By Paul Jude Redmond

Published by Irish Academic Press.

Reviewer: Rhona McCord

I first met Paul Redmond in 2013 at a press conference in Buswell’s Hotel.  The press event was being held to highlight the denial of access to birth records for illegally adopted people in Ireland.

Before that day I knew nothing of Ireland’s illegally adopted or of forced adoption or the nature of the state’s collusion with religious institutions to conceal the history and identity of thousands of people born in the seclusion of so called Mother and Baby Homes.

What Paul Redomond, and his colleague Theresa Tingall, divulged that day, of their own personal stories and the wider damage to society that can never be undone, enrages me still.  All of the lives destroyed by cold forced separation, itself an unimaginable hurt that will never fully heal, is magnified by the wilful collusion, lies and deliberate covering up by the state and the institutions over the decades and may prove impossible to untangle.

Nevertheless Paul Redmond has, in this book, made a serious attempt to unravel the whole sad story from the opening of the first Foundling Hospitals in Dublin in the 1730s through to the 20^th Century Institutions and the most recent discovery of infant burials at Tuam.  For Paul it is a personal story, however it is much more than autobiography.

The book is divided into four sections organised chronologically.  This provides the reader with a thorough historical background of the institutions involved and the conditions that existed inside them.  The majority of space is naturally given to the twentieth century and the early decades of the current century, when Paul’s own quest for justice began.

The release of Martin Sixsmith’s story of Philomena Lee, as a cinematic tale in 2013, went some way to highlight the practice of illegal and coerced adoptions in Ireland and shockingly brought attention to the practice of deliberately misleading family members attempting to locate one another.  It was, of course, the more recent press coverage surrounding the discovery of the burial site at Tuam that blew the story wide open.

While the consistent and forensic work by journalist Conall O’Fatharta at the Irish Examiner has also exposed much of the illegal activities carried out at all of the state’s Mother and Baby Homes, including unregistered burials.  If it were not for O’Fatharta’s persistence much evidence would not have seen the light of day.

Background

By way of context, Redmond explains his own personal story of how his first visit, as an adult, to Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home, where he was born, profoundly affected him.

He described the visit as ‘life changing’ and the impetus for his campaigning work: ‘I hunted down every scrap of information I could find about Castlepollard and in particular the Angel’s Plot’.

Over the years I have got to know Paul Redmond on a personal level and the fact that he was not prepared to stop there, but to go beyond his own experience, does not surprise me; he has unselfishly taken on a momentous task on behalf of all those stolen lives.

In his own words ‘I became an activist by default. The ‘something’ I wanted to do, I realised afterwards, included never letting people forget.’  The author has taken on a difficult task of rescuing history from those Angel plots.  This is literally a history from below and a thoughtful attempt to tell the story of so many who were buried without a name.

Eighteenth & Nineteenth Century

The Adoption Machine traces the development of orphanages back to the establishment, by Captain Thomas Coram, of London’s first Foundling Hospital in 1739.

Before this babies were often abandoned or became the inmates of workhouses where survival rates were perilously low.  It was Coram who introduced the practice of changing the babies’ names upon entering the hospital and therefore losing their identity.  Almost twenty years after Coram’s initiative the first Magdalene Laundry was opened in Whitechapel in London, its function to house ‘fallen women’.

Meanwhile, in Ireland legislation did provide for similar institutions, but as Redmond points out the conditions appear to have been significantly inferior to Coram’s London based Hospital.

Of the 51,000 children who entered the Dublin hospital between 1796 and 1826, over 41,000 died.  Furthermore an investigation by the British government found that in a six-year period between 1790 and 1796, 12,768 babies had been admitted and 9,786 of them had died.

On top of those figures another important statistic was revealed, that of 2,847 vanished babies with no record of their existence.  This is an important precedent in terms of a culture of undocumented infants held by institutions without a record to identify them and sadly that practice carried through to the modern era.[1]

Redmond provides a factual guide to the various ‘Homes’ established throughout Ireland, beginning with the Rotunda Girls Aid Society in 1881 through to those currently under investigation in the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes.

Twentieth Century

The hard attitude to single pregnant women in the early Twentieth Century is put in context in terms of both Catholic prejudice and the reign of Queen Victoria.  A public policy existed in both Ireland and Britain to ‘dispatch single pregnant girls to public workhouses where they were separated from the ‘respectable poor’ and treated appallingly.’

