Colm Wallace tells the story of a shocking crime in rural Kilkenny in April 1923.

After the Civil War finished the Irish court system found itself with a long backlog of criminal cases needing to be tried. The death penalty was imposed many times in 1923 [1]  but surely one of the most shocking crimes to come before the courts involved Kilkenny native Patrick Aylward.

The killing of defenceless children is an especially repugnant crime. It is impossible to fathom why someone would commit such an act. Unbelievably, Aylward’s motivation was said to have been a long-running feud with his neighbours. The question remains, almost a century after this strange trial, however; did Patrick Aylward murder an infant to exact revenge on a family he despised?

Patrick Aylward of Rochestown and the Holdens

Patrick Aylward was a farmer from the townland of Rochestown, a mile and a half from Mullinavat in South Kilkenny. Like many defendants at the time, contemporary records did not state his age, merely describing him as “middle-aged”.

In many cases in the early part of the last century, the people themselves were unsure how old they were as many had no birth certificate at all.

Instead they often described themselves as “middle-aged,” “elderly,” “about 35 or 36” and so on. Aylward, it transpired from later prison records, was born in 1860, making him about 63 years old at the time of the murder. He had spent nearly forty years in America, spending most of his time in Connecticut where he made plated cutlery.

He decided to return to Kilkenny in 1922 to take care of his two elderly brothers, both of whom still lived on the family farm. One brother, William, had since died leaving Patrick to earn a living on their twenty-five acre farm for himself and John, his remaining sibling. Fifty yards away from the Aylward homestead lived their neighbours, the Holden family. The family included Patrick, his wife Mary and their eight children. Relations between the two households were not good.

Patrick Aylward had complained many times about the alleged trespassing on his land by fowl and goats which belonged to the Holden family. On one occasion, Aylward set his dog on a goat belonging to Mrs. Holden which had wandered onto his land. After this incident a dead fowl belonging to the Holdens was found in the haggard of Aylward.

Mary Holden described her neighbour as violent and said that he had twice struck her with his stick. Aylward would deny this accusation, later telling the authorities that Mary Holden was “of the tramp class” and that the Holden family had a campaign of intimidation against him, even involving their children.

He asserted that the mother of the Holden household had attacked him on more than one occasion while her sons constantly annoyed his animals and had used his well as a toilet. What started out as a minor disagreement was about to take a far more sinister turn.

The assault on baby William Holden

On the evening of Saturday, the 21^st April 1923, Patrick Holden was out at work while his wife was minding the children. At 5pm, Mary put her eighteen month old baby William to bed. She then left for the nearby townland of Lisronan where she was planning to buy an outfit for her eldest son’s confirmation scheduled for the following week.

The spring of 1923 was a particularly dangerous time with the Civil War still ongoing and crime rampant. Despite this, the Holdens saw fit to put eight-year-old Patrick in charge of the house. They told him to lock the door from the inside and stay there.

He was left with his brother Michael, his sister Mary and the infant, William. William, the second youngest of the Holden family, was a “very feeble child, barely able to move hand or foot.” He suffered from rickets and was not able to crawl or walk. His mother said “he would stay (in bed) for a month without leaving it.” That is where he was, sleeping peacefully, when his mother left.

Some minutes afterwards, Patrick Aylward allegedly walked the short distance over and rapped at the door of the Holden house, demanding admittance. Patrick, Michael and William were all in the kitchen at this point. After some deliberation, they opened the door to their neighbour. When Aylward entered the room he turned around to the door and twisted the key, re-locking it from the inside. He next extracted the key and put it in his pocket before allegedly telling the children that he “would put an end to the trespassing.” William was still lying down asleep in a bed near the fire wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Aylward, the Holden children said, lifted the small boy and walked over to the fire in which sticks were burning. He then allegedly held the infant down over the burning grate. Patrick Holden endeavoured to intervene but he was powerless against the strength of the older man. Aylward stayed watching the crying infant as he burned on the fire, all the while using a stick to hold off the other children making sure they could not aid their infant brother.

Just as William’s clothes caught fire, Aylward said “Don’t let them goats into my haggard anymore” before dropping the key and striding out the door. The other children quickly removed their infant brother down from the burning-hot grate and put him in a bucket of water to try and quench the flames. They then put the severely-burned baby back into his bed and locked the door.

Patrick Holden Snr. arrived home within the next few minutes to be met with several hysterical children and a baby suffering from life-threatening burns. There were no Gardaí in the area at that turbulent point in Irish history, so Holden instead sent for a local GP. The doctor had to come from Waterford, a journey of over ten miles, and consequently he did not arrive until the next morning.

Meanwhile the Holdens wrapped the baby in cotton wool and waited. When Dr. Coghlan finally called he knocked at the back door of the house. Mary Holden, unsure of who it was, did not answer the door as she was too afraid. Coghlan then saw Patrick Aylward walking by and asked him if that was the Holden’s house. Aylward told him that it was before adding “they’re all mad over there.”

When the doctor was eventually admitted to the Holden house, he described the baby’s condition as follows: “He was in a state of collapse…charred black all over the back and over the lungs. There were burns on both the arms towards the elbows.” William Holden was subsequently brought to hospital but died within twenty-four hours of the incident. His death was attributed to toxaemia, a type of blood poisoning caused by the heat he was subjected to.

The case against Patrick Aylward

Early on the morning after the tragedy, Patrick Holden went to Aylward’s house and accused him of roasting his son. Patrick Aylward strenuously denied it, implying that the Holdens had told their children to tell lies about him.

The coroner’s inquest took place just days after the murder. Aylward appeared and denied having any part in the burning, claiming that he had no grudge against the Holden family.

Nevertheless, the jury recommended that the Gardaí pursue the matter further. The coroner called the case a sad and regrettable occurrence. He had harsh words for the Holdens as well, however, telling them that he did not know whether to sympathise with them because they “left this little infant and three other little children and went away a quarter of a mile from home.” Aylward was arrested on the 8^th May. He replied “I did not do it.”

Patrick Aylward’s murder trial began on the 26^th November, just days after William Devereux’s death sentence was pronounced. The evidence of the Holden children was critical to the case against Aylward. Mr. Carrigan, prosecutor, described the prisoner as “charged with a crime which, if proved against him, was as terrible and hideous a crime as any one described as a human being could commit.”

Aylward himself, permitted by the court to sit for the duration of the trial, maintained a “cool demeanour” throughout, despite the gravity of the charges against him. He pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The prosecution characterised Aylward as a strange and immoral creature. They described his house as “not fit for human habitation. He kept cattle on the ground floor…and lived in his loft. The place was a veritable cesspool and manure heap.” When Dr. Matthew Coghlan took the stand, he was asked about the condition of the young boy and whether the other children could have accidently inflicted such wounds on him if they had taken him out of the bed to play with him.

The doctor stated that he did not believe that William Holden’s injuries could have occurred accidently as they were too severe. He added that as the boy had been suffering from rickets, a disease usually caused by malnutrition, his bones were seriously underdeveloped. For this reason the doctor replied that the infant could not, in his opinion, have got out of bed and burned himself on the fire.

He was further questioned about the character of the accused, Aylward. Coughlan described him as a “degenerate” and said that when he met him he “made up his mind that he was mentally abnormal.” He opined that the accused was responsible for his actions, however, and capable of distinguishing right from wrong.

The next witness was 9-year-old Patrick Holden. Holden was described as an intelligent witness, although he had never gone to school and was unable to write his name. He gave his account of the tragic day. He described letting Aylward into the house. Aylward asked him “what do you want to leave the goats in the haggard for?” he then broke a mug and searched under the bed for something.

After getting up he fell along the bed. Finally he grabbed William and put him across the fire, holding his back against the burning grate. Patrick described trying to take William off the fire and how Aylward would not let him near his brother. Another younger son in the house, Michael, also appeared on the stand and to recount the events of the day. He described Aylward had raised a stick at them as they attempted to rescue their infant brother. As he left the house, Aylward said “Don’t tell your mother or I’ll kill you.”

Aylward admitted to the court that he had been around the Holden house with goats earlier in the day but had not burned the child, adding “Don’t you think I have a soul to save as well as everyone else, or what do you think I am?” He also said “I could not bear to look at a child burning on the fire, not to mind do it myself.”

He told the court that he was “thunderstruck” at the accusation that he had harmed William Holden and that when Mr. Holden had accused him he thought his neighbour “was getting out of his mind.” Patrick Aylward told the court that he did not know why the Holden children would be telling lies about him but he thought they had been put up to it by their parents.

A local farmer, James O’Keeffe, spoke for the defence. He stated that he had arrived at the Aylward house at 4:45pm, around the time the burning was supposed to have taken place. He had stayed until night-time having tea with Aylward and his brother. John Aylward, 75-year-old brother of the accused, also gave the accused man an alibi. He stated that he and Patrick had been tending a sick cow all day and were in the house from the early evening until 9:15pm and that his brother had not left at any stage.

Patrick Aylward told the court that the last time he had been inside the Holden household was five months before the tragedy when he had gone over to tell Mrs. Holden to stop her sons from chasing his sow. He claims that on this occasion Mrs. Holden hit him with a scrubbing brush and he had hit her back with his walking stick. The defence also reminded the jury that Mrs. Holden had not mentioned Aylward in her initial evidence to the authorities, merely stating that the child had been burnt.

The trial took just one day and despite the contentious and contradictory evidence the all-male jury needed just ten minutes deliberation before passing a guilty verdict. A majority of the jury did, however, give a recommendation to mercy on Patrick Aylward for the wilful murder of William Holden.

The judge commented that he agreed wholeheartedly with the verdict before passing the sentence of death on the prisoner. On hearing the sentence, Aylward remarked “I am not guilty at all. I have not been in that house for five months. May God forgive the woman who put the lie on me and God forgive the jury.”

The judge said he would pass on the recommendation to mercy to the appropriate quarters but went on to say that he “could not hold out any hope of mitigation of the sentence he was about to impose.” Aylward was sentenced to death, to be carried out two days after Christmas on the 27^th December. He was sent to Mountjoy Gaol to await his fate.

December 1923, a month of hangings

Five executions were scheduled for the month of December 1923, due to the backlog caused by the Civil War. It would be the busiest ever time at the gallows of the Irish State.

Thomas Delaney and Thomas McDonagh were executed within half an hour of each other. Delaney had attacked and killed 74-year-old Patrick Horan with a pair of tongs and a slasher in the course of a robbery. Horan was an elderly shopkeeper from Banagher, Co. Offaly and Delaney was disturbed in the act by locals.

His guilt was not in question and he would pay the ultimate penalty for the crime. McDonagh had killed his neighbour, Ellen Rogers, in Loughglynn, Co. Roscommon. The two had fallen out years before and had an argument about money. McDonagh went home, retrieved his shotgun and shot Rogers dead.

Unusually, McDonagh had asked not to be visited by his wife in the lead up to the execution. Peter Hynes also faced the hangman. A native of Drogheda, Hynes had killed a soldier named Thomas Grimstone in Co. Meath. Hynes claimed he believed Grimstone was a “Black and Tan.” He had beaten him to death in the middle of the night with an iron bar and then concealed his body underneath straw and hay in a loft. He too was convicted and hanged. William Devereux was more fortunate than any of the above. He received a last-minute reprieve, possibly due to question marks over his mental condition.

The reprieve

Patrick Aylward, who had attracted national attention for his unspeakable brutality against a helpless child, could not have been too hopeful of a commutation in light of the frequent use of the death penalty at the time. However numerous local people, including the Bishop of Ossory, petitioned government minister Kevin O’Higgins, questioning the guilt of the elderly man. They also mentioned the Holden family’s “bad moral character,” and alluded to a previous incident when another Holden child had been burned to death in suspicious circumstances.

This tragedy was said to have occurred in Piltown in 1910 but whether there was any substance to this allegation is not known. Either way, it was announced just hours before the execution that Aylward’s death sentence was to be commuted to one of penal servitude for life. The minister was not obligated to give a reason for this sudden commutation but one can only wonder as to whether it was linked to the fact that a man was being put to death solely on the evidence of children. There also seems to have been a reasonable doubt present.

Patrick Aylward served just under ten years in prison, being released under the general amnesty in 1932 in honour of the Eucharistic Congress. His brother had died shortly after the trial so Patrick resided in an old persons’ home in Kilkenny after his release. He died there three years after his release in November 1935. To the end, he maintained that the Holden family had framed him and strenuously denied having any part in the burning of William Holden.

Colm Wallace has written a book “Sentenced to Death: Saved from the Gallows” about thirty Irish men and women who had the death penalty imposed on them between 1922 and 1985. It is being launched on the 17^th June this year and is available for pre-order on book.ie or Amazon.com. For more information see http://www.somervillepress.com/sentence.html

Note

[1] There were 61 Civil War executions in 1923 enacted by military courts and four more after convictions in civil courts after the conflict had ended.

Sources

The main sources of this article are;

Irish Newspaper Archives 1922 – 1935;

The National Archives, Department of Justice Files; Census 1911

Military Archives 1922.

By Ruan O’Donnell,

Published by Merrion Press, 2015,

Reviewer: Shane Kenna

Throughout the course of Irish History jail experiences have been a factor within the Irish Republican historical narrative.

There have been Irish political prisoners in British gaols since the 1790s but perhaps the most famous were those who recorded their experiences including John Mitchell, O’Donovan Rossa, Tom Clarke, Bobby Sands and Mairead Farrell to name a few.

Despite the wealth of material available to Irish historians regarding the experience of Irish prisoners in British gaols, and their propensity to be a theatre of war, there is a sparsity secondary sources available to the reader of Irish history.

In 2013 Ruan O’Donnell, published Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons 1968-78. The book was a notable addition to Irish historiography and shone a light on a previously untold aspect of Irish History with reference to the experiences of Irish prisoners in British gaols. O’Donnell’s latest book, follows on from where his last ended and examines the years between 1978-1985.

Like the first volume Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons 1978-85 is a comprehensive, well researched, accessible and educational study based upon a plethora of primary sources, personal interviews and real time experiences of IRA prisoners. The stories which O’Donnell seamlessly introduces are a testament to those he writes about as he explains to the reader their real life struggles against the background of a remarkably harsh and exceedingly cruel prison system.

It is apparent to the reader that the experience of Irish Republican prisoners in England was different to that in Ireland. In this respect Special Category: Volume 2 offers a valuable historical insight which can compare the experience of prison life in England with that of Mountjoy, Port Laois, Long Kesh (later the Maze) , Armagh and Crumlin Road. The author recounts with great detail the story of the almost forgotten Wormwood Scrubs riots which took place in 1979 when the IRA staged a rooftop protest over visiting rights.

The author explains the IRA escape from Brixton Prison in December of the following year, when Gerry Tuite became the first Irishman, since the beginning of the Provisional IRA campaign in 1969 to escape prison. Recalling, in exciting real time detail, how Tuite, with assistance from two non-political prisoners, Christopher Thompson and James Moody, dug a tunnel into another cell, broke through a cell wall and then scaled the prison walls to escape to freedom.

Described as ‘a master of disguise,’ despite one of the most significant police operations to find him, Tuite escaped unhindered, returning to Ireland in a decisive blow to the integrity of the prison system and a tremendous propaganda victory to the Republican movement.

An entire chapter is devoted to the experience of the Blanket protest and Hunger Strikes detailing their impact upon political prisoners in Britain and important campaigns to raise awareness of both prisoner’s experiences and British Army activities in Ireland in British towns and cities.

He clarifies how political activities in England, such as rallies and protests, regarding the treatment and conditions of Irish prisoners, particularly those on hunger strike, were used to rally political support in England toward the critical situation in Ireland during the 1980 and subsequently pivotal 1981 hunger strikes.

Outlining the experiences of the blanket men and the 1980 hunger strikers O’Donnell illustrates how the British government successfully outmanoeuvred the IRA and how successive British intransigence and inflexibility with regard to the H Blocks and Armagh Gaols brought about a renewal of the hunger strike by Irish prisoners seeking political status.

Examining the impetus for the 1981 hunger strike O’Donnell introduces the reader to the characters and examines the thinking of Bobby Sands, concluding that Sands was aware of the symbolic potency of his own death. Sands, it should be noted, famously wrote in justification of his role in the hunger strike as a feature of a theatre of war with Britain whom he defined as a monster utilising a monsters army in its assault on Ireland. Prior to commencing the hunger strike Sands recalled:

I shall remember and I shall never forget how this monster took the lives of Tom Ashe, Terence MacSwiney, Michael Gaughan, Frank Stagg and Hugh Coney… tomorrow I’ll fight the monster and his devils again.’  

It is evident from reading and studying the activities of Sands, which the author had done with great detail, that he had a great awareness of Irish history and Republican theory and firmly placed his prison experiences within a historical context of seeking to challenge British policy in Ireland.

While the 1981 hunger Strike is rightly seen as a pivotal moment in Irish history, the author examines the effect of the hunger strike on British based prisoners, republicans and their supporters in Britain. With great detail O’Donnell sets out to inform the reader of how, when Sands was awaiting death, on 26 April 1981, Irish Republicans Martin Coughlin, Paul Norney and Billy Armstrong staged an rooftop protest in Wormwood Scrubs.

The IRA members had believed that it was their duty to stand with their comrade in Ireland as ‘we felt it was our duty to do something before they let him die, rather than after.’ Similar protests took place at Long Lartin where on 4 May 1981 volunteer Gerry Cunningham supported by other IRA prisoners made for the roof of their prison in support of Sands and held out until 10 May.

While the effect of Sands’ death in Ireland is widely known, Special Category: Volume 2 shines a new light onto how Irish Republican prisoners experienced news of his death in England. O’Donnell recounts in great detail how Irish Republican prisoners in England had limited knowledge of the hunger strikes in Ireland due to censorship restrictions, yet when the sad news passed through Pankhurst Prison and how in total dismay and mournful sorrow, the prisoners refused to attend work with some engaging in a three day fast in deference to their comrade.

An IRA prisoner Hugh Doherty recalled this period to be the hardest time of his imprisonment while others recalled a dark shadow menacingly passing through the Republican wings. Similar experiences are recollected with the news of the deaths of Francis Hughes, Ray McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara.

This book is a commendable addition to Irish history and is befitting to all students of the history of modern Ireland. The author has compiled an extensive volume of work which is well researched and presented in an incredibly accessible style.

The greatest strength of this book is the fact that the author engaged with many former Republican prisoners and by doing so has provided a remarkable service to history. Special Category: Volume 2 is an authoritative, comprehensive and masterly study of the modern experience of Irish political prisoners in British jails.

By John Dorney

For 100 years now in Ireland, when we are facing some national crossroads, someone will inevitably invoke the ‘men of 1916’. Occasionally nowadays the women get a mention too.

In 2006 at the 90^th anniversary it became a truism that the Easter Rising had been vindicated by the Celtic Tiger economic boom. Garret Fitzgerald, (son of 1916 rebel Desmond) argued that without the Rising, Ireland could never have developed its own economic policy – attracting foreign investment with low taxes for example.

After 2008 the mood changed of course, after the financial meltdown of that year when Ireland’s banks all but collapsed and the then government guaranteed their holdings, saddling the country with a huge debt.

The Irish Times lamented in 2010 at the time of the IMF Bailout when Ireland lost its financial sovereignty, ‘Was it for this’ they asked that the men of 1916 had died? Tearful contributors to TG4’s excellent series Seachtar na Casca on the executed leaders of 1916, wondered too if they had died for nothing.

More recently at the referendum on same sex marriage, the Easter Rising was invoked by both sides. On the no side, an anonymous leaflet was brought out claiming that the patriot dead would be horrified by a change in the constitution. On the yes side some thought that passing same sex marriage was a fitting tribute to what the insurgents of April 1916 fought for, 100 years on.

So potent is the symbolism of the Easter Rising – selfless bravery, patriotic heroism, martyrdom – that it is used to support almost any vision of what Ireland should be like.

But what kind of Ireland did the leaders of the 1916 Rising actually envisage?

First of all who were they?

One of the extraordinary things about 1916 is that although it was basically the work of two main organisations – the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers – the formal leadership of neither organisation even knew about the Rising until it had begun.

It was organised in secret by a ‘Military Council’ set up in 1915, composed of seven men – IRB veterans Tom Clarke and Sean McDermott, James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, Patrick Pearse, the educator and cultural nationalists along with fellow Gaels Tomas MacDonagh, Eamon Ceannt, and Ned Daly.

Eoin MacNeill, the leader of the Volunteers, was famously only told of the Rising on Easter Sunday and tried to call it off. Bulmer Hobson, a senior IRB figure was arrested on McDermott’s orders to stop him aiding MacNeill. So even within radical nationalism, the Rising was launched by a secret, self-selecting group.

So what did they believe in?

Independence

It seems like an obvious point, but what united the somewhat diverse views of the 1916 leaders was a belief in Irish independence.

This united the cultural nationalists like nationalist Patrick Pearse, the socialist James Connolly and veteran IRB men Clarke and MacDiarmada.

Connolly for instance wrote; ‘the principle that the freedom of a people must in the last analysis rest in the hands of that people – that there is no outside force capable of enforcing slavery upon a people really resolved to be free, and valuing freedom more than life.’

Pearse at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral in 1915 famously declared, ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’. And these sentiments lay at the heart of what launched the Rising of 1916 – the idea that no compromise on Irish independence was possible.

Equally unsurprisingly, though it must now be played down in the official commemorations of 1916, the ‘men of 1916’ were staunchly against the partition, first mooted in 1914.

Irish Freedom the IRB’s newspaper declared in 1914 “North east Ulster is as much part of Ireland as Dublin, Kerry or Clare”.

Economics

Cultural nationalists such as MacDonagh and Ceannt, had in truth little to say on the economic future of Ireland. Patrick Pearse had only the vaguest of formulas.

James Connolly was a Marxist and advocated throughout his life, what he called, ‘the cooperative commonwealth’ that is a democratic socialist transformation. At some points in his career, he argued very strongly for ‘syndicalism’ or what he usually termed ‘industrial democracy’, whereby the workers would take over industries and run them, via their unions, on cooperative lines.

Writing in 1908 for instance;

Under a social democratic form of society the administration of affairs will be in the hands of representatives of the various industries of the nation; that the workers in the shops and factories will organize themselves into unions, each union comprising all the workers at a given industry; … that representatives elected from these various departments of industry will meet and form the industrial administration or national government of the country.

At other times he appeared to argue for the leading role of a political party in a socialist state. And at other times still he appeared to be in favour of reformist socialism or social democracy. To this end he helped to found the Labour Party in 1912.

Though Connolly is perhaps the most fashionable of the 1916 leaders today, the views of the IRB influenced leaders were probably more influential in the founding of the Irish state.

The IRB had worked with Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein from that party’s founding in 1905 up to 1910. And while they broke with Griffith in favour of a more militant line from then on, they absorbed much of his economic thinking. Separatists tended to argue that all of Ireland’s economic ills could be traced back to British domination.

Irish Freedom the IRB’s newspaper for instance opined in 1913 that Ireland capable of easily supporting 20 million people, if domestic Irish industry was not ruined by British competition. Strikes, it argued, were, “the direct result of the British connection”. “Class War”, it argued, was, “incidental to commercial decadence”.“Independent Ireland would of course, have disputes between capital and labour, but they would  be fights to re-adjust a balance, not a fight to the death”.

An independent Ireland should, they argued, create and protect its own industries. It should enact radical land reform, not only buying out the remaining big landlords, but also the ‘ranchers’ and returning the land to food production. They also argued in favour of things like reforestation – not so much, as today, for environmental reasons, but to provide work and resources to poor rural areas.

The truth is that many of these theories were tried in independent Ireland after 1922, particularly by the first Fianna Fail governments in the 1930s. Some, for instance historian Conor McCabe argue that they never went far enough, not setting up an Irish Central Bank until the 1940s, not breaking from Sterling until 1980. Bulmer Hobson in his later career as a civil servant vehemently argued in favour of reforestation and a return to tillage farming as revolutionaries had advised in the early 1900s.

Other 1916 rebels though, like Sean Lemass, who were partisans of economic nationalism, argued by the 1950s that they had simply failed and that the future lay in an open economy, attracting foreign companies by low taxation and other incentives; policies that are still the accepted wisdom in Ireland today.

Women’s rights

The Proclamation of the Irish Republic begins ‘ Irishmen and Irish women’ a nod towards women’s equality and their right to vote.

It would be a mistake to think that the rebels of 1916 were ardent feminists. Of the 2,500 people who eventually received pensions for their role in the Rising, only about 230 were women.  Even the women’s nationalist movement, Cumann na mBan, though many of them had also been suffrage activists tended to subordinate feminism to separatism.

Maire O Brolchain of Inninighe na hEireann, the ancestor of Cumann na mBan, while she acknowledged that some women nationalist were also suffrage activists recalled, ‘The Innighnie was unique among women’s organizations in that it took no interest whatever in women’s rights or suffrage, it just did what was most urgent for Ireland.’

Even radical feminists like Helena Molony insisted that national self-determination must come before women’s liberation. She defined herself and her comrades as Irishwomen pledged to fight for the complete separation of Ireland from England and re-establishment of our native culture.

Among the Republican leadership, Connolly was the most active feminist, famously calling women workers ‘the slave of the slave’. Irish Freedom also praised the suffrage activists as ‘fighters for freedom’. On the other hand the separatists’ rivals the Irish Parliamentary Party were generally against women’s right to vote. Its deputy leader John Dillon said once that women’s suffrage threatened the future of civilisation.

So although the rebels of 1916 were towards the progressive end of the scale on women’s rights, it is untrue as some argue today, that the Rising was somehow feminist in ideology. There were feminists who took part, as there were socialists, but it was nationalism that defined the Rising.

Personal Freedom and religion

The Proclamation of the Republic guaranteed religious and civil liberty. The oft-quoted line promising to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’ is also, in truth a pledge not discriminate against religious or political minorities. The Proclamation also guaranteed ‘absolute religious liberty’.

The IRB and most other separatists were against sectarianism. The exclusion of Protestants from the all-Catholic Hibernians )Who were aligned with the Irish Parliamentary Party) was, for Irish Freedom, “dangerous and  insidious”. “Hibernianism had postponed Irish unity for a generation”, and, “Sectarianism is the decay of the genuine nationalist ideal … All sects must stand together”.

However, unlike for instance the Fenian Proclamation of 1867, the 1916 rebels did not guarantee the separation of Church and state. They were in fact by and large a much more religious generation. During battle in Easter week, many knelt and said the rosary.

The Easter rebels were not the storm troopers of ‘Rome Rule’ as some now like to paint them, but nor were they the secular revolutionaries others now like to imagine.

There was also an element of authoritarianism about the imagined Republic. In 1910 Irish Freedom declared that the true Irish Republican believed in, ‘personal liberty, equality of all men in the eyes of the state and denial of rights unless they are accompanied by an acceptance of duties’. The latter was an interesting phrase. Who would decide what the duties of an Irish citizen were?

No doubt in the mind of the IRB and the 1916 insurgents generally, it was them, the Republican revolutionaries.

The IRB and all of the most radical nationalist organisations supported universal suffrage as a demand, but they also regarded themselves as an elite vanguard who may have to push the passive majority in the right directions – ‘’He is called to a brave charge who is called to resist the majority, but resist he will knowing that he will lead them to a dearer dream than they have ever known.’

A contradictory legacy

Included in the veterans of the Rising were men who in 1923 gave all women over 21 the right to vote, but also those men who in 1927 excluded women from jury duty.

Some of the Rising’s veterans like the actor Arthur Shields bemoaned the cultural of censorship in independent Ireland, but others like Abbey Director Ernest Blythe were enthusiastic censors.

Roddy Connolly, James’ son went on to found the Communist Party of Ireland, while other Rising veterans, for example Eamon de Valera and Richard Mulcahy are associated today with an era of cultural and social conservatism.

History can teach us lessons. But it is a guidebook, not a blueprint.

By Tom Garvin

Publisher: Irish Academic Press, 2016

Reviewer: Ruairí Ó hAodha

 ‘Anyone can make history, only a great man can write it’

Oscar Wilde

Daniel Binchy was the son of an affluent shopkeeper from Charleville.  The Binchys of Cork are thought to have originally come to Ireland with Cromwell.  As a family, they have certainly left their mark on modern Ireland.  The descendant of numerous doctors and lawyers, Daniel was the uncle of novelist Maeve Binchy.  Despite embracing Catholicism in the dying days of the penal laws, the Binchys were committed Anglophiles and took a hard pro-Free State line following the Treaty.

This had interesting consequences.  During the bitterness of the Civil War, Daniel’s father fairly mercilessly fired any employees who harboured anti-Treaty sympathies.  Amongst those workers was one John Higgins, who was dismissed with a written note to the effect that when all the ‘blackguardism’ then occurring in the country was over, there would be no employment for people like him in the Binchy firm, ‘or anywhere for that matter.’   John Higgins and his young family were left impoverished for a number of years by the dismissal.  His son however is the current occupant of Áras an Uachtaráin.

Daniel Binchy was sent to Clongowes and then to UCD, where he excelled at all he turned his hand to; a BA in politics and MA in Irish history.  Unsurprisingly for a Corkonian, his thesis was a study of the political entanglements behind the Desmond Rebellion of the sixteenth-century.

A travelling scholarship to the University of Munich ensured him a thorough foundation in all aspects of medieval linguistics and law; his doctoral thesis was a study of the Irish origins of the church schools of Regensburg, the university of which remains a major centre for higher learning to this day, and was the site of Benedict XVI’s scholarly but provocative ‘Muhammad’ lecture a few years ago.  Following his schooling Daniel Binchy went on to become one of the most important scholars of early Irish history this country has ever produced.

Professor Tom Garvin’s biography of Binchy is more than that.  In some ways it is really two books in one; a look at the career of the man himself as scholar and diplomat; and a separate study of the development of Celtic Studies in the early twentieth-century.  Through the book, Garvin seeks to restore a small coterie of scholars of Old Irish to what Garvin argues as their rightful place; namely as a previously unacknowledged third pillar of the cultural revival, along with the activists of Conradh na Gaeilge and the litterateurs of the Anglo-Irish literary revival.

Garvin goes some way in his book to show that these two movements were to a great degree dependent on the Trojan work of the Celticists.  Along with the influence and collaboration between each of these parties to Ireland’s cultural rediscovery, there went considerable tensions too.

The book opens with a helpful introductory chapter that gives a series of biopics of the great European Celticists of the era; the Swiss Rudolf Thurneseyen, German Kuno Meyer and Norwegian Carl Marstrander, followed by the native scholars they inspired; Osborn Bergin, Richard Best, Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNéill, Eleanor Knott, Thomas and Cecile O’Rahilly, James Carney, Myles Dillon and James Delargy.

Best and Bergin seem to have had the greatest influence on Binchy (the ‘three Bs’ did not escape the pen of Myles na gCopaleen), though Garvin gives insight into the profound friendship, both personal and scholarly, between Binchy and Frank O’Connor.  Binchy never married, and it was to O’Connor alone that he confided the story of a lost love.

He was selected by Joseph Walshe of External Affairs to represent the Irish Free State in Weimar Germany between 1929 and 1932.  He crossed paths with Adolf Hitler on more than one occasion, and was not impressed.

There was more than a touch of the elitist to Binchy.  He appears to have kept to a fairly small social circle in Munich, and in Garvin’s retelling at least, there appears to have been little comment in Binchy’s correspondence on the dire situation of ordinary Germans during those impoverished inter-war years.  It was perhaps this elitism that also led him in 1921 to dismiss that ‘Austrian soldier’ as a ‘lunatic with a gift for rhetoric’:

Hitler was the principal speaker, and as he sat on the platform waiting for the very prosy chairman to conclude, I remember wondering idly if it would be possible to find a more commonplace-looking man.  His countenance was opaque, his complexion pasty, his hair plastered down with some glistening unguent, and – as if to accentuate the impression of insignificance – he wore a carefully docked ‘toothbrush’ moustache.  I felt willing to bet he was a plumber: a whispered query to my friend brought the information that he was a housepainter. (p. 42)

Garvin at this point of the book digresses into a curious explanation as to why Paul von Hindenburg, with whom Binchy was on good terms, later endorsed Hitler as chancellor.  With the arrival of Fianna Fáil in power, Binchy was succeeded in Germany, by Charles Bewley, a Quaker convert to Irish republicanism, who while perhaps not the ardent Nazi Garvin claims he was, nevertheless naïvely spent much of his time thoroughly annoying the British representatives to Berlin, with relentless pro-German propaganda.

