable figures of the advanced nationalists groupings, including of course, many IRB members.

However, one notable omission was Griffith himself. The Volunteers’ organiser, Michael O’Rahilly – more popularly known by his self-appointed clan name, The O’Rahilly – stated Griffith’s non-election to the Volunteers committee was intentional, the worry being that the Volunteers themselves may “savour too much of Sinn Féin.”[37]

In any case, Griffith would would go on to take the rank of an ordinary private amongst the Volunteers, being present at Howth pier as the Asgard docked on 26th July, 1914. One description of his involvement during this time mentions his tendency to have his hat cocked on one side like a Boer when with his company.[38]

Given his participation, he clearly whole-heartedly supported the formation of the Volunteers, a sentiment he expanded on in his writings. Griffith felt that the formation of such a body could prove to be a major contributory factor to creating a sense of Irish nationhood, as he explained:

“What it is going to do if guided manfully is to put public opinion with a backbone in it into the country, to make men more conscious of their duty as citizens, to associate the ideas of order and discipline with the idea of liberty, to bring the manhood of Ireland into touch with the realities, and to make it clear-seeing and fearless, to create, in fact, an atmosphere in the country in which the gas-bag and the flapdoodler will cease to be possible… A national army strong enough to hold Ireland for the Irish may eventually be evolved. All this is with God. It is the clear duty of every able-bodied man to arm in the country’s case, let the event be what it may.”[39]

The Outbreak of War

While he was clearly prepared to support the Irish Parliamentary Party tactically prior to 1914, Griffith railed against Redmond’s support for the British war effort at its outset; making reference to the National Volunteers, the pro-Redmond majority that has broken off from the Irish Volunteers:

“England is at war with Germany and Mr. Redmond has offered to England the services of the National Volunteers ‘to defend Ireland.’ What has Ireland to defend and whom has she to defend it against? Has she a native Constitution? Or a native government to defend? All know she has not.”

Griffith went on to suggest that if the British government were to pass a “full measure” of Home Rule immediately, it would give Irishmen signing up to the British war effort a reason to fight. Otherwise, “they would help to perpetuate the enslavement of their country.”[40]

At the war’s outbreak, Tom Clarke convened a meeting of key individuals involved in advanced nationalism in the headquarters of the Gaelic League, where Griffith was present with other notable figures outside the political mainstream. It would appear that the prospect of a national rising was at least mooted, though not agreed on. Also, a second meeting was to have taken place, which never occurred.[41]

By September 1914, Griffith was approached by the Supreme Council of the IRB to join. Griffith refused, preferring to maintain his own independence through his publications, believing his anti-Redmondite stance would compliment their work.

However, he seemed to believe he had secured an agreement from Tom Clarke and Sean MacDiarmuida  – as representatives of the IRB – that they would inform him of any development in the planning of an insurrection. As later events would prove at the outbreak of the Easter Rising, Griffith appeared to take this promise very seriously.[42]

Conclusion

Given his convoluted relationship with the IRB by 1916, it is not surprising to find Griffith had a peripheral and confused role during the Easter Rising, as this author has detailed elsewhere.

When considering any political differences between Griffith and the IRB in this period, Dennis McCullough’s thoughts are worth quoting. McCullough would complete the three-man Supreme Council along with Clarke and Mac Diarmada in 1910, later becoming President of the IRB in 1915. (Though it must be stressed both Clarke and Mac Diarmada had ensured they both really held the influence in this body).[43] McCullough stated:

“The IRB had the utmost confidence in Griffith and his strong nationalism, his courage and his integrity. He was a member of the organisation… regarded himself as travelling the same road only suggesting that ‘passive resistance’ to British rule offered better chances of success then an armed rising… no question of incompatibility between Griffith’s Hungarian Policy and the frank Republicanism of the IRB ever existed.”[44]

The general perception as indicated here is that the IRB had faith in Arthur Griffith’s bonafides as a separatist and someone they could work with – on this point P.S. O’Hegarty made clear when writing about Griffith in 1924: “… the IRB never quarreled with Griffith, but always worked with him, and recognised him for what he was, the greatest separatist force in the country.”[45]

However, there is enough to suggest the relationship between Griffith and the IRB may have been more self-serving to both parties than might have appeared to some contemporaries at the time or be admitted retrospectively. The relationship with Griffith and the IRB, according to Virginia Glandon, “fluctuated and shifted as each had greater need of the other – at times, Griffith needed IRB funds to keep his newspapers circulating and, at times, the IRB had need of Griffith’s pen.”[46]

Thus, the respective goals of the leadership of this oath-bound secret society and outspoken journalist on the fringes of Irish nationalism complimented each other as long as they existed at a similar point outside the political mainstream. Not too surprising then that this changed outright by mid-1914, when Clarke and MacDiarmada firmly steered the mechanisms of the IRB towards revolution.

And whatever promise had been made to Arthur Griffith, likely due to own stance on political violence, and almost certainly for being well outside the workings of the IRB, he would not be informed of this plan for an insurrection.

However skilled Griffith may have been in his writings, however close a working relationship it may have been before, it made no sense in the revolutionary thinking of the IRB to have this public face of advanced nationalism involved in such a risky and dangerous enterprise.

Gerard Shannon is a member of Skerries Historical Society. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gerry_shannon and contacted by e-mail here.

References

[1] Read the full text of The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (1918) by Arthur Griffith here: https://archive.org/details/resurrectionofhu00grifiala

[2] Younger, Carlton, Arthur Griffith, Gill and MacMillian Ltd, Dublin (1981), page 28

[3] See Maye, Brian, Arthur Griffith, Griffith College Publications, Dublin (1997), pages 94, 96 and subsequent citations.

[4] For a take on Griffith’s often convoluted relationship with physical force republicans during the period covered by this article, see Glandon, Virginia E.., Arthur Griffith and the advanced nationalist press: Ireland, 1900-1922 (American University Studies), Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften (1985), pages 83 – 89

[5] Kenna, Shane, Conspirators: A Photographic History of Ireland’s Revolutionary Underground, Mercier Press (2015), page 11

[6] Younger, pages 6 – 7

[7] Sinn Féin, 5th May 1906, page 1

[8] Maye, pages 112 – 113

[9] Lyons, George A., Recollections of Griffith and his times, Talbot Press, Dublin (1923), page 9

[10] Arthur Griffith Michael Collins, [Commemorative booket], Martin Lester, Dublin (1922), page 10

[11] Lyons, page 44

[12] Lyons, George, BMH/WS, page 2 – 4

[13] Lyons, George, BMH/WS page 5

[14] Younger, pages 41 – 42

[15] See both Glandon, page 85 and O’Hegarty, P.S., Classics of Irish History: The Victory of Sinn Féin – How It Won It and How It Used It, University College Press, Dublin (1998 edition), page 96.

[16] Lyons, George, BMH W/S, pages 5 – 6

[17] United Irishman, May 1900, cited on Maye, page 113

[18] Lyons, page 48

[19] Maye, page 105

[20] Maye, page 115

[21] Brennan, John, The Years Flew By: Recollections of Madame Sidney Gifford Czira, Alren House, Galway (2000 edition), page 66

[22] Glandon, pages 85 – 86

[23] For a summary of the rivalry between the Dungannon Clubs and National Council in this period, see Laffan, Michael, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party 1916 – 23, Cambridge University Press, New York (2005), pages 21  – 25.

[24] Hay, Marie, Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Cenutry Ireland, Manchester University Press, USA (2009), page 67

[25] Younger, page 28

[26] MacAtasney, Gerard, Sean MacDiarmada: The Mind of the Revolution, Drumlin Publications, Leitrim (2004), page 25

[27] Hay, pages 71 – 73

[28] Hay, page 85

[29] Maye, pages 104 – 106; see also Younger, pages 38 – 41

[30] For an account of Sinn Féin contesting the North Leitrim by-election in 1907, see Laffan, pages 25 – 29

[31] Hay, pages 83 – 85; see also Glandon, pages 85, 88

[32] Glandon, page 62

[33] Glandon, page 88

[34] Laffan, page 32

[35] Laffan, pages 31 – 33

[36] Maye, page 115

[37] Colum, Padraic, Arthur Griffith, Browne and Nolan, Dublin (1959), page 120

[38] Aodh de Blacam in Sunday Independent, 11th September 1949, cited on Maye, page 91

[39] Sinn Féin, 22nd November 1913, cited on Maye, page 91

[40] Colum, page 131

[41] Younger, page 48; see also Brennan, Robert, BMH/WS, page 498

[42] O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, page 2; and the author’s own ‘The Sinn Féin Rebellion? Arthur Griffith’s Easter Week 1916’ linked here.

[43] For a brief account of how Clarke and MacDiarmada achieved this, see Laffan, page 34

[44] Glandon, page 39

[45] O’Hegarty, page 97

[46] Glandon, pages 83 – 84

John Dorney looks at a unit of the National Army raised during the Civil War of 1922-23 to put down agrarian agitation and strikes.

On September 8^th, 1923, the Civic Guard or Free State police, at Milltown Malbay, County Clare, requested an armed military ‘covering party’ to ‘protect them while effecting an arrest’ at Seafield, a rural townland near Quilty.

Small wonder that the unarmed Civic Guard wanted a military escort. The country was still awash with illegally-held weapons after the Civil War. Arresting organised bodies of men – be they politically motivated or not – was dangerous work.

Captain Scannell of the National Army detailed a party of soldiers to help the Guards and eight men were duly arrested for ‘forcible grazing of lands’. The eight were held in Milltown Malbay, and guarded by the military, ‘whilst waiting for the formation of a civil court to deal with them.’  They were finally released on bail.

In the military report, the section for ‘reason for arrest’, stated ‘nil’. In other words there was no formal charge. The men had been arrested under the Emergency Legislation which had been enacted during the Civil War. This was the reality of Ireland in mid 1923. There was still no functioning police or courts system in much of the country and the state’s authority, even in civil matters was generally enforced by the military.

The soldiers responsible for the arrests at Seafield belonged to a unit specifically raised to put down social disorder. It was named the Special Infantry Corps.[1]

Background, ‘anarchy and a new Land War’

The Special Infantry Corps was a unit of the Free State’s National Army, founded in January 1923 during the Irish Civil War and wound up in December of that year.

Its purpose was not to combat the anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas but to put down a wave of illegal land occupations, cattle driving and strikes that flourished during the Civil War.

Much of Ireland had been essentially un-policed since early 1920 when the IRA campaign against Crown Forces had begun in earnest and especially since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 which had disbanded the Royal Irish Constabulary and withdrawn the British Army to barracks.

The IRA and the Irish Republican Police (IRP) were supposed to step into the vacuum and to enforce order, but they were ill-suited to the task and in any case, soon split into antagonistic factions over the Treaty. Civil War broke out between and pro and anti-Treaty sides in late June 1922.

This all happened at a time of heightened class and agrarian conflict in rural Ireland, when a slump in agricultural prices created severe hardship. In County Leitrim for instance, in April 1922, the poor were reported to be going hungry in the ‘Worst year for farmers since ’47’  [1847 the worst year of the Great Famine]. Some 100,000 tenants were seeking to buy out or otherwise seize their landords’ holdings and many of them had been on rent strike since late 1921.

Meanwhile as exporting farmers, hit by the recession, sought to bring down wages of their labourers they sparked off a flurry of strikes that peaked in spring 1922 and the summer of 1923.[2]

During the Civil War, state power broke down altogether in much of Ireland. The new Irish police force the Civic Guard was unable to face down armed anti-Treaty guerrillas and in many areas National Army authority did not extend beyond well-fortified towns in the countryside. In any case the Army was most reluctant to get involved in policing work.

On the other side, the anti-Treaty IRA positively encouraged agrarian and social agitation in some area as it undermined the Free State’s authority. For instance National Army Intelligence, reported a case in November 1922 in which ’17 armed Irregulars’ visited a farmer named Byrne in County Cavan and forced him to sign over his land to one of their supporters, the Army concluded, ‘The Irregulars are taking advantage of the present state of the country to annex a farm for one of their supporters’.[3]

The roots of the Special Infantry Corps lay in the increasing disquiet of two members of the Free State cabinet in early 1923 about the law and order situation in rural areas; Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs and Patrick Hogan, Minister for Agriculture.

Hogan warned of ‘anarchy’ and a new Land War’ in late 1922 by people, ‘with a vested interest in chaos’. He argued that the Army needed to take on such tasks as land clearing, debt collection, strike breaking and evictions, and recommended troops be used, ‘who are unknown in the locality’.[4]

Kevin O’Higgins, a Minister known for his hawkish views, believed that the bedrock of the anti-Treaty IRA’s support was not Republican idealism but ‘greed, envy, lust, drunkenness and irresponsibility under a political banner’. The ‘Irregular’ campaign, depended on the support of ‘people in possession of land and property not legally theirs, people who owe money or are engaged in illegal activities such as poitín [illegal liquor] making’.

O’Higgins warned that the existing legal system had broken down, especially in counties Galway, Roscommon, Cork, Kerry and Limerick. ‘It is not a war properly so –called’, he told his cabinet colleagues but, ‘organised sabotage and disintegration of the social fabric.’ ‘The Army must act as armed police as well as military’ in order to ‘vindicate the idea of law and ordered government’.

He cited cases where the National Army was in occupation of a town but three miles outside it, farms were being seized, farmers were on rent strike against paying annuities (owed to the British government for land purchase) and cattle were being illegally ‘driven’.

There was a need, he argued, for a new Army corps to clear occupied land, enforce the rulings of the courts by collecting rents, annuities and taxes and to ‘stamp out poitín traffic’.

He concluded that to bring the Civil War to an end, the government needed increased ‘sternness’ both with the ‘active Irregulars’ (anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas, for whom he advocated execution) and the ‘passive irregulars’ who did not pay their rates, taxes and rents’.[5]

O’Higgins is sometimes accused of exaggerating the extent of the law and order problem but a closer look at one of the affected regions, the Cavan/Monaghan area along the new border, shows precisely how serious the problem was. Violence was routinely being used to settle local agrarian conflicts.

On September 30^th, for instance in Cavan, armed men of undetermined allegiance raided the O’Brien family house, ‘put them out’, threw away their milk and killed their hens, it was thought as a result of a land dispute.[6] Some days later, another armed band abducted farmer Peter Lennon at Ballybay, Monaghan and ordered him to forego a land claim in Lurgan (County Cavan). Shots were also fired into another farmer named Mitchel’s house.[7] In November there was a raid on the property of ‘extensive landowner’ John Bolton, High Sherriff for Monaghan, who fired shots at the attackers.[8]

These were by no means isolated incidents, even in this small region. Rather they represented an intensification of disorder that had been afoot since early 1922.

The local newspaper, the Anglo Celt noted that people were trying to reclaim land ‘where their fathers were evicted’. An evicted tenants meeting Cavan Town Hall heard from Mr MacAbhareagh (McAvery) the Chairman, ‘We need to recover the land from which our fathers and grandfathers were thrown off without law or justice’.[9]

Interestingly, while the likes of O’Higgins saw only greed and avarice in agrarian activism, many landless men and small farmers saw themselves as righting historic injustices caused by decades of conflict and evictions on the land since the 19^th century.

Before the outbreak of Civil War, the IRA had been able to mediate such disputes to a degree. For instance in June 1922 in Ballyhaise, Cavan, when 200 Labourers seized a bog from a local landowner and marked out individual plots for cutting, the local IRA intervened and started arbitration with the landowner.[10]

Now with pro and anti-Treaty factions busy fighting each other, there was no authority at all in many rural areas.

The composition of the Special Infantry Corps.

The Special Infantry Corps (SIC) was composed of about 4,000 men and commanded by Patrick Dalton, a veteran of the Easter Rising and the pre-Truce IRA.[11] Essentially its role was that of an armed gendarmerie rather than a military unit, in that its primary responsibility was not hunting down or fighting ‘Irregulars’ (as the Free State termed the anti-Treaty IRA), but enforcing the law and arresting land grabbers, strikers and other social protesters. In fact the SIC was expressly ordered not to arrest ‘Irregulars’ but to leave that job to the regular Army.[12]

The soldiers in the SIC were paid less than the regular Army and their officers were frequently men who had been moved out of jobs in Intelligence and other sensitive posts for their poor performance or indiscipline in a National Army reorganisation of January 1923. Frequently those so moved were IRA veterans who were deemed to have performed poorly as regular soldiers.

One such was James Patrick Conroy, by origin a house painter from Seville Place in Dublin’s north inner city. He was a veteran of ‘the Squad’ and had seen action at Bloody Sunday in 1920 and the Customs House raid of 1921 at which he had been captured. In the Civil War in the Dublin Guard, he had seen action in Cork and Kerry before being made commander of the Special Infantry Corps 5^th Battalion.[13]

Like James Conroy, Daniel Finlayson (who was also a house painter from Dublin) was involved in killing British Intelligence officers in November 1920 and like Conroy was arrested and imprisoned after the Customs House raid. In the Civil War he briefly served in the Free State’s Intelligence Unit, the CID. Then, like Conroy was sent to Kerry with the Dublin Guard. He was also made a captain in the SIC in early 1923.[14]

From a similar Dublin pre-Truce IRA background was Michael Lawless, another shooter on Bloody Sunday in 1920, who in the Civil War served in Limerick and Galway before being seconded as a captain to the 1^st battalion Special Infantry Corps.[15]

The SIC in action

The SIC was deployed to various ‘disturbed’ areas in February 1923. According to Kevin O’Higgins, it performed its task well. ‘Established via a memorandum of the Minister of Agriculture and myself, it did rough and ready work in stamping out agrarian anarchy and other serious abuses’.[16]

Others, even inside the National Army, were less complimentary however. National Army Dublin Command (which covered most of the north and east of the country), Intelligence reported that the Special Infantry Corps were deployed into Cavan and Monaghan in July 1923 where there was persistent social unrest.

The Army reported threatening letters sent to land owners, a strike by road workers, who voiced hostility to the Army and meetings of unpurchased tenants, where, likewise anti-government view were expressed.

By the summer of 1923, National Army Intelligence was reporting that the Special Infantry Corps was ‘having a very bad effect on the civil population in most districts where it is stationed’. The Corps’ personnel it complained, were men of ‘low morals’.[17]

What precisely this means, we can only surmise. It may simply mean that the SIC troops were lazy and uncouth. Or it may refer to abuse of civilians, drunkenness and possibly beatings and extortion of the local populace, as well as the unpopular work of collecting rents, rates and taxes and evicting illegal land occupiers.

A pro-Treaty TD for Cork lamented that the SIC was seizing land from the same poor hill farmers who had always supported the IRA against the British; ‘these people gave us assistance when we were out in the hills fighting against an alien government. I think it is a very bad action for the government to seize cattle on these farms for arrears of rent due to English landlords’.[18]

The SIC’s reporting of its arrests was patchy until July 1923, thereafter it reported operations such as the following; In Carna, Connemara, five men were arrested for being ‘in illegal possession of lands belonging to Mr Morgan’. At Fernhill County Mayo 4 men were detained for ‘driving [i.e. stealing] the cattle of Mr Kelly’.

In County Clare, there were twelve arrests at Mountshannon for ‘conspiracy – the forcible grazing of lands’. From August 17th to 20^th 1923 there were 32 arrests in Carrickonshannon County Leitrim for ‘cattle-maiming, unlawful grazing, shooting cattle and unlawful working of a bog’. Most of these prisoners were however released after signing, ‘a declaration to keep the peace’.[19]

In some cases though the charges were more serious and those arrested were interned indefinitely. The SIC Battalion in Galway reported 42 arrests in May 1923 of whom four were to be tried for the attempted murder of Mr Naughton in a land dispute in Carna, County Mayo.[20]

Cattle that had been grazing on occupied land were seized by the troops and sold off in Dublin. In Roscommon the Free State troops fired over the heads of a crowd trying to prevent the impounding of animals.[21]

Patrick Hogan the Minister for Agriculture also appealed for the Criminal Investigation Department or CID, the Free State’s much feared plain clothed detective unit, to be sent to assist the Special Infantry Corps to combat, ‘agrarian outrages’. [22]

A meeting of unpurchased tenants in Ballybay, Monaghan – 100 delegates, representing farmers on rent strike since early 1922 – heard that the CID had been used to collect landlords’ rent.  One Father Maguire declared, that while shouldn’t be ‘armed resistance’, it was ‘terrible for the government to lift money for absentee landlords who never spend a penny in the country’. [23]

The anti-Treaty IRA leadership for their part saw some potential in agrarian strife, not so much as an end in itself, but to build up support for an anti-state position and whenever possible they took steps to support agrarian agitators. For instance in March 1923, Liam Lynch, IRA Chief of Staff endorsed a proposal by Sean Russell IRA Quartermaster, to ‘take action’ against a cattle agent named Cuddy who was selling cattle seized by Free State forces in Roscommon and selling it to England at Dublin’s North Wall.[24]

The administration of the Special Infantry Corps was always sloppy. In August and again in September 1923 (by which time the Corps had been deployed for about eight months), Michael Costello, head of National Army Intelligence, appealed for lists of prisoners taken by the SIC to be provided so that they could be brought before civil courts.

He later appealed again for SIC units to provide details of who they had arrested in the period since their last report and reminded them that even if they made no arrests they still had to file reports. There followed a lengthy series of reports from many areas that listed no arrests made in the intervening period. [25]

In total the SIC recorded 371 arrests from January to September 1923, of whom 219 had been released and 152 were still in custody. Of these the majority, 173 were for agrarian offences, with 128 accused of ‘miscellaneous’ crimes and only 8 ‘political prisoners’. They had also issued fines amounting to £5,591 (£1,764 in County Tipperary alone) and had seized 1,553 cattle and 5 motor cars.[26]

However it would probably a mistake to take this as the sum total of SIC activity. For one thing, arrests continued for another three months, up to December 1923. More importantly though, we must ask what the surviving documents do not tell us.

Kevin O’Higgins referred to ‘rough and ready work’ of the SIC. How many cases did Special Infantry Corps men settle with beatings and intimidation that saved them having to fill out the bothersome paperwork associated with formal arrests? The archival sources do not tell us such things but it seems likely that they occurred.

Strikes

The Special Infantry Corps was generally extremely unpopular among small and medium sized farmers in rural areas, many of which remained ‘disturbed’ well into late 1923.

Where the farmers generally approved of state intervention, however, was where it put down strikes and factory occupations. Strikes by agricultural labourers had become endemic in 1922 as workers fought against wage cuts imposed by employers – especially farmers – hard hit by the slump in agricultural prices.

In Monaghan the Farmers’ Union warned of class war as early as January 1922; ‘The farmer goes to work with a revolver in one hand for the time to come’ they stated. Father Murphy (the chair) urged Irish government to ‘fight [farmers’] battles for them’. He warned that ‘Farmers may have to fight labour’. Not reputable unions, he warned, but ‘Disorderly labour, hooligans’. The ‘Government should put down a firm hand’. In south he warned, ‘houses have been burnt, farm produce burnt’. [27]

The Free State was concerned from its earliest days about left-wing subversion as well as ‘Irregular’ IRA military action. Michael Collins for instance then Commander in Chief of the National Army detailed his then Director of Intelligence Liam Tobin to tap the phones of ‘well known anti[Treatyites]s, Bolsheviks, Fianna, Cumann na mBan and the IWW [International Workers of the World].’[28]

In in May-June 1922, striking workers at Cleeves milk factories in County Limerick had raised a red flag over the plants and declared a ‘Soviet’ and workers in the Tipperary town gasworks did likewise. These occupations were eventually ended after the Civil War started and Free State troops wrested these areas off the Republican guerrillas (who had tolerated the ‘Soviets’) and returned the plants to their owners. [29]

Such ‘Soviets’ represented a radical tactic to resist wage cuts, more than a desire for socialist revolution, but they still scared farmers and other employers. At a meeting of the farmers Union in Dublin May 1922, delegates voiced the opinion that the Knocklong occupation represented, ‘the thin end of the wedge of Bolshevism’. ‘We cannot tolerate that workers step in and take over works to which they have no legal right whatsoever’.[30]

The truth was that radical socialism was a fringe movement in Ireland, but strikes, in the atmosphere of the collapse of state power in 1922-23 often descended into violence.

In August 1922 for instance, violence flared in a series of dispute between agricultural workers and farmers in the border region. On August 5^th at Anny County Monaghan, a Farmers Union member James McGinnity was shot dead in a labour dispute. The ITGWU union condemned killing but their language was often radical.

In a meeting of the ITGWU on August 19^th at Arva Mr Redmond ITGWU said , ‘we are constantly scrapping with the capitalists and seldom come off second best.’ ‘We want the factories and the land’. On September 9^th a farmer was stabbed by a worker with a pitchfork in a dispute at Shercock, County Cavan.[31]

National Army troops had already been used to forcibly break up pickets in a strike of the Postal Service in September 1922. In early 1923 at the time when the Special Infantry Corps was founded, Kevin O’Higgins was particularly concerned about a strike of agricultural labourers in Kildare in which shots had been fired by both sides. O’Higgins wanted ITGWU organiser C.J Supple arrested for burning farmers’ property at Athy.[32]

In February 1923, the National Army officers were given directions that in the case of strikers occupying buildings, ‘ordered should be given at once to evacuate buildings and in the event of non-compliance, all necessary force should be used’.[33]

The Special Infantry Corps’ most large scale and violent deployment came in a strike in Kilmacthomas County Waterford that last from May to November 1923, in which 1,500 agricultural workers were locked out for refusing to take pay cut and longer working hours.

By the summer of 1923, 600 troops under General Prout were stationed in the County, which was put under martial law, and a curfew was put in place. A Labour TD, John Butler was arrested and farmers formed their own self-styled ‘White Guards’, who beat up union activists and burned their cottages. [34]

The strike occurred after the IRA ceasefire and ‘dump arms order’ that ended the Civil War proper but both armed factions seem to have used weapons during its course. National Army Intelligence recorded that masked members of either the Special Infantry Corps or the CID had burned seven labourers’ cottages in reprisal for attacks on farmers’ property; ‘such actions are regrettable but are the only way to stop burnings by the labour crowd’ the Intelligence officer concluded. [35]

Anti-Treaty Republican and later communist activist Frank Edwards recalled, ‘It was a localised civil war but a more logical one [than the war over the Treaty]… the Free State Army had to convey the farm crops and stock to the towns’. The workers, whether IRA members or simply union men with access to guns, sniped at the convoys, who returned fire.[36] In some cases, the firefights were quite prolonged, lasting up to 20 minutes.

County Waterford was declared a military area and put under curfew during the strike. The SIC records show that 62 men were arrested in this area during the strike. Their records are not extensive but give us some idea of routine SIC activity there. For example on August 18^th 1923, six men were arrested ‘for threatening to assault a labourer’, presumably one who had not joined the strike, and on October 19^th  five men were arrested in Dungarvan for assault, breaking windows and breaking the curfew.[37]

The strike was finally broken when hunger and shortage of funds forced the workers to accept pay cuts in November 1923.

Disbandment

The SIC was disbanded in late 1923, as part of process of demobilising the hugely bloated National Army after the Civil War to stave off state bankruptcy. The Special Infantry along with other auxiliary Army units such as the Railway Protection Crops were among the first units to be demobilised.