Naturally the appalling treatment of unmarried mothers had a detrimental effect on the health and well being of their babies.  Apart from this, the stigma and prejudice against illegitimate children persisted in Irish legislation until the 1980s.

As Redmond comments they were ‘vilified as bastards, weaklings, runts’ and so on but it is the statistical evidence he provides of mortality rates that really indicates their disadvantaged status.  Throughout the 1920s infant mortality rates for illegitimate children ran as high as 34 per cent, this was approximately four times higher than the rate for legitimate children. 

The central theme of the book is evident from the title; the issue of how so many children were removed from the care of their natural mothers and placed for adoption.  It is very important to note that Ireland did not have adoption legislation in place until 1952, unlike our nearest neighbours who had introduced legislation in the aftermath of the First World War.  So effectively all adoption before that date was illegal.

The different circumstances of separation are described with great care in this book.  Redmond explains that some were taken for long term boarding before being sent to industrial schools aged from 3 or 4 years until 8, or for adoption after 1952.  Other records show mothers and their children being transferred together to country homes before they were split up when the child reached 6 or 8 years of age when they could then be sent to an industrial school.

Adoptions were particularly harrowing as the following paragraph testifies:

Adoptions and transfers generally happened with little or no warning.  Sometimes mothers returned from their work assignments to be bluntly informed that their baby was gone forever. Mothers were normally called to the office and ordered to return to the wards to prepare their babies by dressing them in their best clothes.  They were then instructed to carry them to the front room in the convent.  Any protestations were met with a battery of standard responses common to all homes.  Mothers were told to ‘Get over it! You knew this day was coming.  What else did you expect?  How can you possibly look after a child on your own? Isn’t your child better off with a good Catholic mother and father?

This book can be added to a small canon of material on the subject including, in particular, Mike Millotte’s Banished Babies of 1997. Millotte specifically focused on the illegal trade of babies during the mid-twentieth century from the Homes to Catholic couples in the UK and US.

The extent of this was revealed in records of the Department of External Affairs discovered in 1996 by the archivist Catriona Crowe.  Those records relate to the illegal documents passports and birth registration that recorded the names of adoptive parents as the natural parents.  This practice essentially obscured the identities of possibly tens of thousands of people, the true figures can never be known.

Campaigning

The second half of The Adoption Machine deals with the attempts of the adoption community to organise and form associations, to lobby for their rights, and to have their stories brought out into the public domain.

The campaigning work has two main aims, the first being to highlight their story to have a thorough investigation of the past which involves access to all records held in the hands of agencies, institutions and private individuals.  The right to those records is tied to the second aim and that is to give adopted people a right to their true identity.

The manipulation of the truth, of birth records and other data has made the task of tracing a natural parent or child extremely difficult.  That experience is fore-fronted in the movie about Philomena Lee and her son’s attempts to find each other.  Their efforts were maliciously thwarted by lies and misinformation.

This was not unique to them it is a common experience for the adopted community.  The adopted community have campaigned for decades for legislation to give them a right to access their birth records.  That legislation was eventually drafted in 2015 and moved as a bill the, Adopted Persons Tracing Information Bill 2016, but has made no further progress since.

In their attempts to highlight their stories and further their aims many in the adopted community have utilised social media as an organising tool.  Redmond goes into some detail here of the problematic nature of using social media, Facebook in particular.

This makes for interesting reading and will no doubt be a feature of commentary in the future as the problems he highlights are part of a wider pattern on the use of social media for political activity.  The breakdown in communication often caused by misunderstanding has a tendency to escalate online to a greater extent than in the real world and this has had devastating effects on online political activity.  Redmond gives a very good account of this here.

The intricacies of the disagreements between the various personnel may be superfluous information for the general reader but it does reflect on the problematic nature of trying to organise from a position of limited resources.

Overall this work provides a good and balanced history of the various institutions that incarcerated women and their children in Ireland.  It goes further to describe the lasting impact and damage that a policy of incarceration and forced adoption has had on our society and in particular on those directly affected.

The fallout is very much to the fore at present and as a society we are likely to grapple with it for some time to come.  For anyone interested in learning more on the history of forced adoption and the Mother and Baby Homes, this book is a good place to start; it gives a comprehensive overview of the history of the institutions from their establishment up to the most recent official investigations into them.

It is important that this narrative be owned by those effected from the survivor community and in that sense Paul Redmond, as a leading figure has taken a very important step.

Rhona McCord is the Parliamentary Assistant to Clare Daly TD.