Binchy himself denounced Hitler and Nazism in uncompromising terms in an article for Studies.  It is at this point in the book that Garvin quietly drops a minor bombshell, when after repeatedly recounting how much Binchy desired to return home to aoibhinn beatha an scoláire, we are told that in 1937 he was ‘recruited by the British Foreign Office to undertake a study of Fascism’ in Italy (p. 108).

Garvin then speculates that given Binchy’s experience that it was curious that the British did not send him to Germany and that it was perhaps his critical essay on Hitler that ensured that he was not, so as to keep him out of harm’s way.  Yet, if there is an obvious oversight here it is surely that the Binchy would never have gone to Berlin when the new government in Dublin had their own man on the ground already.  One gets the impression that there is more to this episode than is apparent from Garvin’s account.

In any case Binchy’s sojourn to Italy does not appear to have had significant implications, for as Garvin explains, he was on good terms with De Valera in later years.

In fairness to Binchy, he was a perceptive assessor of contemporary European Fascism; while not playing down the significance of any of the fascists, he judged at a very early stage that Hitler’s regime would prove far more evil and murderous than its allies.  While acknowledging that there were few angels on either side, Binchy, believed that the Francoist victory in the Spanish Civil War was probably the lesser of two evils.

In the case of Italy, Binchy recognized Mussolini for the buffoonish thug that he was, but also suspected that the Italian regime would ultimately prove far less steely than its German ally.  He correctly foresaw that Mussolini would be finished off by his own people.  Chief amongst Binchy’s concerns was the effect the ascension of all these rhetorical lunatics throughout Europe would have upon the Catholic Church, the freedom of the papacy especially, and it was purportedly for this reason that the British sent him to Italy.

His attitude to the church was interesting.  He appears to have had what might best be described as a vicarious attitude to religious practice; according to Garvin, he would frequently leave his home early on a Sunday morning so that his housekeeper would think that he had gone to Mass, only to spend the mornings in Frank O’Connor’s house.

Binchy the academic

The second section of Garvin’s work details Daniel Binchy’s contribution to the understanding of early Christian Ireland; work which has proven deep and long-lasting.  His devotion to his craft can be seen in his tendency to publish very lengthy articles in journals, as opposed to slick books.  There were the usual academic spats, in particular with his one-time protégé James Carney, but by and large Binchy was a polite critic.

His expertise in medieval law did much to clarify Eoin MacNéill’s pioneering studies of early Ireland.  His ‘scientific’ if not consciously sceptical approach did much to burst the bubbles of previous romanticisms.  He sought to separate the true history of Gaelic Ireland from medieval and early modern chroniclers, whom he recognized were frequently (re)writing past times according to the desires of their contemporary patrons.

His description of early Ireland as ‘rural, tribal, patriarchal and familiar’ is now itself almost legendary to those who study medieval history.  He was what might be termed a constructive revisionist.

There is a danger of taking the ‘scientific’ approach too far though, and in Garvin’s hands many of Binchy’s conclusions are made to fit too snugly with the author’s own assumptions, which if one may be cheeky about it, place him firmly in the tradition of his medieval predecessors.

Garvin shows his own hand when he criticizes the disconnect between the man-on-the-street’s understanding of the past with the scholarship being carried out at third-level.  He admits that (excepting Galway) all the national universities since the foundation of the state were firmly in the grip of Fine Gael; he states that Fianna Fáil was a party ‘that remained bereft of any real intellectual tradition’, but later admits that it was only through Dev’s initiative that the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was founded, which not only went on to employ Binchy and his friends, but remains one of the preeminent centre of Celtic Studies in the world.

Mention is not made of the other ‘people’s history’ initiatives of the same period, the Folklore Commission and the school’s studies of the 1930s.  Nor is there any connection made between what if any the schools of thought that have dominated the Irish universities have had on the second-level curriculum.

He denounces the ‘mass education’ of present university culture in Ireland, without wishing to admit with whom its origins lie.  In spite of the success of TG4, the proliferation of Gaelscoileanna and a spate of new translations and publishers in recent years, Garvin has all but buried the Irish language.

As with Binchy himself, he has ignored the warnings of Osborn Bergin, that an appreciation of Modern Irish is a prerequisite to unlocking the mindset of the Old Irish world, although to be fair, he allows for a dissenting voice in the form of Alfred Smith, who has partially blamed the ‘stultifying emphasis on philology’ that all but tragically replaced ‘[w]hatever liberalism remained within the Gaelic League in the appreciation of literature’ (p. 186).

This was a situation that led to what were effectively academic dead-ends – like the ‘two Patricks’ thesis – unprovable theories that were squabbled over for decades.  Little wonder that Myles na gCopaleen acidly observed that Binchy & Co. after years of study had established that ‘there was no God, but there were two St. Patricks.’

In his assessment of Binchy’s work one can detect the long hand of Sir Herbert Butterfield, at whose feet in Cambridge sat Quin, Moody and Dudley-Edwards, who went on to become the heads of Irish history at Queens, Trinity and Garvin’s UCD respectively.

A critic might note that Butterfield’s apparent ‘value-free’ and ‘scientific’ critique of the ‘Whiggish interpretation of history’ has borne remarkable fruit in recent decades in former British colonies, nowhere more so than its oldest colony, in that it has resulted in academic circles in the rigorous deconstruction of native cultures, to the point where it is sometimes asserted that they never in fact existed as culturally distinct communities, while leaving the Whiggish interpretation of British history (and by extension its radically individualist, consumer-capitalist Anglo-American heir) itself remarkably intact.

It is something of an irony too to observe many of Butterfield heirs on both sides of the Atlantic are currently loudly decrying the fruits of the system they have for so long upheld; ‘mass education’ being just one of many examples.  Herein lies the reason, as this reviewer perceives it, why the ordinary man-on-the-street still doesn’t buy this ‘triumph of failure’ school of thought.

One can see in Garvin’s reading of Binchy much of the same process.  And yet, there are numerous inherent contradictions.  Early Ireland was a perennially dying, permanently warlike society, ruled by an oppressive patriarchal elite, upheld for centuries by a rigorous and conservative learned class who apparently kept rewriting dead laws ad nauseum, producing in the process what remains the largest (excepting perhaps Iceland) vernacular literature to be found anywhere in Europe.

This all apparently built upon the backs of a population, the vast majority of who were permanently enslaved.  Binchy is quite correct no doubt in seeing the hand of the Uí Neill dynasty in the pens of the annalists, but how does one explain the continuation of their dominance in the text of native chronicles when most of the surviving annals were written in Connacht after the Dál gCais under Brian Boru brought an end to the six-century dominance of the Uí Neill over Ulster in the early eleventh century?

Nor can anyone who has so much as walked past Kilmore, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, Lismore, Boyle or Tuam assert that the Gregorian reforms of the twelfth century had no impact upon the Irish church.  Has Garvin never heard of the synods of Rath Breasail or Kells-Mellifont, of Ss. Malachy of Armagh or Lawrence O’Toole, the school of Lismore, the Cross of Cong?  One is assuming that these were not the product of a twelfth-century equivalent of the Islamic State.

The narrative as outlined in the latter part of this book is all too neat and reaches a crescendo with the English conquest, which the Irish were apparently only waiting for.

One is reminded of Paul Johnson’s ludicrous assertion in the opening paragraph of his History of Ireland that the invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century was the result of the inherent failure of Irish society to develop a centralized monarchy.  Leaving aside the question of just how ‘centralized’ the English monarchy of that period really was, never mind what that actually means, this is the equivalent of telling a home owner that you robbed his house because the doors and windows were open at the time, ergo it’s your fault.

If The lives of Daniel Binchy proves anything it proves that there can be no such thing as ‘value-free history.’  Binchy was a tremendous scholar and a sensible diplomat who served his country well.  Tom Garvin has written a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man.

Moreover his work throws interesting sidelights on a formative and maturing period of the independent Irish state, that in fairness, others as of yet, have been reluctant to visit.  He has placed the early twentieth century Celtic scholars at the centre of the cultural and national revival.  Binchy has left firm foundations that we can only hope others continue to build on.

The partition of Ireland is reflected in the separateness and rivalry of its two international football teams. Sathesh Alagappan looks at the background.

The Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland football teams are going through a period of relative success. Both will compete at the European Championships this summer.

Indeed, this is the first time that both teams have qualified for the same tournament. However, there will be a significant section of supporters on both sides who will not be cheering on their neighbours.

The rivalry between the North and South has a long history, seated in sectarian tensions and the history of Irish partition. However, this is not as simple as a Catholic versus Protestant conflict. At its heart, the rivalry encompasses complex ideas about identity and nationality in modern Ireland.

Pre-independence origins

Football first gained popularity in Ireland amongst its Ulster Protestant community in the North. Based in Belfast, the Irish Football Association (IFA) governed the sport in Ireland. By the late 19^th century, football was increasingly played further south, but there was a perception that the IFA showed a strong Northern-bias.

For example, Southern footballers complained that selection for the national team was severely skewed. From 1882 to 1921 players from Leinster clubs won just 75 caps for the Irish national team, compared to 798 for Ulster players. Similarly, Belfast hosted almost 90% of all international matched in this period.

 Partition and the battle for football sovereignty

The Partition of Ireland into North and South was first laid out by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. The War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty followed, and by 1922, the Irish Free State was born.

These tumultuous events were the backdrop to the breakup of Irish football. In the 1921 Irish Cup, Northern side Glenavon played Dubliners Shelbourne. The first match played in Belfast ended in a draw, which should have meant a replay in Dublin in March of that year.

However, Glenavon refused to travel, citing the deteriorating security situation in the city where six Republican guerrillas were due to be executed. The IFA came down on the side of Glenavon and ruled that the replay should be played in Belfast.

Shelbourne were enraged by the decision and withdrew from the tournament. This proved to be the fatal blow to the footballing union, and later that year the Dublin based Football Association of Ireland (FAI) was born.

The split was followed by decades of tussling and uncertainty as both FAs claimed to represent the entirety of the island. The confusion was demonstrated by the fact that both teams competed under the name ‘Ireland’.

Furthermore, both reserved the right to pick players from across the border. The IFA was especially prolific at this, using generous appearance fees to persuade Southern born footballers to play for the North. Overall, there was a total of 38 ‘dual internationals’ from 1921 to 1950.

In 1949, both teams had entered qualification for the 1950 World Cup, and the practice of ‘dual internationals’ had become particularly farcical. Four Southern-born players had competed both for the Republic and the North in the qualifying campaign, leading to protestations from the FAI. FIFA were equally embarrassed by the situation and were finally prompted to deliver a resolution.

In 1953, FIFA decreed that the both nations would only be able to pick players within existing political borders. Furthermore, they decided that neither team would be able to call themselves Ireland. Rather, they would now be officially competing as the ‘Republic of Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ (though this didn’t stop the North referring to themselves as ‘Ireland’ in the Home Championships as late as 1984).

However, recent developments have compromised this arrangement. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 allowed Northern Irish nationals to claim citizenship with the Republic. As a result, there has been a wave of Northern Irish Catholics opting to play for the South.

Recent examples include James McClean. Born in Derry in Northern Ireland, he had started his professional career playing for Derry City in the FAI’s League of Ireland, and represented Northern Ireland at U21 level. However, when his senior call up came, he instead opted to join the Republic. Another particularly high-profile case was Darron Gibson, whose defection prompted bitter squabbling between the two FAs, debates in Stormont, and an eventual intervention from FIFA affirming Gibson’s right to play for the Republic.

It is a part of a trend where fewer Catholic players are now represented in the Northern Irish team. Whereas the likes of Martin O’Neil and Gerry Armstrong wore the IFA’s green jersey in times gone past, the current generation are much more likely to defect. There is a feeling that the Good Friday Agreement has opened the floodgates, stimulated by continuing nationalist sentiments. This has left Northern Irish fans and officials bitter, bemoaning an ‘exodus’ from an already small nation.

The dream of reunification

Despite the differences, there have been some attempts to reunite the two teams. Perhaps the closest the teams came to this was in the 1970s, during the height of The Troubles. It had been partly prompted by high-profile figures such as the legendary Northern Irish footballer George Best. Best had made no secret of his desire play for a United Ireland, and claimed many of his teammates felt the same. They argued that the sight of Catholics and Protestants from across the island playing together could help bring communities together, and heal some of the rifts of conflict.

Between 1973 and 1980 the two FAs met for a number of conferences to discuss the issue. However, an agreement was never reached. Ultimately they could not overcome political and ideological divides. It became clear that a significant number of fans in the North were hostile to the idea. With Northern Ireland increasingly drawing its support from unionists and often hardcore loyalist elements, the sight of a United Ireland in any form would prove unimaginable. Harry Cavan, the IFA president at the time, reflected this view:

“The problem with people who speak glibly of unity in Irish soccer . . . is that they tend to ignore the facts of life here in the North of Ireland. The concept of one Ireland football team may be exciting but, unfortunately, it does not take account of the fact that we are living in troubled times. “

 The battle of Belfast, 1993

With reunification failing to come to fruition, the rivalry continued to develop. It reared its head in November 1993, as the two teams met in a decisive World Cup qualification match at Windsor Park.

Jack Charlton’s Republic of Ireland needed a result to book their place in the finals tournament in America. Northern Ireland were already out of contention. Yet, the prospect of knocking out their not-so-friendly neighbours was ample motivation.

The sides had already met in their first qualification tie in Dublin in March 1993, which the Republic had won 3-0. On that occasion, the home crowd had chanted ‘There’s only one team in Ireland’, much to the ire of Northern Irish management and players (no away fans were allowed to travel).

Events surrounding the November match also added to the tensions. In the weeks leading up to it, ceasefire negotiations were hampered by a spike in paramilitary violence. An IRA attempt to assassinate UDA leaders had led to the death of 9 Protestant civilians, in the infamous Shankill Road bombing. In retaliation, the UDA committed the Greysteel Massacre, where 8 Catholic civilians were shot down in a crowded Londonderry pub. Six other Catholics were killed in other attacks that week. Northern Ireland was spiralling into chaos.

In this context, many feared that the match could act as a release-valve for further sectarian conflict. Police swarmed around Windsor Park that evening, which is located in a staunchly loyalist area of Belfast. The Republic of Ireland team were virtually cordoned off in their hotel for their own safety before the match.

Inside Windsor Park, the atmosphere reached fever pitch. Virtually every touch of the ball by a Republic of Ireland player was greeted with a chorus of ‘Fenian bastards’, accompanied by chants referencing the Greysteel massacre. The Northern Irish manager Billy Bingham did little to help, at one point leading the crowd in singing the Orange Order anthem ‘The Sash’. The Windsor Park crowd at other times sang the ‘Billy Boys’, a sectarian anthem that included the line ‘we’re up to our necks in Fenian blood’.

A player who faced particular vitriol on the pitch was Alan Kernaghan. Kernaghan was born in England, but grew up in Bangor, and represented Northern Ireland at schoolboy level. However, IFA regulation at the time meant only players born on Northern Irish soil could represent the national team. Therefore Kerneghan, relying on his grandmother’s Irish citizenship, opted to play international football for the Republic instead. This made him an easy target for the Windsor Park crowd, who welcomed him with shouts of ‘Lundy’ (or traitor, in reference to a Colonel Lundy in 1689 who wanted to surrender Derry to Catholic Jacobite forces).

Jack Charlton recalled that he had “never seen a more hostile atmosphere.” Republic midfielder Alan McLoughlin still vividly remembers the fervent abuse he witnessed from the substitutes bench:

”I could hear it and feel it right behind me. You didn’t dare look around and make eye contact. The venom in their eyes shocked me.”

Events on the pitch added fuel to the fire. Jimmy Quinn’s 73^rd-minute goal seemed to have sunk the Republic and sent Windsor Park into a frenzy. Just five minutes later, however, McLoughlin came off the bench to equalise. The result ended 1-1, securing the Republic’s place in the finals. It was an extraordinary end to one of the most heated encounters in the history of Irish football.

Building bridges?

Many will agree that progress has been made politically. The Good Friday Agreement ushered in nearly two decades of peace, and thankfully the dark days of The Troubles seem to have departed. However, football is inherently tribal, and old hostilities die hard.

In 2002, Northern Ireland’s Neil Lennon received abuse and death threats from a section of his own fans. A Catholic, a Celtic player, and a supporter of a United Ireland team, Lennon became a natural antagonist for some of Northern Ireland’s more hardcore supporters.

This being said it does seem that some of the most unsavoury elements of the rivalry have diminished in recent years. Northern Ireland and Ireland have met each other in friendly matches since, with a less poisonous reception.

Furthermore, the IFA has rolled out initiatives to reduce sectarianism in football. A United Ireland team still seems a long way off, but the relationship has become more cordial.

Sathesh Alagappan is a History graduate from the University of Southampton, where he primarily studied 20^th century history. He has also worked as a Researcher at Manchester United Football Club.

By Liam Kennedy

Published by Irish Academic Press

Reviewer Rhona McCord

Liam Kennedy’s book is a selection of academic essays linked a common theme of misconceptions about significant events in Irish history.

From the point of view of Irish historiographical debate there is nothing new here, it is a subject that has been tackled before.  Particularly in Ciaran Brady’s Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on historical revisionism 1938-1994.  And the events Kennedy selects are themselves well covered by writers of Irish history.

Here the historiographical arguments are spread across three sections: ‘The Long View’ which deals with the complications of the north south divide, the plantations and the development of nationalism and unionism, The Famine which tackles the genocide debate and the Revolutionary Decade of which there has been so many publications it is difficult to see what more can be added.

The main theme of the book is the idea of Ireland’s perceived victimhood and compares some of its history with other nations, which have undergone tumultuous events over long periods of time.  Kennedy says ‘the motif of victimhood bulks large in Irish national self consciousness’ and thereby sets out to debunk some of the more popular ideas about the Irish being the hardest-done-by people in the world.

So we get some very interesting facts about the development of the economy and political structures juxtaposed with developments elsewhere.  The overall point being that actually we didn’t have it so bad and maybe others lived in much poorer and much more repressive conditions than the Irish.

Obviously people bend historical facts to suit a political agenda and this is, of course, very evident in Ireland and has been witnessed recently in debates surrounding the commemorations for 1916.  It is understandable that misconceptions, distortions and misinformation can be annoying; especially to someone whose profession is the study of Irish history.  But the argument is slightly over blown here and for the most part Kennedy has not provided enough examples of who has done or is doing the distorting.

The famine genocide debate

The issue of the Irish Famine has been well documented and the debate around the accusation of deliberate genocide on the part of the British administration is old at this stage.  No historian with any credibility argues that case.  The way that the crisis was handled, the measures introduced whether adequate or inadequate and the indifference in some quarters to the suffering of people during the famine are of legitimate concern to historians.

On the subject of comparisons between the Famine and the Holocaust, Kennedy takes a thematic approach highlighting what is similar and what is not between the two tragedies and is well worth reading.

Kennedy also carries out an interesting experiment through Google to emphasise his point.  He informs the reader that he typed in the words ‘Irish Famine Genocide’ and got 465,000 results, then he typed in the words ‘Irish Famine Holocaust’ and got one third of a million hits.

Perhaps this points to a huge interest in the subject of the Irish Famine but from a historiographical point of view Kennedy argues that it indicates that ‘understandings of the past are formed primarily on the Internet nowadays, with only limited reference to evidence based research.’ That’s a big statement and it is a difficult one to quantify but perhaps a comparison to how many books have been sold on the subject might help to put the point into a better context.

This is the heart of the problem for all historians and not just those concerned with Irish history, although the downgrading of the subject on our junior cert curriculum is perhaps more worrying.  There is of course nothing wrong with learning history through song poetry, art, film or indeed the Internet, but it is the undermining of evidence-based research that ultimately leaves room for people, for a whole range of motives, to distort history.

The Revolutionary decade

The third section of the book deals with the Revolutionary Decade.  Here Kennedy dissects the text ot two of the most famous documents of the period, the Ulster Covenant and the Proclamation of Independence.

The analysis of the language and words used in both texts may be of interest to some but the frequency of adjectives and a chart demonstrating the use of words in each text may seem a bit pedantic and even unnecessary.  What is much more interesting is how both documents are used and interpreted by political organisations north and south of the border and how they build rhetoric around them.

The book finishes on the War of Independence, put in question format, Was there an Irish War of Independence? This is a short chapter, which does not go into great depth but makes a good effort to balance experiences north and south of the border, which is refreshing.

No doubt as 2019 approaches the debates and arguments on the nature of the political violence of the War of Independence will resurface.   If history readers take heed of the warnings about historical interpretation covered in this book, then they will take a critical view of all published history, consider the source, determine their motives and try to take a balanced approach.  If you are going to watch Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins then you should also watch Ken Loach’s Wind that Shakes the Barley.

Unhappy the Land probably suffers a bit from lack of originality and that may be due to it being a long time in the making, but it is a good read, very well written and worth it for anyone who wishes to be familiar with some of the biggest historiographical questions concerning the study of Irish history.

Published by New Island Books, Dublin, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-84840-512-7

Reviewer: Gordon O’Sullivan

From the title, with its slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to classic western movies onwards, Myles Dungan sets the reader up for a very enjoyable romp through the tumbleweed in this history of the Irish in the American West.

This 2016 revision of the initial 2006 edition with subsequent additions is a gentle debunking of classic Western tropes with the author taking some pot shots at the iconic imagery which we all associate with the Cowboys and Indians of Hollywood fare. This minor deflating of the western legend is always complemented by the full telling of the legend; when in doubt the author doesn’t hesitate to print that legend.

A book of fascinating individual stories rather than an in-depth thematic exploration, many of the Irish men and women that the author picks out are frankly worthy of their own movies. There are gun-toting toffs, prostitutes with hearts of gold, ruthless businessmen, quick-on-the-draw cowboys, Indian-scalping soldiers, pioneering mountain men as well as famous artists and writers; all Irish and all caught up in the story of the American West.

This focus on characters and individuals has real merits when you’re describing people as diverse and compelling as Oscar Wilde and Lola Montez. Dungan is also insistent on cutting away the tired old mythology of white and black hats. For example, he cuts the movie character John Chisum as portrayed by John Wayne down to size by detailing the real historical figure who was “small in stature…balding… [with a] moustache, and his most notable physical attribute were his ears, prominent…”

That focus does mitigate however against drawing wider lessons or sketching out broader themes. The context remains very much in the background, based on secondary sources and the author has little to say on more ordinary Irish people who made the long journey to the West. These are relatively small weaknesses however when the characters drawn upon in How the Irish Won the West are so fascinating and warrant both the author’s and the readers’ attention.

Take Thomas Fitzpatrick, born in Cavan in 1799 and, by the time he died in Washington DC, “probably the single most significant Irish-born figure” in the history of the American West and someone of whom it was said, “no man is more representative of this epoch”. While Dungan does point out the contradictions and exaggerations that somewhat inflated Fitzpatrick’s reputation, he also relishes his legend.

As a mountain man or fur trapper, Fitzpatrick helped find and then promote the so-called South Pass through the Rockies, a “more pragmatic foundation for the movement of population to California and Oregon” and a vital factor in facilitating large-scale wagon trains travelling west. He went on to become a wealthy man before becoming a comparatively enlightened Indian agent. Fitzpatrick was both the creator of a famous peace treaty with the Plains Indians at Fort Laramie and the glue that kept it together for the few years of peace that followed it.

Travellers through the western wilderness had far more failures than successes however and Dungan opines that this was a brief and overly romanticised era which “lasted barely twenty years and had produced a short-lived breed of pioneers who had progressed ‘from a cock of the walk to a smelly old relic in half a lifetime’.”

The deadly-fascinating tale of the Donner party and their increasingly desperate plight on the journey west is also given considerable space including the wretched cannibalism that their survival story entailed.

The author sketches portraits of Irish White Hats like Michael Meagher, marshal of Wichita, Kansas who “earned a reputation for defusing potentially dangerous situations without the use of violence and without resorting to his own gun” as well as being the boss of Western icon Wyatt Earp. But Dungan really prefers the Black Hats, spending heavy page time on Irishmen like Dolan, Murphy, Riley and Brady as well as on the exploits of Billy the Kid who featured heavily in the gun play of the Lincoln County War in what is the longest individual section in the book.

Most of the disreputable characters described in How the Irish Won the West, however, directed their villainy towards non-white races and Dungan really doesn’t gloss over the full horror of their treatment, tin particular that of Native Indians, “In a sense, the Irish experience in the West can be seen as a laboratory experiment or an examination of Irish tolerance of other cultures when directly confronted with diversity.

In most instances the candidates can be said to have failed the exam.” James Kirker, for example, from Co Antrim who was said to have scalped 500 Apaches for the reward of $200 each, was “one of many Irishmen who had a career of murdering Indians”. Dungan is careful here to place the Irish man in his contemporary context when he claims that “in the 1840s Kirker was a hero…celebrated by a grateful populace.”

Racism against the Chinese is also explored in the stories of Denis Kearny in San Francisco with his political slogan of ‘The Chinese must go’ and his confrere Matthew Nunan who promulgated city ordinances that discriminated against the Chinese population including the shaving of the heads of all prisoners, a law aimed squarely at the hair queue particular and precious to Chinese men.

While the vast majority of the Irish people who feature in How the Irish Won the West are male, there were many Irish women who stand out, whether “gentle tamers” or “soiled doves” who earned the rewards that lay in “mining the miners”, a typical example of Dungan’s excellent eye for the telling quote.

The female equivalent of Thomas Fitzpatrick in terms of “courage, tenacity, intelligence and longevity” was Cork woman Nellie Cashman who made her fortune running boarding houses for the miners of Tombstone, Arizona and then parlayed that fortune into buying and selling claims all over the North American West.

Cashman become well known to the larger American populace however when she organised a rescue mission of hundreds of stranded and starving prospectors and earned herself the sobriquet of ‘The Angel of Cassiar” into the bargain. One newspaper paid her some highfalutin praise, “In all the vicissitudes of life she has maintained the highest self respect, but is as ambitious in her notions as Joan of Arc”.

Cashman wasn’t the only Irish woman to make her mark in the western dust. Belinda Mulrooney or the Queen of the Klondike started off providing hot-water bottles to miners before graduating to the ownership of a luxury hotel where she used the drunken claims of prospectors to buy herself many profitable mines. And what about Molly b’Damn whose beauty was so great that it sent even the famous Calamity Jane packing?

That’s only a taste though of the many and varied cast of characters in How the Irish Won the West. It would be remiss not to mention also Sir George Gore who is said to have killed hundreds of bears and thousands of buffalo or Horace Plunkett, father of the Irish farming co-operative and a Wyoming cattle farmer called “Hod”.

You can’t leave out John Ross Browne whose travel writing influenced both Mark Twain and Hermann Melville or Paul Kane, the ‘Father of Canadian Art’ or indeed Paul Boyton who “floated down the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers armed with a bugle and a knife.”

Finally, any mention of Irish men in the West could not omit Oscar Wilde and his celebrated tour of a part of America where “the mortality among pianists…is marvellous.” Dungan delights in puncturing another myth about Wilde pointing out that his famous response to a customs official that he had nothing to declare but his genius was “uttered out of earshot of any witnesses” and that the bon mot had “more than a whiff of retrospection about it.”

Myles Dungan does a very capable job of corralling all these stories and all these characters together and bundling them up into a coherent collection. His language is always entertaining, describing Lola Montez for example as a woman who “reinvented herself more often than an endangered chameleon” and he has a quick, knowing wit.

Due to the sheer number of Irish men and women detailed, the author can, on occasion come across as something of a purveyor of tales akin to a wild west salesman selling snake oil while the movie references and framing can be slightly overdone. However, How the Irish Won the West is a wonderful and entertaining starting point for the history reader intent on learning more about the American West and the Irish part in its exploration and settlement.

In the midst of the recent centenary commemorations many local contributions to the Rising have started to come to light. One such focus is the events of Easter week in County. Louth and the role of Louth men and women in the plans for the rebellion. By Ailbhe Rogers.

Similarities can be drawn between the experiences of Louth veterans and other counties; the lack of orders, direction and communication, confusion, problems with transport and opposition from authorities.

The role of women in Louth during the Rising especially has gone completely unnoticed until quite recently. Also striking is the involvement of local Redmondite National Volunteers forces in assisting the arrest of Louth Volunteers after the Rising.

Events in Louth were mostly bloodless. However, on Easter Monday an incident also occurred between local Volunteer forces and the Royal Irish Constabulary at Castlebellingham, Co. Louth in which a policeman was shot dead and a British officer was injured.

The plan for the Rising in Louth

About eighty Irish Volunteers marched out from Dundalk on Easter Sunday morning 1916 with the intention of meeting the Meath Volunteers at the Hill of Tara. The group was made up of units from Dundalk, Ardee, Cooley, Grangebellew and Dunleer.

Their orders were to destroy the bridge at Slane, free a contingent of German prisoners of war and take up positions in Blanchardstown in order to intercept any British military units coming by train from Athlone.

The Louth Volunteers were to form part of an entrenching circle around the city that would keep communication and supply lines open as well as providing a possible escape route to the West for the Dublin Volunteers. A contingent was left behind in Dundalk to commandeer a consignment of arms that belonged to the Redmondite faction of the National Volunteers.[1]

The Countermanding order

However, at the last minute, Eoin MacNeill, the Volunteer Chief of Staff, tried to call off the rising, causing chaos among the Volunteer around the country.

Around lunchtime on Easter Sunday, a courier on a motorbike was sent from Dublin to Dundalk to deliver Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding order, in the form of despatches addressed to Louth Volunteer leaders Patrick Hughes and Donal O’Hannigan.

Because the Volunteers had already left the town, the despatches were instead delivered to Angela Matthews, president of the Dundalk branch of Cumann na mBan, who with the help of Rev. Father Peadar Macardle of the Marist, Dundalk, frantically tried to make contact with the Louth Volunteers before they took any action.

Matthews had MacNeill’s signature authenticated before delivering the despatches to Sean MacEntee who was in charge of the contingent of Dundalk Volunteers who had remained behind in the town to commandeer the guns belonging to the Redmondite Volunteers. She also mobilised some of the Dundalk Cumann na mBan women and to inform them of the situation.[2]

Sean MacEntee along with a group of men set off in motor cars to inform the Louth Volunteers of the countermand. MacEntee, Thomas Hamill and P.J. Berrills were subsequently sent on to Dublin to make contact with Patrick Pearse and James Connolly as to what was happening.

No sooner had they distributed the countermanding order though than got word that the Rising was back on. Around lunchtime on Easter Monday Angela Matthews received a visit from a young lady caller named Julia Grenan of Dublin, who had been sent by Patrick Pearse to counties Louth and Monaghan with despatches explaining that the Rising was now going ahead and that all local units were to strike at noon on Easter Monday. [3]

For the second time, frantic attempts were made to get urgent orders to the Louth Volunteers, who had spent the night in Slane and were now on their way back to Dundalk via Dunleer and Castlebellingham.

Meanwhile back in Dundalk, forces hostile to the insurrection were organising. The local contingent of Redmondite Volunteers voluntarily surrendered the arms in their possession to the local military and police. A Home Defence Corps was formed in the town with the aim of assisting the police should the order be given to arrest the Irish Volunteers returning to the town.

When the local branch of Cumann na mBan were made aware of these developments they decided to cycle south out of the town and meet the Louth Volunteers to deliver Pearse’s mobilisation order and to warn the Volunteers about the Home Defence Corps lying wait in the town. Nellie Clarke was chosen to accompany Angela Matthews in her mission. Matthews took the Blackrock Road out of the town while Clarke took the Dublin Road and the two ladies agreed to meet at the gates of Clermont Estate.[4]

Late in the afternoon on Easter Monday, Seán MacEntee overtook the weary and footsore Louth Volunteers at Lurgangreen in a commandeered Dublin motorcar. MacEntee had successfully made contact with Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in Liberty Hall, Dublin. Pearse’s message for Donal O’Hannigan and the Louth Volunteers was to carry out their original instructions as soon as possible. Around the same time Nellie Clarke reached the contingent and delivered the orders to O’Hannigan and Hughes.