The Corps does not seem to have suffered many casualties during its deployment but at least one officer, Michael Keogh was killed in a bomb explosion in June 1923 in Mallow County Cork and another Lieutenant Arthur of Belfast was shot in the neck in County  Waterford in October 1923 during the strike there.[38]

Most of its men were simply discharged with a redundancy payment, while many of its officers ‘hung around Dublin’ without specified duties for the following months. Some of them got involved in the attempted Army mutiny of March 1924, in which disgruntled former IRA National Army officers protested against their demobilisation. Michael Lawless, one of the ex Dublin IRA SIC Officers recalled, ‘I was to take part in the army mutiny, my job being to seize the “Brian Houlihan” barracks outside Tralee where I was then stationed.’

James Conroy, commander of the SIC’s Fifth Battalion, fled to America after coming under suspicion for the murder of a Jewish civilian, Emmanuel Kahn, in Dublin in November 1923.[39]

By that time most of the country was again peaceful enough for the newly established, unarmed Civic Guard (or Garda Siochana as they began to called from 1924) were able to take over policing duties from the Army. The wave of social and agrarian disturbance that had flared up during the revolutionary years of 1918-23 had blown itself out.

On the land agrarian discontent was headed off by a Free State land Act of 1923, which helped to take the sting out of much agrarian activism.

Interpreting the Special Infantry Corps

To the likes of Kevin O’Higgins, the Irish Civil War was not only a military campaign to put down the ‘Irregulars’ but also a struggle to uphold ‘law and order’ amid state collapse and social ‘anarchy’. In this regard, he thought that his creation the Special Infantry Corps had done a splendid job.

To be fair to the SIC, many of the activities they countered – illegal poitín distilling, land-grabbing cattle driving and the like – were simply manifestations of personal acquisitiveness. Where the anti-Treaty IRA controlled the countryside, they also tried to put a stop to such things.

To others though, the SIC was just a manifestation of the Free State’s repressive reconstitution of Irish society around the pillars of the farming class, the Catholic Church and state institutions.

Republicans campaigning in the election of August 1923 argued that ‘The Land Bill is only election bait, of course it made landlords safe and tenants had to pay. Who are the landlords? [Voices ‘Cromwell’s descendants’]. The land was taken from the Irish people’s grandfathers, and was it got honestly? The farmer’s son has it hard to get rent together’… ‘No wonder there is emigration’. While a Labour candidate argued that, ‘Ranches should be broken up and divided among the people’. [40]

And it was in precisely these poor, marginal rural areas that Fianna Fail, the party that emerged from the anti-Treaty side, built much its support base in the later 1920s –eventually overthrowing the pro-Treaty side in the arena of electoral politics.

To conclude, the Special Infantry Corps to some degree represents simply the Free State’s enforcing of its monopoly on force within its territory. In another sense though its imposition of order was partial enough in favour of the existing possessing classes for some to see it rather as part of an Irish counter-revolution.

References

[1] Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Summary of Special Infantry Corps Arrests, cw/P/02/02/02

[2] Reported in Anglo Celt April 22 and May 6, 1922

[3] National Army Reports, Eastern Command, cw/ops/07/01

[4] Cited in Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society, p131

[5] Memo dated 11 January 1923, submitted to Army Inquiry 1924, UCD Mulcahy Papers P/7/C/21

[6] Anglo Celt September 31, 1922

[7] Anglo Celt October 1th 1922

[8] Ibid. November 11 1922

[9] Ibid. November 23 1922

[10] Ibid. June 17, 1922

[11] Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society, p132

[12] Order Issued by NA Director of Intelligence Michael Costello, 7 August 1923 Military Archives Summary of Special Infantry Corps Arrests, cw/P/02/02/02

[13] Military Pensions file 24SP80 http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/detail.aspx?parentpriref=

[14] Military Pensions file 24SP2125 http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/detail.aspx?parentpriref=

[15] Michael Joe Lawless WS 727 Bureau of Military History

[16] O’Higgins testimony to Army Inquiry, March 1924, UCD Mulcahy Papers P/7/C/21 UCD

[17] National Army Dublin Command Intelligence Report Numbers 12 – 16 cw/ops/07/16

[18] Terence Dooley, the Land for the People, p51

[19] Military Archives Summary of Special Infantry Corps Arrests, cw/P/02/02/02

[20] Ibid.

[21] Terence Dooley, the Land for the People, p51

[22] Cabinet minutes 23 April 1923 Mulcahy Papers UCD P/7/B/247

[23] Anglo Celt March 17 1923

[24] UCD Twomey Papers Sean Russell to IRA D/I14/3/23 and Liam Lynch CS to D/I 16/3/23 P/69/11

[25] Summary of Special Infantry Corps Arrests, cw/P/02/02/02

[26] Ibid.

[27] Anglo Celt, January 28, 1922

[28] Collins to Tobin, 19/7/22 UCD Mulcahy Papers p/7/B/4

[29] Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland, Popular Militancy 1917-23, p203-204

[30] Irish Times, May 19, 1922

[31] Anglo Celt August 5, August 19 and September 9, 1922.

[32] Cabinet Minutes, 17 January 1923, Mulcahy Papers UCD P/7/B/247

[33] Cabinet Minutes, 27 February 1923, Mulcahy Papers UCD P/7/B/247

[34] Kostick Revolution in Ireland, p205-207 See also Emmet O’Connor, Agrarian Unrest and the Labour Movement in Waterford, 1917-1923, in Saothar, Labour History Journal, 1980, Vol. 6 p48-53

[35] National Army Dublin District Reports, UCd Mulcahy Papers MP/7/B/139

[36] Uinseann MacEoin, Survivors, Argenta 1980, p5

[37] Military Archives Summary of Special Infantry Corps Arrests, cw/P/02/02/02

[38] Irish Times, June 22, 1923 and October 17 1923

[39] Michael Lawless BMH, James Conroy Military Pension Claim, http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/detail.aspx?parentpriref

[40] The Speaker was Republican activist Cathal O’Byrne, speaking in Cavan, reported in the Anglo Celt August 11, 1922.

By Daniel Murray

The Arrests

On 4^th November 1921, during the Truce that followed the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins, as IRA Director of Intelligence, wrote to the staff of the Mullingar IRA Brigade in Co. Westmeath. He had received a troubling letter about the arrests of two of its Volunteers: Patrick Dowling on 21^st September, followed by Christopher Kelleghan on 22^nd. Both had been singled out for subversive activities when they attempted to contact the GHQ of the IRA in Dublin.

The two men, so the letter went, were imprisoned in the cellars of a building on the outskirts of Mullingar along with a number of other suspects. The cellar was damp and sleeping conditions primitive, with Dowling and Kelleghan having to make do with some straw, wooden boards, a single blanket and a ground sheet. Dowling was allowed an hour and a half outside for exercise each day while Kelleghan had half an hour.

Most disturbing were the allegations that the abuse had not been limited to simple neglect. Upon arrival at the place of detention, Dowling had been ordered to say his prayers as he was about to be shot. His request to see a priest was refused on the grounds that his execution was about to happen immediately. At no point had either man been given a trial or court-martial of any kind.

The letter that Collins had received summed up such conduct in a damning verdict: “This treatment of prisoners is peculiarly English.” Except English tyranny could not be blamed for an Irish injustice this time. Dowling and Kelleghan had been detained by their own comrades in the Mullingar IRA at the behest of the Brigade staff.

The Charges

The reason why the two prisoners were being so abominably treated, according to the letter, was because they had complained to GHQ about the poor state of affairs within the Brigade. Opportunities to strike against the RIC and the British army had been squandered to the point that Crown forces had moved openly through the town of Mullingar as if without a care in the world.

Informers had been tolerated, an example being that of a local official whose letter to the RIC District Inspector about the locations of Volunteers ‘on the run’ had been intercepted. The matter was reported at once to the Brigade HQ, yet no attempt had been made to punish the spy.

It was true that the ongoing Truce had put a halt to any military operations by the IRA but when the fighting resumed, as it was likely to do, how could the Mullingar Brigade in its present state expect to do its part? It was thus for the good of the cause that Dowling and Kelleghan had made their complaints. For his efforts, Kelleghan had been threatened with death if he did not flee the country by none other than James Maguire, the O/C of the Brigade.

Collins ended his message with a request for a full report to be submitted on the matter as soon as possible. The author of the letter that Collins had received went unnamed though, judging by the sympathetic tone, it was either Dowling or Kelleghan, or someone close to them.

The Replies

Also unnamed was the commentator who left annotations in the margins of Collins’ message but it can be surmised that it was James Maguire. A comment next to the passage about Maguire threatening to shoot Kelleghan was dismissive: “never saw Kelleghan until after his confinement.” Another side note to the claim that Kelleghan had been arrested due to his complaints to GHQ was a simple: “No knowledge.”

Collins was not the only senior revolutionary figure who would be drawn into this dispute. As Adjutant-General of the IRA, Gearóid O’Sullivan would be called upon to handle the bulk of the paperwork relating to the case. In a letter to Sean Boylan on 17^th October, O’Sullivan asked the 1^st Eastern Division’s O/C, who represented the middle tier between GHQ and the country brigades, for a report on the arrests of Dowling and Kelleghan, the charges against them and the conditions of their imprisonment.

Boylan was also to explain, and here a note of reproach slid into O’Sullivan’s letter, why the matter had not originally been reported to Boylan, the implication being that he should have handled it before it could go any further up the hierarchal ladder to land on O’Sullivan’s desk.

The Fact-Finding

Another issue that needed addressing was the lack of a court-martial for Dowling and Kelleghan after their arrest. If the Mullingar Brigade had failed to provide one, then it would be up to GHQ in the form of O’Sullivan to fill that breach in procedure. Many of O’Sullivan’s letters were thus for the purpose of gathering the necessary information for the upcoming inquiry.

One unresolved question was the status of Kelleghan within the IRA. A letter, dated 13^th October, from O’Sullivan to Liam Lynch, the O/C of the 1^st Southern Division which encompassed the Cork brigades, asked for further details on the man.

Kelleghan had claimed to have been a member of the 7^th Battalion of the 2^nd Cork Brigade, where he had held the posts of Company Quartermaster and Battalion Armourer. According to him, he had been on active service with the battalion for a few months previous to the Christmas of 1920 before returning to his native Mullingar on sick leave.

O’Sullivan explained to Lynch that it “appears [Kelleghan] incited some local       at Mullingar, but tried to fight, and because he complained of the indolence of his Officers, Kelleghan finds himself transferred since the Truce.”

The gap in O’Sullivan’s text hints at the problem of classifying exactly what had happened. The accused had not disobeyed orders or directly challenged their superiors, so ‘mutiny’ did not seem to be quite the right word.

Whatever the case, it was going to take a lot of solving. O’Sullivan hinted as much in his parting sentence to Lynch: “A rather full report is necessary in order to deal with the disciplinary side of the matter.”

Further Details

A letter, dated 21^st October, from Seán Grogan, the O/C of the 1st Battalion, Mullingar Brigade, provided an insider’s perspective to the incident. Grogan told of how, in November 1920, he had been approached by Kelleghan who told him he had just arrived from Cork a few days ago, having previously served in the IRA there. Kelleghan had asked about the possibility of acquiring some revolvers for Cork but the conversation petered out when Grogan told him that Mullingar had no guns to spare.

In February 1921, it was discovered that Kelleghan had assembled, on his own initiative, a flying column with eight others in the Mullingar Company. Not that Grogan thought they could achieve much, lacking as they did weapons and ammunition (a constant headache for the Westmeath Volunteers), but Kelleghan had apparently told his new followers that not only had he received permission from GHQ to start the column but that he would provide the necessary equipment.

Whatever the story, the affront to Brigade discipline was galling. A few days later, a parade of the Company was called. Michael McCoy, the unit O/C, asked the assembled men: “Anyone present belonging to Kelleghan’s crowd step out of the ranks.”

Eight of the attendees stepped forth. McCoy told them that they could not belong to two companies and that they were to be suspended from the Mullingar one pending instructions from the Brigade HQ.

A month later, Grogan attended a council meeting, where a written report on the episode was handed to the Brigade O/C, James Maguire. Maguire agreed that suspending the Volunteers involved had been the only course of action under the circumstances. Furthermore, if the men in question were found to be further interfering with the work of the Company, they would be arrested.

Nothing further was heard about the column. It appeared to have withered on the vine, and the mutinous feelings with it, until sometime after the Truce in July 1921, when Dowling sent a report to GHQ. Grogan did not say what Dowling’s letter contained but its tone can be guessed. The message was forwarded to James Maguire who made good on his threat.

At another Brigade council, on 20^th September, it was decided that Dowling be arrested on the charges of making false statements about Brigade officers. As an afterthought, Kelleghan was also to be detained as the instigator of the whole mess.

The Contacts

A letter, dated 22^nd October 1921, by Joseph Begnal, the Adjutant of the 5^th Battalion, Mullingar Brigade, provided an extra dimension to the story: Upon arrest, Dowling and Kelleghan had had a number of letters on them.

This correspondence was related to the connections both of them had made in Dublin with men they believed to be from GHQ. These contacts went as far as to claim that they could get in touch with the famed Michael Collins quite easily.

As far as Begnal could ascertain, none of the supposed GHQ intermediaries were genuine, raising the question as to whether these Dublin contacts had truly been interested in Dowling’s and Kelleghan’s situation or had simply fooling them for whatever purpose.

The Inquiry

By November, O’Sullivan had gathered enough preliminary evidence to proceed with an inquiry, to be held in Mullingar. Present were the two co-defendants – for the inquiry was as much their trial – having been released. O’Sullivan examined them and took their statements along with those from three of the others who had been dismissed from their Company.

Intending to do a thorough job and, hopefully, hear the last of it, O’Sullivan also took statements from the Brigade staff: James Maguire as Brigade O/C, and Henry Killeavy as Vice-Commandant, as well as Sean Boylan as their Divisional Commander. Killeavy in particular and his conduct as an officer would become an issue throughout the hearings.

The longest of the statements was Dowling’s, who used the opportunity to air a number of complaints. Perhaps on the principle that ‘the best form of defence is offence’, Dowling told a bleak tale about his former unit, a litany of missed opportunities by the Company and professional neglect on the part of its officers:

• No action taken towards a couple of alleged spies despite the evidence against them.
• A proposal to rob a RIC policeman of his revolver in Mullingar was quashed by Killeavy who responded by calling the author of the plan an idiot.
• A deal with a soldier from the nearby Crown barracks to sell his revolver for £3 fell through when the Company Captain would only agree to pay 10s.
• Killeavy was drunk at a ceilidhe, during which he struck the O/C, Maguire, with his revolver.

Although he did not contribute much else to the inquiry, Joseph Farrell, one of the four men who had been dismissed, provided another example of Killeavy squandering an opportunity to obtain much needed arms: a British sergeant had offered Farrell the sale of sixteen rifles. Farrell had passed this onto Killeavy but the Vice-Commandant did nothing about it.

Another suspended man, Malachy Mulkeans, corroborated to the inquiry the story of Killeavy being publicly drunk, though he did not see him strike Maguire.

Patrick Dowling

Worsening tensions within the Company was the selection process for its officers. The Company men were told on parade ground that they could not select their officers themselves; this to be done instead by the Brigade staff in accordance with orders from GHQ. Dowling did not think much of some of the officers so selected, though he did not consider himself to be more suitable.

When told to come to a Company meeting, a disgruntled Dowling sarcastically asked if it was going to be for the usual lacklustre activities. Dowling was rapidly gaining a reputation as a malcontent.

Kelleghan asked Dowling at a Company meeting if he would be interested in joining a flying column if one was formed. None of them spoke to the Company officers about the matter. Dowling defended his keeping of his seniors in the dark: “I thought I was acting within the spirit of my Oath of allegiance to my Officers and Dáil Éireann.”

However self-serving, it was a pertinent point, and one that was never properly rebutted. After all, however unauthorised the column had been, was it not part of what the Volunteers were supposed to be doing?

When Dowling was arrested, it was by two other Volunteers who arrived at his home to ask him to come with them. No reasons were given. Dowling dutifully went with them, and they waited by the side of a road for an hour. The two escorts conferred in private and then one left, leaving the other to inform Dowling that he was now under arrest.

A motor car drove up to meet them. Killeavy stepped out, telling Dowling to put on his coat and the other man to blindfold Dowling. When Dowling asked if he was going to be executed, Killeavy replied in the negative. Dowling was driven to the place that was to be his prison. He was left in the cell for a fortnight, and ultimately detained for three weeks.

Of his treatment, Dowling claimed, three days passed before he was allowed exercise and sixteen days before a blanket was given for his straw-bed. For four days he had neither a wash nor a shave.

Christopher Kelleghan

Although identified by the Brigade staff as the Iago of the troubles, Kelleghan’s statement was comparatively brief next to his co-defendant’s. He had known Dowling from school in Mullingar. His prior IRA service had been in the Millstreet Company in Co. Cork, where he had taken part in an ambush as a lookout along with some other minor activities. Upon his return to Mullingar in December 1920, he had considered getting a transfer to the local IRA but decided against due to knowing nothing about the scene.

He knew enough, however, to approach Dowling and then fourteen other Volunteers – those he and Dowling thought of as the best men for the role – for the purposes of forming a column. At some point, these fourteen had been whittled down to the eight who were willing to step forward on the parade ground as “Kelleghan’s crowd”.

Perhaps after some prodding from the inquiry, Kelleghan admitted that he should have joined the Mullingar IRA properly and that he had drawn his recruits from their loyalty to their officers, but maintained he had been right to do so.

Unlike Dowling, he did not list the faults in the Mullingar Brigade, being content to focus on Killeavy. Killeavy, he said, had not turned up when mobilised for Volunteer meetings back in 1919. Kelleghan had little to say about the Vice-Commandant at the present time, other than how he, as a prisoner, had heard Killeavy giving his guards orders to shoot should there be an escape-attempt.

Kelleghan reiterated Dowling’s complaints that they had been allowed very little exercise while in custody and of the lack of bed-clothes and any change of clothes. Conceding again that his actions had been undisciplined, he insisted that he thought he could legitimatise his column with GHQ through his Dublin contacts.

The Mystery Men

One question that was never fully answered in the inquiry was the role of these mystery contacts into which Kelleghan had put so much faith. Kelleghan had been convinced by the, that GHQ had blessed his efforts in forming a column and would provide the required weapons.  This proved not to be the case at all, yet Kelleghan and Dowling gave stories that were broadly similar enough to be convincing, if not altogether clear.

According to Dowling, Kelleghan had travelled to Dublin to seek support for his proposed column and met a man called Martin. When Kelleghan told Martin about his plan, Martin asked if he would like to meet some GHQ men. Dowling was also in Dublin shortly afterwards and spoke with Martin, having previously known the latter’s brother in Mullingar.

Martin forwarded Dowling to another man, O’Kennedy, and the two conversed in the pub where O’Kennedy worked, during which O’Kennedy dropped the names of Michael Collins and other prominent figures. Dowling took the other man to be a GHQ initiate on the basis of what Martin told him, and told the inquiry that he would be greatly surprised to learn that O’Kennedy was not even a Volunteer.

Kelleghan’s account of these contacts is characteristically short, saying only that he knew nothing about a man called Kennedy (the ‘O’ being dropped in Kelleghan’s version), and he had met Martin in Dublin sometime in 1921, having been given an introduction from an anonymous third party.

As Martin had helped Kelleghan get in with several other Volunteers, Kelleghan had assumed he was in the IRA as well and – echoing Dowling – would be surprised to hear that Martin was not a Volunteer after all.

The Senior Staff

The statement of Sean Boylan was short and to the point. He had known Maguire since Christmas 1920 and praised him for the quality of his reports and his honesty. Boylan did, however, almost as an afterthought, drop a more-in-sorry-than-in-anger comment on the performance of the Mullingar IRA: “The activities in this area [were] not as good as we would have liked.”

Not that Boylan could have claimed much activity in regards to the case, saying only that he had asked Maguire to deal with it and to report to him but giving no indication that he had checked on progress or offered anything in the way of guidance.

Maguire was equally keen in his testimony to remain aloof from any responsibility. He had heard about the trouble within the Company when it had first started in February but held off having the guilty parties arrested until September due to a lack of space to confine them.

Presenting himself as merely the go-between for others’ orders, Maguire said that he had been told by Boylan to deal with Dowling and Kelleghan, by which he took to mean arrest. He had never met any of the eight suspended men and had left any necessary investigating to the Company officers like Killeavy.

Henry Killeavy

Aware that Killeavy’s reputation was also at stake, Maguire praised his Vice-Commandant as a good man. Maguire was being generous. As he recounted years later in his Bureau of Military History (BMH) Statement, he and Killeavy had fallen out sometime before the Truce, the issue being whether the latter was Vice O/C of the 1st Battalion.

Killeavy had insisted he had been appointed as such but refused to give Maguire any evidence to support his claim. Maguire found Killeavy an impossible man to reason with but, unlike in the cases of Dowling or Kelleghan, made no effort to discipline or demote him. Either it was easier to let Killeavy keep a post that no one else wanted or he was just a difficult man to say ‘no’ to.

No wonder the 1st Battalion had been in a “bad state of disorganisation”, as Maguire put it, with such dysfunction at its top and members seemingly appointing themselves to whatever positions they wanted. But Maguire was clearly prepared to put on a united front when it came to outsiders like O’Sullivan peering into the inner workings of his Brigade or with uppity subordinates forgetting their place.[1]

For his part, Killeavy denied being drunk at a ceilidge or striking Maguire. He did not recall anything about Farrell reporting the chance to purchase rifles from a British sergeant. The news of the alleged spies had never been passed on to him.

He denied saying anything to Dowling or Kelleghan upon their arrest, let alone threatening to shoot either of them. This was not an entirely convincing defence, as Killeavy’s temperamental behaviour during the inquiry would lead to O’Sullivan severely reprimanding him for such rash remarks towards the eight dismissed men as: “If I had my way there would be none of the eight of them.”

The Result

The attitude of most of the defendants was one of contrition. Patrick Dowling, Joseph Farrell, Malachy Mulkearns and the fourth one, Jack Reilly, expressed regret for their indiscipline, and agreed to obey the orders of their officers in the future if they were allowed back into the Company. O’Sullivan was satisfied that the four men had acted with the best of intentions, however wrongly, and had been led into their breach of indiscipline by Kelleghan.

All four were to be severely reprimanded and ordered to apologise to Maguire. Following that, they were to be reattached to the Company for three months on probation, after which the question of their continuation in the IRA would be settled for good.

As for Kelleghan, O’Sullivan could find no proof for his claims that he had been a Volunteer in Cork or that he had been attached to the Mullingar Company. Until the necessary paperwork was received, any sentence on Kelleghan would be pending. In the meantime, Kelleghan was found guilty of inciting indiscipline and of speaking about IRA matters to a non-Volunteer, by which O’Sullivan meant the mysterious Martin. As with the other four, the inquiry was inclined to believe that Kelleghan had not acted maliciously.

O’Sullivan asked Maguire if he would be prepared to reinstate these men. The O/C asked for leave to consult with his staff. After he had done that, Maguire announced that he was indeed prepared to take the prodigal sons back.

Writing to his own superior officer on 3^rd November, O’Sullivan told Cathal Brugha, the IRA Chief of Staff, his satisfaction with the inquiry results: “I believe this will be for the good of the Mullingar Brigade generally as they were inclined to allow matters rest too long and then act in a thoughtless hasty fashion.”

Kelleghan was to have a sliver of vindication when a letter came in from Liam Lynch on 17^th December, in response to the requests for information on Kelleghan. Lynch confirmed that Kelleghan had indeed been in the Millstreet Company while in Co. Cork, and had served in the local flying column before ill health forced him to leave. During his time there, he was found to be an “attentive and energetic Volunteer.”

Which may have been so, but in Mullingar, discipline, obedience and towing the Company line were shown to be more important than personal initiative and enthusiasm.[2]

Bibliography

UCD Archives

Richard Mulcahy Papers, P7/A/31

Bureau of Military History / Witness Statement

Maguire, James, WS 1439

[1] Maguire, James (BMH / WS 1439), p. 20

[2] Richard Mulcahy Papers, UCD Archives, P7/A/31

By John Dorney

The very name ‘Big House’ has a certain resonance in Irish historical memory. The Big House was the citadel of the ‘landlord’, of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ that had formed the backbone of British colonial rule.

Thus the spectacle of 275 of the ‘Big Houses’ going up in flames remains one of the most potent images of the Irish Revolution of 1916-23. It was a sign after all that the past really was finished and that a new order was being born.

In 2011, I wrote an article here on The Irish Story titled ‘The Big House and the Irish Revolution’ on the destruction of the country mansions during the Irish independence struggle, 1919-23. I made the point that the Big Houses were specially targeted in the Civil war of 1922-23 and argued that it was done basically as a symbol by the anti-Treatyites to show that the revolution was not over with the Treaty and that there would be no compromise with, as they saw it ‘Imperialist’ elements in the new Ireland.

The article has generated a lot of interest in the intervening years, but further research has led me to wish to revise it somewhat.

The key points I wish to address are these; Was the old landlord class really finished as economic power by 1920 (as a result of the 1909 Land Act) as I argued in 2011? Did the burnings represent agrarian class war as well as a nationalist political conflict? Thirdly, how do we explain the burnings in the Civil War especially, do the burnings of the Big Houses represent part of anti-Protestant or sectarian campaign on behalf of republicans?

To go some way to answering these questions I will look at two specific areas of which I have knowledge; the area around County Dublin in which the IRA Dublin Brigades operated and the border region from Dundalk to Leitrim.

Was the Land Question settled?

So first, were the Big Houses still bastions of ‘landlordism’ – where absentee landowners of Anglo-Irish, colonial origin ‘rack-rented’ their tenants?

It is a truism of Irish history to say that the land question had been settled by the 1903 and 1909 Land Acts, which enabled tenant farmers to buy out their landlords with long term loans from the British government. And to a large degree this is true.

However what had essentially happened was that bigger tenants had bought out their farms, and in many cases consolidated them into ‘ranches’ where they could raise cattle for export. Smaller tenants, or those whose landlords simply did not want to sell often still paid rent to traditional landlords.

Certainly this was true in the border region. At an ‘unpurchased tenants’ conference in April 1922, over 1,000 delegates resolved that: ‘the [new] Irish government must complete compulsory land purchase’. They heard that there were over 100,000 ‘unpurchased tenants’ in the 26 counties [Irish Free State] and 2,500 in County Cavan alone. The Cavan delegate Coffey declared, ‘We have been wronged and robbed by landlords.’[1]

Far from conflict between tenants and landlords being a thing of the past, in the border region at least it intensified in late 1921 and early 1922 as the British government began to withdraw from southern Ireland and the new Free State authorities made halting steps to replace them.

In November 1921 a rent strike started on the Portland Estate, County Monaghan, owned by Captain Maxwell, and operated by his agent agent McNorris Croddard.

The tenants demanded that due to a slump in agricultural prices due to a worldwide recession, they could not afford to pay the rent. They agreed to withhold rent altogether unless it was cut by 85% or the landlord sold up altogether. They were shortly afterwards joined by tenants at Baileboro, Cavan on the Lancaster Kellet estate who said they would take ‘defensive action, if forced to pay rent.[2]

There followed similar rent strikes all across the region – on 3 more landed estates by December; Bawnboy Cavan, Logan Ellis Estate the Montgomery Estate and the Rothwell Estate, owned by Major Purdon).[3]

These were the classic tactics of the ‘Land wars’ of the late 19^th century. But with the added factor of calling on the new Irish government to compulsorily purchase the land.