[1] See Conall O’Fatharta, Irish Examiner, 18 February 2018.

Kieran Glennon, author of From Pogrom to Civil War – Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA, describes how this material charts the growth, then the disintegration of the 3^rd Northern Division.

When discussing the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, one is more likely to think of the streets of Dublin or the mountains of Cork and Kerry than of Belfast.

For many years the 3^rd Northern Division was little studied, either in terms of its composition or its activities – the IRA in Belfast and the surrounding areas is not one of the best-known guerrilla formations in the Irish revolutionary period. However, it was one of the formations most directly affected by perhaps the defining event of twentieth century Ireland: partition.

A range of new sources, particularly those in the Military Service Pensions Collection of Military Archives, now enables us to put together a detailed picture of the IRA in the north through the War of Independence, partition and the Civil War.

The 3^rd Northern Division – background

The War of Independence came to the north when local units of the IRA participated in the nationwide burning of income tax offices at Easter 1920.

Raids for arms and attacks on barracks followed, but the outbreak of a pogrom against nationalists in the summer of 1920 forced the IRA into a more defensive posture as it tried to protect nationalist districts from loyalist attacks.

However, in the spring of 1921 there were ambushes on RIC “targets of opportunity” in Belfast and attacks on barracks in Antrim. While the scale of these offensive operations was inhibited by fear of the reprisals they would provoke, the nature of the campaign was broadly similar to that being waged elsewhere in the country.

The 3^rd Northern Division developed from what had been the Belfast, Antrim & East Down Brigades of the Irish Volunteers. In the late spring of 1921, as part of the process of “divisionalisation” set in place nationally, these three Brigades were brought together under the umbrella of the 3^rd Northern Division. Belfast provided the steering, with its Brigade O/C, Joe McKelvey, assuming command of the new Division.

In May 1922, the 3^rd Northern took part in a general “northern offensive”, which was originally meant to involve all five Northern Divisions, aimed at overthrowing the unionist government in Northern Ireland. Assistance was lent from south of the border by both the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of the divided IRA – Michael Collins and Liam Lynch co-operated in the planning of this campaign.

However, the offensive collapsed within weeks and in the summer of 1922, men from the 2^nd and 3^rd Northern Divisions were brought to the Curragh camp in Kildare, ostensibly for training in preparation for the mounting of a new offensive.

For months, they were left with no clear indication from the Provisional Government as to its plans for them, but eventually, after a series of pleading letters sent by the O/C of 3^rd Northern, Minister for Defence Richard Mulcahy replied: “I am not in a position to, nor do I see the necessity for saying more with regard to the question raised in your memo of 18^th October, than that the policy of our Government here with respect to the North is the policy of the Treaty.” [1]

This marked the beginning of the end for the 3^rd Northern Division. Shortly afterwards, some men began enlisting in the Free State Army, while the remainder began making their way back north, where – at best – they faced an uncertain future.

Pre-Truce membership

The Irish War of Independence ended with a Truce on 11^th July 1921. On that date, the nominal rolls of membership of 3^rd Northern units list 1,621 officers and men across the three Brigades and the Divisional Staff. [2]

To this can be added names from other sources, giving a total of 1,772 who had pre-Truce service.[3]  Belfast predominated with 1,052 members, there were 285 in Antrim and 427 in East Down, with 8 on the Divisional Staff.

However, the number of active Volunteers was probably far smaller.

The nominal membership was considerably more than what even IRA GHQ at the time had believed to be the strength of each Brigade. Returns of numbers “on parade” provided to the Director of Organisation in the summer of 1921 show a total strength of less than 800 for the entire Division, less than half of the numbers compiled in the 1930s: 497 in Belfast, 111 in Antrim and 167 in East Down.[4]

The Belfast Brigade had two battalions: the 1^st, based in the nationalist heartland of west Belfast, had six companies; the 2^nd encompassed units from more isolated nationalist enclaves elsewhere in the city.[5]

Covering a much larger geographical area, the Antrim Brigade was divided into four battalions, roughly corresponding to the north, south, east and west of the county. However, describing these as “battalions” was somewhat grandiose, as none had even 100 members. Similarly, the East Down Brigade was split into four battalions, three clustered around either side of Strangford Lough and a fourth further south towards Castlewellan.

There was a strong family element to IRA membership, the most striking example being that of Edward, Charles, James, John and Joseph McEntee, all of King St in Belfast and all members of A Company, 1^st Battalion.