Checkpoints

While eavesdropping upon a conversation between the two Dundalk RIC men, who had been trailing the Louth Volunteers since Sunday morning, Paddy McHugh overheard Sergeant Michael Wymes instruct his colleague Constable Connolly that when the party came within a mile of Dundalk, Constable Connolly was ‘to proceed as fast as he could to [a] barracks and inform the Dundalk police of our arrival.’[5]

As a result, the Volunteers arrested two RIC constables and searched them. They were found to be in the possession of papers which contained copies of notes on the Louth Volunteer movements since Easter Sunday, the originals having been sent on to Louth RIC HQ in Dundalk.[6]

Other Volunteers, on their way to rendezvous with the Meath Volunteers at the Hill of Tara mounted checkpoints and held up about thirty cars to ensure that word of the mobilisation did not get through to the Dundalk RIC. Eight cars were pressed into Volunteer service, two containing British soldiers, who were taken prisoner and also put under guard with the two RIC policemen. Any cars that were not required were dismantled to prevent further use: ‘In some cases we took the valves out of the tyres and threw the valves into fields.’[7]

A horse brake was secured for the dispossessed civilian passengers who were conveyed to Dundalk.

Any vehicles that did not stop were fired on. Local farmer Patrick McCormack was shot in the hand when he refused to halt while passing in his horse and cart.[8] A loaded rifle was also discharged by accident grazing the head of Dundalk Volunteer Richard Jameson.[9]

The nervy weapons handling is not surprising. Due to the severe shortage of guns on the part of the Louth Volunteers before the Rising, some Volunteers like Daniel Tuite had never undergone rifle drill and many others had never fired a weapon before.[10]

The fact that many of the Volunteers had got very little sleep in the previous thirty-six hours would also have contributed to bad temper, tetchiness and a lack of judgement. It can also be presumed that having just been informed that the Rising was definitely on and that they were on their way to Dublin to take part, excitement may have got the better of some of the younger men in the group.

These facts will come to prove tragically important later on in the episode. The dozen or so RIC men and military who were stopped were left behind to make their own way while the Volunteers proceeded onto Castlebellingham to regroup.

Castlebellingham

Castlebellingham is a small village in mid-Louth that is situated between Dundalk and Drogheda and lies about three miles inland from the sea. In the 1911 census there were two pubs and one shop in the village.[11]

In the village, O’Hannigan ordered his men to stock up on provisions and food supplies for the journey to the Hill of Tara. Items such as cheese and biscuits were commandeered from some of the local businesses in the village.

In at least one case they faced opposition from a local shop owner who threatened the Volunteers with a knife. A receipt on behalf of the Provisional Irish Republic was handed over for what food was taken.[12]

While this was going on, two of the village’s policemen, Acting Sergeant Patrick Kiernan and Constable Patrick Donovan left Castlebellingham RIC barracks to investigate the situation and attempt to stop some of the motor cars.

The two were immediately apprehended, searched for arms and placed with a guard upon them alongside some iron railings in front of Patrick Byrne’s pub. The railings surround a grassy triangular area in the centre of the village still to this day. Sean MacEntee was placed in charge of the prisoners and according to O’Hannigan, the orders he gave to his men were: ‘As long as the RIC surrendered peacefully they were not to molest them or injure them in any way.’ However, his men were ‘to shoot if they tried any funny tricks.’[13]

A few minutes later the party were joined in the village by Constable Charles McGee of Gilbertstown RIC barracks who arrived on his bicycle with the intention of delivering despatches to the Castlebellingham RIC.

Born in 1893, twenty-three-year-old Constable McGee was a native Irish speaker from Innisboffin Island, Co. Donegal and had been posted to Gilbertstown in May 1913. McGee was ordered to dismount, which he did. He was subsequently searched for arms and relieved of his despatches. He was put with the other two RIC policemen with their backs to the railings.

Just then a motor car drove into the village and was stopped by the Volunteers. The occupants of the car were Second Lieutenant Robert Dunville of the Irish Grenadier Guards and his chauffeur both of whom had been travelling from Belfast to the ferry at Kingston (now Dun Laoghaire). Lieut. Dunville, who was also twenty-three years of age, was a graduate of Eton College and was the son of John Dunville, former Lieutenant-Colonel in the British army and private secretary to the Duke of Devonshire.

The two were ordered out of the car and lined up with the rest. Dunville was asked if he had any weapons upon his person and Paddy McHugh ‘accepted [the] officer’s word that he was not armed and did not search him.[14]

According to many of the Volunteers’ witness accounts Dunville was very angry at being held up. Edward Bailey recalls: ‘He was not very nice about his treatment,’[15] while Frank Martin states that ‘Lieut. Dunville was threatening and abusing us.’[16]

Just as the Volunteers were about to leave Castlebellingham a brief incident occurred in which Dunville and McGee were both injured by gun-fire, McGee fatally. Sources from both sides differ as to what exactly occurred.

The shooting of Dunville and McGee

Paddy McHugh was covering the prisoners from the last car in the convoy of commandeered vehicles:

MacEntee withdrew the guard on the prisoners but ordered me to cover the prisoners, from the last car. I took up position on the running board of the car and I covered the prisoners with the rifle I carried. As the guard was being withdrawn, and MacEntee’s back being turned, the staff officer whom I had covered made a move that appeared to me as if he was attempting to draw a gun. I immediately called on him to put up his hands.

He did not obey. I called again and he again ignored my call. I called no more but fired, and, to my amazement, the RIC man at the other end of the line of prisoners fell. Another shot then rang out and I called out to cease fire.. The RIC man who fell on the road was killed by a charge of buckshot fired from a shotgun. The man who fired the shot from the shotgun has never admitted the mistake or the accident or whatever his motive was and so it will now probably remain forever his secret.[17]

According to Sean MacEntee who was in charge of the prisoners:

Keeping the prisoners covered the while, I then backed towards my own car.. I had just turned to enter it, had mounted the foot-board and was stepping inside the car, when a shot rang out. I jumped out at once and looked towards the prisoners. The lieutenant was standing quite steady and upright, two policemen were running across the road, while of the other policeman and of the chauffeur there was no sign.. It was not until nearly five weeks later, when I was brought back from Stafford to stand my court martial in Dublin, that I learned that the same shot that wounded the lieutenant killed Constable McGee as well.[18]

Donal Hannigan did not see what happened but from the report he received:

..it appears that when the officer was approached by McEntee he dropped his motor cycle and ran behind the RIC men and made attempts as if to draw a gun from his pocket [sic]. On seeing this one of my men fired at him. At that moment the RIC man unfortunately moved into the line of fire and the bullet passed through the R.I.C. man and wounded Lt. Dunville. Lieut. Dunville was found to be armed with a revolver.[19]

From reading the above statements, a reasonable conclusion that one may come to is that Paddy McHugh may have fired from the rear of the convoy when he thought he saw Lieut. Dunville reaching for a weapon. McHugh’s bullet may have passed through Constable McGee’s left arm, wounding Lieut. Dunville who was possibly standing directly behind him.

When McHugh’s shot rang out there might have been a moment of panic amongst the Volunteer ranks in which a skittish recruit with a shotgun may have also fired from the front of the convoy hitting McGee in the upper torso.[20] A medical inquest on constable Charles McGee [21] found four wounds were found on him, consistent with a bullet  wound to the arm and shotgun blast to the chest. [22]

Constable McGee did not die immediately. He was attended to by Dr Patrick J. O’Hagan who happened to be in the vicinity at the time and along with the help of a 39-year old local dressmaker named Sarah Connaughton who witnessed the incident, the pair managed to drag McGee into George O’Kelly’s kitchen nearby.

McGee was removed by motor car to the Louth Infirmary where he subsequently passed away. The coroner for North Louth Dr. O’Connell returned a verdict of death due to shock and haemorrhage as the result of his wounds.[23] McGee was formally identified by his brother Denis and his remains were brought back to his home place. He is interred in Gortahork Cemetery, Co. Donegal.

In the case of Lieut. Dunville it was found that the bullet had passed through the left side of his chest and may have perforated his lung. He recovered from his ordeal but suffered bouts of ill-heath in later life which was put down to the injury he suffered in 1916. Dunville died suddenly of heart failure on 10 January 1931 in Carltonian, South Africa.[24]

Aftermath

The Louth men pressed on with a group making it as far as Tyrellstown House near Mulhuddart, north Co. Dublin where they became stranded and spent most of Easter week, before dispersing after hearing of the surrender of the insurgents in Dublin. The Louth Volunteers did not disband until Wednesday 3 May and were the last unit of Volunteers to do so.

Over the following weeks the local RIC made sweeps throughout the main towns and villages of Louth arresting about sixty-five men in total. Some were arrested at home while others were at work. Batches were marched to the nearest train station and sent to Richmond Barracks, Inchicore, Dublin.

Others managed to evade arrest by going ‘on the run.’ Edward Bailey took a job working with farmers in the Dunleer district, an area in which he was not very well known by the local RIC.[25] Hugh Kearney and Owen Clifford both travelled to Liverpool along with the help of some sailor friends with Kearney later laying low on the east-coast of Scotland.[26]

Paddy Hughes, Paddy McHugh and Donal O’Hannigan were all wanted and their names appeared in the Irish Hue & Cry Police Gazette on numerous occasions. Paddy Hughes kept his head down in Drogheda and later went on the run in North Louth and South Armagh only re-emerging during the Truce period in 1921.

Posing as a tramp fiddler, Paddy McHugh travelled to Dublin where he avoided arrest by assuming the name of Seán Kiernan, a surname he borrowed from one of Castlebellingham’s RIC constables.

He later became a member of the Dublin IRA Brigade Munitions Staff.[27] Donal O’Hannigan procured a bicycle and travelled to Mitchelstown, Co. Cork from whence he also continued the struggle.[28]

Only ten Louth men were released from Richmond Barracks before the deportations to Britain began. The rest of the men were marched to the North Bull, put on cattle ships and transported to Wakefield, Stafford, Wandsworth and Barnlinnie prisons with an eventual destination of Frongoch internment camp, North Wales.

Upon their arrest, Sean MacEntee, Francis Martin, Denis Leahy and James Sally were all charged with the murder of Constable Charles McGee and were court-martialled in Richmond Barracks, Dublin on 9-10 June 1916.

The four Dundalk Volunteers were defended by Mr. T.M. Healy, Mr. Cecil Lavery and Mr. J.B. Hamill of Dundalk. Various witnesses such as residents of Castlebellingham, motor car owners, chauffeurs, doctors and RIC policeman were all called upon to testify.

Most of the witnesses agreed that the four were present at the incident but did not fire the fatal shot. At the trial RIC Sergeant Patrick Kiernan ‘heard a shot from the direction of the first car.. Another shot followed and witness and Constable Donovan ran into a house. Two shots were fired as they crossed the road.’[29]

Lieutenant Robert Dunville said: ‘A man got out of one of the cars and aimed a long rifle at him. He heard a report and somebody at his right hand side shouted and he found that he himself had been shot.. He could recognise the man who pointed the long rifle but it was not one of the accused.’[30]

All four men were found guilty and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to penal servitude; Sean MacEntee – penal servitude for life; Francis Martin – ten years’ penal servitude; Denis Leahy – ten years’ penal servitude and James Sally – ten years’ penal servitude with a remission of five years.[31] All four were imprisoned in Dartmoor and Lewes prisons in England and were not released until the general amnesty in June 1917.

A common feature throughout the events in Louth during Easter Week is that of confusion caused by Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding orders and the subsequent lack of communication between the various contingents.

The death of Constable Charles McGee had a negative effect on the Louth Volunteers. McGee was very popular in the Dundalk area being a well-known Irish speaker, a talented Gaelic football player and he had associated with many of the Louth Volunteers on a social level. Hence, many of the men found themselves in a difficult situation caught between personal feelings of remorse and satisfaction. Years after the tragic event Paddy McHugh lamented:

I feel convinced that the RIC man was killed accidentally. His death as it happened was regretted sincerely by all in charge of the Volunteers. Every night from this on whilst we were together, that man was prayed for by the whole Company.. May the Lord have mercy on his soul.[32]

The men who were charged with the murder of Charles McGee were not the actual perpetrators and that the person responsible never officially stepped forward to take the blame.

The shooting had ‘an unfortunate and damaging effect on public opinion in the town of Dundalk and district.. ‘turning sympathisers away from us.’33

However due to the executions of the Rising’s leaders and the highly effective propaganda campaign that was initiated by Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan in the aftermath if the Rising, public opinion went from one of anger to sympathy and this subsequently led the way for the road to further raicalisation anf guerrilla war in the years ahead.

References and notes

[1] Donal Hall, World War I and nationalist politics in county Louth, 1914-1920 (Dublin, 2005) p. 21

[2] Ailbhe Rogers, Cumann na mBan in Co. Louth 1914-22 (MA) NUI Maynooth (2013) p. 19

[3] After handing over Pearse’s despatches to Angela Matthews, Julia Grenan returned to Dublin. For the remainder of Easter Week, Julia and her good friend Elizabeth O’Farrell attached themselves to the GPO garrison where they worked as despatch carriers alongside many of the members of the Provisional Irish Government and several other members of Cumann na mBan.

By the end of the week, she was one of only three women left in No. 16 Moore St. at the time of the surrender. Julia Grenan was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol until 9 May 1916. She is buried alongside her best friend and partner Elizabeth O’Farrell in Glasnevin Cemetery.

[4] Ailbhe Rogers, Cumann na mBan in Co. Louth 1914-22 (MA) NUI Maynooth (2013) pp 23-4

[5] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 677)

[6] Donal O’Hannigan Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 161)

[7] Thomas McCrave Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 695)

[8] Arthur Greene Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 238); Irish Times Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Second Edition (New Delhi, 2016) p. 109

[9] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 677)

[10] Daniel Tuite Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 337)

[11] House and building B1 return form for Castlebellingham Town, Castlebellingham, Co Louth, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin (Census of Ireland 1901/1911 and census fragments and substitutes, 1821-51, 1911 National census of Ireland)

[12] Donal O’Hannigan Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 161)

[13] Donal O’Hannigan Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 161)

[14] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 677)

[15] Edward Bailey Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 233)

[16] Frank Martin Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 236)

[17] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 677)

[18] Seán MacEntee Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 1052)

[19] Donal O’Hannigan Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 161)

[20] Stephen O’Donnell, The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans in County Louth: 1919-22 (Dundalk, 2004) p. 229

[21] Carried out by Mr T.F. McGahon J.P. and Mr. A.A. Watters J.P in the Louth Infirmary, Dundalk on the body of Constable Charles McGee.

[22] Dundalk Examiner, 29 Apr. 1916 On the upper left arm there was a large wound about one inch in diameter and an exit wound through the seventh vertebrae. In the left axilla (armpit) they found a large lacerated wound two inches by one inch. In the left side of his chest, splinters of rib bone had embedded itself in the left lung lacerating the organ to a considerable extent

[23] Dundalk Examiner, 29 Apr. 1916

[24] The Times, 12 Jan. 1931

[25] Edward Bailey Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 233)

[26] Hugh Kearney Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 260)

[27] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 664 and 677)

[28] Donal O’Hannigan Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 161)

[29] Irish Times Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Second Edition (New Delhi, 2016) p. 110

[30] Irish Times Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Second Edition (New Delhi, 2016) pp 110-11

[31] Irish Times Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Second Edition (New Delhi, 2016) p. 112

[32] Patrick McHugh Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 677)

33 James McGuill Witness Statement, Military Archives, Cathl Brugha Barracks, Dublin (Bureau of Military History, No. 353)

By Ruán O’Donnell and Micheál O hAodha

Published by Merrion Press, Dublin 2016.

Reviewer: Eoin O’Driscoll

Ruán O’Donnell and Micheál O hAodha’s Voices from the Easter Rising brings twenty eight first-hand account of the 1916 Rising together in one place. The book offers a wide variety of perspectives on the conflict from those that experienced it and offers an illuminating insight into the events of the Rising and particularly its effects on the people of Dublin and beyond.

The vast bulk of these accounts are from extracted from the Óghlaigh na hÉireann’s Bureau of Military History Archives. Between 1947 and 1959 the Irish Government began to collect primary accounts of Ireland’s struggle for independence. These were sealed until all witnesses who gave accounts were deceased in 2003.

Now they provide a hugely important resource for historians seeking to understand the events that led to the birth of the Irish state. While the archives are now largely available online at http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/ by their nature they are largely inaccessible to most readers. Voices from the Easter Rising succeeds in bringing these vivid accounts of Easter 1916 to an everyday audience in an easily accessible format.

Much of the commonly read histories of 1916 were written before these archives were made public. The over-reliance of much of 1916’s historiography on the heavily biased Dublin print media has long been evident. It is clear from the accounts presented in this volume that certain prevailing conceptions of the Rising could benefit from fresh evaluation.

It is notable that British General Harry de Courcy Wheeler notes the “tremendous cheers “that greeted the rebels after their arrest and that it was “perfectly plain that all the admiration was for those who had surrendered”. The commonly accepted idea that the Rising was met with nothing with opprobrium before a mass attitudinal change when the leaders were executed. These accounts, which also note the support for the British forces by various Dublin civilians throughout the Rising, suggest a more complex and nuanced pre-1916 attitude towards the national struggle.

These accounts also vividly portray the sheer chaos of armed conflict. The reader is told of confused soldiers accidently shooting themselves dead; of rebels who may or may not have been killed by  friendly fire; and the sheer confusion of those involved. The dense fog of war is widely apparent particular in the accounts dealing with the close of hostilities and the communication of the decision for the rebels to surrender.

The immense confusion of the conflict, however, does at times overpower much of the narrative value of these accounts, particularly as some of the accounts chosen for publication are those of witnesses whose involvement in the Rising was somewhat tangential.

Without significant knowledge of the specific locations and timeline involved in the Rising, it would be difficulty for the reader to follow many of the accounts and to form a picture of the Rising itself. The volume would majorly benefit from the inclusion of a map or two and an overview of the Rising’s events. As presented, the volume is best read in conjunction with broader accounts.

Edited by Angus Mitchell

Published by Merrion Press, 2016,

Reviewer: Daniel Murray

In February 1916, Roger Casement was recovering near Munich from an unpleasant combination of tropical fever and nervous exhaustion when he replied to a letter from the Countess Blücher, asking for help with writing tips for her diary. Eager to help, Casement expounded at length on the delights – and dangers – of keeping a journal:

You know the charm of a diary is its simplicity. Its reality and the sense of daily life it conveys to the reader depends not on style, but on truth and sincerity. It should tell things but still more of the writer and his (or her) outlook on those things.

Sometimes a diary could tell too much. Casement confessed to the Countess that he had given up on the one he had been writing while in Germany as he found himself recording things that were best left in the dark.

As indicated, keeping a diary was no simple matter but then, there was little in Casement’s life, not least his time in Germany, that was simple. As he confessed at the start of another diary of his, recently reprinted here: “It is not every day that even an Irishman commits High Treason especially one who has been in the service of the Sovereign he discards.”

Quite.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man whose earlier claim to fame had been his exposé of human rights abuses – first in the Congo and later Peru – Casement was conscious of his role in history, taking meticulous care that his personal papers be suitably prepared and leaving behind detailed instructions for their dispersal and eventual publication.

With an eye to posterity – and a trace of grandiosity – he explained the value of his documents to his friends: “they are historic & I leave them to Ireland.”

This forward thinking and the wealth of information it ensured are in no small part the reason why Casement has been one of the better remembered figures of 1916, despite his role being a sideshow to the Rising and not a terribly successful one by anyone’s yardstick: his mission to raise a regiment amongst Irish prisoners in German POW camps resulted in only a handful of recruits and the withdrawal of interest on the part of the German authorities.

The disillusionment was mutual. “My last day in Berlin!” he wrote in this diary’s last entry for the 11^th April 1916 as he departed for Ireland and the fate he was at least half-expecting to find: “Thank God – tomorrow my last day in Germany – again thank God, an English jail, or scaffold, would be better than to dwell with these people longer. All deception – all self-interest.”

This book is well served by its editor. Historian Angus Mitchell adroitly guides the reader through the literary and historical context in which Casement composed this diary, and his introduction should be highly informative to those who know only of Casement’s diaries of the Black sort (Mitchell leaves his thoughts on the authenticity of that divisive matter unstated).

But the star of the show is undoubtedly Casement, always an engaging writer keen to leave an impression on his reader as evidenced by the artful descriptions – the Irish-American liftboys in New York had “the brogue still lingering round the shores of that broad estuary of smiles that takes the place of a mouth in the true Milesian face” – or his crisp accounts of his increasingly acrimonious relationships with various German officials.

Much of the later book makes for painful reading as Casement slowly realises the lack of concern his allies truly had for Ireland except as a convenient second front against Britain.

Which should have been obvious from the start – after all, nations have no friends, only interests, and Casement was too experienced a diplomat not to know this – but the picture that emerges from these pages is of a rather fey individual, intelligent enough to recognise the scale of his plight but not self-aware enough to see how he got there in the first place. But at least he had the comfort of knowing that it was all someone else’s fault anyway.

Still, regardless of one’s thoughts about Casement – and he will continue to be debated – those wanting to learn more about one of the most iconic and controversial figures in 20^th century Irish history would be well advised to start here with the subject’s own thoughts and feelings.

Crime and punishment during nationalist revolution in Dublin. By John Dorney

The most obvious way the state enters our lives is when it attempts to enforce its laws and punish those who break them. For this, as Frederick Engels once wrote it needs ‘bodies of armed men’.[1] In the final instance these may be soldiers, but most of the time they are police, charged specifically with upholding the law.

In any revolutionary situation, the first thing those trying to pull down the existing state must do is to attack and disable the existing police force. In the Irish nationalist revolution of 1919-23, this certainly occurred. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were made the subject of concerted armed campaign and their authority was either replaced by Republican courts or police or reduced to brute, quasi-military force.

Dublin was a little unusual in that its police force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, or DMP, was unlike the RIC, unarmed. Also unlike the RIC, the DMP survived the revolutionary years without disbandment and was integrated into the new national police force, the Garda Siochana in 1925.

However, underneath this apparently smooth transition lies a story of revolutionary turmoil, the effective collapse of the police in the Irish capital, an explosion in ordinary crime and the re-imposition of order under the Irish Free State after 1923.

The DMP – policing Dublin

The DMP was founded by an Act of the Westminster Parliament, the Dublin Police Act of 1836, replacing the old haphazard system of night-watchmen, constables and horse patrol – bodies that had accumulated since the late 18^th century.[2]

The new, unarmed force had a strength of about 800 initially but by the early twentieth century was up to over 1,100 men, grouped into six geographical Divisions; four in the city, D and C north of the river Liffey and A and B on the south side, E in the southern suburbs and F in the south county, plus a Detective squad, G Division, which was raised in 1843.

The G Division was about 50 men strong by the outbreak of revolutionary strife in 1916 and was based in Dublin Castle and in offices on Exchange Street.[3]

G Division was charged with investigating all unsolved crimes but it was also given primary responsibility for investigating and infiltrating radical nationalist organisations such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

By 1900, Dublin, with a population of 390,000, was per head of population the most heavily policed city in the United Kingdom, with one policeman for every 330 people, compared with one for roughly 500 in British cities. It was a city of extremes, containing great wealth and abject poverty and perhaps as a result had over twice the crime rate of Belfast or Cork and greater also than most British cities.

Despite this, it was not, before the advents of political unrest, a particularly dangerous place. In the early 1900s about 80% of the 3,000 or so offences recorded every year were comprised of non-violent theft and most of the rest were connected with drunkenness and assault, with usually only about two to three murders a year.[4]

The DMP were brought into some disrepute by their heavy handed treatment of strikers in the great strike or Lockout of 1913 – beating to death a least three strikers during the dispute and injuring many hundreds more. It came under further pressure during the Howth gun running of 1914, when many constables refused to obey orders to disarm the Irish Volunteers who had illegally imported German rifles at Howth.

However, it was the advent of major political violence after the Rising of 1916 and especially after Sinn Fein tried to seize the reins of state power after their victory in the  General Election of 1918 and the local elections of 1920 (they took over Dublin Corporation in in alliance with Labour in January of that year) that brought about a situation of ‘dual power’ in the city, rendering the old means of enforcing the law irrelevant.

The Counter State

In January 1919, the Sinn Fein MPs met in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic. All over Ireland in 1919 and 1920 the newly ascendant Sinn Fein took over the functions of the state where they could. In January 1919 a boycott was placed on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and on the existing courts. This was extended to the DMP in mid-1919.[5]

The existing courts system was replaced in many parts of Ireland by the Dail (also called Sinn Fein) Courts and the RIC by either the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or a related body named the Irish Republican Police (IRP). By mid-1920, along with the elected Sinn Fein local governments, they had effectively hollowed out the British administration.

The first republican courts were National Arbitration Courts, which were legal, voluntary bodies that handled civil cases. However, the law and order situation deteriorated as the political violence worsened and the RIC withdrew from the countryside in early 1920, forcing the republicans to take over more state functions. In June 1920 Republican Courts or Dail Courts were launched to replace completely the existing Justice system.[6]

The republican counter state – collecting its own taxes and enforcing its own law – popped up not only in remote rural regions but in the centre of the British administration in Dublin.

Taxes were withheld from the state and paid instead to the Republican authorities where possible. Indeed in Dublin IRA Companies were instructed in mid 1920 to raid the homes of rate (local tax) collectors and force them to sign over their takings to the Republic [7]. Various means were also used to levy a kind of war tax on the population.

Having won control of the Dublin Corporation in 1920 they now had its rates under their control until the British government froze all funds of local government bodies under Sinn Fein control.  In a raid by the British Army in December 1920, City Hall was turned into a military base, it funds impounded and several councillors imprisoned.[8]

There was also a ‘Republican gold reserve’ of £25,000 and another £325,000 collected in the ‘National Land Bank’[9] The Republic therefore was not without funds, which it mainly spent on arms, ammunition and paying its few fulltime fighters and administrators.

Destroying the old system

Twelve DMP officers lost their lives during the War of Independence in Dublin from 1919-1921, out of a total of about 300 people killed in Dublin. All but one of these were G Division detectives killed in the assault by Michael Collins’ IRA Squad on the DMP’s intelligence arm from July 1919 to April 1920.[10]

This assassination campaign effectively disabled the force as a real asset to the British authorities. In fact a number of important G Division detectives such as Eamon Broy and David Nelligan actually secretly defected and worked for Collins and IRA Intelligence; in Broy’s case up to his arrest, in Nelligan’s case remaining undiscovered throughout the period.

Ordinary DMP constables were at first armed and sent to accompany British Army patrols in Dublin to seek out IRA suspects. But most were extremely unenthusiastic about the work and the military soon complained of carrying ‘passengers’. In October 1920, representatives of the DMP clandestinely worked out a deal with Michael Collins whereby IRA attacks on the Dublin police would stop if they ceased carrying arms. After talks between the policemen and Jeremiah Mee, a defector from the RIC who spoke on Collins’ behalf, a deal was reached and the DMP stepped out of the war.[11]

The unintended effect of this neutering of the police force was that during the War of Independence and the subsequent Truce period in Dublin, ‘ordinary’ crime sky-rocketed alongside political violence. The proliferation of lethal weapons on the street and the often lax discipline of both British and Republican forces made the normal policing methods of the (now again unarmed) DMP redundant.

There was a massive British security presence in the city in the form of the British Army and Auxiliaries, but almost all their efforts went into containing the Republican insurgency. As a result, a considerable portion of the Republicans’ efforts in Dublin were put into trying to replace the old policing and justice systems that they had effectively undermined.

Republican justice

The Republicans in Dublin detailed a fulltime squad of 12 men of the Irish Republican Police (paid at the same rate as their fulltime guerrillas in the Squad and Active Service Unit), led by an apprentice carpenter named Sean Condron to fight ordinary crime in 1920-21.

They also set up at least two clandestine Dail Courts, in Pembroke and Rathmines, staffed by four Justices each, one of whom had to be a woman and one a priest.

According to Maire Comerford, a Cumann na mBan Republican activist, the Pembroke Ward Court was held in Aine Heron’s house in the salubrious suburb of Ballsbridge and there were some attempts at enforcing a vision of social justice. A money lender, for instance who had charged interest of 800% was ordered not to be repaid. On that occasion though the Republican Minister for Home Affairs, Austin Stack (who operated out of an underground office on Henry Street) stepped in to reverse the decision.

Sean Condron’s men, the Republican Police, who were charged with enforcing the Courts’ rulings, were actually disappointed they had been given a non-combat role and by his own admission, ‘had no idea how to investigate crime’. They held up ‘gangsters’ at gunpoint and at one point had ten men (‘ugly customers’ according to Condron) locked in a shed in the Ringsend area.

Those convicted in the Dail Courts were sentenced to exile from Ireland, as there was nowhere secure to hold them. After the Truce, when the IRP could operate a little more openly, they handed over prisoners to Mountjoy Gaol, including three Royal Air Force officers who had robbed a building site.[12]

The IRP was always shorthanded and underfunded and maintained only a small office on Eustace Street in Temple Bar. Thus the ‘regular’ IRA battalions were also pressed into a kind of policing role, particularly after the Truce that ended open hostilities with the British on July 11, 1921.

Joe O’Connor’s Third Battalion of the IRA Dublin Brigade, based in the south inner city, was one such unit. With the DMP in O’Connor’s words, ‘practically inoperative, there was a danger the criminal element would take advantage.’ He recalled a ‘particularly bad gang’ had robbed an old man and kicked him into the Grand Canal.  O’Connor had them arrested at gunpoint and ‘their leader Hatchet O’Connor, was deported for ten years’.[13]

In the semi-rural 4^th Battalion area, south of the city, Henry Murray recalled

In the Fourth Battalion area the principal criminal activities were in the nature of armed robbery and the stealing of cattle. Persons arrested by the Volunteer police for such serious offences were lodged in premises in the Tallaght area and kept under armed guard pending trial. The trials were carried out by Battalion officers and, as imprisonment was out of the question, punishment for very serious offences usually consisted of flogging or deportation. I acted as prosecutor in several cases which were disposed of by flogging or deportation which were found to be the only effective means of keeping serious crime in check.[14]

Patrick Kelly of First Battalion in the north inner city similarly recalled his men being used to preserve order during the Truce, on one occasion using force to break up a riot between local youths in Smithfield and the local British Army garrison. But like other IRA officers, he was also involved in suppressing ‘ordinary crime’, on one occasion apprehending a gang led by a Royal Air Force deserter, which had stolen a sum of £2000 from a Dublin builder, that was meant to pay his workers. The gang was tracked down, held up at gun point and eventually given to the Republican Courts, who duly handed them over to the British military as deserters.[15]

 This was lot of power for young men with guns, and no real legal constraints to have over the civilian population.

There were, before the Truce, only two working Dail Courts in Dublin  – in Pembroke and Rathmines Wards according to Maire Comerford, (though Christopher Byrne of the 4rth Battalion remembered one working in Cuffe Street in the south city centre too[16]). By early 1922 after the signing of Treaty, it was clear that the newly empowered Irish authorities needed new, more permanent institutions for keeping order, in Dublin and elsewhere.

The British paramilitary police, the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries had never really been used in a law enforcement as opposed to counter-insurgency role, but they were in any case withdrawn and disbanded in early 1922. The RIC was formally disbanded in August of that year. The DMP remained but its morale at this point was at an all time low.

On 24^th of January at an IRA GHQ meeting, Richard Mulcahy along with Rory O’Connor, Director of Engineering and Oscar Traynor, OC Dublin, discussed the ‘maintenance of order in Dublin’. Mulcahy cited a glut of recent robberies and ‘general disorder’.

Traynor agreed, implicitly acknowledging  that some IRA members may have been involved in armed robberies and suggested all arms be put in Quartermasters’ hands that the IRA to take over policing in the city and to get ‘some place of detention’. It was proposed to set up a detective unit, a Criminal Investigation Department or CID with strength of 100 men. [17]

The CID

A file on CID strength on May 16^th, 1922 shows 50 detective officers, a clerk and three drivers. Its acting OC by this time was Frank Saurin, one of Collins’ former IRA Intelligence officers. [18] The CID does not seem to have recruited ex Irish Republican Police, perhaps because many of them, like their chief Simon Donnelly, had anti-Treaty sympathies.