At the Coolamber estate in Longford for example, Tenants asserted they had tried to buy their plots off the Stanley family since 1908, without success. But, ‘times and conditions have altered in Ireland’.’ We cannot raise our offer without bringing obloquy for ourselves and being unjust to other tenants. We do not consider that you have made any sincere effort to give us the benefits of the Land Acts. We are the only tenants in Longford still paying rent to a landlord’. No rent would be paid, they declared until purchase was agreed.[4]

Placating this, mostly peaceful revolt by tenant farmers occupied a large amount of time, (borrowed) money and effort on behalf of the Free State authorities even during the Civil War and led to the land act of 1923.

In short, in poor rural regions big landlords still existed. They were indeed often absentees, represented by agents and many of them if not ‘Cromwellians’ as nationalists often alleged, had ties with the British military and political establishment.

Around Dublin in the more prosperous counties of Meath and Kildare and the mountainous and sparsely populated county Wicklow, there is another picture however. Here, there were many ‘big houses’, many of which, as we will see, were targeted in the Civil War, and many of them were owned by former and in some cases practicing unionists

However either because land purchase had gone further in this, more prosperous region, or because excess labour migrated to the city, there was little in the way of tenant farmer-against landlord conflict. This is not to say there was not rural class conflict – there was, and in the years of nationalist revolution it was sometimes violent, but it consisted mainly of strikes by agricultural labourers against their farmer employers.

Another salient factor is that many of the ‘Big Houses’ around Dublin, though owned by unionists, were not owned by landlords in the classical sense. Baron Glenavy, or James Campbell, for instance, elected as a Unionist MP for Dublin in 1898, a close associate of Edward Carson in his campaign against Home Rule,  a Chief Justice for Ireland in 1916 and chairman of the first Free State Senate, did not come from a land-owning background but had made a successful career in law. He was ennobled only in 1921. That his home in Kimmage, south Dublin was burned in the Civil War was entirely due to political not economic antipathy.[5]

The Guinness family similarly were industrialists, makers of the famous beer in Dublin city, but owned sprawling country houses outside the city in south Dublin and Wicklow. They had been noted if not, like Glenavy, as militant unionists, certainly as ‘Empire loyalists’ – urging their workforce for instance to join the British armed forces during the Great War. Their property too was targeted in 1923 by republicans.

In short, when we speak of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ or the ‘landed class’ at the time of the Irish revolution we are speaking of a very varied group. In some places they were still prominent landlords, in others they were the sons of professionals and industrialists who had simply adopted some of the lifestyle of the older landed gentry.

Were the Big House burnings a form of class conflict?

We have seen that in some areas big landed estates still existed and that there was mass and organised opposition to them among tenants.

So it is tempting to think that in areas like the border region at least, the Big House burnings were the result of local tensions, part of the concerted campaign by tenants’ organizations to force their landlords to either slash rent or sell up.

Most of the Big House burnings in this area occurred in the spring and summer of 1921, during the most bitter months of the War of Independence between IRA guerrillas and British forces.

The first to be destroyed in March 1921 was Gola House, County Monaghan, the property of William Black, resident in South Africa. According to the local newspaper it was burnt because British Army planned to use it for a garrison.[6]

There followed in June 1921 a spate of spate of Big House burnings in the region. On June 4, Lanesboro House, Cavan, the property of the Earl of Lanesboro was burnt and nearby Tomkinroad House, Belturbet was blown up with explosives.[7] On June 18th Ravensdale Castle, seat of the Earl of Arran, between Dundalk and Newry in County Louth was burned along with the courthouse in the town of Ravensdale. The Earl of Arran had recently sold the house to a timber firm and being unoccupied it would also have been a prime site for a military garrison. In Cavan, Stradone House was burnt shortly afterwards on June 29, 1921. [8]

On July 8, Shanton House, Ballybay, Monaghan, the property of the landlord Fitzherbert was destroyed. Fitzherbert himself attended once a year to collect rent, but lived in Queenstown (now Cobh, County Cork). His caretaker was held up, and his house burned. Crown forces were reported to be guarding  other Big Houses in the area.[9]

This was months before the land agitation took off in the border region and it took place at a time when the agricultural recession had still not hit farmers. On the other hand it also occurred at a time when Crown forces, both police and military, were re-doubling their efforts in the region to stamp out IRA guerrillas.

Between the 30^th of May and the 16^th of June 1921, a cavalry column consisting of three regiments, the Carbiniers, the 10^th Royal Hussar and the 12^th Royal Lancers, supported by the Royal Irish Constabulary and Auxiliaries as well as by military aeroplanes, mounted a ‘drive’ through counties Longford Leitrim, Cavan Monaghan. They recorded arresting 600 men in Longford, 700 in Leitrim and about 900 in Monaghan, of whom about 120 were sent to the internment camp at Ballykinlar.[10]

Though the very lightly armed guerrillas in the region could do very little against such large and well equipped forces (only one soldier of the three cavalry regiments was wounded in the operation, during a gun attack in Longford), they were determined to deny them garrisons. It very much looks as if the operations to destroy Big Houses in June and July 1921 in the border region at least were done to deny them to the British Army rather than for agrarian motives.

There were no further Big House burnings in the region until well into the Civil War, when, as we will see they became IRA policy. This is despite the fact that it was precisely in the Truce period from July 1921 to June 1922 that the rent strike and other agrarian agitation was at its height in the border counties.

There was plenty of class conflict in all its forms, including violence and house burnings, but the Big Houses were not the main target.  It seems therefore, that in this region at least it was the guerrilla tactics of the IRA and not agrarian motives that were main motive for targeting the Big Houses.

This backs up James Donnelly’s argument relating to County Cork ,where by his count over 50 Big Houses were destroyed during the ‘Tan War’, that although there may have been agrarian or sectarian animosities at work, most Big House burnings were carried out by the IRA either to deny them as billets to the British forces or as reprisals for the British house-burning policy.[11]

Explaining the Civil War Burnings

As I wrote in my 2011 article, the majority of ‘Big House burnings’ took place during the Civil War of 1922-23 – 199 Mansions destroyed against 76 in the ‘Tan War’. [12]  How do we explain this?

In my previous article I argued that it was because anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas could do little else by late 1922 having been reduced to small bands and fearful of falling victim to the Free State’s increasing use of execution if they were captured. Out of military impotence they resorted to destroying the symbols of the old British order in Ireland.

None of this is wrong, but one point that is important to make is that the burnings of the Big Houses were not a spontaneous action by anti-Treaty IRA units on the ground but were explicitly ordered by IRA GHQ and in particular by their Chief of Staff Liam Lynch in reprisal for the Free State execution policy that began in November 1922.

There had been isolated attacks on former unionists in the Dublin area before this point, particularly by the Second Dublin Brigade, which operated in the south of the County. For instance in August 1922 they raided the house of Henry Robinson (a prominent ex unionist) and after a gun fight he surrendered 3 pistols and 30s rounds.  Later that month the same Brigade burned ‘Errigal Mansion’ to prevent it being used by Civic Guards (police) as a barracks. [13] But this was nothing on the scale of what was to come.

In reprisal for Free State executions of 8 anti-Treaty guerrillas in November 1922, IRA gunmen shot two membesr of the Dail, killing one, Sean Hales. In retaliation on December 8^th, the government shot four leading republicans who been prisoners since July 1922 – Liam Mellow, Richard Barrett, Rory O’Connor and Joe McKelvey.

Liam Lynch the following day issued a General order that, ‘all Free State supporters are traitors and deserve the latter’s  stark fate, therefore their houses must be destroyed at once.’[14] In Dublin the concerted attacks on civilian Free State supporters by the anti-Treaty fighters can be dated quite precisely from this point onwards.

Between December 10, 1922 and the end of April 1923 the IRA Dublin Brigades deliberately destroyed either through burning – usually with petrol – or explosives, 28 civilian homes  along with 6 income tax offices, a number of hotels and attempted to destroy several cinemas and theatres as well.[15] Of these homes, 9 could be counted as Big Houses or mansions associated with the Anglo-Irish class.

The first was the house of Gordon Campbell, Lord Glenavy in Kimmage south Dublin, which was burnt on December 18th. Glenavy was Chairman of the Free State Senate.

On January 29^th, a night that saw four houses destroyed by the IRA in Dublin, one, the house of Dennison on Lansdowne Road which was blown up and ‘completely destroyed’ could be counted as Big House (albeit urban in this case).

On the 16^th of February, the IRA Second Dublin Brigade burned the house of Sir Brian Mahon at Ballymore Eustace, a senator and enclosed further reports of having destroyed; Lord Mayo’s Palmerstown House in Kildare, Horace Plunkett (the co-operative activist)’s house at Foxrock, Kippure Lodge in County Wicklow and 3 houses of informers around Blessington. [16]

On 27 February an attempt was made to blow up Dartry House home of Dr Lombard Murphy. The bomb did not go off.[17]  A month later, Republicans attempted to burn and lay a land mine in Burton Hall, Sandyford, the home of the Guinness family, one of whom was a senator. The fire failed to ignite and the mine was defused by Free State troops.[18]

Finally a month after that on April 21^st the IRA Dublin 6th Battalion (North County Dublin) reported burning the house of  the ‘Imperialist Wilkinson’, and the house of Major Bomford, a ‘Big unionist’ at Ferns Lock Co Meath. [19]

In the border counties too, the burnings of the Big Houses seem to have been specific response to the executions of Republicans. Three Republicans were executed in Dundalk on January 13th 1923 and another three on January 22^nd.[20]

In reprisal for that and in accordance with IRA GHQ orders, a number of Big Houses in the area were destroyed.

On February 3, 1923 Milltown Castle, at Castlebellingham, County Louth was burned, followed by Annaskeagh House, near Dundalk ,burned and blown up – residence of AN Sheridan, a Judge and a month later Clonyn Castle at Delvin County Westmeath.[21]

‘Imperialists and Freemasons’

This all represent a significant degree of violence against civilians. Moreover there was an element of prejudice at work in the IRA against people they termed ‘Imperialist’.

The Senate, which initially was intended to represent former unionists from the Anglo-Irish and more generally Protestant communities, was a particular victim. On 26 January 1923, the anti-Treaty IRA Adjutant General (Con Moloney) issued the following order.

1. Houses of members of ‘Free State Senate’ in attached list marked A and B will be destroyed.
2. From the above date if any of our Prisoners of War are executed by the enemy one the Senators in the attached list…will be shot in reprisal.[22]

Moloney attached a list of the names of 20 Senators and their addresses. Of these, 14 on list A were liable for possible assassination.

In fact none of them were killed. However those marked for death included ‘John Bagwell, General Manager Great Northern Railway, Imperialist and Freemason’ , Henry Wilson, ‘heir to the Marquis of Lansdowne, Imperialist and Freemason’,  Andrew Jameson, Chairman of Bank of Ireland and Bryan Mahon Commander in Chief of British force in Ireland 1916-18 ‘Imperialist and Freemason’. Campbell or Glenavy the Chairman was not marked for assassination, though his home was marked for destruction.  [23]

Terms like ‘Imperialist and Freemason’ could easily be taken as code words for ‘upper class Protestants’. Liam Lynch the IRA Chief of Staff also contemplated at one stage even more radical action, writing to the anti-Treaty Republicans’ ‘President’ Eamon de Valera in January 1923 advocating ‘shooting a large number of Senators’ – ‘at least 4’ – in reprisal for each execution. He voiced the opinion that shooting prominent loyalists or taking them hostage had ‘had most satisfactory results in the last war [against the British] in 1921’. Attacks on the ‘enemy civilian garrison’ [loyalists], he wrote, ‘did more to bring about the Truce [against the British] than anything else’.

De Valera for his part was generally a retraining influence on Lynch telling him, ‘it is unjustifiable to take the life of an innocent man and to make him suffer for the acts of the guilty’. They should not, he argued, target ex unionists who ‘are far less to blame than some Republicans who went Free State’.[24]

However, it is important to remember that, even taking house burning alone as a category of anti-Treaty attacks in the Civil War, the considerable majority of houses destroyed were not ‘Big’ but small houses –the homes of Catholic, usually nationalist Free State supporters.

Of the Dublin attacks listed above 19 out of 28 houses attacked could not be considered Big Houses. Republicans were especially vindictive in targeting other Republicans who had taken the Free State side, Dennis McCullough, for instance (a onetime President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood) saw his shop on Dawson Street blown up, as was the house Jenny Wyse Power, the prominent Cumann na mBan activist who had split off to found the pro-Treaty group Cumann na Saoirse.

Sean McGarry another pro-Treaty IRB man had his house in Fairview burned down with his seven year old son Emmet still inside. He died in the fire. Apart from Emmet McGarry the only other fatal victim of the burning campaign in Dublin was Peter Carney, who was fatally injured when the IRA burned the income tax office where he worked in February 1923. [25]

Dartry House, listed above as one of the Big Houses attacked, was targeted for its owner the (Catholic) Murphy family’s association with the Irish Independent newspaper, hated by Republicans for its fierce hostility to them in the Civil War. The anti-Treaty IRA also attempted to burn down the Independent’s editor ’s house (‘for the doing in of one of our men, Toohey’ they told him) and attacked its office multiple times.[26]

Similarly, in the border counties, it is wrong to suggest that the Big Houses and their owners took the brunt of Republican reprisals for the government’s execution policy. There was for instance an attempt to burn the offices of the Dundalk Democrat newspaper for its pro-Treaty stance, as well as the houses Cavan TD William Cole and Monaghan Senator O’Rourke. There were also at least two civilians shot and killed in January 1923 as alleged informers in the Dundalk area. [27]

Conclusions

In conclusion then the burning of the Big Houses was and remains one of the most visually arresting images of the Irish revolutionary era.

It is incorrect to imagine that the old Anglo-Irish landed class was already a thing of the past by the 1920s. Rather its status differed very much depending on local circumstances and in any case the owners of the ‘Big Houses’ were a very varied group by this time – including as well as the classic absentee landlords, professional and industrial families.

Their politics should also not be assumed, some were indeed hardline unionists, but some such as Horace Plunket and Maurice Moore in Mayo were liberals and nationalists of a sort.

Regarding the burnings, though there were still very significant agrarian tensions in some parts of Ireland including rent strikes aimed at the landlords, they do not appear to have played a very big part in the Big House burning campaigns. These peaked in the summer of 1921, at the height of the War of Independence and again in early 1923 at a time when the Civil war was descending into a spiral of reprisals. It was the orders of the IRA GHQ in 1921 and the anti-Treaty IRA GHQ the following year that were mainly responsible for burning policy, rather than local prejudice.

Finally while IRA prejudices against ‘Imperialists and Freemasons’ certainly played a part in the selection of targets for burning, neither this nor other forms of violence against civilians in the Civil War were predominantly directed against either the Anglo-Irish upper class or Protestants in general.

References

[1] Anglo Celt May 6, 1922

[2] Anglo Celt November 25 1921

[3] Anglo Celt December 24 1921

[4] Anglo-Celt December 31, 1921

[5] William Delaney The Green and the Red revolutionary Republicanism and Socialism in Irish History, p144

[6] Anglo Celt March 5, 1921

[7] Anglo Celt June 4 1921

[8] For Ravensdale, Irish Times June 20, 1921, this website on Shanton House

[9] Anglo Celt July 7 1921

[10] William Sheehan, Hearts and Mines, The British 5^th division in Ireland, 1920-22, p228-234.

[11] James S Donnelly Bi House Burnings in County Cork during the Irish revolution, 1920-21, in Eire/Ireland 47 Fall/Winter 2012. Online here. http://www.nuigalway.ie/research/centre_irish_studies/documents/0647.34donnelly.pdf

[12] Peter Martin, Unionism: The Irish Nobility and the Revolution 1919-23 in The Irish Revolution, Joost Augustein (ed), Palgrave 2002. P157

[13] Military Archives Cathal Brugha Barracks, Capt Docs IE/MA/Capt/Lot28

[14] Liam Lynch IRA General Orders 9/12/22 in Twomey Papers, UCD P67/2

[15] Source: principally National Army Dublin command Operations reports, CW/OPS/07/01 and CW/OPS/07/02

[16] IRA Dub 2 Bde reports UCD Twomey p69/22

[17] NA Dublin reports CW/OPS/07/02

[18] Ibid, CW/OPS/07/03

[19] Dublin 1 Bde reports Twomey Papers UCD p69/20

[20] Wolfe tone Annual 1966, p27-28

[21] Anglo Celt, February 3, 17 and March 17, 1923

[22] Cormac O’Malley, Anne Dolan (eds) No Surrender Here! The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 533

[23] Ibid.

[24] De Valera Lynch Correspondence 15-16 January 1923 in de Valera Papers, UCD P150/1749

[25] National Army Dublin reports CW/OPS/07/01

[26] Ibid.

[27] Anglo Celt, January 6, 1923

By Deaglan de Breadun

Published by Merrion, Dublin 2015

Reviewer: Jim Dorney

The publication of this book is timely given the imminence of the general election in the Republic of Ireland. As the author, a veteran journalist, puts it “Sinn Fein having gone from being the Provos’ brass band to becoming a key player in mainstream politics north and south of the border”.

In other words, Provisional Sinn Fein has moved from existing to support the Provisional IRA’s armed campaign in Northern Ireland, to first becoming the dominant wing of the Republican movement and then achieving electoral success on both sides of the border. The party has got to this position by splitting three times over the last 40 years.

First in 1970 when Ruairi O Bradaigh led a minority faction out of the Ard Fheis on the issue of abstentionism and the failure of the movement (Official IRA) to protect Catholic areas of Belfast.

The party split again on the same issue in 1986 with Ruairi O Bradaigh again led a minority faction out of the Ard Fheis to form Republican Sinn Fein and the continuity IRA.  On this occasion Martin McGuinness said  “The war against the British must continue until freedom is achieved but we are not at war with the government of the 26 counties”. Continuing he said “If you allow yourselves to be led out of the hall today the only place you are going is home.” He was right in that Republican Sinn Fein and the continuity IRA never achieved the same level of support as the Provisionals.

In 1997 the movement again split between those who wished to continue the armed struggle and  those who did not.  The split spawned the 32 county Sovereignty Movement and the Real IRA.

According to De Breadun’s sources, the IRA Army Council’s decision to call off their armed campaign was only arrived at after an intemperate attack on Martin McGuinness by militant a Belfast woman swayed the vote in favour of a ceasefire. Was peace arrived at by this woman’s counter-productive intervention?

Electoral successes

Interestingly, before each of the Ard Fheiseanna where the major decisions were made, the Army Council of the IRA met and their view was on each occasion was endorsed by the subsequent Ard Fheis. This begs the question, does the Army Council determine Sinn Fein policy on major constitutional issues?

The major turning point in moving away from the ‘armed struggle’ and the policy of abstentionism came with the hunger strikes and with the election of the H Block candidates (2 TDs in the south and 2 MP in the North) in 1981, none of whom took their seats. The following year 1982 Sinn Fein contested the new Northern Assembly elections winning 5 of the 18 seats. Again the successful candidates declined to take their seats.  In 1983 Gerry Adams was elected to the Westminster parliament as an abstentionist candidate.

This book is most concerned with events south of the border, as Sinn Fein attempted to achieve a political breakthrough there. Following the dumping of abstentionism from Dail Eireann in 1986 Sinn Fein fielded 23 candidates for the 1987 election none of whom were elected, having achieved only 1.9% of the national vote.  In 1992 the vote achieved was 1.6% which rose to 2.5% in 1997 when Caoimhghin O Caolain was elected (their first TD) and rose to 6.5% in 2002 with 5 candidates elected.

The key breakthrough for Sinn Fein in the Republic came after the ruinous 2008 economic collapse. In the 2011 General Election the party achieved 9.9% of the vote getting 14 seats , presenting itself as a left wing anti-austerity party. In the words of Sinn Fein MEP Martina Anderson, quoted by De Breadun here, ‘in Athens it’s called Syriza, in Spain it’s called Podemos, in Ireland it’s called Sinn Fein’, lining the republican party up with the European far left.

However, to its critics, De Breaduin reports, Sinn Fein, in the words of left wing TD Paul Murphy, is ‘fundamentally a nationalist organisation that uses left-wing rhetoric’. Similarly the current Environment Minister Alan Kelly (Labour) stated that “Sinn Fein are not a left wing party but they are a populist party with a northern command”.

Personalities

This is a well researched book with interesting information and profiles of the main characters within modern Sinn Fein. Among them are, of course, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, described here as ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid’, the significant of which escapes this reviewer. Of Adams, now a patriarch in the movement , one interviewee says, ‘he is a very strange man to be in a meeting with. He says very little and then, what he does say, everyone agrees with’.

Like those two, Martin Ferris of Kerry is part of the generation who cut their teeth in the IRA rather than Sinn Fein. He served 13 years behind bars, for which he makes no apology, not does he apologise for supporting the move away from armed struggle, seeing the two phases as ‘complimentary’. He was also, we are told, a promising Gaelic footballer at one stage, but his IRA career and resulting imprisonment meant he never joined the roll of Kerry All Ireland winners. His generation is increasingly eclipsed in Sinn Fein by a new cohort.

Mary Lou McDonald, a middle class Dubliner and leading figure in Sinn Fein in the Republic, is described as an atypical Sinn Feiner, having been to Trinity College and coming from a Fianna Fail family. Pearse Doherty  ‘the product of a mixed marriage in Irish political terms’ (Fianna Fail and Fine Gael) is described by a Sinn Fein delegate as ‘a financial rock star’.

Eoin O Broin emerges from this book as a very interesting figure, perhaps the leading light in the future in Sinn Fein. De Breadun compares him to Eamon de Valera (they both went to elite Blackrock College), though O Broin, who considers himself a left winger, would not appreciate the comparison. Elected as a city councillor for the party in Belfast he has since worked for charities in Dublin is now a member of South Dublin County Council. For De Breadun, O Broin is an intellectual who in the longer term may aspire to leadership of the party.

On the outer fringes, a humorous anecdote concerns the ill-fated attempt of singer Sinead O’Connor to join Sinn Fein in order to end the  partition of Ireland.  She was dissuaded, in her words, ‘they persuaded me I’d be bored shitless’.

The future

At present Sinn Fein is in government in the Northern Ireland assembly and holds 14 seats out of 166 in the Republic  making it the fourth largest party in that jurisdiction. De Breadun anticipates that the party could double its number of Dail seats in the forthcoming general election.

Up to 1986, Sinn Fein would not enter the Dail at all, deeming it ‘partitionist’. They are now anticipating possibly entering coalition government in the south. Sinn Fein is mandated by its 2015 Ard Fheis not to enter “a Fianna Fail led or a Fine Gael led coalition but only to enter government based on Republican principles approved by an Ard Fheis”. A rather woolly formulation, but one which shows how far they have come.

The factors which could help Sinn Fein electorally are its opposition to austerity and the electorate’s unhappiness with the traditional parties. Sinn Fein is certainly different, its TDs for example, only take about a third of their salary, (34,000 out of 92,000 euro).

But it is vulnerable on questions such as its endorsement of the 2008 bank guarantee, its proposal to introduce a 17.5% corporation tax (potentially scaring away foreign investment) and its equivocation on the payment of water charges. But most of all it is tarred by its past association with paramilitaries, constantly kept in the public consciousness by the Maria Cahill affair (an alleged rape covered up by the party leadership), the McConville abduction and murder back in 1972 and the two recent Belfast murders, leading to suggestions that the Provisional IRA is still active.

De Breadun criticises the party’s tendency to simply deny rather than explain contentious issues, whether it be the bank guarantee or links to paramilitarism.

For the outcome of the general election to be favourable to Sinn Fein it will require transfers, something it has singularly failed to do in the past. It has been, in fact, transfer repellent.

The author opines that Gerry Adams will lead the party into the general election. He then speculates on the succession stakes which will arise mentioning some of the characters described earlier; Mary Lou McDonald, Pearse Doherty and Eoin O Broin.

The possibility that Sinn Fein will be in a position to join a coalition signifies a huge advance for the party over the last 80 years. It has gone from being a small marginalised party in the Republic to becoming a mainstream political force. One would wonder though if entering government will undermine their appeal as a party of protest, or further their long term goal of a united Ireland.

This book charts their progress to date and provides the reader with a well-researched and informative account of the journey from the armalite to the ballot box.

Jim Dorney is former General Secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and current President of the People’s College for Further Education.

John Dorney on the Launch of ‘Our Rising’ Cabra in 1916′ by Brian Hanley and Donal Fallon. November 7th 2015 at Christ the King Hall, Cabra.

In 1916, Cabra was a mainly rural part of north Dublin, abutting the relatively new suburb of Phibsborough ,itself marked with distinctive red bricked Victorian buildings and crossed with tram lines.

Here in April 1916, about 50 Volunteers from the First Dublin Battalion put up barricades outside St Peter’s Church, to block the progress of British troops into the city from the Navan Road and manned the bridges over the Royal Canal. They had hoped for 150 men to turn up but many stayed at home because of Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding order cancelling ‘maneuvers’ that week.

A few streets away, Bulmer Hobson the leading IRB figure, who had sided with MacNeill, was placed under arrest by several Volunteers sent by Sean McDermott.

When on the Tuesday of Easter Week, British Army reinforcements did arrive in Dublin from Athlone, the rebel outposts at Phibsborough and Cabra were among the first obstacles they had to deal with before they could proceed to the city centre. Their four 18 pounder field guns were first used here, blasting away the insurgents’ barricades. They and the subsequent military sweep of the area killed 9 people, only one of whom was a Volunteer, the others civilians.  The troops though were Dubliners too, from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who were among the first units mobilised to put down the uprising.

Most of the Volunteers from the area dispersed before the overwhelming firepower of the artillery. Some made their way into the rebel headquarters at the GPO others to Richard Mulcahy’s contingent in Ashbourne County Meath.

All of this the listeners learnt at the launch of ‘Our Rising’ by Brian Hanley and Donal Fallon on November 7th 2015. Both men are historians and both live in modern Cabra. The area has long since changed from the semi-rural suburb it was in 1916. In the 1930s it was covered with row after row of concrete housing estates, an early effort to clear Dublin’s notorious slums.

Today it is a mature area, housing an increasingly eclectic mix of the existing working class community with young professionals attracted by affordable houses prices and rents, and particularity at the Phibsborough end, many immigrants from further afield.

For all that, the area clearly still feels an affection for its history, as the launch was well attended. Diarmuid Breatnach sang songs of the revolutionary period to kick off the event; ‘Sergeant Bailey’ a satirical ballad aimed at British Army recruiters for the great War and ‘James Connolly’ in honour of the executed Citizen Army leader of 1916.

There was also a display of weapons and memorabilia from the era by the Irish Volunteers society.

Brian Hanley said he had been ‘pleasantly surprised’ to find how much Cabra had contributed to the insurrection of 1916. As well as the fighting there, ‘ a key part of British efforts to re-take the north side of the city, many residents in what is now called Dublin 7 played an important part.

Liam Tobin, later one of Michael Collins’ right hand men in IRA Intelligence was living in the area as was Michael O’Hanrahan, who was among the 16 men executed. Jason O’Sullivan a resident of Phibsborough was sentenced to death by General Maxwell, but like 91 others was reprieved after the intervention of Asquith the Prime Minister.