Involvement also crossed generations – Hugh, Thomas and Joseph Gunn of Brighton Street were all members of the IRA while another Joseph Gunn, presumably a son of one of the others, was a member of the Fianna.

Extended families can also be seen outside Belfast – seven men named Lynn were members of the Ballycastle Company in Antrim, while it is not unreasonable to assume that the three men named Patrick McAuley who were all members of the Glenariffe Company would quite likely have shared a grandfather.

Trucileers

Following the Truce, IRA units across the country saw an influx of new recruits. Some of these had genuine reasons for not having enlisted prior to the Truce, while some undoubtedly only joined up when it was safe to do so in the hope that they could belatedly bask in whatever glory had been earned by the IRA over the previous years. All were described as “Trucileers” by the pre-Truce veterans.

However, in the north, recruitment to the IRA continued beyond the signing of the Truce because the fighting itself continued – as Belfast Brigade O/C Roger McCorley put it, “The pogrom lasted 2 years…the Truce itself lasted six hours only.” [6]

If we compare the numbers on the nominal rolls for 1^st July 1922 to those at the time of the Truce, we can see how rapidly the 3^rd Northern Division grew. The Antrim Brigade had the most rapid expansion, increasing by 65% to 471 men in July 1922. The East Down Brigade grew by 43% to reach 612 members.

Measuring the growth of the Belfast Brigade is complicated by the fact that many of its units had disbanded by July 1922. If we look at the 1^st Battalion, it had grown by 21% to 804 members by that point.

But in the 2^nd Battalion, by July 1922, B Company in Ballymacarrett was “only a skeleton company” with no members listed, while C and D Companies were described as “non-existent”, so comparisons between the two dates are impossible.[7]  Two additional battalions were formed in Belfast in late August 1921, but these had also broken up by July 1922.

However, the very fact that two entirely new battalions had to be created would suggest that recruitment to the Belfast Brigade after the Truce was most likely on a par with that for the other two Brigades, especially as the worst of the violence in Belfast came after the Truce.

Even with some records missing, and some units no longer existing by July 1922, we can see that the Belfast Brigade expanded by a minimum of 25% after the Truce. Even this figure is an understatement as “…there are men who will not allow their names to appear on this list, owing to the nature of their employment.” [8] In total, the 3^rd Northern Division grew by at least 36%, bringing its membership to just over 2,400.

To view this in context, it is worth looking at the pool of men from which the IRA could draw recruits.

The 1911 Census shows that in the whole of county Antrim in that year, there were only 12,605 catholic boys aged 10 (+/- 5 years) and only 11,142 catholic men aged 20 (+/- 5 years). [9] While equating religion with a republican political outlook is inherently flawed, especially given that the constitutional Nationalist Party was still the main opponent of unionism in the north, those would have been the key age groups from which the IRA would recruit in 1920-22. This suggests that roughly one in ten of potential members did join the 3^rd Northern.

The split in the IRA

By the spring of 1922, the IRA had split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. While Michael Collins and his colleagues set up a Provisional Government to implement the Treaty, many IRA officers vehemently rejected it.

On 26^th March 1922, an IRA Army Convention met in Dublin, despite being banned by the Provisional Government; it was attended by Joe McKelvey in his then capacity as O/C 3^rd Northern Division, and by each of the three Brigade O/Cs – Roger McCorley (Belfast), Tom Fitzpatrick (Antrim) and John Hughes (East Down).

The Convention repudiated not only the Treaty but also the authority of the Dáil which had approved it and of IRA GHQ, headed by Collins and Richard Mulcahy. Instead they appointed an Army Executive to oversee the IRA, with McKelvey being elected as a member of the Executive’s governing Army Council.

Desperate to win back the northern units, at a meeting in Beggars Bush Barracks after the Convention, pro-Treaty Chief of Staff Eoin O’Duffy promised McCorley and Fitzpatrick that the Provisional Government would supply them with arms and ammunition, so on foot of this undertaking, they agreed to recommend that their Brigades remain under the command of GHQ rather than the new Executive. [10]

From this point on, it can be said that there were two 3^rd Northern Divisions – one loyal to pro-Treaty GHQ and the other loyal to the anti-Treaty Executive; the latter came to be known as the “Executive Forces”. It should not be assumed, however that the pro-GHQ 3^rd Northern Division was necessarily pro-Treaty, as they were trenchantly opposed to accepting partition and the unionist government in Northern Ireland; rather, they were won over by the promise of military aid from the Provisional Government.