There were, however, many IRA Volunteers recruited from the start, some without any Intelligence background. Two such men, for instance, were Martin Hore and John O’Reilly, both veterans of the 1916 Rising and of the war against the British in Dublin, who both joined the CID in March 1922.[19]

While the CID was generally assumed to have been made up exclusively of IRA veterans, at least of its 27 men were former DMP policemen, including David Nelligan, who eventually headed the unit in late 1923.[20]

The unarmed DMP, according to David Nelligan, were unable to cope with the wave of armed crime that accompanied the armed conflict in the city, the Irish Republican Police were ‘inefficient’ and the well-armed CID officers detailed to combat armed robbery had ‘plenty to do’ in early 1922.[21]

The CID and also related organisations such as the Citizens Defence Force and Protective Corps were effectively used as a pro-Treaty militia during the Civil War. All, but particularly the CID were accused of the abuse and sometimes killing of anti-Treaty prisoners – and most likely had some involvement in the assassination of up to 25 anti-Treatyites in the city. However, for the purposes of this article, the important point is that they were also a particularly blunt means of keeping order in Dublin.

The Civil War and law and order

In March 1922 the IRA formally split over the Anglo Irish Treaty. In April, anti-Treaty elements occupied the Four Courts in central Dublin and sporadic clashes broke out between them and the pro-Treaty National Army throughout the city. On June 28 1922, all out Civil War broke out with the pro-Treaty assault on the Four Courts.

The collapse and fragmentation of the forces of order led, as well as rival militias shooting at each other and commandeering property, to an unprecedented level of violent crime in the city. In all of 1922, not counting killings as a result of political violence, the DMP filed 479 cases of armed robbery, 23 murders and 53 attempted murders.[22] This was a staggering rate of violent crime in a city in which murder had been a rarity before the First World War.

The forces of order, such as they were, were also much more violent than usual. Before 1920 and again after 1923 policemen in Dublin almost always went unarmed. Not so in 1922.

On June 22^nd 1922, for example, three CID Detectives were called to a brawl in a tenement on Upper Rutland Street in the north inner city. John Lawless, a ‘usually quiet’ ex-soldier had drunkenly assaulted Mrs. Ball, wife of another veteran who lived in the same building.

During the arrest, according to the CID, Lawless tried to seize the revolver of a Detective McManus and was shot in the stomach and mortally wounded. At the inquest Mr Noyk the State solicitor representing the Detectives informed the Court that they always went armed, ‘In these times a policeman went about with his life in his hands’. The jury returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’. [23]

Had this incident occurred two years before or after, DMP policemen would have wrestled John Lawless to the ground or a worst hit him with their batons. Now the only body really attempting to enforce the law in Dublin was a heavily armed, poorly trained militia of the CID.

The Civic Guard

Most of County Dublin outside the city had always been policed by the RIC and with that corps disbanded, most of its posts were taken over first by the National Army and then by the new Free State police force the Civic Guard – later renamed to its Irish equivalent  Garda Siochana.

Although it is part of the narrative of that force that it was, from the start, unarmed, in fact, in Dublin it was armed at the beginning of its existence.

Some of its first jobs in Dublin included guarding posts such as Dublin Castle and two Guards actually died in firearms accidents there.[24] An anti-Treaty raid on the police station in Dalkey in October 1922 netted a fair hail of arms.[25]

At some point in late 1922, a decision was taken to completely disarm the Guards, but in Dublin and elsewhere this made them sitting ducks for the anti-Treaty guerrillas throughout he Civil War. In County Dublin, the police stations at Rathfarnham, Dundrum and Skerries were all blown up and destroyed in early 1923. Although the IRA first removed the unarmed Civic Guards from the buildings and there were no casualties, it showed the powerlessness of the new police force during the Civil War.  [26]

Out of of over 200 people killed in the Civil War in Dublin, ten were policemen of different kinds, 5 CID, two CDF, two Civic Guards and one RIC member. This compares to at least 40 police killed in the city in the War of Independence, indicating that in 1922-23, it was the military who took the main burden of counter-insurgency rather than paramilitary police.

Re-ordering Dublin

The Irish Civil War of 1922-23 can be understood to some extent as the restoration of state power after a period of anarchy or ‘dual power’ in which the state was not able to monopolise either the use of force or the imposition of law.

As well as creating its own police and army to crush the anti-Treaty ‘Irregulars’, the pro-Treaty Government also began to overturn some of the institutions created by the nationalist revolution since 1919.

The Sinn Fein or Dail Courts were wound up, after some Republican prisoners appealed to them for release on the grounds of Habeus Corpus (that they had been imprisoned without charge). On October 4^th it was decreed that the Republican Courts were abolished and that ‘all business is to be wound up’.[27]

The previously existing British Courts system had actually been resurrected in early 1922 but was fully back up and running as the Free State legal system by September 13^th. With Four Courts destroyed, it was decided to accommodate them temporarily in Dublin Castle, the former seat of British rule, where they were to be advised by Lord Glenavy, a formerly a leading Dublin Unionist, now a firm Government supporter[28].

As for the DMP, their strength as of April 1, 1922 was 1,126. Unlike the RIC they were retained by the Irish Free State under the Treaty but nearly half – 574, took the option to retire rather than to serve the new state. The Commissioner Edgeworth Johnson retired in April 1923, to be replaced by WRE Murphy.[29]

Murphy had served in the British Army in the First World War, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, before returning to his job as schools inspector in County Derry. In early 1922 Michael Collins recruited him to the Free State’s National Army, where he held the Kerry command until December 1922. In many ways he therefore represented the integration of elements of the old British officialdom into the new Free State.

The CID, the rough and ready corps of ex IRA gunmen was disbanded in October 1923. At the height of the Civil War, its strength had stood at 73, but only eleven of its detectives were deemed fit to join the new reconstituted new 62 man DMP G Division – which soon evolved into the Garda Special Branch.[30]

The DMP had continued to operate during the Civil War, but during the armed conflict it could do little to dent the crime figures. Pursuit of the anti-Treaty ‘Irregulars’ was left to the CID and the National Army.

It was only after the Civil War that the figures for apolitical as well as political violent crime began to fall. In 1922 there were 23 ‘ordinary’ murders, in 1923, 16 and in 1924 it was back down to peacetime levels of just two homicides. There were still however 142 cases of armed robbery in Dublin in 1924, albeit down from 210 cases in 1923 and 479 in 1922. [31]

It took some time for this wave of armed crime to blow itself out as demobilised National Army soldiers and recalcitrant IRA guerrillas both carried out armed robberies in the wake of the Civil War. A former National Army soldier was hanged for instance in Dublin in November 1923 for shooting dead a CID officer during a bank robbery.[32]

WRE Murphy’s signal achievement as the last Commissioner of the DMP was closing down Dublin’s red light district ‘The Monto’ in 1924. In 1925 the DMP was incorporated into the national police force the Garda Siochana as the Dublin Metropolitan Division. Murphy went on to serve as the assistant commissioner of the Gardai under Eoin O’Duffy, another former pro-Treaty soldier turned policeman. [33]

By that date the revolution, the competition between rival aspiring state groups, was over in Dublin. The crime wave that had accompanied the dismantling of the British system of policing was also over. The city faced a future under a new, Irish police force.

References

[1] Quoted here for example.

[2] Jim Herlihy, The Dublin Metropolitan Police, a Short History and Genealogical Guide, Four Courts Press, 2001, P8-25 The RIC had been effectively in existence since 1822 but was formally codified in the same year

[3] Ibid. pp 25, 122

[4] Joseph V O’Brien, Dear Dirty Dublin, A city in Distress, 1899-1916, p180-185

[5] Padraig Yeates, Dublin, A City in Turmoil 1919-21, p47

[6] John Borgonovo, Republican Courts, Ordinary Crime and Irish Revolution 1919-21,In, Justice in Wartime and Revolutions, , Ed.s Margo De Koster, Herve Leuwers, Dirk Luyten, Xavier Rousseax

[7] George Dwyer BMH

[8] Yeates Dublin A City in Turmoil, 1919-21, p189

[9] Maire Comerford papers, UCD LA/18/17

[10] Herlihy, Short History of the DMP p182

[11] Yeates, A City in Turmoil, p161

[12] UCD Maire Comerford Papers LA/18

[13] Joseph O’Connor BMH

[14] Henry Murray BMH

[15] Patrick Kelly BMH WS

[16] Christopher Byrne BMH

[17] Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/A/67

[18] UCD MP P/7/B/26 file on CID, May 16 1922

[19] Military Pensions, applications of John O’Reilly and Martin Hore.

[20] Their names are listed in Herlihy, Jim, The Dublin Metropolitan Police –A short History and Genealogical Guide, 1836-1925, p152-153

[21] UCP MP P/7/C/29 Testimony of David Nelligan to Army Inquiry 1924.

[22] Herlihy, Jim, The Dublin Metropolitan Police –A short History and Genealogical Guide, 1836-1925, p186

[23] Irish Times June 26 1922

[24] A Civic Guard is accidentally shot fatally wounded by his comrade in Ship St Barracks (horseplay), dies on 24^th, Charles Eastwood, (19). (Irish Times September 30 1922)5 October A Civic Guard commits suicide, shoots self, in Ship St Barracks, James Green (Irish Times October 7, 1922)

[25]  27 October, Dalkey DMP Station taken over by the IRA. Three automatic pistols and 2 ‘rook’ rifles taken. (CW/OPS/01/02/07 GHQ Misc. reports) IRA reports 1 Lee enfield, 2 martini and 2 Rook rifles taken ‘all safely dumped’. (Dublin 1 Bde reports to AACS p69/77)

[26]  12 January 1923  Rathfarnham Civic Guard Barracks is blown up by the IRA. 6 men armed with revolvers removed the 2 Guards and the civilians from the neighbouring houses, then detonated a powerful mine. (Irish Times 13 January 1923)27 January 1923 Dundrum Civic Guard Station burnt down. 13 February Skerries Civic Guard Station blown up. (CW/OPS/07/02)

[27] Cabinet Minutes 4/10/22 P7/B/245

[28] Cabinet Minutes 13 September 1922 Mulcahy Papers P7/B/B/245

[29] Herlihy, Short History of DMP p183

[30] Department of Home Affairs report into disbandment of CID NAI TAOIS/S/3331

[31] Herlihy p 186

[32] source

[33] http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/an-irish-general-william-richard-english-murphy-1890-1975/

The first in a series of articles looking at Rory O’Connor’s role in the Irish revolutionary period. By Gerard Shannon.

In most accounts of the events leading to the foundation of the Irish Free State, Rory O’Connor remains best known for his controversial leadership of the anti-Treaty IRA faction in 1922, at the outset of what became known as the Irish Civil War.

O’Connor’s tenure as IRA leader is often defined by a flippant – and likely inaccurate – remark at a press conference in which he seemed to suggest the IRA may seriously consider a military dictatorship in opposition to the then-new Free State government. [1]

There has also been much analysis of the circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s execution at the age of 39 by the Irish Government in December 1922. This is chiefly due to one of the signatories for the order for O’Connor’s death being government minister Kevin O’Higgins, with O’Connor only having served as best man at O’Higgins’ wedding barely a year before; their story a symbol of the bitter nature of the 11-month civil war. [2]

Despite some scattered instances of personal correspondence in this crucial period of his life, O’Connor left behind no detailed personal reminisces detailing his ideology, or his involvement and feelings in the last few years of his life; perhaps going some way to explaining why (to date) he is yet to be the subject of a major study, or biographical work. This is despite the pivotal role he played in the republican opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and to the Provisional Government it established.

Dorothy McArdle, in her seminal work The Irish Republic which is sympathetic to the anti-Treaty position, writes of O’Connor: “a man of uncompromising spirit and a believer in political methods when these were backed by physical force.”[3]

IRA Volunteer Joseph Lawless, however, referring to his interaction with O’Connor in the Curragh military camp during the War of Independence, implied that as a leader O’Connor was irresponsible and not mentally balanced – ultimately dismissing him as “a crank.” Lawless makes it clear that when he sided with Michael Collins over the Treaty dispute, his personal impressions of Rory O’Connor and Eamon de Valera were key to his decision. [4]

What remains little explored are the circumstances in which Rory O’Connor ascended to a leadership position in the IRA during both the War of Independence and the Civil War.

To fully understand this, one must first look at O’Connor’s associations with both the IRB and the Irish Volunteers leading up to, and including, the dramatic events of the 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath.

Early Years and Activism

O’Connor was born on the 28^th November 1883 at a residence on Kildare Street, his full name being Roderick (Rory) Ignatius Patrick O’Connor. He was the third son of John O’Connor, a solicitor.[5]

In one of the last letters written before his execution, O’Connor briefly mentions to his father they often greatly disagreed in the past, likely due to his political activities and increasingly radical stances in the last few years of life. [6]

O’Connor’s radical activism was closely linked with his fateful friendship with future rebel leader Joseph Plunkett. The two men first met when O’Connor joined the Young Ireland branch of the United Irish League in 1908. [7] The United Irish League (UIL) was originally a breakaway organisation from a then-divided Irish Parliamentary Party, and focused its campaign efforts on agrarian reform and Irish self-government.

The Young Ireland branch, of which both Plunkett and O’Connor were members, was founded by Thomas Kettle, and was considered a progressive branch of the UIL for young intellectuals, such as the pacifist and feminist activist Francis Sheehy Skeffington.[8] Both Plunkett and O’Connor were compelled to eventually leave the UIL due to the growing influence of the Irish Parliamentary Party on the organisation in this period, and its eventual absorption into the larger party itself. [9]

At the same time, O’Connor made some progress in his career as an engineer. His early education included stints at Mary’s College, Rathmines and Clongowes Wood College, before going on to qualify as a railroad engineer, taking BE and BA degrees in the Royal University of Ireland (dissolved in 1909 to make way for the National University of Ireland).

After holding a job as an engineer on the Midland Great Western Railway, O’Connor opted to emigrate to Canada to build on his career prospects. Arriving in 1910, O’Connor would go on to hold jobs in constructing railroad with both the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian Northern Railway companies.  His brother Norbert estimated Rory was involved with the construction of 1500 miles of railroad.[10]

After four years, O’Connor opted to return to Ireland by early 1915, and it would appear he contemplated joining the British Army to fight in the Great War on the European continent. However, not long after his return, he soon fell into the social spheres of his old Young Ireland branch friends, Thomas Dillon and Joseph Plunkett.[11]

Plunkett, of course, was by this time on the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Since the outbreak of the war, the Military Council of the IRB – particularly due to the influence of the Fenian, Thomas Clarke and his closest ally, Sean MacDiarmuida – was keen to take advantage of Britain’s involvement in the war on the European continent and ferment a revolution against British rule in Ireland.

Perhaps influenced by Plunkett, O’Connor’s on his return joined Eoin MacNeill’s radical anti-war Irish Volunteers and he was also sworn into the IRB, which maintained an influence on the leadership of MacNeill’s nationalist militia.

The Plunketts and Larkfield

On his return to Ireland, Rory O’Connor would closely integrate himself with the Plunkett family and their associates, becoming a regular visitor to the Plunkett family estate at Larkfield based in Kimmage, then a country area in south-west Dublin.

In her memoir of the period, Plunkett’s sister (and carer), Geraldine recalled her impression of O’Connor: “He was a smallish, very dark man, dark skin, blue jaws, he had to shave twice a day and had such a deep voice that it seemed to slow his speech, yet he had great charm.”[12]

In January 1916, Joseph Plunkett assigned O’Connor as head of engineering on his Volunteer staff, which also included Plunkett’s younger brothers John (or Jack), George, as well as his friends Michael Collins, Con Keating, Fergus Kelly, and a future brother-in-law, Thomas Dillion.  Naturally, all were members of the IRB.[13] This was also the beginning of a strong friendship between Collins and O’Connor, which became stronger when they worked together during the subsequent War of Independence.[14]

As a result of his proximity to such a key figure as Joseph Plunkett, O’Connor was privy to certain meetings at Larkfield with key IRB figures involved in the planning of the 1916 rebellion. Though O’Connor betrayed no reluctance to fight, he seemed wary of the bloodshed such a rebellion would involve, one remark attributed to him at one such meeting being: “Do you realise what this effort is going to cost you in blood? But if you now decide in fighting I am with you.”[15]

The closeness of O’Connor’s relationship with the wider Plunkett family in this period is reflected in a remark of John ‘Jack’ Plunkett’s remarking that despite it then being three decades since O’Connor’s execution in the civil war that: “I would like to say a good deal about Rory but it [still] hurts too much.” [16]

Nor was it all platonic. Geraldine Plunkett-Dillion recalled that O’Connor had a “very frustrating love-affair” with Joseph’s younger sister, Fiona, that had ended by the time of the Civil War; Fiona herself suffered a degree of mental illness throughout what was a turbulent life, though Plunkett-Dillion does not specifically cite this as the cause of the relationship troubles.[17]

Laurence Nugent remembered that Rory and Fiona’s romance was little known to O’Connor’s contemporaries, and that O’Connor’s death left her devastated. Though out of respect, Nugent deliberately leaves Fiona unnamed in his recollections.[18]

In addition to his Volunteer activities, O’Connor took up an engineering position in Dublin Corporation in late 1915.[19] Along with Thomas Dillon (who would become husband of Plunkett’s sister, Geraldine), O’Connor also attempted a side-career and set-up the Larkfield Chemical Company at the Plunkett estate.

The intention of the two men was to produce asprin though the business venture is dismissed by Geraldine Plunkett-Dillion as “a very small affair.”[20] Patrick J. Little puts it succinctly: “… instead of a factory for making asprin, they started a factory for making explosives.”[21]

The Kimmage Garrison

Despite Geraldine’s recollection, the Company was apparently busy enough to provide a paid day’s work every now and then for some of the 40 members of the Volunteers who lived in specifically built quarters in a barn on the Larkfield estate, on whose grounds they would drill and train.

These men, from various backgrounds, as a body became known as the’ Kimmage Garrison’.[22] A recent study asserts the garrison grew to about 90 men by April 1916, including Volunteers hailing from Glasgow, Liverpool and London.[23]

At the end of March 1916,  O’Connor and others on Plunkett’s staff barricaded the house to ward off what was assumed to be a pending attempt by members of the police and military to besiege the estate. The belief amongst those of the Kimmage Garrison that that the increasing practice maneuvers and build-up of arms on the estate came to the authorities’ attention. Plunkett suspected this was part of an expected move against the Volunteers, though after a few hours, both police and military withdrew and did not move in on the property.[24]

This was only one of several dramatic developments as the weeks counted down to the IRB Military Council’s proposed nationwide rebellion on Easter Sunday 1916 utilising the Irish Volunteers and James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army. In the week just prior to the rebellion, Rory O’Connor would be central to one particularly contested aspect of the planning of the Rising.

Castle Document

Patrick J. Little, an old associate of O’Connor and Plunkett’s in the Young Ireland branch of the United Irish League, became editor of the New Ireland newspaper in February 1916. New Ireland was a publication which tended to be wholly supportive of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Home Rule movement, at one point Rory O’Connor being a member of the office staff on Fleet Street.[25]

On becoming editor, Little made sure to tell “Rory O’Connor that, if at any time he wanted to use it specifically for national purposes, I was willing to take the risk.” Some weeks later, Little was approached by O’Connor who informed him of measures being taken by the British administration at Dublin Castle to suppress the Irish Volunteers.

O’Connor, after some time produced for Little what became known as the ‘Castle Document’ – a brief that suggested that a British move to disarms and arrest the radical nationalist movement was imminent. It was be the casus belli for the Rising. Some maintain it was a real leak, others that it was fabricate to make Eoin MacNeill and other Volunteer leaders go along wit the Military Council’s plan for insurrection.

Little notes O’Connor set up the type himself, probably at a printing press that Plunkett owned in Larkfield. In an amusing account, Little recalls O’Connor telling him: “When he had half-finished [the Castle Document], he knocked it with his elbow, and had to do it over again.” When the document in question was given to Little to publish, it had no capitals or punctuation.

However, after only seven copies of this edition of New Ireland were published with the Castle Document, to Little’s dismay, the Dublin Castle authorities were alerted and ensured the offending article was removed from the publication.[26]

There are at least two recorded instances where O’Connor, conveying a message on Joseph Plunkett’s orders, approached key allies amongst the Volunteers – and outside the IRB conspiracy – to convince them of the Castle Document’s validity. Dr. Seamus O’Kelly recalls O’Connor setting up a meeting of politically like-minded friends in a restaurant on College Street near Trinity College shortly before the Rising, the group including Kelly himself, Patrick J. Little and Francis Sheehy Skeffington.

O’Kelly recalls that O’Connor “informed us of Joe Plunkett’s opinion that it would be worthwhile to publish the whole proposal [to suppress the Volunteers] in the newspapers to stir up the people, but that it should be first communicated to the Bishops.” O’Kelly himself was assigned to pass the Document to the Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, only getting as far as his Secretary.[27]

Patrick J. Little also briefly refers to an instance of meeting Eoin MacNeill at his home with the same group, including O’Connor, on either the Monday or Tuesday of Holy Week to persuade MacNeill as the Volunteers’ Chief-of-Staff of the document’s validity and to push for its publication in the national newspapers. [28]

The Rising

At the Rising’s outbreak, O’Connor adopted the name ‘Cyril Cooper’. The reason was his father at the time had a position as Commissioner of the Congested Districts Board, and O’Connor wished to protect his father’s position if he was arrested and the necessity arose. Given his proximity to Joseph Plunkett, it is not surprising he was attached to what became the main rebel garrison at the GPO, serving as an Intelligence Officer.[29]

Given that most of O’Connor’s movements through Easter Week resulted in him moving between at least two rebel positions, and also to Larkfield in the south of the city, he devised a clever method to pass through British army lines with rebel dispatches from the GPO.

In his possession he had a letter to his father, then a solicitor in the Land Commission, with the signature of the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Augustine Birrell. It is inferred that he tried this method to get through British Army checkpoints more than once.[30] Laurence Nugent, then a member of the National Volunteers, who encountered O’Connor at least twice during Easter Week, mentions the bizarre image of O’Connor often carrying “a half a ham and some mutton, playing the part an ordinary shopper passing through army lines.[31]

Geraldine Plunkett-Dillon who married Thomas Dillon in the sacristy of Rathmines Church on Easter Sunday, (with Rory O’Connor as best man) – later recalled to her amusement Dublin Castle detectives trying to barge into the sacristy and O’Connor along with her brothers George and Jack “putting them out.”[32] Newly married Geraldine stayed with her new husband at their rented room in the Imperial Hotel on O’Connell Street; both very unsure of the future amid the impending insurrection.

Several times during both Easter Sunday and the Rising’s outbreak the following day, Plunkett-Dillon recalls being conveyed several messages by a visiting Rory O’Connor. The first instance being in the afternoon of Easter Sunday whereby O’Connor informed both her and her husband of the consequences of MacNeill’s countermanding order and “that as far as he knew the Rising was off for that day but to look out from twelve o’clock the next day.”

Naturally, both Geraldine and her husband’s had a bird’s eye view of O’Connell Street when the General Post Office was taken the next day by republican forces; O’Connor returning to their hotel room several times to keep them updated. At around six o’clock in the evening on another visit, O’Connor was requested by Geraldine to ask could she assist her brother Joseph in the Post Office. (Geraldine normally taking the role of Joseph’s carer in the family, given his various illnesses).
O’Connor informed the couple that there was no need for any more insurgents in the GPO, particularly emphasising to Geraldine there were enough women for nursing and cooking. Instead, Joseph Plunkett had suggested all three attempt to return to Larkfield to try to make more explosives – O’Connor first staying overnight at his father’s home in Monkstown, with the couple staying at their home on Belgrave Road.

Meeting at Larkfield the next day, Rory O’Connor and Thomas Dillon agreed there was little in the way of resources to help them in their assigned task. Deciding to return to the city, both men appear to have weighed up returning to the GPO, with O’Connor deciding he will instead take up the task of carrying various messages from the main rebel garrison. Demonstrating his closeness to the couple, O’Connor would frequently return to the Dillons’ home during Easter Week to provide them with updates to the situation.[33]

During Wednesday, Laurence Nugent, met Rory O’Connor entering his butcher shop on Lower Baggot Street with a message from the GPO. Nugent had sided with the Redmondite majority during the split in the Volunteers over support for Britain’s war effort in 1914. However, the National Volunteers as an organisation had begun to fade by this time, and Nugent remained relatively friendly with some former associates in the minority grouping under MacNeill.

O’Connor implored Nugent in his capacity as an officer of the National Volunteers to get in touch with members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and “offer them £2 per man if they were to join up with the Irish Volunteers. These were Pearse’s instructions.”

Nugent only vaguely recalls these instructions, not surprising as he emphasises he did not take them seriously, particularly as the Royal Hospital of Kilmainham – where he assumed the Fusiliers were based – was a British army garrison.[34]

It was on subsequent visit to Nugent’s shop that O’Connor arrived after being under heavy gunfire. On entering Nugent’s shop with Captain T. J. Cullen, also of the National Volunteers, Cullen remarked to O’Connor: “That was a close shave.”
Nugent removed O’Connor’s hat, incredulous he had survived given he noticed the hat was “bored in two places at the front…” Investigating further, Nugent “parted Rory’s thick black hair and discovered an upward red patch as if it had been burned. It then begun to pain him.”[35]

The gunfire that is identified as coming from the direction of rebel snipers from the College of Surgeons, with a bullet ricocheting off a metal box and hitting O’Connor.[36] At least one other source asserts O’Connor may also have been hit in the ankle by a stray bullet.[37]

It is likely both men ensured the injured O’Connor was admitted to Mercer’s hospital. However, the nurses suspected Rory O’Connor was a Volunteer, saying he should be shot because he had in his possession a holy medal Fiona Plunkett had given him. Once a doctor named as Maunsel realised this he had O’Connor moved to a nursing home in Leeson Street. It was here O’Connor recuperated under the Cyril Cooper name for three weeks until his younger brother Norbet found him.[38]

Incredibly, this ruse worked and O’Connor – unlike so many of his fellow rebels and innocent civilians – evaded capture by British army authorities in the aftermath of the rebels’ defeat and the subsequent surrender.

Aftermath

O’Connor attempted to return some semblance of stable civilian life following his recovery in the aftermath of the Rising, part of which involved his attempt with Thomas Dillon to revive the Larkfield Chemical Company, as well his on-going employment with Dublin Corporation.

However, the two men’s attempt to revive their business venture was complicated that the Larkfield estate was seized from the Plunkett family, who were under an investigation involving the Ministry of Munitions of War in Whitehall, London and the Director of Munitions in Ireland. One engineer who inspected the site determined “Dillon and O’Connor were manufacturing phenol for high explosives… “[39]

Both O’Connor and Dillon pushed for compensation, making an application to the Property Losses Committee in late 1916 to try and get some funds for the loss of the company, alleging British soldiers had looted the Larkfield estate in the aftermath of the Rising. Ultimately, the claim was rejected due to the estate’s association with Joseph Plunkett.[40] Similarly, in March 1917, the Dublin Metropolitan Police rejected a request from O’Connor and Dillon to enter the mill on the estate and destroy the chemicals still in storage in there.[41]

By 1917, O’Connor had become a pivotal figure in the rise of the slowly resurgent Irish Volunteers, having been one of those who helped keep the organisation intact until the amnesty given to those imprisoned after the rebellion by December 1916.

As Laurence Nugent, who had joined O’Connor in these efforts, remarked, to those who had evaded capture: “… the war was still on. Rory mentioned it did not stop at any time… “[42] O’Connor helped to form the Prisoner’s Aid Committee, to give relief to the families of imprisoned rebels, an organisation that later merged with the important and influential National Aid Association.[43]

O’Connor also had a central role in organising the funeral of Muriel MacDonagh, the widow of Rising leader, Thomas MacDonagh, who died of heart failure in July 1917 whilst swimming during a holiday in Skerries funded by the National Aid Association.[44] Given her death was barely a year since Thomas’ execution, it was used as a major propaganda event for the national movement, with 4000 Irish  Volunteers marching behind Muriel MacDonagh’s coffin on the way to the burial in Glasnevin.[45]

During this period, 1916-17 Rory O’Connor also come to prominence in the political wing of the republican movement. The previously minuscule separatist party Sinn Féin was wrongly associated with the defeated rebels in the understanding of both the Irish public and British authorities, but the misconception became a reality after the Rising, when the party was taken over as a vehicle for militant republicanism.

O’Connor was among those seeking to use the party as an instrument to take advantage of the changing public attitude throughout the country. Giving his closeness to the family, it is not surprising that O’Connor became closely allied with Joseph Plunkett’s father, Count George Noble Plunkett, following the Count’s win for Sinn Féín in the Roscommon by-election of January 1917.

O’Connor was also central to the organizing and formation of Count Plunkett’s own political movement, the Liberty Clubs – the Count’s own attempt to dominate the new political movement.[46] This culminated in the formation of a committee of advanced nationalists at a meeting in the Mansion House in April 1917, with O’Connor on the faction of the committee opposed to the Sinn Féín faction led by the party’s founder, Arthur Griffith.

In a meeting with Griffith’s faction at the Sinn Féin headquarters in Harcourt Street, O’Connor is recalled as arguing “the case of for the whole of the national movement declaring itself in favor of a republican policy”; as Griffith and his followers tended to prefer a more broad separatist policy in opposition to British rule in Ireland, in the form of dual-monarchy.[47] Despite these efforts, the Count was ultimately defeated in his attempt at this takeover and it paved the way for all factions of advanced nationalists and republicans uniting under the Sinn Féin banner at the party Ard Fheis in October of that year.[48]

Though O’Connor was involved in forming the Mansion House committee, to many in this period he remained a relatively unknown figure – though Laurence Nugent makes clear O’Connor’s growing influence when referring to him as “a great silent worker” and “the strong man behind the scenes” in both the political and military spheres of the national movement. [49]

Indeed, in only two years since his return to Ireland from Canada, by way of his personal associations and professional skills, Rory O’Connor had quickly worked his way through the ranks of the IRB, the Irish Volunteers and finally, Sinn Féin. His burgeoning roles in both the political and military spheres of the republican movement would only increase in influence as the nature of British rule in Ireland would be challenged to greater effect in the next revolutionary phase commonly referred to as the Irish War of Independence.

Gerard Shannon is a historian residing in Skerries, Co. Dublin. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gerry_shannon

 References

[1] See Kissane, Bill, The Politics of the Irish Civil War, Oxford University Press, United States (2005), page 69 and Andrews, C.S., Dublin Made Me, The Lilliput Press, Dublin (2001 edition), page 233

[2] For instance, see Hopkinson, Michael, Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War, Gill & Macmillian Ltd, Dublin (2004 edition), pages 190 – 92

[3] McArdley, Dorothy, The Irish Republic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York (1965 edition), page 213

[4] Lawless, Joseph, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement No: 1043, pages 373 – 374, 404

[5] O’Connor, Norbert, BMH W/S No: 527, page 1

[6] O’Connor’s last letter to his father is transcribed on O’Dwyer, Martin, Seventy-Seven of Mine Said Ireland, Deshaoirse, Cork (2006), page 54

[7] O’Brolchain, Honor, Joseph Plunkett (16 Lives), O’Brien Press, Dublin (2012), page 107

[8] McArdle, page 72, O’Brolchain page 217

[9] Plunkett Dillon, Geraldine, All in The Blood: A memoir of the Plunkett family, the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence (edited by Honor O’Brolchain), A. & A. Farmer Ltd, Dublin (2006), page 145

[10] O’Connor, Norbert, BMH W/S No: 527, page 1

[11] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S No: 1769, page 7

[12] Plunkett Dillon, page 314

[13] lbid, page 203

[14] lbid, page 313

[15] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 42

[16] Plunkett, John, BMH W/S No: 865, Part II, page 15

[17] Plunkett Dillion, page 313

[18] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 43

[19] lbid, page 42

[20] Plunkett Dillion, page 164

[21] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S No: 1769, page 8

[22] O’Brolchain, page 335

[23] Matthews, Ann, The Kimmage Garrison. 1916: Making billy-can bombs at Larkfield, Four Courts Press, Dublin (2010), pages 7, 25

[24] O’Brolchain, page 360

[25] Connell jnr, Joseph E.A., Dublin in Rebellion: A Dictionary 1913 – 1923, The Lilliput Press, Dublin (2009), page 199

[26] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S No: 1769, pages 10 – 11

[27] O’Kelly, Seamus, BMH W/S No: 471 , page 1 – 2

[28] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S No: 1769, page 13

[29] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 43; see also Wren, Jimmy, The GPO Garrison: Easter Week 1916 – A Biographical Dictionary, Geography Publications,  Dublin (2015), page 252

[30] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S No: 1769, pages 13 – 14

[31] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, No: 30 – 31

[32] Plunkett Dillon, page 221

[33] lbid, page 221 – 227

[34] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 32

[35] lbid, page 30

[36] Little, Patrick J, BMH W/S, page 14

[37] Both Plunkett-Dillon, page 230, and Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 43 refer to the gunfire that injured O’Connor coming from the College of Surgeons, the former mentioning the ankle injury.