Hanley emphasised the ordinariness of most Volunteers; ‘they were not poets or playwrights or dreamers, they did not think they were going out to lose or to sacrifice themselves. When they received mobilisation orders on Easter Monday, they were told they’d win’ he said, in a reference to the idea associated with Patrick Pearse that the Rising was a ‘Blood Sacrifice’.

Hugo McGuinness of the East Wall Historical Society told the story of Catherine Seery, one of those ordinary activists. She and her husband were trade union activists who ‘lost everything’ in the great Lockout of 1913. In 1916 they were both in the Citizen Army ans she ‘baked over 100 loaves of griddle bread’ for the rebel fighters. She later settled in Cabra.

Donal Fallon told the story of Sean T O’Kelly, later a President of Ireland, who cycled around Dublin on the first day of the insurrection pasting up the now famous Proclamation of the Irish Republic. He appealed to the public to remember not only 1916, but also the anti-Conscription protests and the General Election of 1918, the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed it.

Commemoration he said, was ‘too important to be left to the government’. In his view, ‘we shouldn’t apologise’ as the struggle for Irish independence was ‘ultimately heroic’.

The book itself is a slim volume but full of interesting information. This writer for instance was not aware that as a result of the extension of the right to vote in 1918 the electorate more than quadrupled from 30,000 to over 120,000 voters. There is also a lot of interesting social and political information about what life was like on the north side of Dublin in the early 1900s.

It also has detailed accounts from participants of the actual combat in and around Cabra in Easter Week. For anyone interested in the Rising, it is well worth picking up a copy.

Some closing remarks; such independent commemoration events for the 2016 centenary are in many ways refreshing as they do not suffer from the heavy weight of caution that hangs on the shoulders of state events. If people think, as many do, that the Irish participation in the First World War was a waste of lives rather than a noble sacrifice they can say so.

One word of caution though. The flip side of self flagellation about the nationalist struggle is self congratulation. I agree with Donal Fallon that we should not apologise for the struggle for Irish independence, but nor should this stop asking the hard questions. Why were so many Dubliners hostile to the insurgents of 1916? Is the Proclamation of the Republic really worthy of the ‘sacred document status’ it now holds? Who hold the responsiblity for the hundreds of non-combatant deaths in Easter week?

That said I fully agree that public engagement with the 1916 centenary and discussion of these seminal events are much preferable to the often stultifying state events.

As part of an outreach programme supported by the UK Lottery’s Heritage Fund, the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library and Archive (COFLA) in Armagh hosted a one-day conference on Saturday 14^th November,. Kieran Glennon, author of “From Pogrom to Civil War: Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA” reports on the event.

The north of Ireland is often overlooked in the history of the Irish revolution of 1916-23. Often it disappears from histories after the Home Rule crisis of 1912-13, as if that episode when the Ulster Volunteers resisted Home Rule was inevitably followed by partition.

In fact the north, and in particular the six counties that became Northern Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, saw some of the worst violence of the period, with up to 800 deaths in all Ulster counties between 1920 and 1922. In Belfast, Catholic folk memory remembered it as the ‘pogrom’ in which their community was attacked by both the loyalists and the state.

For all that, unlike the south where republicans could look back on aspects of the independence struggle and remember them as a glorious victory, for northern republicans there was only defeat and disappointment. For this reason the story of the north during the revolutionary period has been little discussed. This conference held in Armagh in November 2015 sought to remedy that.

Fr Louis O’Kane Collection at COFLA

COFLA is the repository for one of the most unique archival collections relating to the War of Independence and Civil War. Beginning in the early 1960s and continuing until 1971, a South Derry-based priest, Fr Louis O’Kane, recorded a series of interviews with northern veterans of the 1913-23 period, including members of the Irish Volunteers / IRA, Cumann na mBan and Sinn Fein.

Opening the day’s proceedings, Dónal McAnallen of COFLA gave an overview of Fr O’Kane’s life and remarkable collection. Benefitting from both the trust that would ordinarily have been placed in a priest and also from family connections to the veteran Belfast republican Seamus Dobbyn, Fr O’Kane was able to encourage veterans to open up to him and recount their experiences and memories; word evidently spread on the veterans’ grapevine that he could be relied on to keep his recordings confidential and so he eventually ended up interviewing 75 veterans.

When the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ began in 1969, Fr O’Kane was so concerned that the tapes might fall into the hands of the northern authorities that he handed them over for safe keeping to a fellow priest living south of the border in Monaghan. After Fr O’Kane died in 1973, the collection was passed on to Fr, later Cardinal, Tomás Ó Fiaich.

A process of digitising these recordings was begun in 2001 and since 2013 the collection has been open to the public. This process of digitisation is still in progress, owing to the sheer size of the collection – for example, there are 17 tapes of interviews with Seamus Dobbyn alone.

Eve Morrison of UCD, author of a forthcoming book on the Bureau of Military History and currently researching the Ernie O’Malley notebook interviews, drew comparisons between the O’Kane Collection and these two better-known oral history collections.

She pointed out that the BMH collected relatively few witness statements by northern veterans – there are less than twenty from former members of the 3^rd Northern Division, even though Belfast was still the second-largest city in the country – and that the process of collecting more statements in the north was abruptly ended by the outbreak of violence in 1954, when several RUC barracks were attacked. The Ernie O’Malley interviews focussed mainly on the post-Treaty period, so the O’Kane Collection represents an especially important resource in relation to the period leading up to the Truce of July 1921.

She stressed the unique value of having the audio recordings which capture the full tone of the interviewees’ responses to Fr O’Kane’s questions. She also made the point that Fr O’Kane benefitted greatly from the assistance of John McCoy; originally Adjutant of Frank Aiken’s 4^th Northern Division, McCoy had been centrally involved in both the Military Service Pensions applications of the 1930s and later as the interviewer who conducted the majority of the BMH’s interviews with northern IRA veterans.

As a consequence of McCoy’s involvement, the O’Kane Collection also contains a mass of documents relating to both the MSP applications and the BMH witness statements, as well as many contemporary documents relating to the 2^nd Northern Division – its final O/C, Tom Morris, was another of Fr O’Kane’s interviewees.

 Tyrone and Belfast

The next session focussed on the areas of responsibility of the 2^nd and 3^rd Northern Divisions, both of which operated entirely within what was to become Northern Ireland..

Fergal McCluskey of Coláiste Feirste, author of “The Irish Revolution 1913-23: Tyrone” used the case of Alice Mallon to illustrate the difficulty of arriving at sound historical conclusions when faced with conflicting sources.

Mallon was a leading activist in the Tyrone Cumann na mBan and perhaps not surprisingly, was described as a “very bad woman of the worst class” in an RIC report. She was arrested for her activities in 1921, but McCluskey drew attention to a note in her police file that suggested her arrest, by weakening Sinn Féin in the county, might help the constitutional Nationalist Party in its campaign for that year’s General Election.

He also highlighted the perils of an interviewer who “knows” less than he imagines but then attempts to lead a witness. Mallon’s two brothers had mobilised in Coalisland for the Easter Rising; however, Fr O’Kane was aware that no company of the Irish Volunteers had existed in Ardboe, where the Mallons lived, prior to 1919. The conference was treated to a fascinating excerpt from the interview where he attempted to persuade her that she was mistaken in relation to her own brothers’ involvement in 1916, while she insisted her memory was not at fault.

McCluskey also showed the danger of placing too much faith in uncorroborated oral testimony. Mallon was interned in the summer of 1922 and her internment file shows that she was subsequently released in September of that year having appeared in front of an Assessment Board and successfully persuaded them that she was not a threat to the northern state. However, her interview with Fr O’Kane elides this apparent climbdown and refers only to her “release.”

Not wanting to attribute too much infallibility to police files. McCluskey pointed out that while the RUC believed that Mallon’s two brothers were on the run in the summer of 1922, they were in fact serving in the Free State Army at the time. In some ways, this was unsurprising, as the papers held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) are very much the archive of the unionist regime from late 1921 and thus reflect the thinking and erroneous assumptions of the authorities.  As a counterweight, he advocates a process of “triangulation” between oral testimony and primary source material in order to determine historical facts.

The next speaker was Jim McDermott, the author of “Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms 1920-22”.

He cited the accounts of Seamus Dobbyn and Liam Gaynor, each of whom gave interviews both to the BMH and to Fr O’Kane. Both men were far more forthcoming about their activities prior to and during the Easter Rising, when not a lot actually happened in the north, than they were about the events of the 1920-22 pogrom; he felt this hinted at a certain level of discomfort on their part after the cosy clandestine plotting of the middle-class pre-1916 IRB was replaced by more visceral street violence in the 1920s. It was particularly strange that Liam Gaynor had relatively little to say about the latter period given that his brother Sean was one of the first victims of the RIC “murder gang” in September 1920.

His talk also looked at the connection between the Belfast IRA and Michael Collins, who was a TD for Armagh in the Second Dáil..

According to Gaynor’s interview with Fr O’Kane, Collins initially considered northerners’ accounts of the violence meted out to nationalists in the city as “exaggerated” and declined invitations to visit the city to see for himself. However, Gaynor’s recollection may have been biased – Collins’ decision to end the Belfast Boycott, of which Gaynor had been the director, as part of the first Craig-Collins Pact, so incensed Gaynor that he later tried (unsuccessfully) to join former 3^rd Northern Division O/C Joe McKelvey in the Four Courts garrison.

McDermott said that in order to maintain the loyalty of the Belfast IRA, Collins dispensed “largesse” to them – he cited the example of the Belfast City Guard which was established in early 1922, with 72 officers and men paid a relatively generous weekly wage to become full-time IRA activists.

In relation to the disastrous Northern Offensive of May 1922, he said that what Dobbyn and Gaynor failed to appreciate was that Collins was acting according to the demands of realpolitik – while he was sympathetic to the plight of northern nationalists, consolidating the position of the Provisional Government in the south against the anti-Treaty IRA took precedence. So instead of the offensive being a full-scale rising combined with an invasion across the border, the 2^nd and 3^rd Northern Divisions, each based entirely in the north, were left to fight alone.

The theme of tainted southern “largesse” to the northern IRA was revisited in the question-and-answer conclusion to this session. Fergal McCluskey referred to the replacement of Charlie Daly as O/C of 2^nd Northern Division in March 1922 – he had complained when arms sent north, intended for his division, were instead siphoned off for the 5^th Northern Division, of which Chief of Staff Eoin O’Duffy had formerly been O/C. O’Duffy then replaced Daly with another of Fr O’Kane’s interviewees, Tom Morris – this had the added advantage for the pro-Treaty regime of replacing an outspoken opponent of the Treaty with a more compliant officer, thus tightening the grip of the Provisional Government over the northern IRA.

Given that the centrepiece of the O’Kane Collection is his tape recordings with veterans, it was perhaps inevitable that comparisons would be drawn with the recent Boston College / “Voices from the Grave” controversy. Both Jim McDermott and Fergal McCluskey described the decision to give the recordings made by that project to the British authorities as “an attack on history.”

Tom and Kathleen Clarke

The keynote address of the conference was given by Helen Litton, a grandniece of both Kathleen, wife of 1916 Proclamation signatory Tom Clarke, and of Ned Daly who commanded the Four Courts garrison during the Easter Rising. She gave an outline of the lives of both Tom Clarke, who grew up in Dungannon, and of Kathleen, whose father was prominent in the IRB in Limerick.

Kathleen Clarke was also interviewed by Fr O’Kane. In a section of the recording played to the conference, she described the couple’s time together in the USA with wistful sadness as the only time she was truly happy. This idyllic period came to an end in 1907 when her husband felt compelled by the growing crisis in Europe to return to Ireland to further the republican cause – the remainder of his life, culminating in execution after the Easter Rising, is well known.

What is less well-known is that Kathleen was one of the few women sworn into membership of the IRB as she was convinced that it was her mission to continue her late husband’s work. She later joined Fianna Fail, and became the first female Lord Mayor of Dublin, though she had scant regard for sticking to the party line and little respect for party founder Éamon de Valera.

However, her most acerbic comments to Fr O’Kane were reserved for her husband’s contemporaries – Litton described her comments in relation to Roger Casement as “particularly sulphurous.”

Armagh

Not surprisingly, given the location of COFLA, the next session focussed on the county of Armagh.

In a talk entitled “Sedition in Isolation”, local historian Eoin Magennis outlined the life of Charles McGleenan, who was from Blackwatertown in the predominantly unionist north of the county. He was involved with the Irish Volunteers from 1914 and took part in many of the actions carried out by the IRA’s Armagh Battalion of which he became O/C in 1922.

Interestingly, he was determined to remain neutral when the IRA split in the spring of 1922; when the 4^th Northern Division established a training camp at Castle Shane in Monaghan, he was put in command. However, his neutral stance cut no ice with the Free State Army who raided the camp in July of that year – McGleenan was interned in Hare Park Camp in the Curragh until 1924, not finally returning home until 1926.

Magennis pointed out that Fr O’Kane’s interviews with McGleenan demonstrated the priests’s tendency to editorialise at length, but equally that the veterans were not beyond nodding politely and continuing their own train of thought.

The final talk was given by another local historian, Kevin Murphy, who recalled old veterans calling to swap stories of the revolutionary period with his father during the 1950s. Using a vast range of photos from both the O’Kane Collection and his own, he painted a fascinating picture of the complex network of ties that connected the members of the South Armagh IRA, not just at that time but also extending into the modern Troubles.

The existing family connections between brothers and cousins were supplemented and reinforced by marriages between members of various republican families. However, the connections that Murphy outlined did not only involve people. He pointed out that McGuill’s pub in Dromintee, where a B Special attack on the family killed two men and saw a gruesome sexual assault on a woman, prompted the horrific Altnaveigh massacre perpetrated by Frank Aiken’s 4^th Northern Division, in which 6 Protestant civilians were were shot dead.

The pub was later rebuilt as the Three Steps Inn; this was the last place British undercover officer Captain Robert Nairac was seen in May 1977 – he was presumed to have been abducted and killed by the Proovisional IRA.

Silence

The final session of the conference consisted of a round-table discussion involving sons and daughters of some of the veterans that Fr O’Kane had interviewed, chaired by Eunan O’Halpin of TCD. A common theme, expressed by the sons of both Frank Aiken and John McCoy, was that of their fathers’ reticence – the events of the revolutionary decade were rarely if ever discussed, and even then only with fellow-veterans but not with family members.

Perhaps the most poignant contribution of the day was provided by a son of Elver Monagahan, a former member of 4^th Northern Division. Like the others, his father had seldom talked about the period, but now, thanks to Fr O’Kane’s recording, he could listen to his father telling his own story in his own voice.

Compared to the vast amount of literature concerning the more recent Troubles, the history of the north from 1913-23 remains under-written. The resistance of unionism to Home Rule has been well well-documented, with notable additions in recent years prompted by the centenary of the Ulster Covenant. In contrast, there are no more than a few dozen books that focus specifically on the history of nationalist Ulster in this decade.

The O’Kane Collection at COFLA represents an important resource that should help that history to be developed. The conference struck a fine balance between highlighting the extent of its holdings and pointing out the failings to which oral history can sometimes be prone. The need to be conscious of what is not discussed as much as what is, and to find other means of bringing uncomfortable truths into the light, represents an interesting challenge for future historians of the north in this period.

As part of its ongoing “Irish Volunteers Centenary Project” outreach programme, COFLA will be conducting a roadshow in the spring of 1916, featuring similar conferences on the same theme to be held in Ballyronan Marina Centre, Co. Derry (3^rd February), Whitecross GAA Hall, Co. Armagh (17^th February), St Brigid’s Hall, Dunleer, Co. Louth (9^th March) and PRONI, Belfast (21^st April)

The Easter Rebellion 1916 A New Illustrated History

By Conor McNamara,

Published by The Collins Press, Cork 2015

Reviewer: John Dorney

With the centenary of the Easter Rising approaching, the rush to bring out new books on the insurrection in Dublin in 1916 is reaching fever pitch.

This book, a new illustrated history of the Rising, is mainly a photographic history of the event, with accompanying text providing an overview of the events leading up to the Rising – the Home Rule Crisis, the First World War, the formation of the Volunteers both in Ulster and in the south – and of the Rising itself.

There is nothing especially new in the text, and as general histories of the Rising go, I would recommend readers first consult Charles Townsend’s Easter 1916, or Fearghal McGarry’s The Rising.

The research is diligent, but to the initiated fairly familiar. Perhaps limited space does not allow for detailed exposition of important points, for instance, the author remarks that ‘the prisoners were subjected to abuse by citizens of all social classes’ and leaves it at that. I would suggest that in fact the most violent verbal and physical attacks on the defeated insurgents were made by a very specific class – the poor of inner city Dublin, particularly the women, and of those the most virulent were ‘Separation women’ who had loved ones serving with the British forces in the Great War.

There is some interesting research on casualties – indicating that civilian casualties may be far higher than we had previously thought – Glasnevin Cemetery, McNamara reports, buried 485 people, most of them civilians, as a result of the week’s fighting and dozens more were also buried in Deans Grange, Mount Jerome. So when the 63 insurgents who were killed (and another 15 executed) and 130 military and police deaths are counted we may be looking at death toll in Dublin city from the six days of fighting of over 700, not below 500 as has usually been stated.

Here too though, the author approaches but then backs away from the really hard hitting conclusions. He mentions a case of Volunteers shooting hostile civilians on the first day of the Rising, but there are in fact many such cases. Similarly he alludes to the civilian casualties caused by the South Staffordshire regiment on North King Street, but does not explicitly explain that they, under orders from General Lowe to take no prisoners, took 15 men and boys out of houses on North King  Street, shot them and hid their bodies in cellars. See here.

The reader will not be misled by this book and it is fine as an introduction but there are probably more detailed guides to the Rising out there that flesh out these questions further.

All that said, the point of this volume is to provide a photographic history and at this it excels. The images throughout are jaw dropping; from incredibly well defined photos of the Pearse boys as children, to the tightly packed streets of Dublin on the day of the Volunteers’ show of strength in 1915, to the boldly colourful British recruitment poster for the Great War to the savagely satirical anti-recruitment rejoinders from the separatists.

The reader will find action shots of the Volunteers smuggling guns away from Howth in 1914 and a splendidly clear and well defined double page shot of the Grave side of O’Donovan Rossa where Pearse made his famous speech that ‘Ireland Unfree Shall Never be at Peace’.

What will really stick in the mind, however are the photos of the combat and its aftermath in Dublin city. McNamara has obtained a photograph of the unfortunate Sherwood Foresters at Mount Street with dead and wounded strewn all over the road.

We can see a burnt out tram used as an inner city barricade and the improvised armoured cars British troops used in the fighting. Hungry inner city boys queue up to be fed by nuns, dejected Dubliners walk through the ruins.

It is the ruins themselves, the result both of the British artillery bombardment, looting and the great fire the two caused, that provide the most striking imagery. Views of Henry Street and O’Connell Street in ruins (in images this reviewer has not seen before) are both shocking and awe inspiring. A photograph taken from Nelson’s Pillar, where the Spire is today, shows the extent of material destruction on both sides of Dublin’s main street.

Pages of pictures of burnt out and bombed building put this reviewer in mind of Syria and terrible death and destruction visited on cities like Aleppo, Damascus, Homs and Kobane in the past four years. It was a mercy after all that the fighting in Dublin in 1916 was over in one week.

In short, this book’s text is not a bad general history of the Rising but it is well worth buying for its illustrations alone.

According to their Lights – Irishmen in the British Army in the Easter 1916

By Neil Richardson,

The Collins Press,

Cork, 2016.

Review John Dorney

Neil Richardson has previously published books on Irish service in the British armed forces in the two World Wars. Here he boldly and provocatively tells the story of Irishmen who fought in British uniform against the insurgents in Easter Week 1916.

The title comes from a quote from James Connolly, the Citizen Army leader, shortly before his execution, ‘I will say a prayer for all brave men who do their duty according to their lights’. And so Richardson seeks to rescue from historical amnesia those Irish soldiers who served on the British side in Dublin in 1916.

It turns out that, according to Richardson’s figures that 1,000 of the roughly 16,000 British Army personnel who took part in suppressing the rebellion were Irishmen and so were 41 of their 117 dead and 106  of their 357 wounded. Another 17 Irish policemen were killed. These are significant numbers when we consider that the numbers of Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army fighters in Easter Week are estimated at about 1,500 and adding in Cumann na mBan and other unarmed activists about 2,500 going on pensions later granted. Between combat executions 80 insurgents died.

The insurrection of course happened at time when as many as 200,000 Irishmen were serving in the British armed forces in the First World War from the western front in France and Belgium to Salonika (today Thessaloniki northern Greece) in the east by way of the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Of these three units, the 10^th Dublin Fusiliers, the 3^rd Royal Irish Rifles and the 3^rd Royal Irish Regiment, were on garrisoned in Ireland at the time of the Rising and were ordered to suppress it.

Richardson recounts how three unarmed off-duty Irish soldiers were killed on the first day of the Rising when they stumbled across rebel positions.

The Royal Dublin Fusiliers were first into action as an organised unit, on the first day of the Rising attacking the rebel position at City Hall which abutted the centre of British administration at Dublin Castle. Others fought their way along the South Quays, with particularly hard fighting st Sean Heuston’s outpost at the Mendicity Institute. Another Battalion, the 4^th, used artillery to dislodge the Volunteers from their posts at the bridges over the Royal Canal at Cabra and Phibsborough before making their way to the city centre.

The Royal Irish Regiment began by attacking the South Dublin Union, held by Volunteers under Eamon Ceannt and ended up as part of the force that besieged the insurgents’ headquarters at the GPO while the Royal Irish Rifles stationed in Portobello Barracks in Rathmines were involved in some of the fighting around Mount Street. In Portobello itself, an RIR Captain, Bowen Colthurst infamously executed without trial Francis Sheehy Skeffington and three other civilians.

Perhaps the most interesting chapters – as they point to the divisions within Irish society – are those on the volunteer corps who fought on the British side. The first of these is the Irish Association of Volunteer Training Corps –nicknamed in Dublin the ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ because of their advanced age and the badge on their uniforms GR – ‘Georgius Rex’ (George the King). This reviewer was aware that a unit of the GR was shot by Irish Volunteers on Mount Street as they made their way to Beggars Bush Barracks, but not of many of the fascinating details behind the incident.

In Richardson’s book we learn that the GR was principally composed of middle class, middle aged professionals, there were pronounced links with the Irish Rugby Football Union (at that time Rugby was largely an upper class sport). More interesting still to learn is that many of their members were active in Dublin Orange Order circles and in the Dublin branch of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Loyal Dublin Volunteers, who had stashed a significant arms dump on Rutland (now Parnell) Square.

In the Rising itself the GR’s marched straight into an ambush with no means to defend themselves. Their rifles were unloaded and even once they got into Beggar’s Bush barracks they found that their obsolete weapons would not take the .303 ammunition for British standard issue Lee Enfields. Even once British reinforcements arrived with more weapons and ammunition the GRs had a torrid week, harassed by snipers and low on food.

In Trinity College, long associated with both Protestantism and unionism, the Dublin University Officer Training Corps helped a motley collection of British Australian and South African soldiers defend the University. That the insurgents never took it was highly significant as it severed communications between their posts north and south of the river Liffey.

This book will probably make many people angry, but that is no reason not to recommend it. The fact is that many Irish soldiers in the British forces did fight against the insurgents in Easter Week and this story deserves to be told.

I do have some quibbles with the tone of the book though, which amounts to – the law abiding and decent followed Redmond’s call to join the British Army in 1914, Republican insurgents disturbed the peace and maliciously killed the forces of order. The Republicans are unjustly celebrated and the unfortunate Irish ex-servicemen forgotten.

First of all when we talk about violence in Easter Week itself, it seems unreasonable to expect the insurgents not to have fired on armed soldiers such as the GR or the Lancers who were ambushed on O’Connell Street on the first day. The rebels were not to know that the GR’s rifles were unloaded and naturally the GRs procured loaded weapons as quickly as they could.

Secondly, while it is certainly true as Richardson writes that both sides committed both acts of kindness and acts of cruelty to civilians, most studies (see review above) agree that British forces were responsible for the large majority of the civilian casualties. Nor were they ever held to account for this, which included a significant degree of deliberate killing. The closest was Bowen Colthurst who was found guilty of the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington who was freed on the grounds of temporary insanity.

We may blame, as many Dubliners did, the insurgents for visiting a battle on central Dublin but we cannot absolve the British Army of their part in the human cost of it.

Finally Richardson argues that while only a small minority took part in the rebellion, up to 200,000 Irishmen served First World War. Quite true, but it was not a small minority that protested and joined a general strike against conscription in 1918 or who voted for Sinn Fein and independence in December of that year.

That said this book is a painstaking work of research, presenting a novel and provocative angle on the events in Dublin at Easter 1916.

John Dorney looks at rival Catholic accounts of the 1641 rebellion.

The Irish insurrection of 1641-42 began with an abortive plot by Ulster Catholic gentry to seize Dublin Castle in October 1641 and ended with the formation of the Catholic Confederation and the creation of regular military units, commanded by Irish émigré officers, in the summer of 1642.

At that point, the conflict assumed the dimensions of regular war rather than a popular rebellion. By mid 1642, the Catholics seemed to be in the ascendant, with their own armies, their own government in Kilkenny and their Protestant enemies in Ireland and England divided by civil war.

But the Confederate Catholic cause was to be riven with division throughout the 1640s; over whether their primary loyalty was to the King Charles I, or to the Catholic religion. So bitter were these divisions that, by 1648, they were fighting each other.

The split, over what terms the Confederates should sign a Treaty with the King and his Irish representative, the Earl of Ormonde, reflected deep divisions within Catholic Ireland. On the side of compromise with the Royalists in England were the wealthy, the landed and the Old English of the Pale. On the side of holding out for a self-ruled Irish state with Catholic religious dominance were many of the Gaelic Irish, particularly from Ulster and landless gentry.

After the war ended in disastrous defeat for both Royalists and Catholics with Cromwell’s invasion of the 1650s, both Confederate Catholic factions, sought to blame each other for their defeat. This piece looks at two rival Catholic accounts of this time; Richard Bellings’ History of the Confederation and War in Ireland, (written circa 1670) and The Aphorismicall Discovery of Treasonable Faction (written by an anonymous author, signed only as ‘PS’ at some time between 1652 and 1659).

Comparing their accounts of the rebellion helps us construct a picture of the confused and chaotic conditions that followed the outbreak of the rebellion. It can also trace the competing motivations, loyalties and objectives that divided the Confederates into antagonistic factions. Contrasting how Bellings (of the pro-Royalist or Omondist party) and the anonymous author (a militant anti-Ormondist) portrayed the origins of the war goes some way towards explaining the Confederate’s fatal disunity.

The Two Authors

Richard Bellings was an Old English Pale gentleman, born in 1613. His grandfather, (also named Richard Bellings) was Solicitor General for Ireland from 1574-1584, and was granted extensive lands by the Crown at Mullhuddart near Dublin in 1600. His father, Henry Bellings, served as Provost Marshal, and as High Sheriff of Wicklow County, where he campaigned in the Nine Years War against the O’Byrne clan[1]. Richard Bellings himself was trained as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, London, and afterwards served in the Irish Parliament [2]. Little wonder, then, that he resented the Protestant New English monopoly on, “places of honour , profit and trust” in the Irish government, that he, as a Catholic, was barred from.[3]

Little wonder also, given his family’s impeccably loyalist credentials, that he had little time for the initial (Ulster Irish) rebellion. Or, given his social standing, that he detested what modern historians call the “social rebellion”[4] but he refers to as, “the violent fury of a rude and desperate multitude”.[5] Bellings married Viscount Mountgarrett’s daughter, and was therefore related to the Ormonde dynasty and privy to the thinking of “Ormondist” nobles such as Ormonde himself, Mountgarrett and Muskerry in a way that the anonymous author was not. Furthermore, in his capacity as secretary of the Supreme Council, he was also familiar with nobles like Earl Clanricarde and James Dillon, whose thoughts and actions during 1641-42 he recounts extensively.