After McKelvey’s departure to the Executive, the former Divisional Adjutant, Seamus Woods, was elected O/C of the pro-GHQ 3^rd Northern by a Divisional Council consisting of the Divisional Staff and the three Brigade O/Cs. [11] Woods had been seconded to O’Duffy’s office at GHQ the previous February, so he was obviously someone who O’Duffy felt could be trusted to keep the Division loyal – in fact, Woods later claimed that “I feel personally responsible for holding over 90% of the Division with GHQ…” [12]

The Executive, or anti-Treaty, 3^rd Northern was commanded by Patrick Thornbury. He had originally been a member of C Company, 1^st Battalion in Belfast but for nearly two years prior to the Truce he was attached to an IRA Officers’ Training Corps in Dublin; he had returned to Belfast after the Truce. [13]

Seamus Woods claimed that 90% of the Division was pro-GHQ; in the 1930s, the Brigade Committee for Belfast listed 420 men, out of a total of 1,307, as having taken the anti-Treaty or Executive side in the Treaty split. So, while not as overwhelming as Woods claimed, by nearly two to one the Belfast IRA was aligned with the pro-Treaty Provisional Government in mid-1922.[14]

Nor were all those listed as Executive Forces in July 1922 necessarily anti-Treaty: some two dozen later joined the pro-Treaty National Army in the Civil War, most notably Thomas Murphy from the Falls Road, who became a Staff Captain at Eastern Command HQ.[15]

Outside Belfast, the split appears to have little impact. In the returns for the Antrim Brigade on the second “critical date”, there was no mention whatsoever of the Executive Forces. The situation in East Down was curious – while there were returns made for the Brigade Staff and each of the battalions on that date, there was a second inclusion in the file, which stated that: “This Brigade did not exist at the second critical date (1^st July ’22). The only IRA unit in this area after the split was known as the Downpatrick Active Service Unit and consisted of 16 men.” [16]

Just how active this unit was can certainly be questioned, as 8 of the 16 men listed had already been arrested and interned by the end of June. [17]

3^rd Northern fatalities

Two factors contributed to a thinning of the 3^rd Northern Division’s ranks throughout the pogrom period of 1920-22 – death and arrest.

Writing in 2008, historian Robert Lynch stated that:

“…despite later tales of the heroic defence of Catholic areas, the IRA did not suffer any notable casualties in defensive operations, which might be expected if members were on the front line as defenders. The fact is that no identifiable IRA members were killed or injured in rioting during the whole two years of the conflict. Those that were killed died largely at the hands of RIC murder gangs: extremist, secret loyalist groups within the police force.” [18]

Successive releases of files from the MSPC have since rendered this statement obsolete, but it was repeated verbatim in his contribution to The Atlas of the Irish Revolution in 2017.[19]  In fact, twenty-one members of the Belfast Brigade and five members of the Fianna were killed in the city between July 1920 and June 1922 (two more Belfast IRA members were killed in other counties). In addition, five members of the Antrim Brigade were killed in May and June 1922.

Of those killed in Belfast, five were killed by the RIC’s “murder gang” acting in reprisal for IRA attacks. However, most IRA fatalities in the city did occur during rioting or in action.

For example, James Ledlie was killed in the rioting around the Falls Road that followed the Raglan St ambush just before the commencement of the Truce in July 1921 [20]. On 20^th April 1922, John Walker was killed while attempting to repel an attack by Specials and a unionist mob on the Short Strand [21].

On 31^st May 1922, following the disarming of a group of Specials in Millfield, during which one of them was killed, the escaping IRA party was pursued by armoured cars and George McCaughey was “riddled by Lewis gun fire” [22].

On 20^th June 1922, during the latter stages of the IRA’s northern offensive, William Thornton was killed when confronted by the RUC in the act of fire-bombing a business premises in Gloucester St in the Markets area. [23]

As has been the case with previous releases of MSPC files, future releases may well show that other people killed in Belfast during the pogrom period, who had previously been thought to be civilians, were in fact members of the IRA.

In short, the idea that the IRA in Belfast did not suffer fatalities in street fighting and was therefore not involved in the defence of nationalist neighbourhoods is unsustainable.

The five deaths of IRA members in Antrim occurred in two incidents. On 24^th May 1922, in the early days of the northern offensive, Charles McAllister and Pat McVeigh were killed in Glenarriffe during an attempted ambush on a patrol of B Specials.[24]

The three other IRA deaths the following month were more controversial: a joint patrol of British troops and Specials entered Cushendall, took three men prisoner and interrogated them, following which the three were shot dead.