[38] Plunkett-Dillon, page 230

[39] Matthews, pages 49 – 50

[40] lbid, 49, 51

[41] lbid, page 54

[42] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, page 50

[43] Little, Patrick J., BMH W/S, page 14

[44] Nenagh News, July 14th 1917, page 4

[45] Newspaper clipping (with photograph) from unknown newspaper published Saturday, 14^th July 1917 donated to author by Muriel McAuley, Muriel MacDonagh’s granddaughter.

[46] lbid, page 19

[47] lbid, pages 20 – 21

[48] For an account of the events of the Ard Fheis, see Laffan, Michael, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party 1916 – 1923, Cambridge University Press, New York (2005), pages 116 – 121

[49] Nugent, Laurence, BMH W/S No: 907, pages 42, 91 – 92

How a Catholic celebration in Dublin inflamed sectarian passions in Northern Ireland. By Barry Sheppard.

Public religious commemorations, often exultant in tone, have had a significant impact in terms of influencing ideas of Irish nationhood. From the centenary of 1798 rebellion in 1898 to the Easter Rising Jubilee in 1966 and the centenary this year, 2016, public events have helped to shape Irish collective identity.

The public celebrations which accompanied the centenary of Catholic Emancipation 1829 centenary were described as ‘the public identification of the new state with an apparently unified and triumphant Catholicism’.[1]

Three years after this the Eucharistic Congress consolidated this ‘triumphant Catholicism by affording the Irish state an opportunity to showcase it on a world stage.  While there has been much written on the Congress’s effect upon Irish national identity, less has been written on how such events played out in a state made up of a differing political and religious identities only 100km from Dublin.

Contemporary newspaper representations of the Congress portrayed it as the apex of Irish history, or the high point of Irish religious history.[2] This triumphalist reporting no doubt had negative connotations among the Protestant unionist population in Northern Ireland.  These events are all the more potent when they mix nationalism with religion, public space and political identity.

The prominence of these themes in the Congress of 1932 in particular resulted in instances of inter-communal conflict in Northern Ireland.  This study looks at the Catholic minority in the North at the time of the Congress and how the expression of religious culture and identity were viewed by both the Northern Government and by some of the Unionist population.

Both states; the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, were only a decade out of a revolutionary period which was particularly brutal towards the end in the North, and in particular the Belfast area.  The religious and political differences between the two states were keenly felt from the time of partition.  However, these differences were heightened around the Congress, and for the next several years.

The two states were generally defined by their adherence to the different strands of Christianity, the Free State being closely identified with Roman Catholicism, whereas the Northern state was a devotee of the reformed or Protestant church.

While to some extent these sectarian divisions were manifestations of rival national identities; Irish and British respectively, there was also a purely religious element.

The two clashed on matters of doctrine such as ‘Papal Infallibility – a ‘cornerstone of belief’ to the Catholics, ‘vile blasphemy’ to the Protestants’. These identities were further defined by the ‘differences in the style of ritual-incense, ‘false idols’ and ‘jewels’ for the Catholic ‘chapel,’ and austere surroundings for the Protestant ‘churches’.[1]

Against this backdrop of competing ideologies, instituted identities and the scars of conflict a decade previously the 31^st Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin.

The Eucharistic Congress

Eucharistic Congresses are Catholic congresses – gatherings of ecclesiastics and laymen for the purpose of ‘celebrating and glorifying the Eucharist and of seeking the best means to spread its knowledge’.

The Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is one of the principal dogmas of the Catholic Faith and therefore has been the centre of Catholic worship and the source of Christian piety. Conversely, it is also one of the main disputes between the Roman Church and Protestantism.

The first Eucharistic Congress was held in Lille, France in 1881.  Besides the 1908 Congress which was held in London, there seems to have been little sectarian conflict surrounding the event.  In 1908 there was a considerable residue of anti-Catholic feeling in Edwardian England.[3]  Contemporary reports of the event stated that Protestant societies called upon the Ministry and Metropolitan police to ban processions related to the Congress, which were to pass Westminster Abbey.[4]

However, problems of confessional rivalry in 1908 were mild in comparison to those of 1932, which were entwined with numerous territorial and political problems native to Ireland.

The strong nationalism of both states in many ways mirrored that of its neighbour, a fusion of politics and religion shaped much of public life, which fed into identity-based conflict.  Since partition, relations between the two states were virtually non-existent, yet there was always a watchful eye kept on the other.  This was certainly the case in the build up to the Congress.

After a number of years of conflict, partition, boycotts and civil strife, relations between the two Irish states were frosty at best. The ‘hands off’ approach to relations is illustrated by the Northern government’s reaction to being officially invited to the Congress by organisers in Dublin.

An internal response from Stormont was one of mild confusion as to how to reply to such an invitation.[5]  Officially the top echelons of the Northern government simply ignored the invitations, however some Catholic members of Belfast Corporation took up the offer to attend the congress in their official robes of office.  This act of symbolism and the invite to attend a very public display of Catholicism raised the ire of those connected to the Orange Order and other Protestant groupings in Northern Ireland.

This perceived act of disloyalty led to a meeting of the Belfast County Grand Lodge on 26^th May 1932 to discuss the possibility of stopping Aldermen and Councillors attending such an event in an official capacity.  The following resolution was passed:

“as a Protestant Organisation we feel compelled to register an emphatic protest at the action of the Belfast Corporation in giving permission to Aldermen and Councillors to wear their Robes at the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and thus representing in an official capacity the Belfast Corporation.  We feel that the presence of these Aldermen and Councillors robed…will be taken as an indication that Protestant Belfast is weakening in its attitude to the idolatrous practices and beliefs of Rome”.[6]

   Posters appeared in various locations in Belfast erected by The Ulster Protestant League in response to Alderman being allowed to attend the Congress in official dress. Addressed to the ‘Protestant People of Belfast’, it asked:

‘Why be represented at the Dublin Eucharistic Congress by Roman Catholic members of the Belfast Corporation who have obtained permission to wear the official robes in a country hostile to the King, Commonwealth and Protestantism’?[7]

   The pressure against a progressive and inclusive gesture by Belfast Corporation was further compounded in a letter to the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Sir Crawford McCullough from Ulster Protestant League. The letter stated: “At a crowded meeting held last night in the Ulster Hall, the enclosed resolution was unanimously passed… We wish to know what steps you intend to take to have the decision of 2^nd May, 1932, rescinded.  Your reply and the resolution will appear in the press”.[8] Nevertheless, the historic gesture was upheld and Catholic members of Belfast Corporation attended the Congress in official robes.[9]

Tensions related to symbolism were also highlighted by the omission of the British Union flag from the array of flags representing the nations attending the Congress.  This exclusion was raised in the British press, which referred to it as a ‘Gratuitous Insult to English Catholics’.[10] It was also raised British Houses of Parliament by Conservative MP John Gretton to Dominions Secretary J.H. Thomas.[11] The issue of flags would again come to the fore during the event along contested parade routes in the North.

Travelling to Dublin

It was estimated that 100,000 pilgrims made the cross border journey from the North.  Journeys were made by car, train, bus and even steamboat, with adverts for travel arrangements appearing in local newspapers months in advance of the event, such was the demand.

For the Congress finale, an open air mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on 26^th June exceptionally large numbers of pilgrims from Northern Ireland made their way in the early hours from numerous departure points in Belfast, Larne and Portadown.

What was a highly anticipated excursion soon turned into a crisis when a number of groups of pilgrims on their way to the Congress were attacked by Protestant loyalists in several locations.

In Larne a number of pilgrims from the area had chartered a steamboat to take them along the east coast to Dublin.  According to two local priests from the Larne area, a crowd of 150 in number were permitted to assemble in the area and attack Catholic travellers departing by steamboat and bus, unchallenged by police.

“At the scene of attack police were observed standing inactive while showers of stones rained past them upon the pilgrims.  At the quayside members of the mob advanced even to the ship’s side and insulted the pilgrims going on board, while the police, even when requested by one of the priests in charge, did not remove them.”[12]

Press reaction

A number of similar incidents across Northern Ireland that evening which were quickly relayed in both the Irish and British press. The Newsletter reported on in Sandy Row, South Belfast a loyalist crowd attempted ‘to surge into Roman Catholic quarters’ but were repelled by police.  Further on the same stretch of road a crowd of approximately 200 youths with Union Jacks and a Lambeg drum attempted to block the path of a number of pilgrims who were about to leave by train from the Great Northern Railway Station.

In the town of Ballymena, Co Antrim a 500-strong crowd of Loyalists gathered to confront the travelling Catholics.  It was reported that a number of the crowd stole parcels of food and tore the clothes from departing pilgrims.  The size and ferocity of the crowd was said to have prevented between 130-200 people from making the journey to Dublin.  Further attacks in Claudy and Coleraine in Co Derry saw pilgrims attacked on their bus journeys.[13] The Irish News sensationally reported that attempts had been made to derail a train carrying pilgrims near Armoy Co Antrim.[14]

In Britain the press coverage painted a picture of widespread disorder across the North.  The Dundee Courier and Advertiser told its readers of special trains laid on for the event were besieged by hostile gangs who ‘lined the railway banks, sang party songs, and hurled missiles at the trains’ in attacked in Belfast, Lisburn and Portadown.[15] The paper also reported of incidents of hand-to-hand combat between Orangemen and Catholics who clashed over objections to the erection of Eucharistic Flags in Co Tyrone.[16]

This incident was well covered in a number of other newspapers on both sides of the Irish Sea.  The Aberdeen Journal stated that following a service attended by approximately 300 Orangemen in Donnemanagh Church, Co Tyrone on Sunday 26^th June, clashes with Catholics took place in the main street.

It was reported that the Orangemen resented the erection of Papal and Eucharistic flags being flown on their proposed march route, and ordered that they be taken down.  Once this was refused Orangemen and hundreds of assembled Catholics, who ‘held crucifixes in their hands and sang “Faith of Our Fathers”’ came to blows.[17]  The press account also noted that stones were thrown and several shots rang out, while members of the police were ‘roughly handled’.  After the scuffles irate Orangemen tore down and burned any remaining flags and bunting.[18]

The response from the nationalist press in the North was unsurprisingly robust. Attempting to portray what had happened in terms of good and evil, the Irish News lambasted the Loyalists who attacked pilgrims in various parts of the province. “While one section of the people – drawn from all parts of the world – were united in Dublin seeking divine graces, another section in the North were doing the foul work of the Anti-God forces…..groups of blackguards in various parts of the Six Counties have chosen to tell the world that they, at any rate, have no use for Religion’.[19]

The attacks were quickly condemned by government officials. The Newsletter and several other British news outlets reported that the Ulster Government and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland expressed their condemnation of the various attacks.  “The Government condemns these cowardly outrages in the strongest possible manner”, while the Orange Order stated that it was ‘deeply concerned to learn of the disgraceful attacks’.[20]

Unsurprisingly, the denunciations were met with a dismissive response by the main Nationalist newspaper the Irish News, which laid the blame squarely at the political classes of Unionism and the Orange Order.  It claimed those who engaged in the violence were the ‘ignorant puppets’ of ‘their better-educated leaders, who have never missed an opportunity for inflaming sectarian passions whenever an opportunity arises’.[21]

Pressure was mounting on the Stormont government to act against those who had attacked pilgrims, as up to that point little or no arrests had been made.  It was also alleged that police had been forewarned that attacks were planned, yet no preventative action was taken.[22]  The Bishop of Down and Conor, Daniel Mageean sought out the Minister for Home Affairs, Sir Dawson Bates to highlight his concern at the events and the alleged inaction of the police.

Dear Sir,

Last Sunday I sent you a telegram calling your attention to the attack made in Larne at 2am that morning on the pilgrims to the Eucharistic Congress.  On my return from Dublin I requested the priests in charge of the pilgrims to send me an account of the affair, and I beg to enclose a copy of it.

In view of the attitude of the police on the occasion, and of the fact that no arrests have yet been made in connection with the outrage, although a list of some of the delinquents has been given to the police, I shall send these letters to the press unless measures are taken without delay to bring the culprits to justice.[23]

Boycott

Concerns were raised by businessmen as to how the outrages would affect cross-border trade. Belfast businessman Mr EWJ Harvey reached out to Lord Craigavon to relay the palpable anger among businesses in the Free State at the treatment of their co-religionists and the lack of an official response.  He highlighted the possibility of another Northern trade boycott:

My Lord,

I have just returned from a business trip to Co Monaghan and Co Louth, and, as a Protestant Representative of a Northern firm, I would respectfully draw your attention to the extreme bitterness which exists as the result of the attacks on R.C’s returning from Dublin Congress.

They are quite convinced that our Government did not take any steps whatever to protect the returning Catholics from attacks and that nothing will be done to compensate the sufferers or punish the perpetrators.

A Boycott of Northern goods is contemplated.

I do trust the Government will act immediately and thus do much to wards righting a great wrong and help to retain the small amount of business which we Northern firms still contrive to secure in the face of duties etc.[24]

Publicly, the government did little to acknowledge any concern regarding a proposed boycott, although the matter was raised internally.  For them the prime concern was the security of the Northern state around the border, and the potential for disorder to spread to the cities of Belfast and Derry should there be a breach of security in border regions.  Bates felt that anger among nationalists could lead men from the South to use vulnerable points along the border to attack the North in reprisal for violence towards Catholics during the Congress.

Feeling that Enniskillen was a particularly vulnerable point he argued “I think that, while nothing can prevent it happening, we will be able to make it more difficult for the attackers having regard to the new arrangement in regard to the “B” Specials, and the powers that we have under the Civil Authorities Act, but if large bodies of men come across the border we have no means whatever of dealing with the situations except by means of troops”.[25]

Bates felt that the chronic unemployment which existed at the time was an underlying factor which combined with the attacks on the travelling Catholics could be a catalyst for widespread disorder.  However, it appeared that the need for troops was considered a final option, with the threat of economic measures perhaps being enough of a deterrent.

“It might be said that such an action would be provocative, but, on the other hand, if the British Government intend to use arbitrary powers and prevent by taxation imports of all goods from the Free State, that in itself is an action which may have the result of precipitating the very action which I want to guard against by the use of troops”.[26]

Investigation

An investigation on the disorder was ordered amid allegations of police incompetence and collusion with the attackers.  In Belfast the investigation found that matters had remained quiet until late on Saturday night, 25^th June, and early on the following morning when ‘a rowdy element’ appeared on Great Victoria Street where approximately 35,000 left by various means of transportation. The report stated that disorder only occurred after the pilgrims had departed, with windows being smashed and some looting occurring.

In Larne the most serious disorder occurred. The report stated that while approximately 500 people took police advice to depart early in the evening for the Congress, 700 more insisted on parading through the town: ‘The sight of this unusual procession through the town in the dead of night, in badly lighted streets, had an unsettling effect upon the unruly element of the Protestant side’.[27] A 700 strong hostile crowd attacked busses, while at the port ‘an immense crowd had then gathered and stones were being thrown from a distance.  All the available police were then employed in pushing back the crowd’.[28]

A number of other flashpoints were examined including Ballymena, Lurgan, Lisburn and Portadown.  Nevertheless, the report found no evidence of police culpability.  In the wake of the report and subsequent arrests relating to the disorder, Bates raised some concerns with Lord Craigavon and about the nature of the sentences which were to be handed down to the attackers.

Bates stated that he was somewhat perturbed lest the Resident Magistrates should go in for ‘savage sentences’. Arguing that any such sentencing could unsettle a comparable peace which had descended and handicap the Government should any further disorder occur:

“I had a long talk with the Attorney and the Chief Crown Solicitor, and the view that we took was that it would suffice if the rank and file of the offenders and those who bore good characters were bound over to keep the peace and that moderate sentences should be imposed on those of bad character and the ring-leaders. I do not want when the new Parliament House is opened, or when, on the other hand, we might be engaged in very violent disturbances in connection with the Free State, to have the Government handicapped by having 70 or 80 young fellows in gaol”.[29]

   The insistence on leniency for the perpetrators in this case highlights a siege mentality among northern politicians at the time.  The religious and cultural differences between the two states and the public declaration of faith by one at times fed into the anxieties of the other.  Political and religious identities had become extremely ingrained within the two states since their establishment. With the added elements of the revolutionary period and the enforced partition of the two states little over a decade previously, any public displays of identity involving large numbers of people would have been a perceived threat to the other.

The almost carnival atmosphere in which flags and bunting were festooned upon countless streets and houses were looked upon as an indication of the complete acceptance of the ideals of the Congress from the top to the bottom of Irish society.

This is, of course in stark contrast to how similar items were seen as a source of contention along contested parade routes, which ended with the burning of Papal and Eucharistic flags.  Incidents of inter-communal conflict happened long before and after the events of June 1932.  However, the sheer size of the events in Dublin and further afield arguably brought Catholic identity to the fore for the first time in the Northern state, with explosive results.

References

[1] Elliot Leyton Opposition and Integration in Ulster in Man, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 185-198

[1] Gillian McIntosh ‘Acts of ‘national communion’: the centenary celebrations for Catholic Emancipation, the forerunner of the Eucharistic Congress’ in Joost Augusteijn (ed) Ireland in the 1930s, (Dublin, 1999), p.84.

[2] Holmes, ‘The Eucharistic Congress of 1932 and Irish Identity’ p56.

[3]  G. I. T. Machin ‘The Liberal Government and the Eucharistic Procession of 1908’ in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 34, No. 4, (1983), pp 559-583.

[4] The Spectator, 12 Sep. 1908.

[5] Mr F. O’Reilly to Sir Dawson Bates, 6 Mar. 1931 (CAB9B/200/)

[6] Memo to Sir Crawford McCullough from Belfast County Grand Orange Lodge, 28 May. 1932 (LA/7/3A/5)

[7] Rory O’Dwyer, ‘The Eucharistic Congress, Dublin 1932: An Illustrated History’, (Dublin, 2009), p.13.

[8] H. Niblock to Sir Crawford McCullough, 30 May. 1932 (LA/7/3A/5)

[9] Ulster Herald, 18 June, 1932.

[10] The Hartlepool Mail, 24 June, 1932.

[11] Western Daily Press, 24 June, 1932.

[12] Fr Bernard MacLaverty C.C. and Fr Peter Kelly C.C. to Larne Parochial House 29 June 1932 (CAB9B/200/ Govt of Northern Ireland File on the Eucharistic Congress).

[13] The Newsletter, 27 June, 1932.

[14] The Irish News, 28 June, 1932.

[15] Dundee Courier and Advertiser, 28 June, 1932.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Aberdeen Journal, 28 June 1932.

[18] Ibid

[19] The Irish News, 27 June, 1932.

[20] The Newsletter, 28 June, 1932.

[21] The Irish News, 28 June, 1932.

[22] The Irish News, 29 June, 1932.

[23] D. Mageean Bishop of Down and Connor to Sir Dawson Bates, 29 June 1932. (CAB9B/200/ Govt of Northern Ireland File on the Eucharistic Congress).

[24] EWJ Harvey to Viscount Craigavon, 29 June 1932 (CAB9B/200/)

[25] Sir Dawson Bates to Viscount Craigavon, 2 July 1932. (CAB9B/200/)

[26] Ibid.

[27] Director General’s Office, Royal Ulster Constabulary Belfast Report into Eucharistic Congress Disorder, 8 July 1932 (HA8/494)

[28] Ibid.

[29] Sir Dawson Bates to Viscount Craigavon, 26 July 1932 (CAB9B/200/)

Muriel MacDonagh, wife of executed 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh, outlived him by just one year. By Gerard Shannon

On 9^th July 1917, just over a year following the execution of Thomas MacDonagh for his part in the Easter Rising, the MacDonagh family would be rocked by another tragedy with the sudden death of Thomas’ widow, Muriel that would leave both their children suddenly orphaned.

 Who was Muriel?

 In 1885, Muriel Enid Gifford was born to parents Frederick and Isabella Gifford. Muriel was the eight child of the couple’s twelve children.[1]

Frederick and Isabella Gifford were both of upper middle-class origin and of unionist-leaning politics. The family home by the time of Muriel’s birth was a house built to the couple’s specifications known as ‘Temple Villas’ located on the Palmerstown Road, Rathmines.

The Giffords were a-typical of families of a similar class residing in the southside of Dublin city in the early twentieth century. Theirs was a mixed marriage, Frederick being Catholic and Isabella being Protestant. Though the custom known ‘Palatine Pact’ determined all children of a mixed marriage be raised Catholic, it is clear from family accounts that all the Gifford children were raised Protestant.[2]

The favourite parent of the Gifford children was Frederick, as Isabella was recalled as a stern matriarch, and much of the raising of the children was left to their nannies. Though remembered as a serious and humourless woman in written accounts, there is little doubt that Isabella took a keen interest in the happiness and well-being of her children.

One of the trips would involved summer visits to the beach in Greystones, where each of the children became adept at swimming. While Frederick took to teaching the boys, Isabella appointed a woman called Ellen, who ensured the girls, Muriel included, would all become strong swimmers. [3] This was in spite of the fact that Muriel had survived girlhood rheumatic fever with a weakened heart. It would be later, in 1915, when she became hospitalised with the dangerous blood clotting condition, phlebitis.[4]

Growing into adulthood, Muriel was described as a tall, striking woman with long red hair. It was generally felt she was the quietest individual amongst a family who were considered quite sociable and out-going. [5].

Thomas MacDonagh

A London-born journalist, called Mrs. Nora F. Dryhurst, would befriend the Gifford girls and bring them into a wider social circle ensuring that, as a result, the six Gifford sisters: Katie, Nellie, Ada, Grace, Sydney and of course Muriel became noted figures in the social and artistic life of the capital in the midst of the cultural revival.

Through functions, events and parties, Muriel and her sisters would come to meet John Butler Yeats, and his son Willie and Jack, Arthur Griffith, Countess Constance Markievicz, the journalist James Stephens, and many others.

As a result, the six Gifford sisters: Katie, Nellie, Ada, Grace, Sydney and of course Muriel became constants in Dublin’s artistic social scene. A running joke with their father Frederick was the frequent comment when he would see them at home was: “What is the matter? I hope you are not ill.” [6]

Mrs. Dryhurst was keen to take them to a new school that had opened in 1908, and was first located on Oakley Road, Ranelagh – and later moved to Rathfarnham. This was ‘St. Enda’s’, a bilingual private school for boys, founded by the journalist and cultural nationalist Patrick Pearse. On the day it opened, the Gifford girls would meet Pearse, and also another one of the teachers, Pearse’s assistant and friend, Thomas MacDonagh.

Thomas McDonagh was born in 1878, originally from Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary and had studied to become a priest, before eventually opting to become a teacher, a profession shared his parents. After teaching at several schools, in 1908, he was to join his friend Patrick Pearse at St. Enda’s. Through this period, right up the 1916 Rising, Thomas McDonagh would write plays and poetry of a nationalist theme, and many essays on Irish writing.

Described as short, but sturdy, with grey eyes and brown curly hair, Thomas McDonagh was known for his engaging personality and good humour; something that was certainly on display when he first met the Gifford sisters that included Muriel.

In a well-recalled anecdote on this first meeting, Mrs. Dryhurst advised Thomas that he ‘should fall in love with one of these girls and marry her!’

Displaying a quick wit, Thomas responded with: ‘That would be easy – but the only difficulty would be to decide which one!’[7] There is an alleged exchange with Patrick Pearse at this meeting, in which Pearse remarked to Thomas, “you should marry one of these girls”, to which Thomas replied, “I’ll have the beautiful one!”[8]

However, it was not until 1911 after an array of a social meetings that a romantic relationship between Thomas and Muriel would finally develop. Thomas for some time, was reeling from an earlier romantic rejection from a nationalist activist called Mary Maguire, who would later marry his friend, Padraic Colum. Muriel herself would also break off an engagement with another suitor to begin a relationship with Thomas.[9]

Their wedding took place on 3^rd January 1912, at a temporary chapel later replaced by ‘Church of the No Name’ on Beechwood Avenue in Dublin. The ceremony was deliberately low-key, due to the ‘mixed’ nature of the marriage (i.e. Muriel being Protestant, Thomas being Catholic).
Muriel and Thomas’ son, Donagh MacDonagh, was the couple’s first child, born on the 12^th November, 1912. Their second, Barabra, was born nearly three years later on the 24^th March, 1915. The family would reside at their home on Oakley Road, in Raneleigh.

However, as much as these were happy times for the family, Thomas was being drawn into events that would forever change the political and social direction of the country. Unbeknownst to many who knew him – including his wife – over the two years priors to 1916, he had become drawn into a conspiracy involved the Irish Republican Brotherhood that sought to overthrow the British administration in Ireland with the use of the nationalist milita, the Irish Volunteers.

The Rising and Execution

Muriel left behind an account of the last time she saw Thomas before the outbreak of the Rising:

“For about a fortnight before the Rising my husband did not sleep in our house, No. 29 Oakley Road. There had been some detectives watching the house for some time previously. For the last week he would run in in the morning and say that he would not be able to stop for breakfast. I saw him for some time every day.… On Saturday my husband took a whole suit-case of things with him, including his uniform and emergency rations.

I saw my husband on the following day (Easter Sunday) about 4 o’clock. He came to the house at that hour. Five minutes after he came the two Pearses arrived and remained with him for about twenty minutes. After that my husband got a taxi and went to John (Eoin) MacNeill’s. He came back about 8 o’clock. I only saw him the presence of friends who were with us. He left the house about 10 o’clock. He had the taxi waiting for him at the door. He said: ‘I may or may not see you tomorrow – if possible, I will come in the morning.’ He did not say anything about the Revolution. I never saw him afterwards.

… A friend of ours saw him in Jacob’s, and said that the Volunteers they were in great form – that the only complaint they had to make was that they need not have needles for their gramophone, and that the soldiers did come out to fight.”[10]

Under Thomas’s command was the Jacob’s biscuit factory, which he and a group of 150 men seized on April 24th. Jacobs was a huge building, much larger than the Dublin City University and the National Archives Office buildings which occupy the site today. It is clear that its central location was why it was chosen by the insurgent, but after it’s seizure by the Volunteers by the end of Easter Monday, the garrison under Thomas saw little action in the week ahead.

After the surrender of the rebels, in the early hours of 3^rd May, from his cell in Kilmainham Gaol, Thomas composed a final statement. Towards the end of this document, he addresses Muriel directly:
“My dearest love, Muriel, thank you a million times for all you have been for me. I have only one trouble in leaving life – leaving you so. Be brave, darling, God will assist and bless you. Goodbye, kiss my darlings for me. I have sent you the few things I have saved out of this war. Goodbye, my love, till we meet again in Heaven. I have a sure faith of our union there. I kiss this paper that goes to you. I have just heard that I have not been able to reach you. Perhaps it is better so…. God help and sustain you, my love. But for your suffering this would be all joy and glory. Goodbye. Your loving husband, Thomas MacDonagh.”[11]

In her account of the period, Geraldine Plunket Dillion, Joseph Plunkett’s sister, relates a story about Muriel on that fateful Tuesday of May 2^nd. Having being brought a message by a private soldier that Thomas was to be shot, Muriel was not given a pass and was stopped at the cordons each time on the way to Kilmainham Gaol to see her husband.

She then attempted to get a message to administration in Dublin Castle. A sympathetic doctor named Hennessy helped Muriel find a phone located at a residence on Oakley Road, but the occupants refused to let her use it. [12]Another account suggests Muriel was unable to be collected to visit Thomas because there was still intense sniping by the Volunteers going on throughout the city on May 2^nd.[13]

Perhaps due to a combination of all these obstructions, Muriel’s sister, Sydney would later suggest that because it would have taken Muriel three hours from the Oakley Road residence to reach the Gaol, the military authorities were simply unwilling to wait. In any case, Muriel learned of her husband’s execution in one of the stop-press editions of the daily newspapers.[14]

In a press interview in the aftermath of the executions, Muriel is recorded to have remarked to a reporter: “Someone told my little son… that the soldiers had killed his father – that was very unwise. Now the child screams at the sight of a soldier, and hides his face. He worshipped his daddy. I shall tell him the true story when he grows up.”[15]

Widowed

One of Thomas’ pressing concerns was how Muriel would be provided for after his death. Immediately after the Rising, financial support came pouring in (particularly from organizations in the United States), to make sure the co-dependents and children of the Rising leadership were not left broke and destitute.

This soon led to the creation of an organization to co-ordinate the stream of these donations, known as the ‘Irish National Aid Association’ and the ‘Volunteer Dependents’ Fund’ (INAAVDF), also referred to as the National Aid Association.

This organization did much to shape the popular memory of the 1916 Rising, transforming it from outright hostility to the rebels to a more sympathetic stance. It also ensured a steady stream of funds to families of the executed leaders, Muriel included.

Despite this assistance, Muriel had to move the family from Oakley Road to a flat at Marlborough Road, Donnybrook. Her mother, Isabella, once visited to give her £5.00. Isabella commented on how Thomas had left the family destitute. Muriel then handed the money back and told her mother she was not going to accept her money if she bad-mouthed her husband.[16]

In early 1917, there was a dramatic development involving her son, Donagh. Muriel had taken her two children to sit for photographs at Switzer’s department store in the city centre. These photographs were to be used by the National Aid Association as part of a pamphlet to raise money for the dependents of the Rising leaders and those imprisoned. Muriel and her two children were photographed together, and as Muriel and Barbara were being subsequently photographed, Donagh wandered off. As he did so, he fell down several flights of stairs and injured his back in several places.[17]

On May 3 1917, a year to the day since Thomas was executed, Muriel had an important development in her life, converting to Catholicism, the religion of her late husband and receiving Holy communion. She had grown close to Thomas’ sister, Sister Francesca, and had requested her attendance at the ceremony. On 3^rd May, 1917 Muriel was received into the Catholic Church and received First Holy Communion.[18]

In July 1917, the National Aid Association had rented a house in the town of Skerries for the use of relatives of the Rising leaders for a short holiday. Muriel was reluctant to place Donagh in hospital, recalling her brief time as a nurse and the potential to catch infections. However, it was her sister Grace, the widow of Joseph Plunkett, who persuaded her to go to Skerries, saying she would not go unless Muriel did too. Muriel reluctantly agreed, and had Donagh put in hospital. She requested that the Capuchin priests, Father Albert and Father Aloysius, check on him from time to time.

At the time, dramatic events were unfolding in the electoral constituency of East Clare. The sole surviving commandant of the 1916 Rising, Eamon DeValera, was running as a Sinn Féin candidate in an important by-election that would determine if the republican ideals of Easter Week held sway over the Irish electorate.

He was also running on an anti-conscription platform, as it was feared that conscription would be enforced on the Irish populace as Britain was still engaged in the Great War. Joseph Plunkett’s father, George Noble Plunkett, had already won Sinn Féin’s first electoral victory in a by-election in Roscommon-North earlier that year, so DeValera’s prospects were seen as promising.

Skerries

On the trip to Skerries that July, the group included Muriel, her daughter, Barbara, Muriel’s sister (and Joseph Plunkett’s widow) Grace, Lillie Connolly (James Connolly’s widow) and their children Roddy, Fiona and Ina, Aine Ceannt (Eamon Ceannt’s widow) and her son, Ronan. Agnes Malin (Michael Malin’s widow) and her five children: Seamus, Sean, Una, Joseph and baby Maura. (In a latter recollection, Joseph Mallin would recall one of Pearse’s sisters also present, who was “wheeling me in a chair” around Skerries during the trip).[19]

Miramar have been a large holiday home based on Strand Street in the town centre, the structure later being demolished for what was a time the local Ulster Bank, and today the Rockabilly Restaurant stands at 41 Stand Street.