Finally, Bellings’ account was written in the 1670s, from the perspective of a sound royalist, whose property had been recovered after the Restoration of the monarchy. His bias therefore, is to present the rebellion as a tragic accident caused by the King’s untrustworthy ministers, and which was joined only reluctantly, and under extreme provocation, by him and his associates in the “peace party”.

Since he remained anonymous, we know little for certain about the background of the author of the Aphorismicall Discovery. Clearly he was an educated man – he occasionally throws in quotes from classical antiquity to prove it. He claimed to hold the Old English and Old Irish in equal affection but he was almost certainly a Gaelic Irishman.

There are several indications of this. Firstly, his brief synopsis of Irish history glorifies the resistance of the Old Irish to the English conquest (claiming that Ireland was conquered by trickery rather than force of arms) and their role as more consistent fighters on behalf of Catholicism. We can also infer this by his wholehearted approval of the rebellion, including the attacks on the New English colonists whom he calls, “English Protestant Undertakers”[6].

However, the wars of the mid-seventeenth century occurred at a time when Irish identity was shifting from being defined by language and ethnic origin (Gael against Gall) to one defined primarily by belonging to the Catholic religion. The anonymous author considered Royalist Old Englishmen such as Ormonde and Clanricarde to be sufficiently Irish to be traitors rather than simple enemies. Moreover, his examples of heroic Irish Catholics include Gaelicised Old Englishmen such as Garrett McWilliam Fitzgerald –who he tells us was, “an excellent scholar in both Latin, English and Irish” – and even Elizabethan Catholic settlers like Oliver Stephenson, whose, “only commotion was for religion” [7].

He was probably a gentleman – and derisively terms Parliamentarians, and the New English in general, as, “base and mechanical fellows”, i.e. of low un-aristocratic origin[8]. His account was written in the years between 1652 and 1659, after the total defeat of the Confederate and Royalist forces in Ireland. His primary aim is apportion blame for this defeat, which he attributes, as his title suggests, to the treachery of the peace party. His accusation is that, under the direction of Ormonde (the “prime factioner”) certain, mostly Old English, people deliberately sabotaged the Confederate war effort.

In his account of 1641-42, he tries to show how this conspiracy was present right from the outbreak of the rebellion, on the part of Ormonde’s kin and dependants, and faint-hearted Old Englishmen such as General Barry or Castlehaven. A secondary aim of the account is show that there was no distinction to be made between the Confederate and Royalist parties in Ireland. The war, for him, was against the Roundheads, Puritans and (New) English, between whom he does not make fine distinctions.

The Origins of the Rebellion

Despite their different perspectives, both men agreed that Ireland, in 1641, was a prosperous place, and had become so as a result of the 40 years of peace since the end of the Nine Years War (1594-1603). The anonymous author goes so far as to say that, “Ireland… stood in fairer terms of happiness and prosperitie than ever it had done these five hundred years, she had enjoyed the sweet fruits of a long peace, full of people and riches”[9].

Bellings, for his part emphasises the modernisation of the Irish economy, with “much improved” farms and the development of manufacturing, trade and fishing. Also, as might be expected of a lawyer, he approvingly comments that Ireland was governed by the Common Law of England (regulated by a, “free parliament”), and its people, “derived from laws an assurance of being protected as free subjects”[10].

On the long term causes of the war, the anonymous author says that Ireland was, “commanded by foreigners, and the majesty of religion eclipsed” [11]. He cites Poynings law of 1494 (which subordinated the Irish Parliament to the English one) as the most objectionable feature of this situation. Bellings details two major grievances that, “disquieted the nation” in the years leading up to the rebellion[12]. The first of these was, “the very vigorous acts… against the Catholic religion” dating from the Elizabethan period. Although these were, as yet, not strictly enforced, their presence in the law both antagonised the Catholics and frightened them with the prospect of full-scale repression in the future.

The second major grievance was plantations. This refers not to the large plantations already undertaken in Ulster and Munster, but to the constant questioning of existing land titles by government ministers. In particular, Bellings objects to the aggressive search for 200-300 year old royal titles, and the intimidation of juries to find in favour of confiscation. Although only a quarter of an estate could be confiscated in this way, the ministers responsible tended to confiscate the most valuable quarter and any estate under 100 acres was confiscated in full[13].

Bellings also states that the Old English community were now, “less free than before”. He implies that this had resulted from the ban on Catholics holding, “places of honour profit and trust” (i.e. public office). On the grievances of the initial (Ulster) plotters, Bellings records; fear of an invading Scottish or Parliamentary army, fear of the English Parliament enforcing the Penal laws in full and resentment of the Ulster plantation, which had seized lands independent of Earls Tyrone and Tyrconnell and which did not allow native Irish to purchase or lease the lands in question[14].

Despite outlining these sources of discontent, Bellings still argues that war could have been avoided in all three kingdoms had it not been for the malign influence of men who, “thought of changing their master” and ultimately, “inflamed the nation to their own destruction”[15]. Both authors argue that Ireland was destabilised by the politics of England.

Interestingly, both Bellings and the anonymous author ascribe to the English Parliament, that their objective, right from the outset, was to, “disenthrone royalty”[16] and, “upon the pretext of patronising the rights and liberties of the nation… to change the government”[17]. To destroy the monarchy in other words – a fact that was far from clear on the ground in Engalnd in 1642. They were also agreed on its intentions with regard to Ireland, which were, “the destruction of both the Catholic religion, monarchy and the Irish nation” according to the anonymous author[18], and, “the extirpation of Popery out of Ireland” according to Bellings[19]. Essentially, both saw the rebellion in Ireland as a defensive reaction to the Parliament’s threat to both the King and Irish Catholics.

Outbreak of Rebellion

The two mens’ accounts of the events that marked the outbreak of the rebellion do not differ very much. Both of them agree that the initial plot was to take Dublin Castle by stealth and having taken over the state in Ireland, to dictate their own terms to the English Parliament. Meanwhile, the northern lords were to take several towns and forts in their vicinity.

The anonymous author alleges that Ormonde and James Dillon of Westmeath were in on the plot but lost their nerve when the conspirators were caught[20]. Bellings, who was probably in Dublin during the attempted coup, and who later had the opportunity to talk to some of the main protagonists, gives a far more detailed account.

He records how MacMahon and Maguire, having drunkenly revealed the plot to Protestant kinsmen, were betrayed to the authorities and arrested. What was more, through the exaggerated tales of O’Connelly (the main informer) or MacMahon when in custody, the Lords Justices were led to believe that the plot involved a nation-wide insurrection and a general massacre of English and Protestant inhabitants[21].

This impression may have been the reason behind the State of Dublin’s heavy handed repression of the Catholic population in the following months. In fact, Bellings was told later, “by those who best knew it that there were no more than a hundred men engaged in it, for their sole end was the taking of the [Dublin] Castle”[22].

The attitudes of the two authors towards the plot and the initial rebellion differ sharply. The anonymous author does not dwell on the subject, but clearly approves of the rebellion, given that its motives were, “maintaining the Holy religion, defence of his Majesties prerogative and the vendiction of the free liberties of the Irish nation, the meere destruction and extirpation of which was intended by both states England and Ireland”.[23] He also implies that the rebels had Royal approval, saying Phelim O’Neill, “took Charlemont and several towns and holds for his Majestie’s use”[24].

Bellings, on the contrary asserts that the northern gentry involved, “took up arms blindfold” without sufficient reason, arms or support[25]. Moreover, their “sole hope” was to capture Dublin Castle, complete with its arsenal and magazine, after the failure of which they had no alternative strategy. He concedes that their plan might just have worked had they captured Dublin Castle and issued popular demands such as for the freedom of religion.

However, as it was, their failure to do this left themselves exposed to retribution of the Lords Justices and the English Parliament and left them with no choice but to try to instigate a general rebellion. As for Royal approval, Bellings asserts that it was a fraud to impress the “ignorant multitude”, and not only that, but the King’s enemies used it to “render him odious to the people [of England]”. According to Bellings, Phelim O’Neill later greatly regretted this ruse, since it led, indirectly, to the King’s execution[26].

The Disaffection of the Pale

Over the next six months, the rebellion spread from being a phenomenon localised to Ulster and parts of Wicklow to be a general insurgency throughout the country. Both authors record that initially Catholic Ireland’s political class were less than enthusiastic about the rebellion. According to the anonymous author, most of the nobility did not join, “judging the revolution of the northern people rather initiative in them than in any settled ground”[27].

Belling’s records that the Pale gentry were hostile to the rebellion, since it came from Ulster, “the seat of those disasters which formerly fell on them” – a reference to the Nine Years War. They remembered, “the desolation of those times” and feared that a new war would overturn the prosperity of the last 40 years, especially for, “those who could derive no other pretence to their estates than grants from the Crown of England” [28]. How do Bellings and the anonymous author account for the subsequent rapid spread of rebellion?

On the disaffection of the Pale, the anonymous author states that, having witnessed the repression carried out by, “that blood sucker Sir Charles Coote” in Wicklow and north Dublin, the Palesmen felt they, “must either tender their necks unto the merciless doom of the King’s enemies or join with Phelim O’Neill…of these two evils, they chose the last being the least”. Their final decision was reached when Phelim O’Neill arrived at the siege of Drogheda and presented his cause as being for the King, the Catholic religion and the “free liberties of the Irish nation”.

At this, the nobility drafted an oath, pledging allegiance to these objectives, and demanding of Lords Justices in Dublin that they listen to their grievances at a “free parliament” and offer an “act of oblivion for what was past”[29]. In his account, this union happened before the rebel victory at Julianstown – where the insurgents routed a hastily raised English force sent against them in November 1641.

Bellings portrays the break between Palesmen and the State as a far more tortuous affair. Firstly, he contends that the Ulster rebellion was not beyond peaceful settlement, the insurgents hoping that their contacts in the Irish Parliament, “would intercede for them”, and they, “strove to contain the raskall multitude from those frequent savage actions of stripping and killing which were after perpetrated and gave their enterprise an odious character as well in the opinion of their countrymen as of strangers”[30].

The Lords Justices, according to Bellings, removed this possible constitutional solution (of the Pale as well as Ulster gentry’s grievances) by proroguing the sitting of the of the Irish Parliament from November 11 until the 26^th of February. Already, the day after the attempted coup, the Lords Justices had blamed the rebellion on, “a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil affected Irish Papists”. Although the Lords Justices later said they were referring only to the “meere Irish in…Ulster”, their declaration was taken as evidence of a conspiracy to persecute the, “natives and all Catholics”. [31]

Since the Lords Justices, particularly William Parsons, were already suspected of “distrust of the nation”, their decision to prorogue the Parliament convinced many, according to Bellings, that the government wanted to provoke a rebellion in order to invite over a Scottish army to, “extirpate Catholicism”. Significantly, Bellings has Ormonde pleading with the Lords Justices to convene Parliament. According to Bellings, the actions of the Dublin Government ultimately left the Palesmen with little choice but to join the rebellion, despite, “their constant fidelity in all former rebellions”, including of fighting against, “those who pretended the advancement of the Catholic religion”[32].

Firstly the Lords Justices deputised the nobility to put down the rebellion, but refused to arm them sufficiently to do so. Secondly, Charles Coote (a man who did not enjoy an affectionate relationship with Irish Catholics) murdered Catholic civilians in Wicklow, Clontarf and Santry. These actions convinced the Pale gentry that the Authorities planned a general massacre of Catholics[33]. Finally, Bellings attributes the Pale’s disaffection to their fear of a hostile Ulster rebel army (particularly after their victory at Julianstown), and Rory O’Moore’s justification of the rebellion to them as, “not rebellion and disloyalty to our King”, but to, “vindicate his rights and prerogatives from the unjust encroachments made upon them by the Malignant party of the Parliament of England”[34].

The two authors, therefore do not greatly contradict each other about this crucial phase of the rebellion. The anonymous author appears to be outside the Pale, looking in, whereas Bellings, as we know, was inside looking out. Whereas the anonymous author portrays the Pale’s defection from Government as being almost automatic, Bellings describes it as an unfortunate, belated response to great provocation on the part of the Lords Justices.

From Putsch to Popular Rebellion

On the spread of the rebellion to the rest of the country however, there is a great deal of disparity between the two writers. The anonymous author depicts the rebellion as an almost unanimous response to the circulation of the oath framed at Drogheda, when it was sent to the nobility and gentry of the country “who observing the lawfulness thereof could not choose but embrace it, hereby coming to several heads in each province”. The only obstacles were traitors such as Clanricarde and the Earl of Thomond (Barnaby O’Brien) [35].

He claims, for example that Piers MacThomas Fitzgerald of Kildare, “observing the oath that was taken by all the Catholics of Ireland, being of one and the same religion himself, could not but adhere unto them” and marched his troops to Phelim O’Neill’s camp at Drogheda, “to his Majesty’s service’[36]. This level of co-ordination sounds fanciful, and is not mentioned by Bellings. However, according to a Lords Justices report on the 25^th November 1641, a rebel oath swearing loyalty to crown, country and religion was being circulated in English and Irish[37].

The early rebellion might therefore have had greater cohesion than Bellings wished to portray. The anonymous author goes on to list the important individuals and families who took part in each locality, for example Luke O’Byrne in Wicklow, Morgan Kavanagh in Wexford and Viscount Mountgarret in Munster[38].

He provides the most intimate detail of the early fighting in the midlands counties of Offally, Laois, Carlow, Kildare, Meath and Westmeath, with high praise for relatively obscure local leaders such as Art Molloy and Tadhg O’Connor.

Unlike Bellings, he makes no mention of the “social rebellion” as a destabilising factor in the countryside, nor does he mention the role of Lord President William St Ledger in Munster – whose indiscriminate killings had a similar impact to those of Charles Coote in Leinster. One reason for these omissions is probably a propagandist intention to simplify the rebellion as a noble Irish Catholic crusade, but he also simply may not have been very familiar with the situation in the south, or with the thinking of the nobility – whereas Bellings was.

The massacres of Protestant settlers in 1641-42 has always been, both then and later, the most controversial aspect of the 1641 rebellion. For over two centuries it was portrayed in Irish Protestant discourse as a genocidal plot orchestrated by the Catholic Church. However, modern historians have attached far more importance to its social and economic roots – showing how most attacks at least initially aimed at robbing settlers and re-possessing what they considered to be confiscated land rather than killing Protestants. Resentment at the Plantations was clearly part of this but short term factors such as a poor harvest in 1641 and high levels of debt among the minor gentry were also important.

Bellings, presents this, “social rebellion” which he describes as, “this disease”,[39] as being central to the spread of the rebellion. He gives little space to the tensions and resentments that lay behind this violence except to say that, “the floodgate of rapine, one being laid open, the meaner sort of people was not to be contained”, and that it involved attacks on Protestant planters who, “lived in profound peace among them”[40].

Initially, he records it involved looting of English Protestant property, “rich and easy booty, taken from those seemed rather to be amazed at their loss than sensible of it”[41]. However, as the political crisis deepened, the attacks on Protestants became more violent, “several innocent souls, astonished with the madness with which their neighbours among whom they had dwelt so many years so friendly were possessed, lost their lives”[42].

The anonymous author’s attitude to the attacks on English and Protestant settlers is very different. He, unlike Bellings does not ascribe any economic motives to the attackers but alleges that those attacked had all, “declared for the Parliament”, and that this was the reason for the assaults[43]. Moreover he approvingly records incidents like the Kavanaghs burning Carlow town and, “carrying away from thence great preys and pillage”, Art Molloy killing a large number of, “English Protestant Undertakers [colonists]” at Inislaghcurhye in Offally on Stephen’s day 1641, and that Henry Dempsie, “plundered and pillaged all the English Protestants that came in his way”[44]. A reminder also, that the massacres of 1641 are not only an Ulster story.

Clearly, the “social rebellion” was a great deal more chaotic than the anonymous author makes out, but perhaps it also had greater support from the upper classes than it suited Bellings to show. What this disparity really highlights is the gap in perception between the Ormondist party – drawn from the highest echelons of Catholic Ireland, and the anti-peace party, supported in the main by those with least to lose. One viewed the attacks on Protestants and their property as a grim reminder of what could happen when, “the multitude without control did satiate their particular spleen and malice”,[45] the other as a necessary elimination of “malignant” foreigners and heretics.

The Catholic Gentry Join the Rebellion

According to Bellings, it was the spread of attacks and looting by the lower classes throughout the country that forced the nobility to take up arms. He has Clanricarde warning the gentry of Galway that, “we [are] being exposed to be destroyed by all sorts of loose and desperate people” and raising an armed body of his kin and dependants to keep the public peace[46].

Likewise, Bellings claims Richard Butler, Viscount Mountgarret, shot dead a looter of Protestants on the streets of Kilkenny, and Donagh McCarthy, Viscount Muskerry raised a large army of his tenants in southern Munster armed with skeins (knives), darts, javelins and pikes to deal with “loose fellows”[47].

What drove the nobility from keeping the peace into actual rebellion, according to Bellings was the Lords Justice’s distrust of them as Catholics, their heavy handed repression and the widespread defection from government of the nobility’s kin and local gentry. Clanricarde, according to Bellings, through his commendable loyalty to the King, managed to stand aloof from the rebellion and despite having no support from the government in Dublin secured Galway town and county for them[48]. The anonymous author, unsurprisingly, takes a very different view of Clanricarde’s actions. He states that Clanricarde treacherously prevented his family and followers from raising arms because he, “although a Catholic and an Irishman was under board (at least) against the Catholics and for the Parliament” [49].

He attributes this to the fact that Clanricarde was related to the Earl of Essex – a prominent Parliamentary general. To support this, the anonymous author cites Clanricarde’s aid to the fort of Galway which was garrisoned by English troops, “knowing very well that they were members of the English Parliament and consequently against the king”[50].

Richard Butler, Viscount Mountgarret and the most powerful Catholic member of the Butler dynasty, according to Bellings, having prevented looting and sheltered Protestant refugees, was provoked into rebellion by, “the desire the Lords Justices were said to have to force men of fortune to be criminal”[51] and for fear of, “the height to which the meaner sort of people might grow up against the nobility and the gentry”[52]. Bellings states that Mountgarret was asked by the clergy and gentry to lead the rebellion in Munster to stop the depredations of St Leger and to prepare to resist the feared Scottish invasion. He agreed in order that his rebellion become, “the common cause of the nation” and to enlist and control, “loose swordsmen under regular discipline”.

Similarly Viscount Muskerry (Donagh MacCarthy) was, in Belling’s account asked by the local gentry to use his local force (raised to prevent looting) to protect them from St Leger, “ to whom they were resolved not to be reconciled”, and, “from whom they expected the greatest severity”[53].

Muskerry, to whom Bellings attributes, “excellent parts and judgement”, agonised over whether to risk his prosperous estate by rebellion. He was swung by the involvement of his friends and kinsmen, and his suspicion that the Lords Justices were secret Parliamentarians, intent on provoking war to prevent the King, “reclaiming” the Irish and using them to resist the Parliament. Incidentally, Bellings’ eulogy of Muskerry is a good example of how class transcended ethnicity in the orientation of the peace party.

The anonymous author has little to say about the outbreak of the rebellion in the south, mentioning Mountgarret only briefly and Muskerry not at all. This may have to do with his lack of familiarity with the region and with the high nobility, but in any event, he was probably reluctant to credit “Ormondist” nobles such as these with initiating of the war. Bellings, on the other hand, is at pains to point out how reluctant the nobility of the peace party were to, “fall from government”, and is also keen to disassociate them from the looting and killing of Protestants.

The anonymous author reserves his greatest hostility for Ormonde himself, alleging that he had sworn allegiance to the “Irish Confederates” and that Phelim O’Neill, “was very confident of his conjunction with them”. However Ormonde betrayed them by going over to the State having, “deceived the Irish in the very ambition of their affairs, unmindful of his sworn covenant and ungrateful to his Majesty”[54]. This analysis seems untenable – since Ormonde, a Protestant, would never have sworn to uphold the Catholic religion – and seems extremely naive.

However it is probably a ploy, both to hide the awkward fact that Ormonde was commander of Royalist forces in Ireland against the Irish Catholics, and to serve as an early indication of why the Irish should never have trusted Ormonde, who was to undermine their cause by spreading “faction” and disunity.

But Ormonde had left his family behind in Kilkenny, “to the mercy of the Irish”, and the anonymous author argues that the Irish should have held his children, “as pledges of his compliance” and that, “this would have caused him to prove more honest than he did”. Instead, Mountgarret, in his first act of treachery, let his nephew’s family travel to Dublin by sea. Bellings records that Ormonde had hurried to Dublin in the first days of the rebellion, where he has him acting as a moderating force on the Lords Justice. He confirms that some of the rebels in Kilkenny and Waterford who, “believed themselves fit for authority” wanted to hold Ormonde’s family to, “restrain the Earl, whose power they most apprehended) from being violent against them”[55].

However, Bellings commends Mountgarrett’s refusal to countenance such an action. The anonymous author further alleges that Ormonde – now working for the Parliament – sent Patrick Darcy and later Castlehaven (two prominent members of the peace party) as, “a very fit instrument to draw and work private understandings between Ormonde and his kindred and friends abroad”[56] As spies, in other words, to undermine the Confederate cause. Whereas Bellings shows Ormonde as essentially a benevolent figure, the anonymous author tailors his account of the outbreak of the rebellion to show that Ormonde should never have been trusted, and that the “peace party” was a treacherous faction planted by him in the Irish ranks.

On the military encounters of 1641-42, there is a considerable disparity between the two authors. Bellings is better informed about the situation throughout the country, except, significantly, in Ulster. For example, of the siege of Drogheda and its collapse, the anonymous author says only that Phelim O’Neill raised the siege when he thought it best that commanders return to their own provinces to raise strong field armies[57]. Bellings on the contrary, recounts in detail O’Neill’s inept attempts to take the town, including the wasting of an opportunity when his men were let in by a sympathiser in the town. This badly co-ordinated assault, Bellings comments acidly, showed that, “a multitude of fresh undisciplined men are no more dextrous in surprising towns than they are skilful in besieging them”[58].

He goes on to detail the besieging Ulster Irish force’s rout at the hands of Lord Moore, when they were driven back beyond Dundalk. Bellings’ further accounts of the early campaigns are focussed on the south, where he probably fled, having been one of the Pale gentry implicated with the rebellion. The anonymous author describes the English offensive in Leinster in the spring of 1642 before switching his attention to Ulster. He places special emphasis on the atrocities of these “perfidious roundheads”, and stresses repeatedly that in the early campaigns the English and Scottish troops in Ireland gave no quarter to the Irish rebels.[59]

He also records, with great satisfaction, the death of Charles Coote at Trim, a man, “generally hated by all well or humanly affected…this is the end of the tyrant”[60]. Bellings tells of the rawness and ill-discipline of the hastily raised southern Catholic armies, particularly of the softness of the gentry, who had thought war would be, “a pleasant progress and but a change of exercise”. One Lord refused point blank to attack Dungarven saying that, “none followed him but those whom he himself had led to the service and whom he had never intended to employ in fighting against walls”[61].

Of the major encounters of 1642 at Kilrush and Liscarroll (both Catholic defeats, respectively in Kildare and Cork), the two authors give much the same account in substance. Both agree that lack of ammunition, undisciplined troops, and weak and divided leadership were to blame for he Irish defeats. Bellings makes the telling comment about General Garret Barry, defeated at Liscarroll, that in common with other Irish, “eminent officers” he was not a born leader and performed “irregularly’ when he had to make independent decisions[62]. The anonymous author cannot resist levelling the charge of “treasonable faction” and alleges that Mountgarret deliberately lost the battle of Kilrush to his nephew Ormonde and refers to Barry as, “a great friend of the English”[63].

Furthermore, the anonymous author speaks bitterly of the desperate state of Ulster after the landing of Munro’s Scottish army in March 1642,

“the north of Ireland, far from relief, was now bleeding… thousands of poor Irish starved in the woods, bogs, dens and caves [with the enemy] as strong as inhuman, killing without remorse all man, woman and child”[64].

What was worse, the Supreme Council appeared indifferent, “not once calling to mind the bleeding wounds of Ulster”[65]. Bellings, indeed, seems unaware, at this time, of any of these events in the north. Certainly, the feeling this highlights, that the Ulster people’s sacrifice was not appreciated by the Supreme Council ,was one of the major fault-lines of the future Confederate split.

The anonymous author describes Eoghan Rua O’Neill’s arrival as, literally, a gift from God to the hard pressed Irish, whereas Bellings, who was on the Supreme Council, mentions it only in relation to the row it provoked between Eoghan Rua and Phelim O’Neill[66]. Conversely, Bellings regards the Old Englishman Thomas Preston’s arrival, in Wexford with qualified enthusiasm (qualified no doubt by Preston’s disastrous performance later in the war), where the anonymous author records sourly that the Supreme Council, “discarded Owen Roe O’Neill” in favour of the Pale gentleman Preston because they were “dubious of his greatness”[67].

An “Orderly War”

The summer of 1642 was a watershed for the war in Ireland, with the formation of the Confederation, and regular armies under its command. As Bellings comments, the rebellion, which up to this point had been marked by “freebooting”, assumed, “the appearance of the start of an orderly war”[68].

Revealingly, while both authors locate the creation of the Confederation in the need for military unity, Bellings records how the nobility and gentry of the Pale made a final attempt at reconciliation with the Lords Justices, appealing for, “an end to the devastation of their country” and the killing of their tenants and a pardon for “estated men” who had joined the “defection” through fear of the northern army[69].

It was only after the Lords Justices rebuffed their attempts and tortured to death their emissary John Read (on his way to see the King) that the Palesmen declared war on the King’s “pernicious ministers” – who, he alleges, were secretly serving the Parliament anyway. At this point, “the Catholic natives” of Ireland formed a government to, “unite the affections of the nation in prosecuting the common cause”[70]. Both men record approvingly the Clergy’s instigation of the Confederation in May 1642, including their approval of the war as “just and Godly”. The anonymous author however leaves out their condemnation of acts motivated by, “avarice, hatred, revenge or any other motive of that kind”[71].

Bellings records briefly the election of the Supreme Council (of which he was a member) and comments only of the daunting tasks which faced them, “who had no rules prescribed them”, to, “vindicate them from being thought arbritrary”[72]. For the anonymous author however, the Supreme Council was taken over from the beginning by untrustworthy “Ormondists”, elected by mistaken people who thought Ormonde would, “never be against King or nation being too far interested therein himself, but such were far deceived as hereafter to the destruction of both, and our grief will appear”.

Speaking of Mountgarrett, Darcy, Bellings, Garret Fennell (Ormonde’s doctor) and Muskerry, he alleges they were, “totally for Ormonde, his creatures and though sworn to the Irish Confederacy will do nothing without passing through the channels of his pleasure, as hereafter more at large”.[73]

This is certainly an exaggeration, but, as Bellings account confirms, these men clearly represented an interest that was less antagonistic to Ormonde and Protestants generally, than was the militant anti-peace party. Furthermore, the anonymous author records (and Bellings does not) that Fennell wrote a coded letter to Ormonde shortly after becoming a Supreme Councillor [74].