Though she enjoyed the surroundings and good weather, Muriel’s thoughts were very much directed towards her recovering son. She kept up a flurry of postcards to the recovering Donagh: “Dearest Don, this is a lovely place…” “Babbily came to meet me at the station with Aunt Grace”… “Babbily was in the sea today”… “Babbily is getting quite brown”… “I have a lovely surprise for you when I come home. Babbily is having a lovely time getting dipped in the sea.” Intriguingly, one postmarked on 8^th July states: “Dearest Don, I had a lovely big swim today, and nearly got over to the island. [author emphasis] I’ll have some lovely seaweed and sea shells when we go back.”[20]

Several days into the holiday, on Monday, July 9^th, 1917, the party of women and children assembled on the South Strand beach in the glorious weather. Just directly across from them was Shenick Island with it’s Martello Tower. Muriel and Grace took Barbara around the beach to collect shells, which Muriel placed in a cosmetic box for the daughter.

Shenick Island lies to the east of Skerries, and largest of the islands off the coast of the town. The Martello Tower on the island dates from the 19^th century, when the British built defensive forts throughout the Empire. It’s name Shenick comes from the Irish for ‘sionnach’ meaning fox.

It was around 4.30pm that Muriel left the beach for her swim.[21]

Muriel’s reasoning to set out that far has been the result of much rumour and conjecture. One account that is noted by a biographer of Muriel sister’s Sydney is that it was a suicide, as she had been known to be a strong swimmer.[22] However, looking at contemporary accounts and the subsequent inquest suggest a somewhat less dramatic, but no less tragic, series of events.

Another well-known account that has held strong in the near-century since suggests Muriel wanted to raise the tricolour flag over the Martello Tower on Shenick Island. [23] Decades later, Grace later told a family member that the idea had come about when there had been a lot of Union Jacks flying along the beach, and the nationalist families had put a tricolour flag along the tent they were using. Two men of the Royal Irish Constabulary had arrived on the scene had told them to take it down, and when they left, Muriel told the group, “I’ll put that flag where they can’t get it.”[24]

While not discounting Grace as an important eyewitness, it should also be noted the story of raising the flag was never reported at the later inquest nor in contemporary newspaper accounts. A tricolour flag was never mentioned to have been found near Muriel’s body. One suggestion she had a bathing cap in the colours of a tricolour, however likely, this is only conjecture.[25] It is also possible that while the idea was talked about, it was not Muriel’s intention as she set out on her initial swim.

Indeed, one recorded exchange between Muriel and Ina Connolly, as the former told her to look after Barbara was Ina joking with Muriel: “I will not [look after Barbara] unless you promise not to swim to the island.” Muriel smiled and promised she would not.[26]

In any case, as Muriel swam out, she was pulled out by the strong tidal current in front of Shenick Island. Ina Connolly would recall at the inquest that the crowd on the beach, herself included, called out for Muriel to return.[27] While Muriel waved back to indicate she as fine, it soon became clear she was in some sort of distress. Her sister Grace would recall saying to the group, “My goodness! She’s an awful distance out!” Moments later, Muriel disappeared beneath the water.[28]

Pandemonium immediately set in amongst the group on the beach. A screaming Barbara, having witnessed her mother disappear, was removed from the scene into a house nearby.[29] Grace, and several men, went to another nearby house to commander a boat to head out towards the Island. At the house in question, they were refused the use of oars by a servant.

At the later inquest, an RIC Constable John Burke, said the homeowner (one Sir John Griffith) and his family were not in the house at the time and the servant said that she had not understood what the lady wanted the use of the oars for. The servant also informed the constable that a lady wearing a soldier’s badge – likely Cumann na mBan – asked for the oars but was again refused. Grace said at the inquest she did not feel the oars were refused due to ignorance.[30]

A rowing boat eventually set out for the direction of Shenick Island eventually commandeered by Noel Lemass, a young Volunteer recovering from his wounds suffered during Easter Week in Skerries, as well as an off-duty British officer who accompanied him.[31]

After other boats and search parties set out, Muriel’s body found was found at around 7.30am the following morning about a quarter of a mile away from where she was last seen. It would be an old friend of her husband’s, Commandant Rory O’Connor of the Irish Volunteers, who later arrive in Skerries and identify her body. [32]

The later inquest would say “When the body was found, it was lying face downward with the hands crossed.” A Dr. Healy would state at this inquest, that because of the position of the hands and no water in the lungs, he concluded that heart failure due to exhaustion was the cause of death.[33] When she died, Muriel was 31 years old.

As Barbara later told her family, in the confusion and panic over her mother, she had gone missing. Though later located, a peculiar aspect of this tale tells that the young Barbara somehow found her way to house and was later found banging on the door of the locked room where her mother’s body was located, screaming over and over for her ‘Mammily’.[34]

An inquest was held by the Deputy Coroner, Mr. Thomas Early, on the afternoon on locating the body in Skerries. Ina Connolly and Muriel’s sister, Grace, were among the witnesses called. Before the jury retired at the inquest, Grace made the suggestion that there should be lifebuoys or boats placed on the strand. On returning, this inquest would go on to determine that the deceased had died of heart failure, due to shock or exhaustion.

The inquest ended with an expression of deepest sympathy with Muriel’s family and friends.[35]

Funeral

The radical newspaper The Irish Citizen, recalling Muriel’s activism in nationalist politics, would remark that “this intensely tragic death… has removed another ardent suffragist from our ranks.” Many years later, the feminist activist (and Rising widow herself) Maude Gonne would recall in a letter that Muriel “was such a lovely girl.”[36]
The arrangements for the funeral fell to Rory O’Connor, Fathers Albert and Mr. Fred Allen, Secretary of the National Aid Association.[37]

In a letter found in the MacDonagh papers, Mr. Allen outlines the plans for the burial site. The National Aid Association had looked to a site in Glasnevin cemetery near the burial place of the Fenian O’Donovan Rossa, in what would become known as the Republican Plot.

Much of the desired burial site for Murial and Thomas was owned by the O’Rahilly family, as the Volunteer organizer, Michael O’Rahilly or ‘The Rahilly’, killed during the 1916 Rising was buried there. Mr. Allen then states ownership of the part of the plot designated for Muriel and her husband was now in the ownership of Thomas’ brother, Joseph.[38] The funeral was set for the 12^th July, 1917.

A contemporary news report described the scene as Muriel’s coffin departed Skerries: ‘The chapel bell tolled the moment the remains left Miramar until it reached the station. Behind the hearse walked Father Albert, followed by the Volunteers of North Dublin, then came the children from Miramar carrying wreaths and near relatives and friends… the coffin covered with the tricolour was placed on the train and as it steamed out you could hear the sobs and lamentations of the vast crowd that thronged the little seaside station.’[39]

A larger contingent of Volunteers met Muriel’s coffin at Amiens’ Street Station from Skerries on the 11^th July, and from there to the MacDonagh family home at Marelborough Road, Donnybrook. The next evening, around 9.30pm the coffin was removed. Draped ina tri-colour flag, Muriel’s coffin was then carried by a group of Volunteers to the horse-drawn hearse, the hearse then made it’s way to the Pro-Cathedral. Crowds thronged the streets for the funeral, while a large group of Muriel’s family and friends followed the hearse carrying wreaths.[40]

A contemporary article described what was perhaps the most striking sight of all, a contingent of up to 4,000 of the Irish Volunteers marching behind the hearse in perfect formation, about four deep.[41]

Many members of the Republican Movement were expected to attend, despite it being the aftermath of the famous by-election for Sinn Féin in East-Clare, which saw Easter Rising veteran Eamon DeValera elected. An article covering the election victory made note that Countess Markiveicz was leaving the celebrations early to return to Dublin for the funeral.[42]

As the funeral mass was conducted, the Volunteers assisted in keeping the roads and thoroughfares clear for the coffin’s final journey to Glasnevin. A family account says that as the mile-long funeral passed by the children’s hospital in the thousands, a nurse brought the still-recovering Donagh to the window and said, “That’s your mammy going by.”[43]

Now orphaned, Barbara and Donagh would find their custody being fought over by the MacDonagh and Gifford families in the years that follow. The Giffords would help raise the children until the death of Muriel’s father, Frederick, and then the MacDonaghs took the children. Thomas’ sister, Sister Francesca, was anxious that the children should receive a Catholic upbringing felt it would be best they would be raised by a family in foster care. The surviving Gifford sisters would try to take the MacDonaghs to Court over custody, however they would lose the case. In any event, Grace herself would remain close to Barbara and Donagh until her death in 1955.[44]

Donagh MacDonagh himself would become a famous playwright and poet, as well as a distinguished judge.

While attending UCD, Barbara would study to be a librarian, and while at the college, met her husband, Liam Redmond. They would marry, and Barbara from then on, was devoted to raising her family.[45]

For the rest of Barbara’s life, she kept the little eau-de-cologne cardboard box containing the seashells she collected with her mother in Skerries in 1917. This was later provided on loan to Kilmainham Gaol Museum by Barbara’s daughter, where it can be seen as part of the ‘Last Words’ exhibition specifically in the display related to Thomas MacDonagh; a poignant symbol of what became a devastating double-tragedy for the young MacDonagh children.

Gerard Shannon is a historian residing in Skerries, Co. Dublin. He is currently expanding on his research into the life and death of Muriel MacDonagh for an installment of the Kilmainham Tales series. He can be found on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/gerry_shannon

References

[1] See Clare, Anne, Unlikely Rebels: The Gifford Girls and the Fight for Irish Freedom, Mercier Press, Cork (2011), page 30

[2] See O’Neill, Marie, Grace Gifford Plunkett and Irish Freedom: Tragic Bride of 1916, Irish Academic Press, Dublin (2000), page 4; author conversation with Muriel McAuley, granddaughter of Muriel MacDonagh, January 2013

[3] Clare, page 45

[4] Redmond, Lucille, article entitled ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Skerries News Vol. 19, No. 8, Dublin (October 2008)

[5] Parks, Edd W. and Aileen Wells, Thomas MacDonagh: the man, the patriot, the writer, University Georgia Press, Athens (1967), page 27

[6] Clare, page 67; Czira, Sidney Gifford, (edited, Hayes, Alan), The Years Flew By: Recollections of Madame Sidney Gifford Czira, Arlen House, Galway (2000), page 30

[7] O’Neill, page 10

[8] Short biography of Muriel MacDonagh, written by Muriel McAuley and kindly given to author, early 2013.

[9] For a detailed account of the courtship and marriage between Thomas and Muriel see McCoole, Sinead, Easter Widows, Doubleday Ireland, UK and Ireland (2014), pages 191 – 225

[10] Newspaper cutting of Muriel’s account of last seeing Thomas, National Library of Ireland Manuscript 20,646/2

[11] Mac Lochlainn, Piaras F., Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed After the Rising at Easter 1916, Office of Public Works, Dublin (2001), pages 61 – 63

[12] Geraldine Plunkett Dillion, All in the Blood: A memoir of the Plunkett family, the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence, A. & A. Farmar Ltd, Dublin (2006), pages 230 – 231

[13] Bateson, Ray, They Died By Pearse’s Side, Irish Graves Publications, Dublin (2014), page 145

[14] Czira, page 22

[15] McCoole, page 263

[16] Short biography of Muriel MacDonagh, by Muriel McAuley, donated to author.

[17] In conversation with Muriel McAuley, January 2013.

[18] Short biography of Muriel MacDonagh, by Muriel McAuley, donated to author.

[19] Video interview with Father Joseph Mallin, written and directed by Marcus Howard, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzaET7zxZy8

[20] Postcards from Muriel to Donagh MacDonagh, the MacDonagh Papers, MS 44,321/5

[21] Redmond, Lucille, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Skerries News, Vol. 19 No. 8

[22] Hayes, The Years Flew By, page xx

[23] Clare, page 200

[24] Short biography of Muriel MacDonagh, by Muriel McAuley, donated to author.

[25] In conversation with Lucille Redmond, June 2013.

[26] McCoole, page 286

[27] Nenagh News. (See previous)

[28] Redmond, Lucille, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Skerries News, Vol. 19 No. 8

[29] Same as previous.

[30] Nenagh News. (See previous).

[31] McCoole, page 287

[32] Nenagh News. (See previous).

[33] Nenagh News. (See previous).

[34] Redmond, Lucille, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Skerries News, Vol. 19 No. 8

[35] Nenagh News. (See previous)

[36] Both referred to in Hayes, As The Years Flew By, page xx.

[37] Nenagh News. (See previous)

[38] National Aid Association plan for MacDonagh family plot, NLI MS 24,376

[39] From an Irish Times newspaper report, partially transcribed at McCoole, page 288

[40] Article from unknown newspaper published on Saturday, July 14^th, 1917 donated to author by Muriel McAuley.

[41] Newspaper clipping (with photograph) from unknown newspaper published Saturday, 14^th July 1917 donated to author by Muriel McAuley.

[42] ‘The East Clare Result’, Nenagh Guardian, July 14^th 1917, page 3

[43] Redmond, Lucille, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Skerries News, Vol. 19 No. 8

[44] In conversation with Muriel McAuley, January 2013

[45] In conversation with Muriel McAuley, June 2013

Review: Truce

By Padraig Og O Ruairc

Published by Mercier Press 2016

Reviewer: John Dorney

This book is about the four days leading up to the Truce of July 11, 1921 that ended the Irish War of Independence. The Truce led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 and, indirectly, to the political settlement that bequeathed partition, the Irish Civil and much of the island’s political landscape today.

‘Truce’ is an in-depth, worm’s eye view of how the Truce came about. However, Padraig Og O Ruairc, as well as minutely describing the violence of these days by all participants; Republican, RIC, Auxiliaries, British Army, loyalist, also seeks to dispel what he considers myths that have grown up around the war in general and the events leading up to the Truce in particular.

Negotiations

Perhaps the book’s strongest chapter is the opening one, which contains much of interest on the negotiations that led to the cessation of hostilities in July 1921. O Ruairc deftly describes how earlier attempts to end the violence had come to grief, particularly in December 1920.

Beginning in 1919, the Irish Republican movement had capitialised on their election victory of 1918 to form an Irish Parliament, the Dail, and to declare an Irish Republic to be in existence. There followed a long conflict between their military wing, the Irish Republican Army or IRA and the British authorities who attempted to suppress the declared Republic and to move Irish demands back to a more limited form of self-government within the United Kingdom.

Achieving a political settlement depended on reconciling these two objective – safeguarding Irish aspirations or British strategic interests. With neither side willing to compromise sufficiently, both sides persisted throughout 1920 and through 1921 in continuing to advance their objectives by military means.

As early as July 1920, we learn in ‘Truce’, Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary urged Lloyd George to consider Dominion status for Ireland – that is the same status within the British Commonwealth as Canada or Australia. In October of that year Conservative MP, George Cockerill, tried through backdoor channels, to negotiate a ceasefire with Sinn Fein President Arthur Griffith.

The talks were scuppered from a number of angles, one being Father Michael O’Flanagan the Vice President of Sinn Fein, who publicly voiced the opinion that the party might accept the terms, though he had no authority to do so.

Another Catholic Cleric, Bishop Clune, almost negotiated a truce in December 1920 and found both Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith amenable to the idea. The deal stalled, however on the insistence of the British and in particular Hammar Greenwood, the commander of the RIC, that the IRA would have to surrender its weapons and TDs who were also IRA men would not be allowed to sit in a legalised Dail Eireann. Macready the British Army commander in Ireland also voiced the belief that a truce would strengthen the IRA.

Lloyd George endorsed Greenwood’s hardline position and that was basically that as regards peace initiatives for another six months, as the British military was given the task of crushing the IRA before talks could again resume.

O Ruairc argues, rather cogently, that it was the failure of the British military to achieve the decisive results against the Republican guerrillas that they had promised and a political unwillingness on the British part to go ‘all out’ and wage total war in Ireland,  that led in the summer of 1921 to the actual truce. Under its terms the demands for IRA disarmament and the proposed limits on who could attend the Dail were dropped.

In the event, the truce was declared for July 11, 1921, after which time it was agreed that neither side would engage in offensive actions against the other or against civilians. This allowed space for the political negotiations that in December 1921 produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Much of this material is new, or at least has not been aired in public before and O Ruairc deserves much praise for expanding the historiography here.

Spies, informers and polemics

There is also strong quantative research. O Ruairc has extensive tables and figures for all the civilians killed by the IRA as alleged informers up to the Truce, broken down by name, by county and by religion and military service. This will prove of much interest and use to further researchers, as will the detailed chronicles of IRA operations leading up the Truce.

Where, however, the book ventures more into the territory of a polemic, it runs into some problems. First of all, an objective of the book seems to be to debunk some of the more populist journalistic anti-IRA accounts of the days leading up to the Truce, where, according to the likes of columnists Kevin Myers and Eoghan Harris, an IRA filled with bloodlust wantonly killed unarmed soldiers, police and civilians safe in the knowledge that they would soon be safe from reprisals.

Debunking some of these stories proves very easy to do and O Ruairc gleefully shows that for instance, four unarmed British soldiers shot in Cork city just before the Truce were not, as Myers had claimed, teenagers out buying sweets. They were in their twenties and appear to have been to the pub and it appears likely were killed in reprisal for the shooting of an IRA prisoner the night before.

An RIC constable Alfred Needham, shot in Ennis days before the Truce was not as Myers had written, gunned down on his wedding day in front of his new bride but shot while talking to young woman who may or may not have been his girlfriend.

This is well and good as far as it goes. Myers’ columns in the Irish Times and Irish Independent and Harris’s in Sunday Independent newspapers owe rather too much to the propaganda put out by British forces at the time, and a lot more to Myers’ and Harris’s antipathy to the Provisional IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein in the 1990s and 2000s. But no one who takes history seriously is in any danger of taking them as reliable historical sources. Thus it is open to question why they are quoted so extensively in this book. If the objective is to correct a fallacious discourse in contemporary journalism then the book succeeds.

The problem is that it tends to confuse this kind of journalistic polemic with serious historical argument. So while the likes of Kevin Myers’ writing on the War of Independence may fairly be dismissed as biased and without factual support, the same cannot be said for several other important arguments made by historians.

Sectarianism and ex soldiers

The most important of these is the idea that the IRA, especially in Cork shot some categories of people more readily than others as informers, particularly Protestants and those who had served in the British Army. O Ruairc shows that, in the case of Protestants, they comprised 32% of the 182 victims he identifies as having been shot as alleged informers by the IRA in the War of Independence. Since 32% is roughly in line with their share of the all-Ireland population in 1921, O Ruairc concludes that sectarianism could not have been a factor in their deaths.

There is a serious problem with this reasoning. Irish Protestants were overwhelmingly concentrated in north east Ulster, but this area saw next to no Protestants (and few Catholics) shot as informers. Southern Protestants were therefore considerably over-represented in the numbers of those killed as informers – i.e. about 10% of the population but around 32% of those killed as informers. Furthermore, such figures do not include civilians killed by the IRA who not alleged informers such, as for instance, Dean Finlay, a retired Protestant cleric killed in Cavan in a house raid in May 1921.

This does not automatically mean that, as some have suggested, that the IRA was engaged in a campaign of sectarian killing, in the opinion of this reviewer and based on my own research it was not, but it does mean that we must consider the question further.

O Ruairc here shows, in another fine piece of research, that the British accepted that 98 out of the 182 people killed as informers were indeed British Intelligence assets and paid their families compensation. It is possible that more Protestants were killed simply because they were more likely to aid Crown Forces in southern counties, but it seems unwise to assume that sectarian animosity played no part.

Similarly in the case of ex soldiers, while, as again O Ruairc adroitly points out, detailed examination of cases shows that the IRA was not in the business of randomly targeting ex-servicemen, there is more to say, also on this cleavage within Irish society in the revolutionary years. Throughout the First World War there was the most intense animosity between Republicans and Irishmen in he British Army and especially their families – the so called ‘Separation women’. Republicans invariably blamed the latter for rioting that broke out in favour of the Redmondites at election times and also for things like the attacks on Sinn Fein offices at the Armistice in November 1918.

The question becomes then, while some ex-soldiers went on to serve in the IRA, is it possible that those who did not were more likely to get a bullet in the head, where others might by be let off with a warning, if they came under suspicion for informing?

Thirdly there is the question of ‘soft targets’. It seems undeniable that as the War of Independence went on the IRA in response to British escalation radically widened the categories of targets they were prepared to kill. By July 1921, in retaliation for British executions and clandestine assassinations of their men, the IRA was fully prepared to kill unarmed soldiers and police (which they had not done before early 1921).

O Ruairc acknowledges this, and his highly detailed listing of the casualties in the lead up to the Truce shows many examples. However he argues against the idea that the IRA turned to soft targets because they could no longer attack military targets by mid 1921. For instance, fending off claims that the IRA was no longer able to hit ‘hard targets’ he cites a litany of attacks on barracks and ambushes in July 1921.

Finally, O Ruairc dismisses the contention that the IRA took advantage of the coming Truce to kill as many of their enemies as possible, knowing that they would soon have legal immunity from prosecution. Most combatants, he argues had no idea there would be a Truce until about two days beforehand.

Conclusion

Thus the spike in violence that preceded that Truce was in some cases incidental (Belfast’s Bloody Sunday on July 10 in which 16 people were killed, was sparked by an ambush of an RIC patrol and the perennial tension over the Orange marching season), in some cases symptomatic of the intensifying guerrilla war and only in a minority of cases a result of either side ‘settling scores’ before the Truce. Nevertheless, by O Ruairc’s count, 57 people lost their lives in political violence in the four days from the Truce’s announcement until its implementation.

Some readers will strongly agree with O Ruairc’s conclusions, some will find his tone polemical. What is sure though is that no one in the Irish historical community can ignore such a feat of painstaking and carefully documented primary research. Leaving historical arguments aside, this book is highly valuable as a source in and of itself on the War of Independence, well written and challenging. As such it is to be recommended to scholars and anyone interested in the period.

A short article on Roger Casement. Executed today 100 years ago. By John Dorney

Roger Casement, hanged on August 3, 1916 was perhaps the most unusual story among the 16 men executed for the Easter Rising.

Casement, originally from County Antrim, was of Protestant and unionist origin. He wasn’t the only rebel activist from this background, Bulmer Hobson and Ernest Blythe were two more. Unlike them, Casement was not an IRB man or cultural nationalist.

Casement made his name in the British Colonial Service, and as consul, investigated Belgian abuse of native workers in Congo where Belgians rubber planters were hacking off limbs of robber workers who did not meet quota of rubber collected, or who tried to escape. He was later sent to Brazil and Peru where he also investigated the abuse of native workers by rubber plantation owners. He had to leave Peru under threats of the rubber bosses. He was later knighted for his humanitarian work.

So Casement was embodiment of British Empire’s self image as benevolent empire. But he later turned against Empire, apparently as a result of the Boer War. In 1907 he wrote;

I had accepted Imperialism, British rule was to be extended all over the world at all costs because it was best for everyone under the sun and those who opposed this extension ought to be rightly ‘smashed’…Well the Boer War gave me qualms at the end – the concentrations camps bigger ones at the end, and finally when up in the Congo forests where I found Leopold I [King of Belgium] I also found myself, the incorrigible Irishman!

By the time of the Home Rule crisis, 1912-14 he was back in Ireland. In opposition to the Ulster Covenant, which collected half a million signatures against Home Rule, Casement, with a Presbyterian minister named Armour collected about 12,000 signatures of northern Protestants in favour of Home Rule.

When unionists armed in the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule, Casement was to the forefront in founding the nationalist Irish Volunteers, and set on their governing committee. He later came up with much of the finance to import guns for them at Howth.

He seems to have become involved around this time with the IRB via Bulmer Hobson and then, so some degree with the secretive IRB military council which was planning a Rising before the Great War ended. Casement, on the outbreak of war, went to Berlin to get German aid. Joseph Plunkett also went to Germany with Casement on behalf of the military council.

Casement tried to recruit Irish Brigade for Germany from Irish prisoners of war but got very poor response, only about 60 joined. Unlike the hardcore insurrectionists in Ireland, Casement was against Rising without direct German military assistance, in other words a landing of not less than 12,000 German troops.

By the time he actually went to Ireland on a u-boat in April 1916 ,he had decided to try to stop the Rising, which he was convinced would be a failure, in the absence of German troops. Not that he was especially impressed with the Germans commitment to Ireland, writing in his diary;

“My last day in Berlin!” he wrote in this diary’s last entry for the 11^th April 1916 as he departed for Ireland and the fate he was at least half-expecting to find: “Thank God – tomorrow my last day in Germany – again thank God, an English jail, or scaffold, would be better than to dwell with these people longer. All deception – all self-interest.”

He landed at Banna Strand Co Kerry but was soon arrested by the RIC on Good Friday 1916 and taken to London as prisoner. Roger Casement later asserted that the British Army Intelligence officers who interrogated him refused him permission to make a public declaration calling on the Volunteers to call off the rebellion saying, ‘ it’s a festering sore, it’s much better that it come to a head’.

He stood trial for treason and in his defence argued that he had been trying to call off the Rising. At this point the British Government began leaking the ‘black diaries’ with details of Casement’s homosexual adventures on his travels around the world.

The traditional nationalist version is that the dairies were forged to blacken Casement’s name. Casement never married and there were strong rumours of number of same-sex love affairs. Whether he also had hundreds of sexual encounters with boys and young men across Africa and South America as he allegedly wrote in his private diaries we will probably never know. Forensic tests in 2002 suggested that the diaries were genuine, but they may well have been fantasies rather than records of real events.

In 1916, such allegations apparently merited the death sentence more than mere treason against the Crown. Without the ‘black diaries’ he may well have been granted ‘clemency’ as he had influential friends in Colonial Service.

He was hanged at Pentonville Prison, in London on August 3, 1916. In 1966 his body was brought back to Ireland and buried with military honours in Glasnevin Cemetery as an Irish patriot.

The roots of clerical control over care for disabled children in Ireland. By David Kilgannon

‘They took the liberty of doing things, and the things they have done were an awful lot of evil things … I was only a young, innocent boy and I went through evil things that I didn’t want to go through. I went through their devilish hands … I was only dirt.’ (Ryan 5.85)

Above is the pseudonymous account of ‘Graham’ from the 2009 Report of the ‘Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse’ (The Ryan Commission). Graham was sexually abused as a child at a Catholic run special-needs institution,  Our Lady of Good Counsel in Glanmire, Co. Cork.

Tragically, Graham’s experience was far from exceptional, as the publication of the Ferns Report (2005), the McCoy Report (2007), the Murphy Report (2009) and the Ryan Report have highlighted the widespread abuse of vulnerable children in Catholic run institutions in twentieth century Ireland. One strain of this wider phenomenon was the abuse of intellectually disabled children within institutions designed for their care. Concluding his testimony to the Ryan Commission, Graham posed a question. He asked: ‘Whose idea was it to grab children and fill their schools up with children, [the authorities] not knowing what was going on?’ (5.86)

To answer Graham’s question is challenging, as it requires an examination of state policy towards intellectually disabled children in the 1950s. This examination is necessary as the 1950s were a pivotal period for the establishment of the Irish system of disability care, in which Catholic run institutions became a central component of the state’s overall policy. Indeed, the 1950s saw a huge expansion in the capacity of Catholic Church run institutions to care for disabled children, growing from 1,168 residential places across seven institutions in 1950 to 2,620 places across fourteen institutions in 1960.

One reason for the propagation of Catholic institutional care lay in one of the predominant forces shaping state policy in 1950s Ireland, that of subsidiarity. This idea, which originated in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931), held that ‘the task of the state … was to facilitate activity by other groups and persons within the community but not to supersede these if they were working with reasonable efficacy.’ (Barrington 144) In the case of the intellectually disabled, subsidiarity meant encouraging the development of voluntary sector efforts to care for this group.

The state should not involve itself directly in the care of the disabled, the encyclical describing such an idea as ‘a great evil and disturbance of right order.’ (Power 351) The spread of subsidiarity was aided by a more general shift in governance methods from the late 1940s onwards, as the Irish state became ‘more totally committed to Catholic concepts.’ (Whyte 158) Thus, to create a system of publicly funded, but privately operated, institutions aligned with the dominant ethos of Irish public policy in the 1950s.

A second probable reason lies in bureaucratic inertia within the Department of Health. Minutes from a meeting in November 1953 discuss three possible avenues ‘for providing [further] accommodation for mental defectives.’ These options were: Catholic run institutions, Catholic managed institutions with lay staff or institutions operated by local councils. Yet, while there were three options, only Catholic run institutions were considered by the Department of Health. Indeed, even the initial November 1953 meeting to consider the three options focused solely on religious run institutions, the minutes bemoaned ‘the reluctance of male orders to undertake further schemes.’

At the same meeting, Dr. Dolphin (a senior civil servant within the Department) noted his plans to visit a number of religious orders, including the La Sagesse order in Liverpool, the Order of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary and the Augustinian Nuns, all to ‘enquire into their capacity for undertaking the care of Mental Defectives and the possible location of an institution which they might set up.’ Thus, both the prevailing trend within the state and the orientation of influential civil servants favoured an expansion of Church run institutions to care for the intellectually disabled.

This helps to account for the growth of these institutions in the 1950s, but not the lack of oversight from the state. The Ryan Commission alone, for example, noted the almost total absence of oversight from the state into conditions within church run institutions.

A key reason for this may lie in the venerated position of Catholic religious orders in Irish life. Within the Irish parliament (Dáil Éireann), the work of religious orders was almost incessantly portrayed as beyond reproach, with members of Parliament (Teachta Dála) describing how it was ‘a revelation to go into these institutions and see the spirit of devotion, self-sacrifice and loyalty’ displayed by orders like the Brothers of Charity in the care of the intellectually disabled. Such veneration of the role of religious orders may account for why Graham’s institution, Our Lady of Good Counsel in Glanmire, did not receive an official inspection from either the Department of Health or the Southern Health Board ‘between the period 1939 and 1990.’ (5.39)

Hence, to even begin to answer Graham’s question requires interrogating a diverse range of influences that shaped mid-twentieth century Ireland. These forces determined the acceptable form of care for children with intellectual disabilities, leaving the state as the funder for a network of privately run uninspected institutions. Combined with the norms that venerated the authority and probity of the clergy, the Irish state produced an toxically insular system of disability provision, in which the abuse described by Graham could truly flourish.

The evolution of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence. By John Dorney.

After the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish Volunteer movement in Dublin looked dead and buried, but by 1921 the Volunteers, now renamed the Irish Republican Army or IRA, had built a new formidable urban guerrilla organisation to fight the British presence in the Irish capital.

Up to 90 Volunteers of the Dublin Brigade and Citizen Army men lost their lives as a result the 1916 Rising and a further 1,000 were interned [1] , leaving only a shadow organisation left in Dublin. This might have been the end of the Volunteers in Dublin, had the British policy of repression been pushed through to its logical conclusion – the Volunteers interned serving out their long sentences of penal servitude. The organisation also lost most of its weapons.

But in fact the British response swung erratically from harshness to lenience. Most of the rank and file Volunteers were released in December 1916 and even the surviving leadership of 1916 were released in mid 1917.

Not all of the Rising veterans remained active after their release, but the Dublin Brigade was rebuilt in 1917 and 1918. The Dublin Brigade, like most Volunteer units around the country, received an influx of thousands of new recruits as it prepared to resist conscription, which the British government extended to Ireland in April 1918. Dublin Volunteers helped to marshal a General strike against conscription in April 1918 and were also involved in activities such as seizing food set to be exported to Britain and distributing it among the Dublin poor.[2] [3]

In the general election of December 1918, the Dublin Volunteers campaigned for Sinn Fein, stewarded their rallies and on occasion rioted with the families of those who relatives in the British Army. Sinn Fein won the election, not only in Dublin in all of Ireland and declared Irish independence and the formation of its own Parliament, the Dail.

On January 19, 1919, the Dail, met for the first time in Dublin’s Mansion House, and declared Irish Independence. Out of 75 TDs, 27 could not attend, could not attend   however, being imprisoned.

On the same day in Tipperary Volunteers shot dead, in shootings unauthorised by the Volunteer command, two RIC constables were shot dead at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary. Together the events, though unconnected, signalled the beginning of a new insurrection against British rule in Ireland.

Todd Andrews Rathfarnham Company of the Dublin Brigade 4^th Battalion, like all IRA Volunteers around the country, took an Oath of Allegiance to Dail Eireann and the Republic in the autumn of 1919, in his case in Ballyboden library.[4] The oath administered by GHQ sent, ‘I will support and defend the Irish Republic and the Government of Ireland, which is Dail Eireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic’.[5] From this point onwards they began to refer to themselves by a new name, the Irish Republican Army or IRA.

The Squad

Guerrilla war did not come immediately to Dublin however. Though 1919 saw some shootings in the city, it was not until mid 1920 that something akin to a war situation developed in Dublin.

The resumption of political violence began with Michael Collins’ formation of a shooting ‘Squad’ – fulltime paid operatives – in his Intelligence Department to eliminate Detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. This was initially a reactive measure –a response to mass arrests of Sinn Fein activists in 1918-19.

The Squad according to one of its founder members, James Slattery, was formed on the 30^th of July 1919 at a meeting on North Great George’s Street.

Dick McKee, the head of the Dublin Brigade, asked selected men, mostly from the north inner city second battalion if they had objections to shooting enemy agents. Many did. Their notion of warfare was akin to the ‘stand up fight’ of 1916, not clandestine assassination. But at least 6 men at the initial meeting did accept the task of premeditated targeted killing.[6]

The Squad had an anomalous place within the IRA, being part of no recognised unit, independent even of the Dublin Brigade and answerable only to Collins himself as Director of Intelligence. In the Military Pension files it is described as the ‘GHQ Active Service Unit’.

The Squad started out with about 6 men and later grew to 12 men, hence the popular nickname, ‘The Twelve Apostles’ and had no more than 21 members by the time of the Truce in July 1921. The Intelligence Department had according to one founding member, Frank Thornton, only 6 men in 1919, though this also expanded considerably during the armed conflict.[7]. The numbers serving in Inteligence are hard to pin down exactly but together the Squad and Intelligence Department seem to have numbered about 50 men by the Truce.[8]

The Intelligence Department assembled information on targets, and according to Bernard Byrne, ‘came along to point out targets’. James Slattery recalled that orders for ‘jobs’ were given by Intelligence officers Liam Tobin and Tom Cullen and occasionally from Collins himself[9]. In practice though, the two units tended to bleed into each other. Squad men occasionally found targets for themselves.

On one occasion for instance, Tom Keogh and Bernard Byrne happened across a British Intelligence officer, Captain Cecil, ‘by chance’, followed him back to his hotel room on Wicklow Street and shot him beside his wife.[10] Conversely Intelligence men often went on ‘jobs’ themselves, not only pointing out the target but frequently pulling the trigger too.[11].

Over them all was ‘the Big Fella’, Michael Collins. Although Collins in theory held the rank only of Director of Intelligence in the IRA, everyone knew that in practice, he was the boss. His authority was based not on his official rank but on his personal charisma and this was true especially over his authority over the Intelligence Department and the Squad.

An Army inquiry in 1924 asked Charles Russell, a First World War veteran, junior IRA officer as of 1921 and later National Army Colonel, about Collins special position. Was Collins, the Inquiry asked, subject to Richard Mulcahy the IRA Chief of Staff? ‘No’, Russell replied, ‘he was Director of Intelligence, Commander in Chief and “the man”…. He was everything, he was General Collins, anyone knows that’. ‘He was chief man regardless of his position as D.I.’.[12]

The Intelligence Department and Squad were Collins’ men alone, according to Charles Russell; ‘if certain things that were carried out were done through ordinary Army channels they might not be carried out so well… they [Collins’ men] were if you like, the shock troops’.[13]

After a ‘job’ or a ‘plugging’ as the Squad came to call killings, they would report to Collins personally at Kirwan’s Bar or as Frank Thornton remembered, Devlin’s Pub on Parnell Street.[14] By the Truce of July 1921 they had killed at least 25 people. Collins’ targeting was selective but startlingly ruthless.

A list later compiled by Todd Andrews of those ‘executed’ on the orders of IRA Intelligence in Dublin lists 10 civilians killed by the Squad, including 6 in June 1921 alone,  along with one ‘unknown man’, 13 DMP and RIC detectives, two ‘agents’ and one British Army officer. The civilians were mostly alleged informers but some like Allan Bell was a Magistrate investigating the ‘Dail Loan’ and Frank Brooke was a railway magnate advising the British Army on moving troops by train.[15]

Andrews’ figure of 25 dead at IRA Intelligence’s hands in Dublin is certainly an underestimate of the Squad’s tally, as he did not include the most spectacular assassination attack. This occurred in the early morning of November 21^st, 1920 – later christened Bloody Sunday – when the Squad and Intelligence officers, along with several dozen gunmen from the Dublin Brigade were sent to over 20 addresses in central Dublin to kill British Intelligence officers and their informants – from a list compiled by Collins and the Intelligence Department.

Some of the targets were not in, others escaped but by daybreak 14 people had been shot dead; eight of them  were British officers, of whom six were confirmed Intelligence agents, two Auxiliaries, the rest either bystanders or civilian informers [16]. They were killed mostly in their beds. In retaliation the Crown forces  – RIC and Auxiliary police took the lead – opened fire on Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing another 14 civilians. Three Republicans including Dick McKee, commander of the Dublin Brigade were also arrested and killed by Auxiliaries that night in Dublin Castle.[17]

The up close killing that the Intelligence Department and the Squad were asked to carry out and the constant stress of their battle of wits against British Intelligence took its toll on them.  According to Charles Russell, ‘these men carried out the most objectionable work side of pre-Truce [War of Independence] operations’ which ‘left them anything but normal’. ‘If shell shock existed in the IRA prior to the Truce, the place to look for it was among these men’.[18]

Liam Tobin, the head of the Intelligence Department ‘looked like a man who had seen the inside of hell’.[19] Mick McDonnell, the original commander of the Squad was sent to California to recuperate in January 1921, ‘for health reasons’, though it is not clear if these were physical or psychological.[20] He was replaced first by James Slattery and then Paddy O’Daly.

It is hardly surprising, given that he was surrounded by a ruthless assassination unit, responsible to him alone, that Michael Collins’s position created tension with other leaders of the movement. So, to a lesser extent, did the authority of the IRA Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy, who directed much of the IRA guerrilla campaign.

Both men had a difficult relationship with Cathal Brugha the Dail’s Minister for Defence. Brugha was unhappy with what he perceived as Collins’ personal authority –far beyond his official role of Director of Intelligence – over the IRA.

In fact on a number of occasions Brugha flexed his muscles and intervened to veto or modify a number of IRA operations in Dublin. Most notably on Bloody Sunday itself, Brugha reduced Collins ‘hit list’ from over 50 names down to 35 on the grounds that there was not enough evidence against some of those marker for death.[21]

The Dublin Brigade

The Dublin Brigade of the IRA was divided into four main battalions, 1 and 2 north of the river Liffey (First Battalion to the west of O’Connell Street and Second to the East), 3 and 4 south of it (three in the inner city and Four in the more suburban area to the west and south). These formations tallied so closely with the Dublin Metropolitan Police Divisions, that it seems almost certain they were originally based on them[23]. Fifth Battalion was engineers and Sixth Battalion covered south county Dublin and neighbouring Wicklow.

The commander of the Dublin Brigade was Dick McKee who was killed by Auxiliaries in Dublin Castle in revenge for the mass killing of British agents on Bloody Sunday in November 1920. He was replaced by Oscar Traynor, a veteran of the1916 Rising and Vice Commandant of Second Battalion.

The numbers in the Dublin Brigade fluctuated from about 2,000 in 1916 to a much larger number of temporary recruits in the conscription crisis of 1918, down to about 2,100 Volunteers in 1920-1921, though the active total was much smaller[24]. Generally speaking the rank and file Volunteers in Dublin came from a specific social stratum – the Catholic skilled working class and lower middle class.

Social Profile of the Dublin Volunteers

Todd Andrews remarked that in his Company of 4^th Battalion, ‘the men were men of no property. Except for what little furniture the few married men had accumulated … But they were all in regular employment even if their jobs were menial, very badly paid and insecure. None of them were destitute. They had a minimum of food, clothing and shelter.[25]

Andrews himself spent his early years in Dublin’s tenements but his father and mother both ran their own small businesses meaning that by the time he joined the Volunteers in 1917 his family lived a comfortable life in suburban Terenure.

Though about a third of Dublin city’s 320,000 inhabitants lived in the slums and made a meagre and erratic living from unskilled labour, they were under-represented in the IRA. A study of 507 Dublin Volunteers found that 46% of them were skilled workers while only 23% were unskilled, with shop and clerical workers making up most of the remainder.[26]

Apart from the greater tendency to the very poor to serve in the British Army (much more regular payers than the IRA), this can probably explained by the fact that Volunteers had to pay a subscription of 3d a week to the organisation to pay for weapons and other costs. Dublin’s lumpen proletariat by and large did not have this much disposable income.

It may not be a coincidence that the fulltime Volunteers of the IRA in Dublin, in the Squad, the Intelligence Department, the Active Service Unit (ASU) and the Republican Police (together only about 200 men), were paid at the rate of a skilled worker, at about £4 per week. This was more than twice the average labourers’ wage which was 16-18s for a 48 hour week. [27]

A little higher up in the IRA, those who attained the rank of officer were generally of the lower rungs of the middle class. A study of 86 Dublin IRA officers found the largest single class were shop or clerical workers.[28] Frank Henderson for instance, commander of the Second Battalion was a clerk. Joseph O’Connor of the Third (nicknamed ‘Holy Joe’) worked as a civil servant in Dublin Corporation, Frank Thornton the Intelligence Officer worked for the New Ireland insurance firm[29].

For this reason, part of the IRA psychological make up was a feeling that they represented the ‘common people’ of Ireland. Not the ‘Imperialist’ or ‘Castle Catholic’ upper class, nor the ‘rabble’ that joined the British Army.

Todd Andrews remarked that the average Dublin Volunteer was a ‘Christian Brothers’ boy. It was rare to meet any ‘Diocesan boys’ – from the elite Catholic fee-paying schools (though there were some) and he hardly ever met a Protestant in the IRA, though again there were a handful. Andrews noted that IRA prisoners –he himself was interned from early 1921 – ritually said the rosary together as act of defiance.[30]

Another interesting demographic feature of the Dublin IRA is how many of its Volunteers were university students – Kevin Barry, hanged in November 1920 was a medical student at the ‘National’ or Catholic University College Dublin (UCD), as was Frank Flood, an ASU man hanged in March 1921, as  were IRA officers Ernie O’Malley, Todd Andrews and Andy Cooney. At a time when only a small proportion of the population typically made it to third level education, it seems certain that university students too were over-represented in the Dublin IRA.

Finally, a significant number of Dublin IRA Volunteers were not originally from Dublin at all. Many, including all the above named university students apart from Andrews and Flood, were originally from elsewhere – Barry was from Carlow, O’Malley was born in Mayo, Cooney was from Nenagh County Tipperary, Power, Bonfield and McEvoy’s roots were all in County Tipperary. Analysis of the IRA men killed in Dublin from 1916 to 1921 indicates that about 20-30% of Republican fighters in Dublin were not natives of the city, but like many of the city’s inhabitants, migrants from the rest of Ireland. [31]

Arms and ambushes

Richard Mulcahy the IRA Chief of Staff wrote to embattled rural guerrilla commanders in 1921 that ‘Dublin is by far the most important military area in Ireland… The grip of our forces in Dublin must be maintained at all costs… no victories in distant provincial areas have any value if Dublin is lost in as military sense’.[22]

There were never even nearly enough weapons to arm all the young men who belonged to the Dublin Brigade. The British Army thought that even after the Truce when the IRA’s armament had improved somewhat, only about 10% of the ‘rebels’ in Dublin had access to rifles, 25% to revolvers and 35% to ‘bombs’.  Given that most rifles in Dublin were sent to rural areas in mid 1920 this was probably an overestimate of the Dublin Brigade’s armament[32]

Until after Bloody Sunday, most IRA actions in Dublin were arms raids – as was for instance the raid in North King Street in which two British soldiers were killed and for which Kevin Barry was hanged. But most arms raids did not involve overt violence. Todd Andrews’ Company raided the local Big House for arms. Joe O’Connor’s Third Battalion bought and stole hundreds of rifles out of Wellington Barracks along the Grand Canal with the complicity of the Barracks Quartermaster.[33]

It was not until late December 1920 that IRA GHQ really committed the Dublin Brigade, as opposed to the Squad and Intelligence Department, to the fight. What the young men in the companies were expected to do, especially from late 1920 on, was to meet weekly for ‘parades’, where they would collect arms from a ‘dump’ and to ‘patrol’ their company areas. If and when they encountered British forces they were to attack them and make a quick getaway.

A typical IRA party on a ‘job’ in Dublin in 1921 carried improvised grenades and handguns only. [34]

The close presence of so many British troops and paramilitary police meant that prolonged fire-fights in urban situations were suicide for the IRA and making a quick getaway (and mingling into civilian crowds) was more important than firepower.

After the ‘job’ the revolvers and grenades were again hidden in a dump. Rank and file IRA Volunteers, when not ‘on patrol’ did not routinely carry weapons on the streets.

‘Factories’ were set up particularly in urban areas to manufacture grenades. In Dublin one clandestine workshop was churning out up to 1,000 improvised grenades per week by late 1920.[35] These were not always the most reliable weapons however. Often they did not explode and sometimes they exploded in the hands of the thrower.

The ‘patrol actions’ accounted for most IRA operations in Dublin. In the beginning, in early 1921 these were amateurish in the extreme. Todd Andrews recalled that in January 1921 his 4th Battalion Company had its first taste of action at Kenilworth Square; ‘We heard a lorry approaching from Terenure. We pulled our ‘dogs’ (we each had 45 Webley [revolvers]). It [the lorry] was packed with soldiers. They were all singing a popular song of the time ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles,’ We immediately opened fire, with Kane shouting, ‘we’ll give you f_ing bubbles’. The soldiers returned fire and the lorry accelerated just as [our men] threw their bombs at it’. Two soldiers were wounded.[36]

The IRA company ambushes evolved into something considerably more deadly in the coming months however. In March 1921 for instance, three British soldiers were killed and five wounded in a grenade attack on Wexford Street – a stretch leading from city centre to Portobello Barracks known as the ‘Dardanelles’ such was the frequency of ambushes on it.[37] The IRA in Dublin like all guerrillas, went through ‘combat evolution’, in other words, those who were reckless or careless were killed or captured. Those who remained learnt competence.

Mulcahy the Chief of Staff acknowledged the most active Battalions in Dublin were the Second and Third, ‘Most attacks are done by Battalions 2 and 3’, ‘1 and 4 are being worked up’.  He advised in the spring of 1921, cutting transport, sniping and killing informers, or as he put it an ‘anti-tout offensive’. He also suggested that Volunteers rely on hand guns more than grenades in ambushes. [38]

The ASU

For more targeted attacks the Brigade set up an Active Service Unit (ASU) in December 1920.  Like the Squad, these were fulltime, paid Volunteers. The aim was to recruit 100 men to the ASU but in fact there were closer to 50, divided into four sections along the lines of the Dublin Brigade Battalions. Unlike normal Volunteers they carried arms at all times.

One young recruit was Padraig O’Connor, a railway worker from county Kildare, a member of Fourth Battalion. Like the Squad, he recalled, they were given orders for ‘jobs’ by the Intelligence Department.

One of the ASU’s first operations ended in disaster however, when an attempted ambush in Drumcondra saw an entire section captured, six of whom were executed in March 1921. [39]

On the rare occasions where the IRA in Dublin were forced to stand and fight, their hand guns and ‘bombs’ were no match for British rifles and machine guns, especially when combined with armoured vehicles. One such occasion was the Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street ambush in March 1921 when a patrol of Auxiliaries raided a Third Battalion base just as the Company patrol had returned. In five minutes of firing, seven people were killed, two men on both sides and three civilians. Two IRA men were captured, and another four wounded. Joe O’Connor remarked that it showed the dangers of Volunteers disobeying his explicit instructions to avoid prolonged engagements.[40]

An even worse setback was the IRA operation to burn the Custom House (centre of local government) in May 1921. Insisted on by Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic, the operation was a disaster especially for the Second Battalion. Out of over 120 Volunteers committed to the operation, none was armed with anything heavier than a pistol and improvised grenade – some had only a revolver and six rounds. When the building was surrounded by heavily armed Auxiliaries and British soldiers, five guerrillas were killed and 70-80 captured with only four Auxiliaries injured.[41]

Such were the numbers captured that the Squad and the Dublin ASU had to be amalgamated afterwards into a new formation – the Dublin Guards under Paddy O’Daly.

Though the IRA in Dublin was in general kept up under tighter control than units elsewhere and was therefore less free to pursue private vendettas, they certainly became more ruthless as the clandestine war went on. Only 2 civilians were killed as informers in Dublin until early 1921 but in the following six months over a dozen were shot in quick succession, mostly in May and June. At least 9 of these men were ex-servicemen and three were Protestants.[42]

By the end, with the British executing their fighters both officially and unofficially after capture, IRA units attacked British soldiers whenever they had the opportunity, whether they were on duty or not. A cricket game at Trinity College for instance was shot up in June 1921 because soldiers were playing; one woman spectator was killed. A mass assassination attack (a second ‘Bloody Sunday’) was planned on British Intelligence officers on the shopping thoroughfare Grafton Street in the summer of 1921 but never came off.

By the summer of 1921 and the Truce of July 11, the British Army thought they were getting on top of the IRA in the city; many had been arrested and interned. The guerrillas however were far from finished in Dublin by that date. There was no shortage of new recruits and the pace of attacks slackened only a little, even after the disaster of the Customs House attack. The Dublin Brigade recorded 67 attacks in the city in April 1921, 103 in May and 92 in June.[43] Ammunition was certainly a problem, in some cases IRA ‘factories’ in the city were put to work at the risky task of converting .303 rifle ammunition into .45 revolver bullets.[44]

However the IRA was also adapting. The first batches of Thompson submachine guns had arrived in the city and were used in several ambushes in Dublin in June 1921. There was also a turn towards avoiding combat altogether and destroying British war infrastructure. A raid on the Military transport depot in June 1921 destroyed 40 vehicles including five new British armoured cars, without any shooting taking place.[45] Whether the IRA was on the verge of collapse, particularly in Dublin or whether it was in a position to keep going later became a bitterly contested point.

When the Truce with the British was agreed for July 11, 1921, the initial reaction among the IRA in Dublin was one of relief. Todd Andrews, who had been interned since January 1921 escaped from a military camp at Newbridge and made his way back to the city with the aid of sympathisers in Kildare. Back in south Dublin he found that he and his comrades were suddenly popular.  The Squad and ASU men established a training camp in the remote Glenasmole valley in the Dublin Mountains.

A British Army report in October 1921 on the possibility of the resumption of hostilities reported that IRA, ‘in a desperate situation before the Truce’, with’ their ASUs an columns being chased and harried from pillar to post, defeated and broken up’, was now ‘a more formidable organisation’. They reported that the IRA was recruiting ex-soldiers to help with training was now better armed, including with the Thompson sub machine gun and also had far more rifles with which to carry out sniping attacks.[46]

Casualties

Some 300 people died violently in Dublin between January 1919 and July 11^th 1921 and hundreds more had been wounded.[47]

The IRA counted 54 of their Volunteers killed in Dublin[48] and according to British figures, another 70 guerrillas at least were wounded in action and over 1,400 arrested and imprisoned.[49]

The British military admitted their losses in the city as 25 soldiers killed and 68 wounded, but a careful modern count found 35 killed by the IRA in the city with another 42 non-combat deaths due to firearms or other accidents, 3 murders of fellow soldiers and 12 suicides. [50]

Some 40 policemen were killed in Dublin by IRA action, including 8 DMP officers, mostly detectives killed by the Squad, 11 Auxiliaries and 22 RIC or Black and Tans officers. In total, therefore about 75 Crown forces were killed in action in Dublin in 1919-21, a number that rises to about 110 once accidental deaths are included.[51]  This would indicate around 150 civilian fatalities in the city, once combatants are subtracted from Eunan O’Halpin’s figures. [52]

Did the Dublin IRA win their war? Richard Mulcahy claimed that the Dublin IRA had, ‘pinned 1/6^th of English armed forces [in Ireland] in the city without too much effort’.[53] The truth was though that in Dublin and elsewhere, the Irish War of Independence had no military conclusion. It was ended by a political compromise before a military decision was reached.

Disputes over the Anglo Irish Treaty, signed on December 6 1921 provoked a split in the Dublin Brigade and throughout the IRA. By and large, the Squad and the ASU in in Dublin sided with Michael Collins and the pro-Treaty side, while the majority of the Dublin Brigade’s battalions went anti-Treaty. It took a civil war between them before the Irish revolutionary period came to an end.

References

[1] 62 insurgents were killed in the fighting and between those who subsequently executed in the city (14) and those during or as a result of their imprisonment, (16 more either from wounds of sickness) the total of dead in the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers rose to 90 (counting the Citizen Army men as Volunteers and also Thomas Ashe who died after force feeding on hunger strike in 1917)The Last Post pp 93-98

[2] Yeates City in Wartime pp 227, 234-236,

[3] Laurence Nugent WS 907

[4] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p120

[5] IRA General Orders, Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/A/45

[6] James Slattery BMH Statement WS445

[7] Joe Leonard’s BMH statement says that by the end of the War of Independence the Squad was up to 21 members, Frank Thornton in his BMH Statement lists six men in the original Intelligence Department in 1919, though this later expanded considerably.

[8] The Military Pensions of 1924 list 17 men as having been Squad members at one time or another ten at least as members of Collins’ Intelligence Department, but these are understatements. Military Service Pensions Collection, online at Ton Ennis for example is named James Slattery as being a founder member of the Squad but this is not stated in his pension file.

[9] See James Slattery, Bernard Byrne BMH Statements

[10] Bernard Byrne BMH

[11] Ibid. James Slattery recalled that Intelligence officers Frank Thornton and Joe Dolan were given the job of killing an RIC Sergeant on Capel Street in October 1920 for instance, while Bernard Byrne recalled that Intelligence officer Frank Bolster was one of the gunmen who shot 2 RIC officers on Parliament Street in February 1921. Vinny Byrne lists Bolster, usually counted as an Intelligence officer, as a Squad member. Vincent Byrne BMH

[12] Charles Russell Testimony to Army Inquiry, 1924,Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/C/29

[13] Ibid. P/7/C/28

[14] Bernard Byrne BMH

[15] Andrews Papers UCD, P91/87

[16] Jane Leonard,  ‘English Dogs or Poor Devils?’The Dead of Bloody Sunday Morning, in Terror in Ireland, p130

[17] See Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p 89-90,

[18] Russell Testimony to Army Inquiry, Mulcahy Ppaers UCD P/7/C/20

[19] Cited in Anne Dolan, ‘Ending War in a Sportsmanlike Manner’, in Thomas Hachey Ed. Turning Points in Twentieth Century Irish History., p35-36

[20] Michael McDonnell, Pension File

[21] T Ryle Dwyer the Squad, p190

[22] ‘War Overview, Richard Mulcahy to IRA Commanders, 4/3/1921, Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/A/47

[23] Eamon Broy in his BMH statement outlines the 6 DMP Divisions in Dublin. They correspond very closely with the IRA Battalions. Two north of the river Liffey, to south of it and G Division, the Detectives performing an analgous role to the Squad and IRA Intelligence.

[24]James Durney, ‘How Aungier/ Camden Street became known as the Dardanelles’, The Irish Sword, Summer 2010 No. 108 Vol. XXVII  p245

[25] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p113

[26] Hart, Peter, The IRA at War p119

[27] For labourers’ wages Yeates, a city in Wartime P48 For IRA wages, see Maire Comerford Papers UCD

[28] Hart, IRA at War, p119

[29] Frank Thornton BMH

[30] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p134-135

[31]Out of the 80 Volunteers killed or executed in Dublin in the Rising of 1916, 27 were from outside the city (including 2 from Britain) and out of 54 IRA Volunteers killed in Dublin from 1919-21, 16 were from other parts of Ireland The Last Post p93-130

[32] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin p126

[33] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p121 Joseph O’Connor BMH

[34] Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p165

[35] Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p149

[36] Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p174-175

[37] James Durney, ‘How Aungier/ Camden Street became known as the Dardanelles’, The Irish Sword, Summer 2010 No. 108 Vol. XXVII p249

[38] Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/A/47

[39] O’Connor, Sleep Soldier Sleep, p33-34

[40] Great Brunswick St is no Pearse St. For the ambush see WH Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, The Irish Rebellion 1919-1921, p207-208, O’Connor BMH for his reaction.

[41] See Today in Irish History, the Raid on the Customs House.

[42] Joost Augusteijn counted 15 informers killed in Dublin, Padraig Og O Ruairc counts 13, of whom 9 were former soldiers or sailors, see Truce p101-102.

[43] Joost Augusteijn, Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p 173

[44] Maire Comerford Papers UCD LA/18

[45] Charles Townshend, The Republic, The Fight for Irish Independence,  p290

[46] In Mulcahy Papers, P7A/48

[47] The figure is from Eunan O’Halpin’s ‘Counting Terror’ in Fitzpatrick Ed. ‘Terror in Ireland’ is 309 killed in Dublin. Though this may overestimate violence in Dublin a little as it includes those wounded elsewhere who died in hospital in the city. The death toll included at least 58 IRA members (per the Last Post), 25 British Army soldiers killed in action ( Per their report re-published in Wiliam Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p130 though more died there due to accidents, illness or suicide) and about 40 police, which would indicate well over 150 civilian fatalities in the city.

[48] See the Last Post

[49] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p129-130

[50] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p129-130 and the Cairo Gang website, here http://www.cairogang.com/soldiers-killed/list-1921.html

[51] Abbot, Police Casualties in Ireland It does not seem reasonable as some studies do, to include as conflict related casualties those soldiers, guerrillas or civilians who died of illness such as the ‘Spanish flu’ in 1918-19, which killed at least 2,600 people in Dublin alone. Padraig Yeates A City in Wartime p270-273

[52] Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p130

[53] Mulcahy Papers UCD, P7/A/47

John Dorney on the logic of violence in the Irish Civil War, based on research for his forthcoming book on the Civil War in Dublin, to be published by Merrion Press. See also Making Sense of the Irish Civil War.

In what kind of war do rival sides fight over who can collect dog licences? What kind of war is it when more combatants are killed in executions than in combat?

Why would a government that apparently has an overwhelming military advantage introduce judicial executions to finish a war it has already won?

This essay is the result of research for forthcoming book on the Irish Civil War in the Dublin area. The conflict itself is often dismissed as form of madness, its violence, particularly the grim litany of executions, sabotage and destruction of property.

The intimate history of the Civil War is often therefore dismissed as of little interest, as a mere state of prevailing anarchy as an almost inexplicable outbreak of collective cruelty and lunacy. A detailed look at Civil War violence as it occurred in Dublin however identifies that the war had its own internal logic, both sides with more or less coherent strategies that explain much of the violence that occurred.

Measuring violence

By my count there were at least 258 fatal casualties in Dublin city and its environs during the Irish Civil War, if we include the period from the start of 1922 to the end of 1923.

In some ways this looks like a small number, not only compared to other internal conflicts in the inter war years, but also given the numbers of armed men engaged.

At the start of the Civil War, some 2,000 pro-Treaty soldiers in the National Army, armed with plentiful small arms, armoured cars and some artillery, took on over  1,000 fairly well-armed fighters in the anti-Treaty IRA in a pitched battle in central Dublin.

In December 1922, at the midway point in the IRA’s guerrilla campaign in the city, the National Army, who clearly had good sources within the IRA, counted 300 men in the First Dublin Brigade, with 80 rifles 3 machine guns and 50 revolvers and in County Dublin the Second Dublin Brigade had 100 men with 50 rifles, 27 revolvers and 2 machine guns  -so a total of about 400 guerrillas split up into groups of about 8-10 for operational purposes [1].

By the close of the Civil War in May 1923, Dublin was garrisoned by 3,000 National Army troops, with 5,000 nearby at the Curragh as well as the CID, an armed police detective unit, over 75 strong, the related Protective Corps of 175 men charged with ‘protecting the houses and persons Government Ministers’ the Citizens’ Defence Force 150 strong (a pro-government plain-clothed militia) and some armed regular police.[2]

While the guerrilla columns of the IRA had been much reduced by this time, they both IRA Brigades (city and south county) could between them muster still muster about 250 men (140 men in Dublin 1 and 104 in Dublin 2) and about 50 rifles (with about 25 rounds each), 90 handguns and two Thompson submachine guns and a small amount of explosives[3].

Of the IRA, by my count, 84 men lost their lives – only 30 killed in combat, 43 executed or assassinated and the remainder killed in accidents or on hunger strike. It was far more common for anti-Treaty fighters and civilian activists to be arrested than killed. National Army figures show about 3,500 anti-Treatyites were arrested and interned in Dublin[4], a number borne out by Anne Marie McInerney’s research who cites 3,557 Dublin addresses among those interned in the prisons and camps in 1923. [5]

On the pro-Treaty or Free State side, there were at least 95 violent deaths but of these, at least 36 died in firearm or vehicle accidents, suicides or murders by their comrades rather than by enemy action (including one hanged for murder). As for civilians, I have counted 72 deaths attributable to Civil War fighting in Dublin, though most 50, were the result of crossfire rather than deliberate targeting. So in a city and county of nearly half a million people, with perhaps 9,000 armed men present at one time or another, there at least 258 but no more than 300 deaths (counting also 6 British soldiers and one RIC Inspector). [6]

Moreover the deaths that occurred in action are stacked towards the start of the Civil War, with nearly 200 dying between June 28^th 1922 and the end of that year and only another 50 or so losing their lives in the city due to political violence between January 1923 and the IRA ceasefire in April of that year. A further 9 died afterwards due to Civil War related causes.

One might conclude therefore that Dublin was not a terribly violent place during the Civil War of 1922-23, that the conflict effectively ended thereby early 1923, that it had few lasting consequences and that the Free State’s keeping so many men under arms in the city was simply paranoia and that the state’s use of official and unofficial executions was needless cruelty.[7]

All of these assumptions are however, mistaken. To take the first, local studies have generally found low casualties for all areas of Ireland in the Civil War. Tom Doyle’s Kerry in the Irish Civil War for instance found 170 fatalities[8] in that county, while Peter Hart’s study of County Cork found 180 Civil War dead[9]. A rough count of my own found around 130 fatal casualties in County Tipperary while elsewhere casualties are reported to have been lower still – some 48 in Sligo according to Michael Farry[10], 45 in Kildare according to James Durney[11] and only 22 in Offaly according to Phillip McConway’s research[12].

These figures are likely to be underestimates, and future studies are likely to find more victims due to the expansion of sources now available, especially the National Army Pension Records, which have been released recently, but they are unlikely to be very large underestimates.

So comparatively, Dublin suffered more than its fair share of Civil War violence in what was, in terms of lives lost, a low intensity conflict.

However, assessing the Civil War’s course and severity solely in terms of casualties is mistaken, for two reasons. First, it misunderstands the kind of conflict the Irish Civil War was. Secondly it overlooks another important factor; the ways in which people died and how their killing was perceived by their surviving comrades.

Practically over by late 1922?

It is certainly true that the highest intensity fighting in Dublin occurred in the first week of the war, June 28^th to July 5^th 1922, in which the anti-Treaty forces were routed from the Four Courts and other fixed positions in the city.

At least 81 people lost their lives and at least 274 were wounded in this battle including 15 Republicans, 29 National Army soldiers and 36 civilians the damage to property amounted to many millions of pounds.

And it is also true that the majority of the remaining casualties were inflicted in a four month period from August to December 1922 when most of the larger guerrilla attacks in around Dublin took place. Thereafter the constant stream of arrests and seizures of weapons by Free State forces and perhaps the terrorising effect of executions, made it increasingly difficult for the anti-Treaty IRA to mount effective military attacks.

However, neither the pro-Treaty government nor the anti-Treaty IRA leadership believed the war, in Dublin or elsewhere, to be over by January 1923.