The anonymous author charges that right from the beginning the Supreme Council sabotaged the Confederate war effort by cashiering good colonels such as Art Molloy, Rory O’Moore and Henry Dempsy (amongst others) who, “had acted better from the outbreak of the commotions upon their own charges” and replaced them with, “those who acted nothing, were either neuters or antagonists” [75].

Bellings says of this that it was impossible to, “satisfy such a number of men as had given themselves more martial titles than could well be distributed among the officers of two or three regular armies” [76]. This analysis is probably correct, given the Confederate’s difficulty in financing their armies[77]. However, regardless of whether there was a deliberate purge of politically suspect officers on the formation of the Confederate’s regular armies, the anonymous author’s indignation at what happened is a good indication that this action was received with a great deal of discontent by future opponents of the Supreme Council.

The two authors’ respective accounts of the creation of the Confederation are designed to legitimise their version of later events. Bellings has the Supreme Council, having been fairly elected, honestly trying to solve difficult problems under trying circumstances, with at this time, the full support of the Clergy. The anonymous author on the other hand, depicts the Supreme Council as a nest of untrustworthy sycophants of the arch-traitor Ormonde.

 Conclusion

In conclusion, Bellings’ and the anonymous author’s accounts of the outbreak of the rebellion tell us a great deal, not only of the events of 1641-42 but also of how these events were viewed by the adverse factions of Catholic Confederates. Bellings’ narrative is more detailed and more analytical. However he takes the opportunity to put forward (to the Restoration regime) a version of events which is most advantageous to the peace party Confederates.

He portrays the rebellion as being provoked by the injustices done to Irish Catholics and the aggression of the English Parliament, however he utterly condemns the initial rebellion itself, especially the “social rebellion” and the killings of Protestants. Moreover, he relates how reluctant the Palesmen and nobility were to join the “defection”. His bias is clearly in favour of the Old English, but as his description of Muskerry demonstrates, ethnic divisions were often transcended by class affinities in Confederate Ireland.

The anonymous author, by contrast gives unqualified support to the rebellion, including to attacks on Protestant and English settlers. He gives no indication that a, “social rebellion” took place, rather showing the extent to which the lesser gentry participated in the killings and looting of Protestants.

His affinity is primarily with the “ancient Irish”, but like Bellings, in practice, members of his “party” comprised of a range of ethnic backgrounds. The anonymous author takes every opportunity to blame Irish reverses on the treachery of the Ormonde faction and clearly is putting a retrospective spin on events. However, his allegation that the members of the peace party were not fully committed to total victory tallies to some extent with Bellings’ account of their reluctance to join the rebellion in the first place.

Furthermore, the anonymous author’s accusation of the Supreme Council’s indifference to Ulster’s problems is given credence by Bellings’ omission of them from his account. Comparison of these two versions of outbreak of the rebellion, therefore, indicate that ethnicity, class and region (north versus south) were key factors in the Confederate schism, along with the cleavage of Clergy and Nuncio against Supreme Council. The motto of the Confederation was, “Ireland unanimous, for God, King and Country”. Yet by 1648 the Catholics of Ireland were fighting each other. Examining of these conflicting accounts gives us some insight into how this came about.

 Sources

1. Elrington, Ball, Francis, History of the County of Dublin – Volume 6,            British Society,            Dublin 1902.

2. O’Donoghue, D.J., Article on Richard Bellings,   Catholic Encyclopaedia –

Vol. II,            Robert Appleton Co.,             New York, 1907.

3. Bellings, Richard, History of the Confederation and War in Ireland (c. 1670), in Gilbert, J.T.,                         History of the Affairs of Ireland,       Irish Archaeological and Celtic society,                                 Dublin, 1879.

4. Lenihan, Padraig, Confederate Catholics at War,           Cork University Press,

Cork 2001.

5. Anonymous, Aphorismicall Discovery of Treasonable Faction (c. 1652),   in

Gilbert, J.T.,                            History of the Affairs of Ireland,       Irish Archaeological and Celtic society,                                    Dublin, 1879.

6. O’Siochru, Micheal, Confederate Ireland 1642-49 – A constitutional and political analysis,                                Four Courts Press, Dublin 1999.

References

[1] Elrington, Ball, Francis,    History of the County of Dublin – Volume 6,                British Society,     Dublin 1902

[2] O’Donoghue, D.J.,            Article on Richard Bellings, Catholic Encyclopaedia – Vol. II,

[3] Bellings, Richard, History of the Confederation and War in Ireland (c. 1670), in Gilbert, J.T., History of the Affairs of Ireland,              Irish Archaeological and Celtic society, Dublin, 1879, p2

[4] Lenihan, Padraig, Confederate Catholics at War, p24

[5] Bellings p32

[6] Aphorismical Discovery, Gilbert 1879, P17

[7] Ibid, pp.50, 66

[8] Ibid. P52

[9] Ibid. p1

[10] Bellings p2-3

[11] Aphorismical Discovery p1

[12] Bellings p3

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bellings pp. 2, 17

[15] Bellings p4-5

[16] Aphorismical Discovery p2

[17] Bellings p6

[18] Aphorismical Discovery p10

[19] Bellings p16

[20] Aphorismical Discovery p6

[21] Bellings p9

[22] Bellings p13

[23] Aphorismical Discovery p11

[24] Ibid. p7

[25] Bellings p7

[26] Bellings p14-18

[27] Aphorismical Discovery p7

[28] Bellings p 19

[29] Aphorismical Discovery p11

[30] Bellings p15

[31] Ibid. p18

[32] Ibid. p20-22

[33] Ibid. p44

[34] Ibid. p37

[35] Aphorismical Discovery p18

[36] Ibid. p26

[37] O’Siochru, Micheal, Confederate Ireland 1642-49 – A constitutional and political analysis,                          Four Courts Press, Dublin 1999, p27

[38] Aphorismical Discovery p15-16

[39] Bellings p23

[40] Bellings p14

[41] Ibid p24

[42] Ibid. p32

[43] Aphorismical Discovery p19

[44] Aphorismical Discovery p15-17

[45] Bellings p32

[46] Bellings p53

[47] Bellings pp 57, 68

[48] Ibid. p54-56

[49] Aphorismical Discovery P36

[50] Ibid. p37

[51] Bellings p55

[52] Ibid. p65

[53] Ibid. p66-69

[54] Aphorismical Discovery p33

[55] Belllings p57

[56] Aphorismical Discovery P70

[57] Ibid. p31

[58] Bellings p47

[59] Aphorismical Discovery P44

[60] Ibid. p54

[61] Bellings p72

[62] Ibid.

[63] Aphorismical Discovery, pp.49, 66

[64] Ibid. p74-75

[65] Ibid. p83

[66] Bellings p116

[67] Aphorismical Discovery p83

[68] Bellings p90

[69] Ibid. p78

[70] Bellings p79-81

[71] Cited in Bellings p87

[72] Bellings p88

[73] Aphorismical Discovery p68

[74] Ibid. p69

[75] Ibid. p73

[76] Bellings p88

[77] See Lenihan, Padraig, Confederate Catholics at War, Cork University Press, Cork 2001P51

1916: Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition

By Kieran Allen.

London: Pluto Press, 2016

Reviewer: Aidan Beatty.

Kieran Allen’s new study of the Irish “revolutionary tradition” begins by observing a basic problem facing the Irish state: how to commemorate a series of events defined by political radicalism, when that radicalism is at stark odds with Fine Gael’s socially conservative politics?  And Allen quickly moves to take serious aim at some of the more glaring offenders in all this, such as the government’s ill-fated video, Ireland Inspires, 2016, or John Bruton’s attempts to strong-arm John Redmond back into historical legitimacy.

There is much to work with here and Allen is definitely on solid ground when he observes that James Connolly’s revolutionary socialism “is simply an embarrassment to a state that has become a tax haven for multi-national corporations.”  Similarly, his critique of John Bruton’s attempt to (re)write history – “While attacking the ‘violent separatism’ of the Rising, he conveniently forgets or ignores the far greater shedding of blood of the First World War” – is well received.

As Allen points out, less than 500 people died in the Rising versus some 300,000 at the Battle of the Somme alone.  “Yet nowhere does Bruton assign any responsibility to John Redmond for urging men to enlist in this pointless war”, is Allen’s fair appraisal.

In conscious opposition to all of this, Allen sets out to recover a supposedly lost (or at least half-forgotten) revolutionary tradition, a radical politics leaning towards anti-capitalism threading through the last hundred and fifty years of Irish history.

The events of 1916 and the War of Independence act as a kind of fulcrum for Allen – the period when Irish radicalism was at its greatest potential as well as the historical moment that would generate the memories that later sustained this radicalism.

In a spirited review, he moves chronologically from the rise of Fenianism in post-Famine Ireland, through the history of the Home Rule movement, into the Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, before moving on to analyses of the two states that emerged after partition.  He ends with an account of anti-austerity activism since 2008, the clear implication being that opposition to water charges is the latest manifestation of Ireland’s long tradition of militancy.

Contradictions

In his social-historical investigations, Allen lays major emphasis on the “contradictions” of Irish society, or even just the contradictions he feels are inherent in certain strands of republican and nationalist ideology.

Yet for all that, it is Allen’s own logical contradictions that let him down.  Quoting Piers Brandon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Allen claims that the Easter Rising “blasted the widest breach in the ramparts of the British Empire” since the end of the American Revolutionary War.

As well as being seriously exaggerated, this contradicts his earlier suggestion that this was a none too violent event.  If the British Empire was able to survive the far greater violence of the Somme, how could this lesser engagement have been so devastating in its impact?  Allen does not explain.  Nor is it clear how his fair-minded assessment that during the War of Independence “The IRA was successful enough in fighting the Empire to a stalemate – but it could not break through” can be reconciled with claims that at the end of the “Revolution”, the British Empire was “shaken” and “its troops were forced to leave Ireland”.

And at the close of the text Allen asserts that since 2008, there has been “no historic memory or readily available language to critique capitalism”, contradicting the entirety of the book and its discussions of a subterranean left tradition in twentieth-century Ireland (what he openly names as “a revolutionary tradition that stretches back to James Connolly”).

In addition, for all of his reasonable critiques of how conservative figures like John Bruton mythologise the likes of John Redmond, Allen engages in historically questionable political mythologies of his own.

In his discussion of the ideology of the Rising, Allen is keen to point out the Marxism of Connolly and the more restricted radicalism of Pearse.  But he makes a mistake here that he harshly criticises in others; that is, selectively choosing certain elements of Irish nationalism and ignoring those that are politically embarrassing.  Pearse was not as left-leaning as Allen suggests, and Connolly’s republicanism was never just a convenient vehicle for his socialism.

Connolly’s eulogy for O’Donovan Rossa, for instance – even though it has never received the attention of Pearse’s famous speech on Our Fenian Dead – is filled with conventional nationalist tropes: slavery under British rule, degradation of the national soul, and the need for a future “salvation of the nation”.[1]  That cultural nationalism was a major influence on Connolly goes unanalysed by Allen, in favour of a more politically useful (if historiographically doubtful) image of a straight-forward and unadorned class-warrior.

The same problem lies at the root of Allen’s view that the War of Independence came close to being a socialist revolution: he downplays complex historical realities in favour of a depiction that suits twenty-first century leftist politics.  Drawing heavily on Revolution in Ireland, Conor Kostick’s well-known work on the topic, Allen makes much of the Soviets and strikes that broke out in this period and presents them as revolutionary harbingers.

As one piece of evidence of the potential for a workers’ uprising in this period, Allen quotes Aodh de Blacam’s 1920 pamphlet What Sinn Fein Stands For: “never was Ireland more devoutly Catholic than to-day… yet nowhere was the Bolshevik revolution more sympathetically saluted.”  This certainly seems to support his case.  But in a roughly contemporaneous work, Towards the Republic: A Study of New Ireland’s Social and Political Aims, de Blacam claimed an affinity between Irish Catholic nationalism and Bolshevism:

“There is really but one cause in the world, the cause of the weak truth against the strong lie.  Lenin and Trotsky in Russia battling against lies and force; Labour struggling against its self-appointed tyrants; the Gaelic tongue striving against the foreign jargon; Ireland striving against England – all are but phases of the single war that still rages undecided, though certain in its outcome – the warfare of the Christian State against the Gates of Hell.”[2]

Clearly, De Blacam only had a limited understanding of Bolshevik politics [Leon Trotsky, a Jewish Ukrainian Marxist, as a defender of the Gaelic Christian State?].  As Allen says at the same juncture of his book, this was “an age when mass communications were far more limited than today.”  Certainly limited enough to prevent much information getting from war-torn Russia to Ireland.

Likewise, it is not clear if those who described their strikes as “Soviets” were using this term in the same way as Trotsky or Lenin.  The first Irish “Soviet”, for example, at an asylum in Monaghan in early 1919, merely sought a four-shilling pay raise. Their “Soviet” lasted twelve days and ended when that pay-raise was secured.  Hardly the opening salvo in a workers’ revolution.

Allen ignores the politically inconvenient possibility that workers’ actions may not have been clear expressions of class-conscious politics.  For instance, he declares that “On a number of occasions, the sheer strength of the workers’ movement forced the British government to retreat.  The first was the attempt to introduce conscription in April 1918.”  But this was not a particularly workerist action, nor does he give any evidence that anti-conscription activism was couched in any kind of class-conscious language.  And indeed Allen proceeds to admit that “labour’s campaign against conscription had become absorbed into a pan-nationalist alliance endorsed by the Catholics bishops.”  So it was a workers’ revolt even when it represented a broader constellation of class interests.

Indeed, a reporter from the Manchester Guardian, quoted by Allen, visited Clonmel when the town was under the control of a Workers’ Council and found that “it is no exaggeration to trace a flavour of proletarian dictatorship about some aspects of the strike.”  But the language used here (“trace”, “flavour”, “some aspects”) suggests something far more ephemeral, far less definite in its implications than Allen’s contention that Ireland was on the verge of a socialist transformation.

Nonetheless, he sticks to the assertion that this was a thorough-going revolution.  Referencing Peter Hart, Allen says that the term “revolution” is not in “general or scholarly use” in Ireland.  Given the plethora of books on the “revolution”, this is an outdated assertion.  The quote from Hart, for example, comes from an unambiguously titled edited collection on The Irish Revolution – if anything, “Revolution” is an overused and under-examined term in Irish history-writing.

Allen also states that “Just as slave revolts or the contribution of women to science or art have been “hidden from history”, so too have workers’ action during the Irish revolution.”  This is an anachronistic claim that ignores a full forty years of work in areas such as gender history, social history, or the history of race and slavery.

And indeed, Allen overlooks much of the important scholarly work on women’s contribution to Irish nationalist politics (Louise Ryan, Sonja Tiernan, Senia Paşeta, going back to Margaret Ward’s seminal 1983 work Unmanageable Revolutionaries).  Nor are serious Marxist analyses of Irish political and economic development (Richard Dunphy, Maurice Coakley, Denis O’Hearn) incorporated into this book.  Instead, Allen plays up a blatant caricature, as if all contemporary historians were ivory-tower intellectuals devoting their time only to the great deeds of dead rich white men.

Commemoration

Nonetheless, Allen does raise important questions about commemoration and the limits of the Irish state’s ability to celebrate the more radical aspects of Irish republicanism.  Allen’s is only the latest in a raft of criticisms of the government’s handling of the commemorations, with much of the censure focusing on how the contributions of certain groups (women and workers being the main candidates) have been systematically neglected.

But as fair as these criticisms are, they miss an important consideration.  The Easter Rising is not being commemorated simply because it was a revolt against British rule, but because it was a revolt that fed into the successful movement to establish an Irish state (a state that was – and is – not sympathetic to either socialism or feminism).

Ultimately, it is that state which is being commemorated, not the Rising itself.   As Allen points out, understanding Irish history through the lenses of class or gender, instead of the nation or the state, does offer a fresh alternative to staid revisionist accounts.

But it is worth considering if the self-commemorations of a bourgeois patriarchal state can even accommodate these alternative visions? Does an alternative view of Irish history not also require an alternative view of commemorations and an alternative chronology? Or to put it differently – can there ever be a centennial commemoration for the founding of the Irish working class?

[1] “Why the Citizen Army Honours Rossa.”  In Diarmuid Ó Donnabháin Rosa, 1831-1915: Souvenir of Public Funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, August 1^st, 1915.

[2] Aodh de Blacam. Towards the Republic: A Study of New Ireland’s Social and Political Aims (Dublin: Thomas Kiersey, 1918) 109-110.

by Paul O’Brien

New Island 2015

Reviewer: Daniel Murray

For those who have been living under a rock for the past year, 2016 is the centenary of what was possibly the most influential event in modern Irish history. For those who know that there was such a thing as a Rising but are fuzzy on the details, Paul O’Brien’s series of interlocking books, each one focusing on a different area of the fighting – the Four Courts, St Stephen’s Green and Ashbourne – are ideal for catching up on the basic facts.

This one centres, as the subtitle would suggest, on the events at the General Post Office (GPO) and little else. The wider issues such as the choice of strategy by the Rising leaders (their failure to secure sites like Dame Street allowed the British to isolate the GPO), the confusion over orders that meant that the majority of the country stayed quiet, and the subterfuge within the Irish Republican Brotherhood that made the Rising as much of a conspiracy within a conspiracy as anything (to use Professor FX Martin’s phrase) are touched upon, then dropped.

Likewise, the personalities and motivations of the Rising leaders, as contrasting as, say, Patrick Pearse’s and James Connolly’s, are unexplored. This is a narrative work first and foremost.

Given the limited length of the book (141 pages, index included), it was probably a mistake on O’Brien’s part to quote The Proclamation of the Irish Republic in full. It is well-known text and it feels like filler in a work that is otherwise tightly focused.

The book begins with the minimal of preamble – a brief foreword on the state of Dublin at the time and the political build-up to the Rising – before cutting straight to the Monday morning of 24^th April when the different participants assembled and the first of the Volunteers entered the GPO.

A salvo of shots to the air was enough to clear out the majority of dumbstruck civilians before the Volunteers set to work to turn a post office into an improvised fortress. A postal worker had time to telephone the superintendent on duty in the Central Telegraph Office in London with a message that ended with: The streets are not safe.

The truth of that warning would become apparent when the authorities moved their soldiers into place to quell the rebellion. After the initial British advance through the northern suburbs of the city was checked along the railway line of the North Wall Station, the GPO garrison knew that an all-out enemy assault was only a matter of time and hunkered down to wait. The hourglass was quickly running out, as O’Brien puts it with a flair for the dramatic (as indicated by the titles in the rest of the series – Crossfire, Field of Fire and Shootout).

But first, there were other issues to take care of. Later on the first day, Pearse read out the Proclamation in front of the GPO to a mostly indifferent crowd. Many of those gathered were women with husbands serving abroad in the British Army, the ‘separation women’, who were the most vehement towards the Volunteers on duty outside the GPO. A group of priests who tried clearing people out of then-Sackville Street and harm’s way were only partially successful. Looting broke out, with the sweet and toy shops being the first to be targeted (presumably it would be ‘Foot Locker’ today).

As a result of the speed of the uprising, a cavalry unit of Lancers entered the scene on Sackville Street, still ignorant of the scale of the trouble and believing they were there to disperse a mere civil disturbance. A volley of shots disabused them of that notion. The immediate result of the Rising was not so much revolution as confusion.

Despite the unsightly scenes outside, morale within the GPO garrison remained high as night fell. The failure to first secure Trinity College, however, meant it became a firing post forenemy snipers. Looting continued in the streets even as the Rising leaders in the GPO learned that the plans for a nationwide rebellion had failed, leaving Dublin to resist alone. And resist it did, even as the gunboat HMS Helga sailed up the Liffeyonthe Wednesday to shell the city centre and British platoons continued to advance in the teeth of heavy fire.

By the Friday, the pressure was enough for the Volunteers to abandon the GPO and take doubtful refuge in buildings around Moore Street, the same site under danger from Celtic Tiger developers until purchased by the State in April 2015. That there were plans for a breakout attack on British barricades before the decision was taken to surrender indicates that the esprit de corps among the Volunteers remained strong.

The Rising leaders were, of course, executed, by which point the reader is probably thoroughly exhausted from all the previous shootings and shelling.The photographs included show the damage inflicted on Dublin, which resembled Sarajevo or Beirut by the end, but the most striking one was taken during the fighting at night with the city in flames.

O’Brien takes full advantage of the wealth of first-hand accounts now available Witness Statements from the Bureau of Military History, allowing readers an intimate, close-up view of the action. One of the more memorable observations was from one Volunteer on the opening day of the Rising:

I remember seeing Joe Plunkett with plans in his hand outside Liberty Hall. He was beautifully dressed, having high tan leather boots, spurs, pince-nez and looked like any British brass hat staff officer.

[James] Connolly looked drab beside him in a bottle green thin serge uniform. The form of dress of the two men impressed me as representing two different ideas of freedom.

Two different ideas of freedom, indeed. What these freedoms precisely were and to the extent either were delivered, the reader will have to go to a more in-depth work. But here is a good start.

John Dorney on the meaning of the Easter Rising centenary.

In 2016, Ireland will mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.

The Rising itself was a short but bloody insurrection in Dublin city from April 24^th to 29^th 1916. Just under 500 people were killed and over 2,500 injured in five days of fighting initiated by Irish separatists organised in the Irish Volunteers, who had taken over various positions around the city centre.

By the end of the week – Easter Week, from which the uprising draws its name – British forces had forced the surrender of the insurgent headquarters, who in turn ordered their other strongpoints around the city to surrender, in the words of Patrick Pearse, ‘to prevent further slaughter of the citizens’.

With the abuse of many of the self-same citizens, who were outraged that their city had been turned into a battlefield, ringing around their ears, the 1,500 or so insurgents were marched into captivity.

It could perhaps have been that the Rising would now be a mere footnote in Irish history – a relatively obscure if dramatic early 20^th century event.

Instead the Easter Rising is a touchstone of national memory and identity in modern Ireland. So much so that, in 2016, 100 years on, the commemoration of the event will dominate public discourse in the Irish state in the first half of year at least. Political parties in the upcoming general election will all pay some lip service to ‘the men and women of 1916’ (50 years ago it was just ‘the men of 1916’) and claim they represent their legacy.

Indeed there will be rival events, all claiming to be the authentic celebrants. The Irish state will have its official commemorations, involving the Taoiseach, the President and the Irish Army. What was once called the Provisional Republican movement (today Sinn Fein) will have their events – which judging by their enthusiastic recreation of the O’Donovan Rossa funeral in 2015 may well overshadow the official ones. The smaller ‘dissident’ Republican groups – still wedded to ‘armed struggle’ in Northern Ireland – will try to claim their commemorations are the only authentic ones.

The Labour party will try to claim for themselves the legacy of James Connolly and the Citizen Army  – the socialist trade union militia that participated in the Rising. There will also be hundreds of local commemorative groups throughout the country who are organising marches, talks, re-enactments and the like.

The questions is; why? Why do the events in Dublin of April 1916 have such symbolic power?

The actual insurrection was after all, basically a failure. Those who launched it, basically the most militant faction of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, did not even have the support of the leader of the Volunteers – Eoin MacNeill – or the President of the IRB – Dennis McCullough. MacNeill’s attempt to call off the Rising at the last minute – his famous countermanding order – meant that there was no insurrection outside Dublin city.

The British Army brought overwhelming force to bear and crushed the Volunteers and Citizen Army within a week. There was no mass uprising accompanying the rising, no general strike to impede British forces, no mass mobilisation of the citizens of Dublin or anywhere else in favour of it. Indeed, many units of the rival National Volunteers came out to help ‘preserve order’ – in other words to aid the Crown forces – in various parts of the country.[1] Many nationalist dominated County Councils passed motions condemning the ‘mad events’ in Dublin.

The conventional answer was always that the Rising ‘woke up’ the Irish people and set them on the road towards independence. The execution of the leaders helped to turn the Irish people against the British government and to demand full independence. It was therefore a sacred event.

‘The Glorious Protest’

This view is taken up in a number of memoirs of Republican guerrilla fighters of later years. Todd Andrews for instance; ‘Dublin [in 1901] was a British city and accepted itself as one’[2] . Andrews was too honest and too down to earth a memoirist to make out the Rising changed this immediately – he was already a republican sympathiser for instance-  but others did so.

For Ernie O’Malley ‘the old hatred of the redcoats had disappeared’ before the Rising. During it he at first ‘walked around in a detached manner, I had no feelings for or against’, but having seen some of the fighting experienced a kind of conversion, ‘The men down there [on the barricades] were right, that I felt sure of… No one had a right to Ireland except the Irish. In the city Irishmen were fighting British troops against long odds. I was going to help them in some way’.[3]

Tom Barry, a policeman’s son in the British Army in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) wrote that he’d had ‘no  national consciousness’ but on reading of the news of the Rising, he had a ‘rude awakening ‘. ‘Guns were being fired at people of my own race by soldiers in the same army with which I was serving’. He was enthralled by the ‘beauty of the words’ of the Proclamation of the Republic. ‘Through the blood sacrifice of 1916 had one Irish youth been awakened to Irish nationality’[4].

PS O’Hegarty wrote in 1924, ‘at the outbreak of the European War the Irish people, swept off their feet by a wave of British propaganda…powerfully aided by the Press and the [Irish] Parliamentary Party…became anti-German and pro-British… The European War had shown Ireland to be less Irish and more Anglicised than ever she had been in her history; had shown Ireland to be three fourths assimilated to England.[5]

In such accounts, the Rising is represented as a transformational event. Before it and the martyrdom of the leaders in front of British firing squads, ‘Ireland’ was dying, her people forgetting their ‘national consciousness’ her youth serving in British uniform in the Great War. After it, Ireland was ‘reborn’, her people now, supposedly, uniformly committed to Irish independence, her youth shunning the British Army and joining the Volunteers – as O’Malley and Andrews did in 1917 and Barry later did on his return from the War.

The power of this interpretation of the Rising is that without the insurrection, Ireland as we know it would not exist. Not merely the Irish state, but Irish identity itself.

While obviously this narrative was not without some truth, at this remove we should be sceptical of it. For one thing, by the time those men and others like them came to write their memoirs, they had been through the ideological education of the Republican movement. Well before the Rising, IRB members in their newspaper Irish Freedom were arguing that the Irish nation was dying and had to be redeemed in blood.

In January 1911 for instance it wrote; ‘a nation cannot exist if a people will not respect and insist on its integrity…we are not faced with a situation in which compromise is possible’. In August 1914 it declared after the Bachelors Walk shootings, ‘the Volunteer movement has been formally baptised in the blood of Volunteers and also of British soldiers’. And in October 1914 reacting to John Redmond’s support for the British war effort; ‘He is conspiring to remove Ireland’s name from the roll of nations’.[6] Those who placed the Easter Rising at the centre of their ‘national consciousness’ were seeing it through this prism.