Indeed, Liam Lynch the IRA Chief of Staff, sounded a confident note in early December 1922 stating that economic warfare and sabotage would bring the Free State to its knees; ‘the Free State is on the verge of collapse’ he wrote to his ‘President’ Eamon de Valera.While he later wrote, ‘we cannot hope to overthrow the enemy unless there is a big desertion or complete change of the people to our side’ what I hope for is to bring the enemy to bankruptcy and make it impossible for a single Government Department to function. The enemy has to waste half his troops defending railway lines, officials’ houses, depots etc’ [13]

The expense of this, he hoped along with an assault on the Free State’s taxation system would bankrupt the state in short time. To this end he ordered his commanders to ‘smash up  the revenue system of our opponents’, a task of the utmost importance but of relatively little risk’. Free State tax collectors should be given formal warnings to desist.[14]

Lynch has often been accused of over optimism, even self-delusion, in his assessments of the war’s progress and certainly there is some truth to such assessments. His Director of Intelligence, for instance, (and the Dublin Brigades themselves) did not share his rosy view of republican prospects by the spring of 1923. Yes, the IRA Director of Intelligence Michael Carolan wrote to Lynch, the Free State’s budget was in deficit, but ‘credit is the important thing and this is still good enough to enable him to carry on’. In the meantime the overwhelming Free State military force meant that t was ‘suicide’ to carry out more assassinations of Government Minister as Lynch wanted.[15]

But the Free State civilian and military authorities were also in fact deeply pessimistic about the future in the winter of 1922-23. Cabinet Minutes of December 1922 show that ‘State funds are almost exhausted’ and the President, WT Cosgrave, ‘had to go to the Bank of Ireland to ask for more loans’. [16] In a more earthy manner, National Army officer Paddy O’Connor later told Ernie O’Malley of the situation in late 1922, “we were losing the support of the people, our men were war-weary and the going was too heavy for us. Our men had no grub, no uniforms and no pay’.[17]

Patrick Hogan the Minister for Agriculture wrote in January 1923, ‘In my opinion the civilian population will surrender definitely before too long in the Irregulars are able to continue their particular form of warfare… Two more months like the last two months will see the end of us and of the Free state’.[18]

Why was this, given that it can be shown that the anti-Treaty IRA as an effective military force, in Dublin and much of the rest of country as well, was largely broken by this time?

Monopolies of force

The reason is that the Irish Civil War was not only, perhaps not even primarily about armed conflict between military groups.

Rather, it was a competition between on the one hand the pro-Treatyites who wished to set up a viable state under the Treaty’s terms and on the other side, the anti-Treatyites, who wished, first to block this and if possible to resurrect a state of their own, the Republic declared in 1919.

So the true contest was not force of arms but whose state functioned effectively. What does this mean?

The primitive state, Charles Tilly once wrote is like a ‘protection racket’. [19] What this means is that armed bodies of men ‘extract’ taxation from a civil population, in return for protection from other armed groups or individuals.

But in practice this is a rather blunt definition. Max Weber the father of sociology, defined a state as ‘the monopoly of legitimate force within a given territory’.[20] In other words, a state is indeed ‘bodies of armed men’, but it also represents the monopoly of legitimate force. In other words, it is a body that enforces its laws, extracts taxation to fund itself but also has these processes accepted by the majority of the citizenry.

In modern state since the 19^th century this legitimation process includes a codified legal system, equality before the law and representative government. And such processes have certainly made states fairer and better run than before. However, it is important to grasp that elections, a legal code and constitutions cannot exist without the basic core of the state, the control over violence, the ability to enforce its laws and the ability to extract taxation to fund its servants.

Both sides in the Irish Civil War were acutely aware of this, a fact that helps to explain both Lynch’s optimism and Free State pessimism in late 1922 an early 1923. For by that time the anti-Treatyites’ arms were only rarely used in direct assaults on the Free State’s armed forces. Rather they were used to do two things; to wreck the Free State’s economy and tax collecting apparatus and thus its ability to raise revenue; and secondly to impose a rival system of ‘law’.

The assault on the Free State’s taxation and infrastructure system took the form of burning income tax offices, robbing post offices and mail trains, blocking roads and blowing up railway lines. To take a typical example the operations reported by the First Dublin Brigade (city) for the week ending February 17 included; raiding the house of an applicant to the CID, seizing the mails, cutting don telegraph poles and blocking roads.

Third Battalion (south side of the Liffey) was the most active with gun attacks on Free State posts at Beggars Bush, Brunswick Street and Ballsbridge Post Office. Sixth Battalion in the north county area blew up the Civic Guard Barracks at Skerries and also exploded the railway station at Howth. The Brigade’s Active Service Unit (ASU) intimidated workmen repairing telephone wire that had previously been cut, burned the van of a baker supplying Free State troops with bread and detonated a mine at a Government office on Parnell Square. The Intelligence Department for its part got its men to throw a bomb through the window of the Government stationary office on Fleet Street in the city centre.[21]

So by this time we can see that only some of the anti-Treaty guerrillas’ efforts went into attacking well armed and more numerous National Army troops. Rather most attacks were aimed either at destroying the workings of government or intimidating civilians away from cooperating with them.

The attempt to destroy the Free State’s system of law and order was done by a number of means, destroying police stations for one, for instance, Skerries and the Rathfarnham and Dundrum police barracks were all blown up in January 1923 by the Second Dublin Brigade – in both cases after first removing the unarmed policemen.

A second method was by intimidating civilians who cooperated with Free State security forces. In many Civil Wars, such tactics result in the majority of casualties being civilians killed for collaborating with the other side.

This was true to a degree even in the War of Independence, which saw far greater killing of civilians than the Civil War. In the Civil War itself however, it was far more common to intimidate civilians than to kill them. For instance the First Dublin Brigade, first Battalion reported in March 1923,  visiting the house of one Mrs Maher on Richmond Road, Drumcondra, whom they suspected of being an informer; ‘after many threats she swore that she would not do anything that would harm us again’.[22]

Thirdly in early 1923, the IRA embarked on a sustained, though mainly non-lethal attack on the Free State’s civilian supporters, to show that it could not provide them with security. Late 1922 saw two assassinations of pro-Treaty politicians in Dublin (Sean Hales and Seamus Dwyer) as well as a much more widespread arson campaign against the homes of TDs, Senators and other Free State supporters.

Rival protection rackets?

Finally and intriguingly the anti-Treaty IRA also took some steps towards attempting to replace the Free State as a collector of taxes and enforcer of laws (or at least a punisher of criminals).

In Dublin itself during the War of Independence, a Republican Police Corps had been set up under Sean Condron to battle organised criminals at the same time as the IRA’s Active Service Units were destroying the existing system of law enforcement in the capital.

In the Civil War this was rarely possible in the city itself, but in the hills around Blessington, some 30 km outside Dublin, where a column from the Second Dublin Brigade under Neil Boyle was active, Liam Lynch reported in February 1923 that the area, was under the effective control of the guerrillas of the Second Dublin Brigade. The area, he wrote to de Valera, was ‘mostly in our hands’. ‘The Free State only functions when they come in lorries’ and ‘even unionists prefer our armed men’ who he claimed protected them from robbery.[23]

The National Army version differed only in emphasis. In January 1923, around 350 National Army troops under Hugo MacNeill with two armoured cars, 8 Lewis guns swept the mountains around Blessington. No IRA columns were found and no arrests made.[24]

Thereafter the IRA column which had gone to ground in the hills during the sweep returned to the villages around Blessington and according to a National Army report of May 1923, despite the installation of a permanent Army post of 60 men in Blessington itself the ‘fairly well armed ‘Irregular’ column of ten men was still ‘terrorising the locals’, taking food, clothing and bicycles. The locals they said ‘are afraid to talk to the military’. The area was not pacified until Boyle and his column were finally cornered in a cottage at Valleymount. Boyle himself was killed, according to the IRA while attempting to surrender and 11 of his men were captured on May 15^th. [25]

Whether we go along with Lynch’s version, that the guerrillas were popular because they were providing security in the hills south of Dublin, or whether we go with the National Army version, whereby the guerrillas were a predatory band who had successfully intimidated the civilian population, the result is basically the same. For much of the Civil War the area was out of Free State hands, despite few instances of combat in the area after the close of 1922. This scenario, so close to Dublin, was replicated very widely over the country as a whole in districts as far apart as south Kerry, north Leitrim and south Wexford.

Throughout the War of Independence against the British, the IRA had collected unofficial ‘war taxes’ in many localities from the civilian population, a practice that continued into the Truce days of late 1921 an early 1922. In December 1920 Richard Mulcahy, at that time IRA Chief of Staff, ordered each IRA Company around the country to collect money over three or four days and to lodge it with the Brigade Quartermaster in order to buy arms[26]. In the Truce period when the IRA could act with more impunity, Mulcahy worried that such levies were not voluntary. Levies he warned ‘may not be imposed’ by force or threats. [27]

In the early days of the Civil War, when the anti-Treatyites held most of the south of Ireland they regularised what was effectively a system of taxation by control of the Customs and Excise office at Cork city, and collecting duties on goods imported into Ireland. This of course was brought to an end by when the National Army retook Cork and the rest of the Munster towns in the summer of 1922.

However, even during the guerrilla campaign in late 1922, in Dublin the Free State’s capital, the IRA made some attempt to collect its own taxes. Lynch wrote to Austin Stack that republican tax collectors should be assigned and paid to collect levies, particularly on alcohol. Revenues raised were to go to the IRA, ‘contraband goods’ of those who refused to pay were to be seized.[28]

The IRA printed off thousands of dog licences in the name of the Irish Republic and informed its Volunteers that they were expected to collect them from dog owners. Liam Lynch acknowledged that this was as much for propaganda value, to show that an underground Republic existed, as to raise revenue, and in practice many of the republican ‘tax forms’ were seized in a raid on a republican printing press in early 1923. [29]

But the point is clear, the Civil War was in essence a completion between two armed groups both seeking to impose systems of law and to extract taxation.

The logic of Civil War violence

Until the Free State could effectively do both of these things, they had not won, a fact which brings a lot of Civil War violence into sharper focus. The anti-Treatyite campaign against state property, economic targets and the state’s revenue was not mindless vandalism as it has sometimes been painted. Rather it was a calculated attempt to paralyse the Free State and most of it was ordered from the top of the anti-Treaty IRA

Similarly the Free State’s recruitment of such a large army and the proliferation of paramilitary armed groups such as the CID and CDF was not the result of paranoia, or as has been argued an attempt to alleviate unemployment.[30] Garrisoning every vulnerable point of the state’s infrastructure was the only way to protect its financial infrastructure and to impose its laws effectively.

Furthermore, the State’s use of executions, both official and unofficial is best understood as a means of terrorizing an opponent that increasingly refused open battle but which continued to nibble away at the state’s life support, into submission. They were not, or at least not only, vindictive or revenge killings, rather, like republican violence, they had a point.

In both cases, one can argue that such strategies were misguided. The anti-Treaty campaign to destroy the infant Irish state, its economy and fiscal apparatus would, at best have left the republicans in charge of a failed state, unable to support itself. The pro-Treaty policy of executions was arguably less effective in ending the war than what they eventually developed a more coherent system of intelligence leading to high level arrests, would have been. But neither strategy was necessarily illogical in pursuit of their short term goals.

We may conclude that the Civil War over the Treaty was a terrible mistake, and that the violence that accompanied it was therefore futile, but it was not senseless.

References

[1] Military Archives, National Army Eastern Command Intelligence Reports,  December 1922-January 1923 cw/ops/07/15

[2]Memo to Joseph McGrath by AS O’Muieadhaigh 13 October 1923, National Archives TAOIS/S3331

[3] Twomey papers P69/22 Dublin 1, (city)’s inventory was reported by National Army intelligence on May 2 1923. National Army archive cw/ops/07/16.

[4] Irish Times reports 450 taken after July 1922 battle. NA file (CW/P/3/5) gives 187 names arrested in ‘bridges job’ August 1922. Same file gives 310 names of prisoners processed through Wellington Barracks to Prisons/Camps in August 1922. C. 300 names processed through in September 1922 C 100 in October 1922 Data for prisoners missing for November and December 1922 and January 1923 (CW/P/03/06) Arrested in Dublin, 13 February 1923 – July 1923 gives 226 names. Above gives c 1,300 arrested and interned in Dublin,  File (CW/P/03/01) gives over 2,600 names arrested and mostly interned in Dublin command December 1922-July1923, Tentative total c 3,500 arrested and interned.

[5] Figure given at Talk, 15/10/15, citing Military file ie/ma/cw/p)

[6] See Appendix for details

[7] Padraig Yeates, for instance in his recent, Dublin, A City in Civil War 1921-23, states that ‘the civil war was effectively over in Dublin by January 1923’. QUOTE AND PG NO

[8] Doyle, The Civil War in Kerry, p328-331

[9] Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, p 121

[10] The Irish Revolution: Sligo 1912–23

[11] James Durney, the Civil War in Kildare, p14-15

[12] McConway, The Civil War in Offally, Offally Tribune, 2 January 2008.

[13] De Valera Papers, UCD p150/1749 De Valera-Lynch correspondence 14 December 1922 and 28 December 1922

[14] Lynch to Austin Stack February 21, 1923, De Valera papers p150/1749 UCD

[15] DI to Lynch 30 March 1923 Toumey Papers UCD /69/11

[16] Cabinet Minutes December 20, 1922, Mulcahy Papers UCD P/7/B/245

[17] O’Connor, Connolly, Sleep Soldier Sleep, p131

[18] Cited in Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green, the Irish Civil War, p 222

[19]  Charles Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organised Crime, http://www.fd.unl.pt/docentes_docs/ma/RBR_MA_11377.pdf

[20] Max Weber, Politics as Vocation (1919) http://www.ucc.ie/archive/hdsp/Weber_Politics_as_Vocation.htm

[21] Dublin Brigade weekly report February 17 1923 Toumey Papers UCD, p69/20

[22] Ibid. Report 21 March 1923

[23] Lynch to de Valera, 12 February 1923, De Valera Papers, UCD p150/1749

[24] National Army Dublin Command reports February 1923  (CW/OP/07/01)

[25] Dublin 2 Brigade reports, 16 May 1923 Toumey Ppaers p69/22

[26] IRA General Orders 3/12/1920 Mulcahy Papers UCD p/7/a/45

[27] Ibid. 7 October 1921

[28] Lynch to Austin Stack February 21, 1923, De Valera papers p150/1749 UCD

[29] IRA Director Publicity to AG 30/12/1922 Twomey papers P69/79

[30] As Gavin Foster argues, in my view mistakenly in his fine book The Irish Civil War and Society, p63

Barry Sheppard on how Catholic teaching helped to shape Irish social policy in the 1930s.

The 1930s – the era of the Great Depression and the rise of dictators across much of Europe was a tumultuous time. Ireland was no exception in the regard.

In this time of political and social upheaval, the teachings of the Catholic Church, in particular the Papal Encyclicals informed much Irish thinking on possible solutions to the problems of the day.

The political context

The relationship between Britain and Ireland during the 1930s was one of significant change, brought about through the change of government in the Irish Free State from the pro-treaty Cumann na nGaedheal to the more hard line Fianna Fáil administration under Eamonn de Valera in 1932.

This changeover of government and the ascent to power of the anti-Treaty Republicans in Fianna Fail, heralded many alterations to the relationship which emerged after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Eamon de Valera’s government removed the British King as head of state, abolished governmental institutions such as the Governor General and the Senate and withheld payments owed to Britain – the Land Annuities – which had paid for land reform.

One of the consequences was the Anglo-Irish Trade War, more commonly known as the Economic War (1932-38), a trade dispute which was played out against the backdrop of the world wide depression of the 1930s.

This ‘trade war’ led to the implementation of trade barriers between the two states.  It would also contribute to a breakdown in the relationship between the two countries which would not be repaired for some years.

Indeed, this era in Anglo-Irish relations is usually defined by the trade dispute which lasted for most of the decade.  Nevertheless, on a non-government level there was a certain degree of cooperation between agrarian groups on the two islands which deserves a closer inspection.  Although small-scale, it nevertheless shows a willingness of groups to cooperate in a common cause despite the lack of cordiality between their respective governments.

Motivated by the effects of unemployment and a severe lack of opportunities since the economic crash, and inspired by Papal teachings for guidance, a number of clerics and lay Catholics began to organise agrarian groupings which it was hoped would better the lot of their co-religionists who had been adversely affected by the harsh realities of a society shattered by the economic depression.

Catholic land reform  

The Papal Encyclicals which inspired these groups were Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, both of which had a significant impact on issues relating to land reform and creating new productive communities in 1930s Britain and Ireland, and further afield.

Two of the groups which were inspired by these encyclicals were The Catholic Land Association of Britain and Muintir na Tíre (People of the Land) in Ireland.  Although the groups were separate, they had a number of connections which are interesting given the tense standoff which was happening at official government levels.

The movements were quite progressive, but as we shall see, central to each project was a longing for an idyllic past coupled with a desire to extract themselves, as far as possible from the turbulent economic and social climates of the 20s and 30s.

The Encyclicals.

Rerum Novarum was issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII on the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”, in response to social conflict that had risen in the wake of industrialization.  Forty years later in 1931, Pius XI’s issued Quadragesimo Anno.  In this text Pius XI focused upon private property as essential for the development and freedom of the individual. It consolidated a number of themes from Rerum Novarum for a generation of Catholics confronted by huge economic upheaval, who viewed the texts as much needed guidance in dealing with a system many viewed as moving beyond control.

Containing critiques of both Capitalism and state-controlled socialism, the texts had the character of a finely balanced manifesto providing guidance towards an alternative to both ideologies, a third way by which Catholics could live.

Social and religious reform groups inspired by the texts began to establish cooperatives and ‘back to the land’ movements in various countries, from Belgium to Canada in an attempt to isolate people from the prevailing capitalist system as much as possible to an existence of small subsistence-farming, co-operative living and frugality.  This was very much in line with Leo and Pius’ vision.   The term frugality which was central to the text was also closely associated with de Valera and Fianna Fáil in Ireland.  The following extract of Rerum Novarum gives a flavour of the teaching contained within.  This extract is concerned with small subsistence living on the land and less reliance on the state in any form:

Man’s needs do not die out, but forever recur; although satisfied today, they demand fresh supplies for tomorrow. Nature accordingly must have given to man a source that is stable and remaining always with him, from which he might look to draw continual supplies. And this stable condition of things he finds solely in the earth and its fruits. There is no need to bring in the State.[1]

 THE CATHOLIC LAND ASSOCIATION

Passages like the one above were important to the groups which formed in the first half of the twentieth century, after the economic crash of 1929.  It gave them the impetus to free themselves, as they saw it, from the system which had caused so much unemployment and misery.

In Britain a number of branches of the organisation named the Catholic Land Association sprang up throughout the country, with the first being formed in the Archdiocese of Glasgow on 31 May 1929, under a Rev John McQuillan, a priest of Irish extraction.[2]

This movement had, in part evolved from Distributism, the socio-economic theory popularised by the Catholic intellectuals G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  Distributism was also influenced by the aforementioned encyclicals and argued that property ownership was a fundamental right, and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible, rather than being centralized under the control of the state, a few individuals, or corporations.

It had further argued that the industrial age factory system would lead to the enslavement of the mass of working people who were controlled by a concentration of the rich few.  In contrast, their vision was of widely dispersed small ownership, family farms, and co-operative workshops which would be owned by craftsmen.[3]

There was a growing appetite for this theory in Scotland where the first Catholic Land branch had been founded. In Glasgow University in 1930 there was a thriving Distributist club among the 500 Catholic students, again some of Irish extraction. (This club would eventually become more involved with Irish Nationalist politics.   In the 1950s there was an attempt to elect two ‘jailed Sinn Fein MPs’ as Honorary Vice-Presidents of the Club).[4]

The establishment of Catholic Land Association branches in Scotland were greeted with much enthusiasm in Catholic Ireland.   Favourable reports of the organisation appeared as early as 1931 in the Anglo-Celt newspaper. Later, The Irish Independent told its readers of a great ‘Progressive Movement in Scotland’ under the ‘Priest Pioneer’ McQuillan, which was helping to relieve economic distress in Scotland.

The article emphasised frugality by reporting how much being attained with little money.  Stating that in the space of three years the branch had employed forty youths on a well-stocked farm with an estimated waiting list of 400 more people trying to obtain a place.[5]

The Fianna Fáil associated Irish Press were also quick to emphasise links with what was happening in Scotland and their party’s own government agenda.  On 23 April, 1934 the paper stated that the aims of the Catholic Land Association in the main ‘bear a remarkably close resemblance to the economic policy being pursued in Ireland’. Such was the apparent success of the Scottish CLA branches that the Irish Independent in January 1935 claimed that people within Ireland were preparing to move to get a place in this ever expanding ‘Catholic Village’.[6]

Two settlements were established in Scotland, followed by several in England. Loans from benefactors enabled the South of England CLA to lease a farm in Buckinghamshire. The North of England CLA training farm was established in Parbold, Lancashire, and the Midlands group supported one at Market Bosworth, Leicestershire.[7]  Interestingly, the South of England branch would seek help in their efforts from an surprising source, the Fianna Fáil government in Ireland.  During this period the Fianna Fáil government had begun to establish their own rural colonies for Irish speakers, which also followed ideas laid out within the Papal encyclicals.

‘Nationalist and quasi socialist’

This scheme was primarily packaged as a programme for breathing new life into the Irish language.  However, if one looks at the first Fianna Fáil Manifesto from 1926, it is apparent that several of their seven points for Government were inspired from the same encyclicals which inspired other land movements.

Certainly their ‘Gaeltacht Colony’ template was similar to what those other Catholic ‘Back to the Land’ movements were attempting elsewhere.

Indeed, many of Fianna Fáil’s social programmes were, according to Mary E. Daly: ‘an amalgam of nationalist and quasi-socialist policies often stolen from the manifestos of left-wing republican organisations, tempered by Gaelic antiquarianism and Catholic social teaching as found in papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.[8]

The ‘quasi-socialist’ element was emphasised by Fianna Fáil’s opponents when they emerged upon the political scene. ‘Red scare’ tactics by newspapers such as the Irish Independent were designed to cause alarm among the electorate.  The Irish Press responded, stating that Fianna Fáil’s policies were the opposite of Socialism:

According to the paper, the rights of the individual and family to own private property would be recognised while the government would provide work for the unemployed by establishing rural industries.  Such a policy, the paper argued, was not socialism, but was in fact advocated by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno.^[9]

Some members of the Catholic Clergy also sought to allay those fears, in a letter to the Irish Press Rev Malachy Mac Branáin, curate in St Cuan’s Ballinasloe would defend Fianna Fáil’s Catholic credentials:

Allow me to state that in my opinion the economic policy of Fianna Fáil is neither Socialistic nor Communistic but, on the contrary, in accord with the Encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’ of Pope Leo XIII.  As a matter of fact, the general policy of the Fianna Fáil government in making the poor and distressed their first care and consideration is the surest remedy against Communism or Socialism.^[10]

The Irish Press, was, as expected, vocal in emphasising Fianna Fáil leader, Eamonn De Valera’s close links with these encyclicals, in a 1937 editorial it stated that:

Mr de Valera has proved himself not merely a close student of these monumental documents, but a courageous statesman who is willing to give effect to the recommendations embodied in them.[11]

In the ‘Gaeltacht Colony’ project it can be argued that Fianna Fáil attempted to ‘give effect’ to the encyclicals recommendations.  In 1934 in Irish speaking migrants from Connemara were given new holdings on average 22 acres in Co Meath, which was in keeping with the encyclicals and Fianna Fail’s own social vision.   This programme was beset with many difficulties, nevertheless what is important is they attracted the attention of people attached to the CLA in Britain.  Early in 1936 a request was made for assistance in establishing land colonies in England in a letter from a Miss Clare Maddock, a representative of the South of England CLA:

Would you be so very kind as to let me have any pamphlet you issue in connection with the small holding movement in Ireland (i.e., mixed family farming on 25-50 Acres) living on the produce and selling the surplus?  I feel strongly such a move should be undertaken in this country.  Perhaps our timid adventures might gather courage from your successful efforts.[12]

Although this was indeed high praise for such an enterprise, those within the Irish Land Commission and the government were reluctant to divulge any information.  An internal memo stated that the scheme was still largely ‘experimental’ with the need to watch developments very closely at this stage.[13]   While it is true the project was at an early stage, the response was not unlike others to those beyond the Emerald Curtain in relation to Irish social matters in this era.  Nevertheless, it highlights what people viewed as common objectives, based upon the teachings contained within the encyclicals.

Muintir na Tíre

Outside of what could be termed, the ‘state-sponsored’ programme, the agrarian group Muintir na Tíre were themselves trying to reshape rural Irish life in line with Papal teachings.

The inaugural meeting of the group took place on 9^th April 1931, with a number of issues up for discussion, including the organisation’s symbol, which was agreed to be that of a Cross and a Plough.  A variation of the same symbol was also adopted by the CLA, and featured on their journal of the same name.[14]

This meeting also saw the adoption of a mission statement which enshrined the teachings within the two encyclicals as ways to achieving their aims.[15] However, one small, but not insignificant difference was laid out by John Hayes, founder of Muintir na Tíre.

As the CLA had become known as a ‘back to the land’ movement, Hayes stressed that his organisation was a ‘stay on the land’ movement.  This was not a major departure from the ethos of the CLA, rather it highlighted the societal differences of the two islands, one being more heavily industrialised than the other and the need to tackle Ireland’s age old problem of emigration.  Nevertheless, the general goal was the same, to change society from within.

 As with the CLA in Ireland, Muintir na Tíre came to the attention of the British Catholic press.  The Catholic Herald in August 1935 informed it’s readership that Muintir na Tíre was commanding considerable attention in its efforts in keeping people on the land in line with Catholic teaching.   On another occasion it detailed one of the organizations projects, where 40 acres of land were divided into shares for 312 workers, all unemployed men.

Stating: ‘A single man gets one-eighth of an acre, a family man one quarter. Seeds, manure and plants are provided free; and the men have produced about £2,000 worth of food per annum for the past two years’.[16] The Catholic weekly The Tablet also ran articles promoting the Muintir na Tíre story, comparing the similarities between them and Britain’s CLA, from the size of some farms (approx. 30 acres), farming methodology and their shared ethos.

This movement took time to gather pace, and it was several years before the impact was felt.  The organisation’s ‘Rural Week’ became the main event in Muintir na Tíre’s social calendar, where ideas were exchanged and speeches on social and religious issues were given by a wide range of people.  One of the most important early speeches of this kind was given at the 1938 Rural Week, and highlighted a common cause by both Muintir na Tíre and their British counterpart, the Catholic Land Association.

The keynote speech was given by Mr H. Robbins, the chairman of the CLA of Britain.  Robbins’ speech highlighted the similarities of Muintir na Tíre and his own organisation, acknowledging ‘that it must be a great consolation to all that the genius of our common philosophy had led widely scattered groups all over the world to an almost identical struggle for the departure from the crisis thrust upon us by industrial capitalism’.[17]

 Successes and Failures

Both organisations, as one would expect, had their moments of triumph and tragedy.  Funds were scarce during a world-wide economic downturn.  While both operated outside of Government circles, the aims of one organisation, Muintir na Tíre were more closely aligned to that of their domestic government.   Although financial backing was one thing which was not forthcoming from the relationship.

In the Dáil on 29 September 1939, de Valera praised the kind of work Muintir na Tíre was involved in, signalling a shift in his interests away from a very expensive colony project in Meath, to one which had a similar ethos, and crucially was being run on a voluntary basis.   Indeed, he declined a reluctant request for a grant from Muintir na Tíre founder, Fr Michael Hayes around this period, stating that if this good work was to continue, it had to be done without government backing.

The CLA had similar investment problems. The British Government had enacted the Special Areas Acts of 1934 to deal with the long-term unemployed.  Leading members of the CLA were dismayed at this, feeling that they had been bypassed despite informing the Government on a number of occasions at the need for such a programme to be implemented.  Their dismay was voiced in their journal right up until the last edition in 1949.

Besides the government’s aforementioned Act, government grants were not available for the kind of family-owned, mixed subsistence farms favoured by the CLA.  On top of this British Catholic bishops refused permission for a national collection, claiming that all the money they could raise was needed for building schools and churches in new housing areas.

Outside of economic matters, personalities in Muintir na Tíre and the CLA, specifically clergy members had an impact on the life of their respective organisations.  One of the CLA’s main clergy members, Fr Vincent McNabb became an isolated figure within the organisation.  The longing of a not too distant past which preoccupied a number of the organisation’s leadership wasn’t enough for McNabb.  McNabb too wished to recreate an idealised past, however he claimed the Middle Ages were too close.  He wished to go back further, stating: ‘We want to go further back, we want to go back to the first ages, not to Crecy and Agincourt, but to Jesus and Nazareth’.[18]

This was in a way, a reflection of the writings of his close friend G.K. Chesterton who stated that to achieve a society of peasant proprietorship ‘the only step forward is the step back’.[19]   Although it is not clear Chesterton had in mind the large step McNabb envisaged.  McNabb’s continued insistence on this saw him – and consequently the CLA – become isolated from a Catholic Church which was increasingly committed to addressing urban moral decay via other forms of social action such, as charity work and public evangelisation.[20]

Muintir na Tíre were in a more favourable position under John Hayes.  He was adept at bringing Irish history alongside his theology.  In his writings he used religious language and referenced Irish historical figures such as Michael Davitt and Padraig Pearse, figures who people could rally behind;  figures who had been and gone before the bitterness of the Irish Civil War and partition.

A 1971 article in Hayes’ local paper The Nenagh Guardian summed up what motivated him; a loyalty to his faith and a Gaelic, Free Ireland. Hayes himself, looking to this faithful and Gaelic Ireland said that: “The Ireland of our dreams, would be again the Ireland of the past”.[21] It was this blend of faith and patriotism which perhaps made Hayes a success, and consolidated Muintir na Tíre’s existence in Irish life, which lasts in a form to this day.

In many ways, the groups above recalled an idyllic past which they wanted to exist in.  A past free of unforgiving modern economic conditions and political divisions.  What is interesting is that, outside of Papal teachings they had similar, if unattainable aims.

Among some involved in the Gaeltacht colony project a desire existed to see a re-conquest of Ireland from within as an Irish-speaking nation, with the first colony being the catalyst for the spread of the language.  Vincent McNabb in the CLA also voiced his hopes that the ‘Catholic colonies’ would do likewise in Britain, in terms of conversion to a Catholic nation once again.  Muintir na Tíre, were perhaps the only organisation which did not produce such radical rhetoric, although it may be fair to say they wanted to refine their existing society.  Perhaps they were more in tune with their immediate environment than the other groups.

The Second World War effectively put the brakes on these projects.  The Gaeltacht colony project and the CLA slowed down around 1939, due to financial issues.  The CLA thereafter found itself marginalised in a modernising post-war country.  The Gaeltacht colony project did continue, though not with the same intensity as the first number of years.  Muintir na Tíre however, fitted in to a society which was mostly rural and at a time when the national outlook was in many cases on the past, both politically and religiously, and which would not modernise for a decades to come.

References

[1] Pope Leo XIII ‘Rerum Novarum’ 4. <http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html> 05/01/2014

[2] J. Kelly, Vincent McNabb, Agrarian Utopia and The Theology of Work (An exploration of the theology of the Catholic Land Association in relation to the social encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens) p 289

[3] V. Flasetti, The Catholic Land Movement, (2002)

[4] F. McGowan, Moderate Radicals: The Distributists at Glasgow University: https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/moderate-radicals-the-distributists-at-glasgow-university/

[5] Irish Independent, 9 June, 1932, p. 4

[6] Irish Independent, 28 Jan, 1935, p. 4

[7] Flessati

[8] Mary E Daly, Industrial Development

[9] M. O’Brien, De Valera, Fianna Fail and the Irish Press, pp47-48.

[10] The Irish Press 13/1/1933, p. 7.

[11] The Irish Press, 7/5/1937, p. 1

[12] Letter from South of England Catholic Land Association to High Commissioner For The Irish Free State 18/2/1936. DFA/132/11

[13] DFA/132/11

[14] The Cross and the Plough, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1934

[15] Inside Cover of Muintir na Tíre Handbook

[16] The Catholic Herald, PAGE 5, 3RD FEBRUARY 1939

[17] Irish Independent, 1 Sept, 1938, p. 10

[18] Valentine, Vincent McNabb, p. 287

[19] G.K. Chesterton, The Third Way, III. On Peasant Proprietorship

[20] Agrarian Utopia, Kelly

[21] Nenagh Guardian, 16 Oct, 1971, p. 11