Was Irish nationalism really ‘dying’ for instance in Todd Andrews’ boyhood in Dublin? A Dublin where his father was a committed Parnellite and where his uncles taught him to hate ‘the informer Carey’ who had ‘betrayed’ the Invincibles’?[7] Where the Corporation – dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party – refused to meet King George when he came to visit in 1910? A city where thousands attended rallies in support of Home Rule in 1912-14 singing ‘A Nation One Again’? No, what the separatists meant was that their particular conception of Irish identity was in danger of being marginalised – the idea that Ireland had been and would always be in a state of war with ‘England’ until she conceded full independence.

Equally, did the Rising transform all Irish people’s views? Did all the Irish Home Rule supporters instantly become republicans? Hardly. Did the Irish soldiers in the British Army desert on hearing the news of the Rising? Indeed not, despite German propaganda directed at them, very few did so. [8]

A further problem with the ‘thunderbolt’ interpretation of the Rising is that it ignores to a large degree the context in which the rising occurred – that of the continual postponement of Home Rule, the proposed partition of Ireland and the ongoing threat of conscription for British force in the First World War. While Irish nationalists – at the urging of Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond – generally supported the British war effort in 1914, the war’s huge casualties very rapidly drained away Irish enthusiasm for it. What the separatists who opposed the Rising – principally Eoin MacNeill and Bulmer Hobson – argued was that the Volunteers should not act without mass support. They should act defensively if Britain attempted to suppress their organisation or to impose conscription.

Although both men were marginalised by their efforts to call off the Easter insurrection, events essentially proved them right. What made the Republicans into a mass national movement was not so much the Rising but the mass, mostly non-violent, campaign against conscription in the spring of 1918. Buoyed by this, the separatists, now organised in the Sinn Fein political party, gained a landslide victory in the first post-war election of December 1918.

So why, one may ask, should the Easter Rising become the transcendent symbolic event of 20^th century Ireland?   Why not, say, the general strike against conscription in April 1918? Or the meeting of the First Dail in January 1919 which declared Irish independence?

For this we must look deeper into its cultural importance.

Martyrs

The fact that blood was shed in Dublin in 1916 is important. The insurgents took up arms openly and in many cases in uniform. As the ballad the Foggy Dew, composed not long afterwards, put it, ‘Right proudly high over Dublin town we hoisted our flag of war’. Against the overwhelming might of the British Empire they had only small arms, but fought bravely and honourably for a week, risking their lives, killing and dying.

There were many in the city who did not think the fight particularly honourable at the time – Volunteers sometime shot riotous civilians whose workplaces they had occupied in the first day of the rising for instance. [9]

But this was not the point. This was a Europe that valued bravery on the battlefield. Irish republicans had been scorned as cowards and play soldiers for remaining at home while thousands of Irishmen served in British uniform. The Foggy Dew again summed up the symbolic ground broken by the Rising; ‘it was better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud Al Bar’ [site of the Gallipoli campaign where many Irish soldiers died in 1915]. They had proved themselves, to contemporary sensibilities the equal of those prepared to die in the European war.

One has to factor in also the pervasive influence in Irish Catholic culture of the martyr. The martyr is a religious trope, the word itself meaning ‘witness’. A martyr is one who suffered for their faith, died for it but refused to renounce it. The martyr was not simply someone who died in battle. The martyr was someone who was put to death for their beliefs. The implication being that before such certainty and commitment, the idea itself must be true – the martyr was ‘witness’ to the truth of his ideas. If people were willing to die for Irish independence, then surely it must be a serious cause? A holy cause even?

The executed leaders themselves were intensely aware of their status as martyrs. In a letter written while awaiting execution Sean McDermott for instance wrote, “I feel happiness the like of which I have never experienced. I die that the Irish nation might live!”… “I know now what I have always felt, that the Irish nation can never die … posterity will judge us aright from the effects of our actions”.[10] According to PS O’Hegarty, a participant in the Rising. ‘The Insurrection of 1916 was a forlorn hope and a deliberate blood sacrifice. The men who planned it and led it knew they could not win… But they counted on being executed afterwards and they knew that would save Ireland’s soul’.[11]

Irish nationalism already had a long standing tradition of secular martyrs, the most famous in the early 20^th century being the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, three Fenians hanged in 1867 for shooting a prison guard while trying to rescue their leaders from a prison van in Manchester. The 14 men shot in May 1916 put the Manchester Martyrs forever in the shade, but the point is that the niche in the culture was already present, it just had to be filled.

Nor did the religious metaphors end there. That the Rising took place at Easter time – the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ – was also no coincidence. Just as Jesus had died to redeem humanity Patrick Pearse died to resurrect Ireland. Thomas Ashe, a Rising veteran who died after force-feeding on hunger strike in 1917 explicitly made this link in a poem he wrote, ‘let me carry your cross for Ireland Lord’. Growing up in the 1950s in Derry Eamon McCann recalled; ‘one learned quite literally at one’s mother’s knee, that Jesus had died for the human race and Patrick Pearse for the Irish section of it.[12]

The parallel was also immediately obvious to another group of Catholic nationalists – the Basques – who, partly for its religious analogies and partly out of admiration for the 1916 Rising placed their own national day – Aberri Eguna the day of the fatherland – on Easter Sunday in the 1920s.[13]

Acknowledging this religious imagery is not to support some contemporary commentators, who liken the psychology of the insurgents to present day Islamist extremists or jihadis, who term suicide bombing ‘martyrdom operations’.[14]

This is a senseless analogy to the Easter Rising. Though the Islamic root of ‘martyr’ – shehid – is precisely the same as the Christian one, the phenomenon of suicide bombing developed only in the 1980s. There is a difference between the willingness to die, as in 1916 and deliberately killing one’s self along with others – as in a suicide bomb. A further important difference is that jihadi organisations apparently encourage volunteers for such operations with the rewards of paradise. In 1916 the emphasis was on the sacrifice of the martyr, not their reward. Their reward they believed would be the moral effect of their sacrifice.

Thirdly and most importantly though most insurgents in 1916 were practicing Roman Catholics, in many cases devoutly so, they at no point made governing by religion or for any branch of it one of their aims. Nor were there any attacks on any minority religious or political groups during the Rising. Its political programme was purely nationalist and political.

The Changing Meaning of 1916

Above I have tried to argue for some of the reasons for the symbolic importance of 1916 as the corner stone of Irish independence, which, for practical purposes, it was not; the First Dail of 1919 or even the Treaty of 1921 or perhaps even the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 have much better claims in this regard.

The guerrilla war of 1919-21 that we now call the Irish War of Independence arguably was a much more successful military endeavour than the insurrection of 1916, but many aspects of it, such as the campaigns against the predominantly Irish Royal Irish Constabulary and the widespread shooting of civilian informers, have always produced a certain squeamishness about its commemoration.

What 1916 has that these events do not have is the power of myth – heroism, bravery, martyrdom, the rebirth of a nation.

For all that, commemorating the Rising has proved to be extraordinarily problematic for the Irish state born in 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The first problem was that the 1922 settlement did not meet all the nationalist demands of 1916. Ireland was partitioned and the southern state – the Irish Free State – was originally a dominion of the British Commonwealth with the British monarch as head of state. While some of these defects were remedied over the years, the enduring fact of partition has meant that the existing, 26-county Irish state has always been vulnerable to the charge that it had ‘sold out the ideals of 1916’.

The other problem with 1916, as conventionally understood, was that a virtuous minority was understand to have taken armed action on its own, without public support but in doing so had swung public opinion around by its brave example. What was to stop armed minorities from repeating the performance, north or south of the border?

This first became apparent in 1922 during the Civil War over the treaty, when anti-Treaty republicans, decrying the argument that the Treaty was the ‘Will of People’ brought out hand bills saying, ‘if you had answered the will of the people in 1914 you would all have gone to Flanders [and the Great War]. If you had answered the will of the people in Easter Week you would have lynched Patrick Pearse’.[15].

In short, for some the lesson was that the people could sometimes get it wrong, favouring peaceful compromise over heroic national aims, and might have to shoved back into line. For a state built essentially on compromise with Britain this was an uncomfortable legacy.

Perhaps for obvious reasons the pro-Treaty Cumman na nGaedheal governments of 1923-32, (victors of the Civil War) veterans though some of them were of the 1916 Rising, kept commemorations of it somewhat low key, its implications were too militant, too uncomfortable politically.

It was only after the anti-Treaty Republicans in Fianna Fail came to power in 1932 that the Rising was celebrated bombastically, with large military parades. By the time the 50^th anniversary of the Rising came around in 1966 RTE, Ireland’s then infant television station, were told that ‘the emphasis must be on celebration, on salutation’. That year saw not only huge military parades but specially commissioned television programmes and a live action pageant at Croke Park.[16]

Interestingly enough though, with the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict in 1968-69, the celebration of 1916 was again quickly considered too inflammatory. In 1970, the military parade was stopped and was only revived in 2006, well after the end of the Northern ‘Troubles’. In 1976, when supporters of Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA attempted to hold their own Easter parade down Dublin’s main street, it was banned under the Offences Against the State Act. In 1991 the 75^th anniversary of the Rising, there were effectively no official public commemorations in the Republic of Ireland.[17]

Some like Conor Cruise O’Brien, a prominent Labour Minister of the 1970s argued that it was the glorification of the Rising itself that caused the continuance of political violence in late 20^th century Ireland; ‘violence, applied by a determined minority,’ could, in their minds, bring about unity’.[18]

Values

Despite this, popular enthusiasm for the Rising as national myth appears to be undimmed. On a recent visit to a local 1916 group in Cabra in the north of Dublin I noticed that local children had been encouraged to draw pictures of the Rising, ‘our heroes’ some of them said.

The main reason for this is that, like any symbol, the Easter Rising is capable of being made to represent a range of rival values. For instance John Hume the SDLP politician in the 1980s used the Rising to try to persuade the Provisional Republican movement to call off their armed campaign. Had Pearse not, he asked Gerry Adams, surrendered to save the lives of Dublin’s citizens in 1916? [19]

In the 1960s and before the Rising was assumed to stand for what were then the dominant national ideals – the revival of the Irish language, the moral primacy of the Catholic Church, a united Ireland. After the 1970s as Irish society became more liberal, more interest developed in the socialist and feminist ideas of some of the Rising’s participants; to the extent that today the consensus for many is that the goal of the Rising was to bring about a more equal and just society. [20]

The truth is that the Rising’s participants included people who believed in all of these sometimes rival and contradictory ideas but that what united them all was pursuit of Irish independence.

In 2010, with the Irish state apparently bankrupt and needing a financial bailout from the EU and IMF, the Irish Times in reference to the Rising led with a headline ‘Was it for This?’ [21] The Irish Times in 1916 was of course extremely hostile to the rebellion, but this is essentially irrelevant. What they were invoking in 2010 was the sense that 1916 represented the brave and fearless pursuit of Irish independence, now apparently again under threat.

On a more prosaic note, I can recall a primary school teacher in the early 1990s telling us that the best way to honour the memory of the executed leaders was not to litter and to keep Ireland beautiful as they would have wanted it.

This leads me to conclude that the Rising as memory, the Rising that will be commemorated in 2016, is not really about the historical event at all, but about the values that Ireland of 2016 wishes to project on to it.

 References

[1] In Wexford for example, see here, but also in Sligo, see Michael Farry, the Irish Revolution Sligo p29

[2] Andrews Dublin Made Me p3

[3] Ernie O’malley on Another Man’s Wound, p31, 39, 43

[4] Tom Barry Guerrilla Days in Ireland p1-5

[5] PS O’Hegarty, the Victory of Sinn Fein p 1-3

[6] Irish Freedom archive, NLI

[7] See Andrews Dublin Made Me p23

[8] See for instance, Neil Richardson, according to Their Lights, p400-403

[9] See The Rabble and the Republic http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/08/08/the-rabble-and-the-republic/#.VoL5QbaLTGg

[10] MacAtsaney, Sean MacDiarmada, p137

[11] O’Hegarty, the Victory of Sinn Fein p3

[12] Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (1993), p65

[13] For Basque–Irish links in the early 20^th century, see Daniel Leach, Fugitive Ireland, European minority nationalists and Irish Political Asylum, p52-58

[14] “Though Not Quite a Jihad it was a Holy Disaster’, http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/easter-rising/how-pearse-clarke-and-co-wrote-wrongs-into-irelands-history-34301082.html  In less polemical terms the link is also discussed here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=HRmYapWETqcC&pg=PA77&dq=martyrdom+easter+rising+suicide+bombers&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9youz-oHKAhUFew8KHTxRC0IQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=martyrdom%20easter%20rising%20suicide%20bombers&f=false

[15] Capuchin archives

[16] See Cathal Brennan, A TV Pageant http://www.theirishstory.com/2010/11/18/a-tv-pageant-%E2%80%93-the-golden-jubilee-commemorations-of-the-1916-rising/#.VoLw6raLTGg

[17] See http://www.irishtimes.com/news/taoiseach-reinstates-1916-easter-parade-past-the-gpo-1.508821

[18] Cruise O’Brien, Conor, States of Ireland (London, 1974), p. 143.

[19] Brendan O’Brien, The Long War, The IRA and Sinn Fein, p19

[20] To Take just one example, Irish Times September 15 2015, ‘Are we Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally? http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/second-opinion-are-we-cherishing-all-the-children-of-the-nation-1.2362906

[21] http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/was-it-for-this-1.678424  ‘It may seem strange to some that The Irish Timeswould ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today.’

Happy New Year to all our readers and contributors! In 2015 we had 500,000 views and 290,000 visitors. Our now annual review of the year’s top new posts. See last year’s list here.

Our 2015 Top Ten

These were our most read articles published in 2015.

1. The Northern Ireland Conflict – an overview, by John Dorney
2. Weapons the Irish Revolution Part I -1914-16, by John Dorney
3. The Illies and Environs in the 19th Century, by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn
4. The Sinn Fein Rebellion? Arthur Griffith and 1916, by Gerard Shannon.
5. The Pearse Street Ambush, March 14, 1921 by John Dorney
6. Weapons of the Irish Revolution Part II the War of Independence 1919-21. by John Dorney
7. Napoleon’s Irishmen at Waterloo by Stephen McGarry
8. Ireland and the Spanish Armada 1588 by John Dorney
9. Nineteenth Century Landlords of Greater Buncrana, by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn
10. ‘Glorious Madness’ – The Life and Death of Micheal O’Rahilly by John Dorney

The O’Donovan Rossa funeral was 100 years ago in 2015. Article here.

Some other interesting articles,

• Part III of the Weapons of the Irish Revolution on the Civil War.

• Belfast’s Bloody Sunday 1921, by Kieran Glennon.
• The Burning of the Big Houses revisited, 1921-1923 by John Dorney
• Siege and Shootings: The Decline of the RIC in Westmeath, 1920, by Daniel Murray.
• Dublin in the 16th century, by John Dorney
• Irish Fatalities in World War One by Jason Myers,
• Women and Achill Mission, by Patricia Byrne.
• The Desmond Rebellions Part I and Part II.by John Dorney
• ‘This Splendid Historic Organisation’: The Irish Republican Brotherhood among the Anti-Treatyites, 1921-4 By Daniel Murray.
• Padraig Og O Ruairc on the War of Independence in Clare.
• ‘Rough and Work’ the Special Infantry Corps,by John Dorney

Top Ten Book Reviews

• Emmet Dalton, Somme Soldier, Irish General, Film Pioneer, by Sean Boyne, reviewed by John Dorney
• 1916 Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition, by Kieran Allen, reviewed by Aidan Beatty.
• Sean Murray Marxist Lenninist and Irish socialist Republican by Sean Byers, reviewed by  Martin Flynn.
• 1916 Illustrated History and According to their Lights by Neil Richardson. Reviewed by John Dorney
• Conference Review: Reflection on the Revolution in Ulster by Kieran Glennon
• Power Play the Rise of modern Sinn Fein by Deaglun de Breadun, reviewed by Jim Dorney
• Dublin 1930-1950 by Joseph Brady, reviewed by Rhona McCord.
• The Irish Civil War and Society by Gavin Foster, reviewed by John Dorney
• Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland, edited by Jennifer Redmond, Sonja Tiernan, Sandra McAvoy and Mary McAuliffe, reviewed by John Dorney
• A Formative Decade, Ireland in the 1920s, Edited by Mel Farrell, Jason Knirck and Ciara Meehan. Reviewed by John Dorney

By Owen McGee

Published by Merrion Press, 2015.

Reviewer: Gerard Shannon

Though Arthur Griffith has been the subject of recent studies of specific aspects of his life and career, Owen McGee’s Arthur Griffith comes to shelves as the first comprehensive biography in nearly 20 years of this pivotal figure of the revolutionary period. Given this lack of availability of works on the Sinn Féin founder on bookshelves (only Anthony Jordon’s recent comparative study of Griffith with Yeats and Joyce comes to mind), this particular book comes with a great weight of expectation.

The book’s strongest section is in these first few chapters, as McGee expertly traces the development of Griffith’s political thought as he navigated through the cultural and literary societies of Dublin in the late 19^th/early 20^th century. In one noted departure from previous biographies of Griffith, (particularly those by Calton Younger and Brian Maye), McGee draws from available sources to de-emphasize the notion of any youthful hero worship on Griffith’s part of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.

In this period, Griffith comes into contact with many figures who would have a profound impact on him, including John O’Leary, Maud Gonne, John MacBride, and of course, his great friend and collaborator, William Rooney.  The advanced nationalist response to the Boer War of 1899 – 1902 is depicted as having had a radicalizing effect on Griffith, not to mention his deeply convoluted dealings with the Irish Republican Brotherhood and their influence on his career as a journalist. (Given the uncertainty of when Griffith left the IRB, McGee posits the intriguing notion that this could suggest Griffith never left it at all).

What becomes clear however as one progresses through the book is that this is very much intended as a political biography of it’s subject, with details on more personal aspects of Griffith’s life – such as his marriage to Maud Sheehan – often disappointingly confined to the sometimes lengthy footnotes. Some of these are as fascinating and illuminating as anything in the main text, particularly the influence of Griffith’s working class background and relationship with his family members. (Rarely do authors mention how his father ended up in a workhouse and its effect on Griffith).

Some of the more common historical debates around Griffith are also to be found in the footnotes, such as the allegations of Griffith being prone to anti-Semitism in his writings. Perhaps McGee felt the debate on Griffith’s alleged anti-Seminitism – discussed at length in Brian Maye’s 1997 biography – was a bit worn out, but the exclusion of his own thoughts on this contested subject from the main text is disappointing.

As the narrative rolls into the 1916 Rising, one also gets the impression one is less reading a biography and more of an alternate thesis on the entire revolutionary period, with asides on Griffith interspersed in the text from time to time. For instance, from this juncture in the narrative McGee seems increasingly fond of giving blindsides to the reader of the revolutionary period; featuring rather unique perspectives and commentary on familiar personalities and events in this period that will surprise many. One idea that recurs in the text and footnotes is the suggestion Maude Gonne was a British spy.

As the reader moves beyond the 1916 Rising this tendency of the book for McGee to challenge accepted ideas about the revolutionary period becomes more apparent, to the point one can get the sense it’s central subject can become more then a little lost. This is a problem for a biography, as important as it may seem to detail aspects of the Irish economy and Catholic Church in this period.

This approach is seen most clearly in the section dealing with the events of the Irish Civil War, which surprisingly does not venture into overt details on the Treaty negotiations or the subsequent descent into militancy on both sides, or into the heated debate which Griffith played a part in. For instance, McGee dismisses the anti-Treaty republicans as more focused on setting up a trade union for Volunteer members in April 1922, and suggests the term ‘IRA’ was first adopted by Volunteers only then. Certainly a detail most historians of the period would take issue with.

McGee then strangely sums up the Irish Civil War as “essentially an economic fall-out from business and banking leaders’ extant commitment to the Government of Ireland Act… “ (page 345). This is in keeping with a theme in the book to which the writer frequently returns, that British policy towards Ireland in this period was geared towards keeping a firm economic influence on the island by way of partition.

In this respect the book’s treatment of Eamon de Valera may prove to be particularly controversial, implying de Valera’s opposition to the Treaty was mainly due to this, having foreseen the Treaty split long before the document’s signing.

To McGee’s credit he does frequently back-up this recurring theme with an array of sources and ties it into conclusions he makes on Griffith’s life and legacy, though one cannot help but wonder if the author might have been better writing it into an alternate thesis on the revolutionary period instead of at the expense of increasingly detracting from it’s main subject in the closing chapters.

As a result, understanding Griffith’s role in these tumultuous years becomes a little difficult to understand as the book spins out in other directions, disappointing given the strength of the earlier chapters and how they illuminate Griffith’s early life and political development.

The writer also betrays something of an axe to grind in the book’s lengthy conclusion, which becomes at times fiery, and sometimes near-unreadable treatise on Irish historiography on the period. Certain contemporary historians, often on opposite ends of heated public debates, may find themselves greatly surprised who they are grouped with. One example being in the footnotes McGee suggesting historian John Regan takes his research into the civil war from the lead of Erskine Childers’ propaganda of the period, which even Regan’s fiercest detractors may deem too dismissive and not dealing with the issues Regan raises in his research.

While on occasion the points McGee makes in this concluding section can be interesting even if the reader does not fully agree, it is finally (if awkwardly) tied into a concluding – though valid – point on how elusive Griffith remains as a historical subject for would-be biographers. On this point, those interested in the period and Arthur Griffith should be thankful Owen McGee’s fascinating, if at times greatly frustrating, work helps to begin to redress this balance.

Given the lack of recent biographical works on Griffith, it will be intriguing to see if Owen McGee’s book begins a trend of other works on the Sinn Fein founder as we head towards the centenary of Griffith’s death in 2022. Many may rightly dispute Owen McGee’s views on the Irish revolutionary period and wider Irish historiography, yet what he reveals of Griffith’s politics and career should prove more than enough to contribute to what could prove to be an increased debate on the life of this divisive figure.

Gerard Shannon is a member of Skerries Historical Society. He has written two previous articles on Arthur Griffith for this website here and here.

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc on the debate on a controversial killing on the last day of the Irish War of Independence.

On the night of the 10 July 1921, the eve of the Truce that ended the War of Independence, four British soldiers; Corporal Harold Daker, Private Henry Morris, Private Alfred Camm and Private Albert Powell were abducted by an IRA unit in Cork.

Word soon reached Connie Neenan, an IRA officer in the 2nd Battalion, Cork City Brigade that four soldiers had been abducted and were facing execution. Neenan and a small group of his comrades set out in search of the soldiers in the hope of securing their release:

‘About 1.30am we gave up and shortly after met some men … [who] had been told that the soldiers had been shot. … I just could not believe it … our efforts had been in vain, the soldiers had been executed and we had been unable to prevent it.’

The following morning, just two hours before the ceasefire began, the bodies of four soldiers were found in Ellis’ Quarry on the outskirts of Cork. Each soldier had been blindfolded and shot through the head. A British soldier photographed the bodies in situ (see photo) and the killings soon featured in anti-Republican propaganda produced by the British military and the Free State.

A century later this incident remains one of the most controversial events of the War of Independence. It has repeatedly been presented in academic work, popular histories, newspaper columns and on television as pointless unprovoked murder committed by republicans whose sole motivation was a belief that the impending ceasefire meant they could never be brought to account.

In The IRA and Its Enemies Peter Hart used this incident as an example of the IRA’s ‘dirty war’ and he later suggested that republicans ‘made a point of killing as many enemies as possible up until the last minute [before the Truce]’.

Writing in the Irish Times Kevin Myers cited the killing as an example of how the IRA exploited the announcement of the Truce as ‘a once-in-a-lifetime Summer Sale of murder, guaranteed without legal consequence’. Eoghan Harris suggested in the Sunday Independent that the shootings were the direct result of IRA ‘blood lust’. The killings also featured in Eunan O’Halpin’s TV3 documentary In The Name of the Republic.

 These killings became part of the urban folklore of Cork and stories about the event were embellished to emphasise that these British soldiers were mere boys who left their barracks to go sweet shopping. Cork author Gerard Murphy cited the killings in his book The Year of Disappearances as an indicator of the ‘degradation’ the IRA had sunk to by 1921 and stated the four were ‘teenage soldiers who had gone out to buy sweets in view of the impending Truce’.

Local historian, Richard Henchion, described the killings as ‘evil’ in The Land of the Finest Drop claiming the soldiers had been buying sweets on the Bandon Road when they were spotted by IRA Volunteers who were playing pool in the a nearby hall. According to Henchion several IRA Volunteers refused to take part in the executions and all four soldiers were shot by one member of the IRA . Henchion implied that Connie Neenan was responsible: ‘While Neenan by his own words clears himself of involvement … the traditional story is adamant that he was in the hall that night playing billiards … His version has never been accepted by the non-aligned general public.’

Despite the significant attention that has been paid to these killings none of those who wrote them questioned the assumption that the killings were sparked by the advent of the Truce.

Furthermore, none of these authors researched the context of the killings in enough depth to establish that there were direct links between the Ellis Quarry killings and the killing of an IRA Volunteer by the British forces the previous night. Now, recently released material from the Military Archives not only exonerates Connie Neenan – it also  identifys those responsible.

There is no evidence to support the claim that the soldiers left their barracks specifically to go sweet shopping when they were killed. Although one of the soldiers may have had a bag of sweets when captured, the earliest account of the shootings from Walter Phillip’s The Revolution in Ireland (1923) states the four soldiers ‘were being “treated” by a friendly publican in celebration of the Truce’. The probability that the soldiers had been drinking when captured has been erased from the most recent highly emotive accounts of the incident which seek to emphasise the supposed innocence and childlike demeanour of the soldiers.

Claims that the soldiers were mere ‘teenagers’ are false – all four soldiers were aged in their twenties. Nor were the soldiers particularly naive or inexperienced ‘raw recruits’. One of the four Henry Morris, was a labourer before joining the British Army in 1914. He was a veteran of the First World War and had served on the Western Front, where he was wounded twice and survived a gas attack.

The verifiable facts are that the soldiers left the British Army post at Cork Jail. They were travelling on foot and were unarmed. At 8 pm they were captured by a patrol of seven IRA volunteers who had been searching an area from Donovan’s Bridge along the Western Road in search of a suspected civilian informer. The only surviving account of the executions by an IRA participant is the official report sent to the IRA GHQ which gave no indication as to the grounds on which the execution was carried out. It simply reads: ‘We held up four soldiers (2 Royal Engineers, 2 Staffordshires) and searched them but found no arms. We took them to a field in our area where they were executed before 9 p.m.’

The author of this report, the Captain of H Company, 1^st Battalion, Cork City Brigade, had led the operation and ordered the executions. However, like most contemporary IRA reports, it was signed with his rank, not his name which made it practically impossible to identify him.

The recent release of the IRA Organisation and Membership Files by the Military Archives enables us for the first time to identify those who held rank in IRA at the time of the Truce. The Captain of H Company who wrote this report and ordered the executions was Dan Hallinan a 36 year old, plasterer from Bishopstown, Cork. Not only does the identification of Hallinan exonerate Neenan, it also suggests a definite motive for the Ellis Quarry killings.

The night before the Ellis Quarry killings, British soldiers captured IRA Volunteer Denis Spriggs at his family home in Strawberry Hill, Cork. Spriggs, a 20 year old plasterer, was asleep in bed when the raiders struck at midnight. He was unarmed and on being confronted by the British soldiers he immediately surrendered without offering resistance. Spriggs was placed on a lorry with an armed guard and was driven a short distance to Blarney Street where he was shot dead. The official British military version of events is that Spriggs had been shot dead ‘while attempting to escape’. However the officer who led the raid, Lieutenant d’Ydewalle, had a history of involvement in the killings of unarmed prisoners and the likelihood is that Spriggs’ killing was a premeditated and deliberate act.

The British soldiers who had killed Spriggs were members of the South Staffordshire Regiment. Two of the British soldiers killed at Ellis quarry the following night, Daker and Morris were also South Staffordshires. Hallinan who ordered their execution appears to have known Denis Spriggs personally.  As well as being members of the same IRA Battalion, both Hallinan and Spriggs worked as plasterers and were involved in the Cork Plasterers’ Union. All of the previous multiple shootings of off-duty British soldiers in Cork had been reprisals to avenge local IRA Volunteers killed while prisoners in British custody. These facts suggest that, far from being a pointless and unprovoked mass murder, the Ellis Quarry killings were a reprisal for the killing of Spriggs.

Daniel Hallinan was expelled from the IRA during the Truce period, he was exiled from Cork and went to Dublin to enlist in the Civic Guard Ireland’s new pro-Treaty police force. Hallinan was quickly promoted to the rank of Superintendent but his career as a police officer was short-lived. He was expelled from the force in January 1925 for indiscipline. Hallinan returned to Cork and resumed his previous trade as a plasterer. Hallinan was brought to court in 1932 charged with the theft of funds belonging to the Operative Plasters and Tilers Society. He was declared bankrupt shortly afterwards and served a term of imprisonment in Cork Jail.

Although it was widely known that those responsible for the Ellis Quarry killings had taken a pro-Treaty stance during the Civil War the incident was continually exploited by prominent Free State supporters in Cork who sought to blame Connie Neenan and his anti-Treaty IRA comrades.

‘A priest who had been on our side … turned violently against us during the Civil War. He strongly denounced the shooting of the four soldiers … I told him straight out that he lionised our [Free State] opponents although he knew perfectly well that those who shot the four soldiers were mem­bers of that very opposition of ours. Still the priest continued his accusations that we were all mur­derers, bank robbers and common criminals.”

Whilst Hallinan’s role as the orchestrator of the Ellis Quarry killings has only just come to light – the information about the involvement of the South Staffordshire regiment in both that incident and the killing of Denis Spriggs has been available for decades. Those keen to re-tell the tale of the Ellis Quarry killings as an unprovoked and cynical exploitation of the announcement of the Truce have consistently failed to put the incident in its historical context or explore whether the IRA had any other possible motives.

The simplistic way the Ellis Quarry Killings has been portrayed and its exploitation as anti-Republican propaganda is typical of similar stories about pre-Truce killings which have also become highly mythologised.  By focusing inordinately on IRA killings in the pre-Truce period, generations of historians and writers have produced a biased history of the last days of the War of Independence and created a hierarchy of victimhood lamenting the deaths of those killed in eleventh-hour IRA attacks while consistently ignoring equally contentious killings committed by the British forces in the same period.

Sources

Provisional Military Inquiry in Lieu of Inquest for Denis Spriggs, (NAUK, WO35/159A)

Connie Neenan Memoir, Cork City and County Archives pps 70a -71.

RIC County Inspector’s report – July 1921 (NAUK, CO, 904/115)

Activity Report O/C H Company, 1st Battalion, Cork. No. 1 Brigade IRA, July 1921 (UCDA, RMP, P7/A/23)

W.Alison Philips, The Revolution in Ireland 1906 -1923 (London 1923) p. 216

Uniseann McEoin, Survivors, Dublin (1980), p. 241.

Kevin Myers, Irish Times, 27th August 1994.

Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, (Oxford, 1998)

Peter Hart, The IRA at War (Oxford, 2003)

Richard Henchion “The Land of the Finest Drop” (Cork, 2003)

Gerard Murphy, The Year of Disappearances, (1st ed. Dublin, 2010)

Eoghan Harris, Sunday Independent, 31st March 2013.

Eunan O’Halpin, In the Name of the Republic, TV3, March 2013.

http://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-service-pensions-collection

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, was recently awarded a PhD in history. His latest book “Truce: Murder, Myth and the last days of the Irish War of Independence’ has just been published by Mercier Press. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Truce-Murder-Myth-Irish-Independence/dp/1781173850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452259963&sr=1-1

 By Marguerite Helmers,

Published by Irish Academic Press, 2016.

Reviewer: Patricia Curtin Kelly

Harry Clarke (1889-1931) is best known for his magnificent stained glass windows but he was also a renowned graphic artist and illustrator, and carried out commissions for Harrap’s of London, among others.  He also designed letter-heads for such companies as the Irish National Insurance Company and his illustrations for Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe were a major critical and commercial success.    Clarke was born in Dublin and trained in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (1905-10) and, for a short period, at the National Art Training School in Kensington, London (1906).

He was commissioned, in 1919, to illustrate Ireland’s Memorial Records 1914-18 which commemorate enlisted Irish men who died in World War 1 (WW1).   Published by the Irish Academic Press, Marguerite Helmers, Rosebush Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA has written Harry Clarke’s War – Ireland’s Memorial Records 1914-1918, which gives fascinating details on the background and history of this commission, as well as Clarke’s approach to the illustration work.

From the 19^th century onwards, there was a strong tradition of Irishmen joining the British Army, probably driven predominantly by the promise of a regular income in difficult times.  To encourage local recruitment, the country was divided into catchment areas, which resulted in such well-known regiments as the Munster Fusiliers and the Dublin Fusiliers.

At the outbreak of WW1, John Redmond (1856-1918), leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, had called on Irish nationalists to support the Allied war effort by enlisting in the British Army.   He saw this as a means of ensuring the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act.   In 1916, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizens’ Army seized strategic locations in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic.  In 1919, therefore, Ireland was a country in turmoil, divided by the issue of Home rule.   Irish Nationalists saw their goal almost within reach whereas Unionists, led by Dubliner Lord Edward Carson (1854-1918), prepared for resistance by force.

Clarke probably received the commission for this work from his patron Laurence Waldron (1858-1923).   He was one of a small group convened by the Viceroy of Ireland, Sir John French (1852-1925), to create a memorial to the Irishmen who had died in WW1.   The group came together in July 1919 and decided to build a room to house a series of memorial scrolls in eight books.   These records list 49,435 men who were killed in action or died of wounds.

A hundred sets were sent to libraries and churches throughout Ireland and Allied countries.   After the Armistice, many countries produced such books of records as a memorial to their dead countrymen.   Such books did not include illustrations, therefore, Ireland’s Memorial Records are different in that they also include Harry Clarke’s elaborate depictions.

The complexity of enlisting in the British Army at the time cannot be underestimated.   While those who supported the British Government wanted to commemorate those who had sacrificed their lives, Irish Nationalists found this to be traitorous.   Surviving soldiers came home to a different Ireland and were not, by and large, regarded as heroes.   Helmers gives a general background to this complex history and also places Ireland’s Memorial Records in the context of the development of War Art, the Arts and Crafts Movement and popular silent films.   Most of the book is dedicated to describing and analysing the nine plates illustrated by Harry Clarke.

Clarke designed a Celtic inspired title page and eight illustrated bordered pages.   One could say that he took inspiration from Medieval Prayer books as they also have elaborate borders surrounding text.   Clarke’s borders contain soldiers in silhouette, ruined houses, graves, trenches, the Gallipoli Peninsula, cavalry, airplanes, tanks, bursting shells and search lights.   Clarke did not serve in the War and took his inspiration from photographs in such magazines as The Irish Soldier as well as silent black and white films.

Medieval manuscripts were full of lavish colours as are the stained glass windows designed by Harry Clarke.   In this instance, however, he has depicted the borders in stark silhouettes of black and white.   This adds considerably to their dramatic impact and authenticity.   Clarke is conscious of commemorating Irishmen as he uses Irish motifs inspired by the Celtic Revival as well as the Book of Kells in his illustrations.

The cover page has a round tower, a Celtic cross, a rising sun, a female figure of Ireland with wolf and harp at her side, as well as four angels holding the emblems of Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connaught.   Clarke does not glorify war as his illustrations are both somber and thought provoking.   He also presents religious symbols such as the Virgin and Child, Cross of Sacrifice and angels with laurel leaves.

Clarke presents badges of seventeen Irish Regiments in his illustrated borders.   He also includes a kangaroo to honour the contribution of the Australian and New Zealand Allies and a maple leaf for the Canadians.   The book contains 49,435 names but it is contended that this represents only a fraction of Irish people who died as a result of WW1.    For example, Irishmen who served in other non-Irish regiments are not included, neither are there any female names.   What is incontrovertible, however, is Clarke’s artistic achievement in these books.

After Clarke’s death, Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was commissioned to design a memorial garden and room in Islandbridge, Dublin, to house a set of these eight books.   He designed special cases for the books so that they could be displayed to the public, one page at a time, as happens to the Book of Kells in TCD.

Helmers has produced a meticulously researched book on the historical context and story of Ireland’s Memorial Records as well as the illustrations in these books.   She also confirms Clarke’s prowess as a graphic artist and as a key person in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland.   As a footnote, Helmers points out that this book also represents two forgotten spaces – Ireland’s Memorial Records and the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, Dublin.   She has sourced the locations for eighty sets of these books worldwide which are available to view.   Now would be a good time to seek out these forgotten gems and to read about them beforehand in this book.

Patricia Curtin-Kelly is a Cork born Art Historian who lives in Dublin.   She holds an M.A. in Art History from University College, Dublin and an M.Sc. in Human Resources Management from Sheffield Hallam University.   Her book, An Ornament to the City – Holy Trinity Church & the Capuchin Order, was published by the History Press in 2015.

Portrait of a 19th century Irish woman novelist. By Maeve O’Sullivan

As a young woman, who has a keen and passionate interest in literature and Irish history, I am always looking for a way to join the two together. With that in mind, I struck gold on one cold winters evening, when I found the solution to my problem in the comfort of my own home – a prolific Irish female author of the nineteenth century.

When flicking through my local town’s history journal: ‘Rosscarbery Past and Present Volume 13’, I discovered an article all about a female author named Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. As luck would have it, not only was she an Irish author, but I was astonished to learn that both Mrs Margaret Wolfe Hungerford and I, share the same town land, with just 161 years of a difference. So close that we could have been next door neighbours. Surely this was the best way of combining my love of literature and history together for my ideal world? With a little bit more research I was able to get to know more about her.

It was the year 1855 and the Great Famine had been over for less than a decade. Three years later James Stephens would found the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Paris. In the same Rosscarbery, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1856  founded the Phoenix National and Literary Society, the aim of which was “the liberation of Ireland by force of arms However, these Irish heroes are not the only person worth talking about.

Margaret Wolfe Hamilton was born in Rosscarbery, County Cork, in 1855, the eldest daughter of a Church of Ireland minister, Canon Fitzjohn Stannus Hamilton. Canon Hamilton, whose family came from Dunboyne near Dublin, was the rector and vicar choral of St.Fachtna’s cathedral. Margaret would have had quite a comfortable life style, as being the daughter of a well recognised religious figure came with some perks, such as access to an education, which by no means all girls her age had. Margaret went to a local school where her talent of storytelling quickly showed and she won compositions prizes with stories initially written to entertain her friends.

Margaret moved to Dublin when she left school. However, the reason for this move is unknown. Perhaps she moved so that she could give her a writing career a stronger platform; as Dublin was believed to have better opportunities than Cork, especially in terms of literature. She first married Edward Argles, a Dublin solicitor at the early age of seventeen. Marriage at seventeen in today’s society is considered rare but according the University of Glasgow, a girl could get married as early as twelve years old in 1800s.

Soon after her marriage Margaret had three daughters: Daisy, Reine and Elsie. It is possible that the early marriage was due to pregnancy. Unfortunately luck was not with Margaret and her husband died in Canada for reasons unknown when her oldest child Daisy was about six years old.

This left Margaret, a twenty three year old widow to raise three young children while at the same time trying to develop her writing career.

With that in mind, Margaret returned to her home, Milleen House in Rosscarbery, County Cork where she met Thomas Henry Hungerford, who lived at Cahermore House – situated just around the corner from where she lived. Thomas Henry came from the well known family: The Hungerfords. They were the landlords of the townland at that time so it can only be assumed that at some previous stage, their families conversed; maybe as friendly neighbours or perhaps just for business.

Thomas Henry was the eldest son of Henry Jones Hungerford and Mary Boon Couper. Thomas Henry was born December 6^th, 1858. As the oldest son, he was trained for the army, but when the time came for him to buy his commission his father refused to give up the money for it. When the Boer War in 1881 came along, Thomas Henry enlisted however he was contacted by his mother who sent for him to return home at once as his father was behaving badly. He rushed home at once only to find his mother had lied and only wanted him home to marry a very rich young lady, Miss Townsend of Derry House. Henry refused to marry her and she later went on to marry George Bernard Shaw.

It is unknown for how long Thomas Henry and Margaret courted but we do know that they had a secret marriage ceremony in London, while there on a business trip for Margaret to meet with publishers. Thomas Henry’s mother was still very annoyed over her son’s failure to marry Miss Townsend and that he had chosen a widow with three children and who had a career as a writer, instead. Perhaps this is what drove the couple for a secret wedding and what sparked the ensuing unpleasant relationship between Margaret and her mother-in-law.

The couple returned to live in Milleen House where children Henry and Vera were born. When Vera was about two or three the whole family went to live at St.Brenda’s House in Bandon (now called Overton House) which they rented.

The move was prompted because Margaret was so afraid of her mother-in-law that she couldn’t even bring her self to eat with her and she was very unhappy in her house. Margaret and Thomas Henry’s son Tom was born in St.Brenda’s. This is where the happiest years of Margaret’s life were spent and here she wrote most of her novels. She begun to write during her first marriage and continued to write until her death when she was in the middle of her book ‘’The Coming of Chloe’. She spent eight happy years in St.Brenda’s.

Her plots follow the usual conventions of romantic novels of the day. They contain delicate love scenes that were never offensive to the ideals of Victorian morals. Her works are characterized as entertaining and charming, though usually not of great depth. She tends to have little to see of character development, tending more towards flirtatious dialogue. She captured the tone of contemporary fashionable society, and sometimes used Irish settings. 

Her novels had a great vogue in their day. Often writing on commission, she wrote many novels, short stories, and newspaper articles. Her books continued selling as fast as she could write them. Most of the books appeared anonymously but a few bore the pseudonym ‘The duchess’. Perhaps an indication that women authors still struggled to be recognised.

The first novel, ‘Phyllis’, appeared in 1877. Other books she wrote were ‘Portia’ , ‘Faith and Unfaith’, and ‘An Unsatisfactory Lover’ which tells the story of Terentia O’More who is a wilful, impoverished orphan who is courted by the well-off and older suitor, Mr. Trefusis, and her equally poor cousin, Lawrence.

The most popular of all was perhaps ‘Molly Bawn’ 1878; the story of a petulant Irish girl and a flirt, who arouses her lover’s jealousy and naively ignores social conventions. Margaret was officially credited with the well known saying ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which appeared in her novel ‘Molly Bawn’. (www.phrases.org.uk)

On January 24th 1897, Margaret died of typhoid fever at just age forty-two. She was buried in the Hungerford of Cahermore vault in Rosscarbery. Her coffin was carried by the tenants of Cahermore estate from the causeway to the church. Her husband Thomas Henry Hungerford was broken hearted.

I searched for the Hungerford vault in which Margaret was laid to rest in and luckily I found it in my hometown of Rosscarbery. The inscription on the base of her tomb reads:

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wife of Thomas Henry Hungerford died 24^th Jan 1897 ‘Neither death nor life shall be able to separate us from the love of God’.

The 18^th and 19^th century saw an increase in women writers. Women like Jane Austin, Charlotte and Emily Bronte were active writers of this time and along side Margaret, they helped in bringing down the wall around the idea that women were not educated enough to be writers. Even though they are two/ three centuries gone, they are perfect role models for female writers of the 21^st century.

Sources

‘Rosscarbery: Past and Present Volume 13’

History enthusiast, Michael Harte.

University of Glasgow

www.phrases.org.uk

The Irish Story in association with the People’s College is proud to present a series of 8 historical lectures focusing on  the 1916 Rising. This is part of its Programme to celebrate 1916 and Parnell Square – the “Rebel Square. “

Commencement Date:  Wednesday 27^th January 2016.

Lectures will be 60 minutes followed by discussion.

 VENUE: INTO Learning Centre, 38 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

TIME: 6.30pm

 1. 27^th January The Irish Citizen Army             Brian Hanley

The Irish Citizen Army was a trade union militia was founded in the 1913 Lockout. Brian will discuss its role in the insurrection of 1916, its socialist and feminist credentials and its legacy on Irish republicanism.

Dr. Brian Hanley is the author of; The IRA  A Documentary History, 1919-2005, The IRA: 1926-1936, and with Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution, The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party and Our Rising, Cabra 1916.

2. 3^rd February ‘Home Rule, Home Fronts’: the 1916 Rising and the Irish Parliamentary Party   Darragh Gannon

The Irish Parliamentary Party was the dominant force in Irish politics up to the Rising. In this talk, Darragh Gannon discusses the party’s rise and fall amid the stalling of Home Rule, The First World War and the Easter Rising.

Dr Gannon tutors in Irish and European history at UCD.  He was awarded his doctorate by NUI Maynooth in 2012 for a thesis entitled ‘Irish republicanism in Great Britain, 1917-21’. He has published in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium andEire-Ireland and is currently completing a monograph entitled Conflict, diaspora and empire: Irish nationalism in Great Britain, 1912-22. 

3. 10^th February Proclamation of 1803, 1867 & 1916        Padraig Ó Óg Ruairc

How did the celebrated proclamation of the Republic in 1916 compare to previous efforts in 1803- Robert Emmet’s rebellion – and the Fenian Rising of 1867? Padraig Og O Ruairc discusses them with regard to their democratic, egalitarian and non-sectarian credentials.

 Padraig Ó Óg Ruairc has recently completed his PhD at the University of Limerick. He has published a number of books on the Irish revolution; Blood on the Banner The Republic Struggle in Clare, The Battle for Limerick City 1922 and Revolution: A Photographic History of Revolutionary Ireland 1913-1922. His latest book  “Truce: Murder, Myth and the last days of the Irish War of Independence’ has just been published by Mercier Press.

4. 17^th February Five Glorious Days – or a Week of Slaughter                        John Dorney

What did the Easter Rising look like on the ground? How intense was the fighting across Dublin?  How did both sides interact with civilians and what was the human cost? John Dorney discusses these questions.

John Dorney is the editor and main contributor to the Irish Story. His first book ‘Peace After the Final Battle, the Story of the Irish Revolution’ was published by New Island Press in 2014. he is curently working on a history of the Irish Civil War in Dublin 1922-23.

5. 24^th February A Schoolmasters’ Rebellion? The INTO Experience           Noel Ward

Like Padraig Pearse, many of the Rising’s key players were teachers. Noel Ward explores their experiences.

Noel is INTO Deputy General Secretary/General Treasurer since Easter 2010.  He holds a primary degree, a H. Dip. in Education and an MA in Education from UCD

6. 2^nd March The Dog that Failed to Bark – The Easter Rising in Cork    John Borgonovo

We remember the Easter Rising as a Dublin event but nearly as many Irish Volunteers were moblised in Ireland’s second city, Cork in 1916. In this lecture John Borgonovo explains why the Easter Rising failed to happen in the southern capital.

Dr. John Borgonovo is an American-born but Cork-based historian. He has written, Spies Informers and the Anti-Sinn Fein Society, The Intelligence war in Cork City, 1920-1921, on the War of Independence in Cork city. More recently he has written ‘The Battle for Cork City 1922’ and most recently The dynamics of war and revolution, Cork city, 1916-1918. He teaches at University College Cork

7. 9^th March Cumann na mBan & Separation Women – Women’s Experience of the Rising   Fionnuala Walsh.

Women were both insurgents and loyalists in 1916. Many women – about 300 – served in the Rising in Cumman na mBan and the Citizen Army, but many others ‘Separation Women’ with relatives in the British Army in the Great War were among the Risings’ most implacable opponents. In this talk, Fionnuala Walsh will talk about what the Rising really meant for Irish women.

Fionnuala Walsh is based at Trinity College Dublin and is an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar. Fionnuala is working on the experiences of Irish women in the Great War and has recently completed a Phd on the subject. 

8.16^th March Oral History and the Rising of 1916,  Eve Morrison

The Irish nationalist revolution in general and the Easter Rising in particular must be one of the best documented revolutions in modern history. This is especially true since the release of the Bureau of Military History interviews in 2003, in which hundreds of Rising veterans gave testimony. Eve Morrison, as expert on the Bureau and other oral history sources will speak about what they teach us about the Rising.

Dr Eve Morrison is an IRC postdoctoral fellow in the UCD School of History and Archives, working on the project Remembering violence and war: contexualising the Ernie O’Malley Notebooks. She studied history at Trinity College Dublin, and was a recipient of an IRCHSS post-graduate scholarship. She is currently writing a book on the Bureau of Military History based on her doctoral work for Liverpool University Press.

Cost: €30 for all 8 lectures or €5 per individual lecture

You can book online here http://www.peoplescollege.ie/courses/lecture-series-people-remembering-people/ 

The Clareman who led a British ‘murder gang’ in Roscommon. By Paidraig Og O Ruairc.

On the morning of the 11th of July 1921 the town of Castlerea in Roscommon bustled with activity. After two and a half years of guerrilla warfare a Truce had been agreed between the IRA and the British Crown Forces which was due to start at noon that day.

The townspeople, eager for news of the ceasefire, awaited the delivery of the Dublin newspapers and the chief topic of conversation everywhere was the ceasefire. Unnoticed, two IRA Volunteers, Thomas Crawley and Ned Campion, stood, apparently in idle conversation, inside a shop drinking lemonade. They were keeping a close watch on the passers by outside on Patrick Street waiting in the hope that Sergeant James King might appear.

Sergeant King, a native of county Clare, was a forty four year old married man with four children. He had served twenty three years in the Royal Irish Constabulary (the British colonial police force in Ireland)  and had spent eight years in Castlerea after being promoted to the rank of Sergeant. In that time he had become both hated and feared by the local republicans.

King had an intimate knowledge of the area and it’s people and he knew in detail the activities of the local IRA. Sergeant King was the chief instigator in the British backlash against popular Republicanism in Roscommon during the War of Independence and he personally led what the local populace dubbed the ‘Castlerea Murder Gang.’

Throughout the Irish War of Independence military activity by the IRA in Roscommon had been hindered by poor leadership and a flat local terrain unsuitable for the type of guerrilla warfare the IRA had developed in the southwest. However the biggest problem the Roscommon IRA faced was infiltration by British spies and informers who worked for Sergeant King.

Thomas Crawley, the Vice-Commandant of the IRA’s South Roscommom Brigade recalled: “We were damned right from the start by having traitors and agents amongst us and in the area and we were never really able to get control over this situation or eliminate that danger. …Quite a number of men in the Castlereagh area were shot in their beds by the RIC or taken out of their beds and shot, and all of these can be put down to the activities of that ruffian.”

Acting on intelligence received from a British spy Patrick Conroy, an IRA Volunteer was abducted from his home on the 6th of April 1921 by the RIC and Black and Tans. His dead body was found in a nearby field a short time later. The local IRA maintained that Sergeant King was responsible for Conroy’s murder.

In the early hours of the 2nd of June another two IRA members, Michael Carty and Peter Shannon, both of whom were ‘on the run’ staying at a republican safe house were surprised by an RIC raiding party. Carty was killed and Shannon, though shot six times, managed to survive. Again the IRA’s chief suspect for these killings was Sergeant King who was alleged to have led both raids.

On the night of the 22nd of June 1921 the ‘Castlerea Murder Gang’ struck once more. This time a force of RIC and Black and Tans led by Sergeant King surrounded the Vaughan family home at Cloonsuck, Roscommon.

They surprised three IRA Volunteers, John Vaughan, Ned Shanahan and Martin Ganly who were sleeping in their beds. The three republicans were all armed but never got a chance to draw their weapons. They fled the house as the RIC raiders entered but Ned Shanahan and John Vaughan were shot dead as they ran and Martin Ganly was captured and taken prisoner. Not content with having killed two wanted republicans and captured another Sergeant King took up a rifle and beat Vaughan’s mother  unconscious with it and then shot dead the family’s dog before departing.

The RIC’s success in pinpointing the hiding places of IRA men who were ‘on the run’ made it obvious that there was a spy at work. It was soon revealed that Paddy Egan the Brigade Intelligence Officer for the South Roscommon Brigade was a double agent who had been working for the British and he fled to the USA before the IRA could capture him.

With Egan’s escape Sergeant King became the main focus of the IRA’s revenge. Sergeant King was aware of this development and, for his own safety, he began sleeping in the  local RIC Barracks instead of his family home in Patrick Street, Castlerea but returned there sometimes early in the day for breakfast. On the morning of the 11th of July Thomas Crawley was waiting.

“Sergeant King of the RIC was the principal man in the murder gang that was organised in the RIC in Castlereagh and was responsible for a number of killings around the area. He was badly wanted by us. On the morning of the Truce, the11th July 1921, we made a final effort to get this man. Between 10 and 11a.m. on that morning we proceeded into the town on this mission. …

We went into a shop to get a drink of lemonade and when only a few minutes there Sergeant King came out of his own house on the opposite side of the street and proceeded to get on his cycle as if to go to the barracks. We left the shop. Ned Campion and I let him have it. He died immediately. Although the truce took effect at 12 o’ clock on that day, the enemy chased us until about 6pm that evening. We finally escaped them, however, by adopting the role of shepherds gathering up sheep.” King was struck in the chest by at least two of his attackers bullets and despite receiving prompt medical attention died at approximately 10.30 am  – less than two hours before the ceasefire was due to begin.

Whilst the killing of the first two members of the RIC, Constables James O’Connell and Patrick McDonnell shot at at Soloheadbeg, had shocked the nation on the first day of the War of Independence in January 1919- the death of Sergeant King less than two hours before the Truce  on the 11^th July 1921 barely caused a ripple in a country that had become numbed by violence, and few people mourned the passing of the leader of the ‘Castlerea murder Gang’.

In more recent years a number of commentators have sought to rewrite history by portraying Sergeant King as an innocent who died as the last tragic victim of the conflict. For example the newspaper columnist Kevin Myers claimed that King was a pious Catholic, a deeply religious man, who had been foully murdered by the IRA as a ’soft target’ as he went about his religious observances.

According to Myers; James King was “a daily communicant … murdered in Castlerea as he cycled to Mass”. Myers claimed that Sergeant King’s was the last inoffensive victim of an IRA murder campaign a “once in a life time Summer sale of murder” orchestrated by the IRA to kill as many innocent victims as possible before the ceasefire began.

Myers one-sided and inaccurate account failed to mention Sergeant King’s role as head of the ‘Castlerea Murder Gang’ or his role as a perpetrator of several reprisal killings. Sergeant King was not the last victim of the conflict – this dubious ‘honour’ fell to Hannah Carey a hotel employee who was shot dead without warning at her workplace in the Imperial Hotel, Killarney by Sergeant King’s comrades in the RIC – However Carey’s killing has been airbrushed from history by politicians, newspaper columnists and historians who have sought to whitewash men like RIC Sergeant James King.

Sources

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc has a PhD in History from the University of Limerick. His new book “Truce: Murder, Myth and the last days of the Irish War of Independence” has just been published by Mercier Press.