At the time, it was claimed that all three were unarmed, although the mother of James McAllister was subsequently given a gratuity in acknowledgement of her son having been on IRA active service at the time. [25] John Gore and John Hill, the other two killed, were included in the nominal roll of members of the Glenarm Company of the Antrim Brigade’s 3^rd Battalion.[26]

There were no East Down Brigade members killed. In many respects, this was the least warlike of the three Brigades in 3^rd Northern; this is reflected in the low number of 1916-21 Campaign medals awarded – of the 153 medals awarded to former members of the 3^rd Northern Division IRA and Fianna, only 5 were given to members of the East Down Brigade.

Arrests and internment

In response to the killing of Unionist MP William Twadell in Belfast on 22^nd May 1922, the Northern Ireland government invoked the power of internment it held under the provisions of the Special Powers Act, passed six weeks earlier.

The initial impact on the 3^rd Northern was limited – of the first 202 internees, only 41 were from Belfast, Antrim and Down and even these were not necessarily all IRA members [27]:

“A few IRA officers, generally of lower rank, were lifted. Far less than 10% of those arrested during and after the sweep were active members of the IRA. The vast majority of those arrested were nationalists and pro-Treaty.” [28]

But as the hunt for IRA suspects went on over time, more and more 3^rd Northern members were interned. Eventually, 100 from the Belfast Brigade, 13 from Antrim and 28 from East Down would be captured, together representing 6% of the total Divisional strength – the Divisional Staff was particularly hard hit, with 4 of the 13 pre- and post-Truce members being detained. Altogether, of the 145 3^rd Northern members interned, 19 were staff officers, at either Battalion, Brigade or Divisional level. [29]

Some of the internees had travelled surprising paths. At the time of the Truce, Rory Graham was a Staff Captain on the Divisional Staff; the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was the only Protestant among the 3^rd Northern leadership: “He said that, being a Protestant, he was a sort of white blackbird as far as the Catholic Irish Volunteers were concerned. Eventually, however, he committed to join the Volunteers and was received into a company by Seán Óg O’Sullivan. That would be in 1917.” [30]

But the journey of Patrick Barnes was probably the most protracted and remarkable: he had been a member of the 1^st Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles in the British Army at the start of the Great War and had received the Mons Star medal; wounded in the Battle of Ypres, he was granted an honourable discharge. [31]

He then enlisted in the Irish Volunteers and mobilised with the Belfast Battalion in Coalisland during the Easter Rising.[32]  Prior to the Truce, he was a member of B Company, 1^st Battalion in the Belfast Brigade and was later listed as a member of the Executive Forces at the start of July 1922.[33]

He was then a drill instructor for the 3^rd Northern detachment in the Curragh and was known by the northern government to be stationed in the Curragh when his internment order was signed on 19^th September. [34] Six days later, while home in Belfast, he was arrested and interned on the Argenta.

Despite claiming in March 1923 to have been be a member of the Free State Army, and provision of a letter from the 17^th Battalion of the Army supporting his claim, he remained interned on foot of a recommendation against release “on any condition.” [35] He was eventually freed in December 1923, thus having been a member of each of the British Army, the Easter Rising Irish Volunteers, the pre-Truce IRA, the Executive IRA, the 3^rd Northern contingent in the Curragh, the Free State Army and having been an internee.

Free State Army

According to Roger McCorley, when the men in the Curragh were told there would be no more offensive action undertaken against the northern government,

“We held a meeting with the Divisional O/Cs and Staffs and we decided that any man was free to go where he wanted, either to go home to the North or join the Free State Army … there was no pressure brought to bear on us whatsoever.” [36]

The Army Census, undertaken on the night of 12^th – 13^th November 1922, illustrates the degree to which the offer to join the Army was taken up.

In total, there were 624 men from Belfast, Antrim and East Down in the Army, but less than a third of these, 190 men, can be definitively correlated with men listed on the nominal rolls.

We know that others joined the Army after the Census, bringing the 3^rd Northern total to 242 or roughly 10% of the total Divisional strength. Of those, 3 had been on the Divisional Staff, 153 were from Belfast, 57 from Antrim and only 28 from East Down, again illustrating that Brigade’s general lack of martial ardour.

Between the sending of Mulcahy’s abrupt memo on 20^th October and the taking of the Census, the 3^rd Northern contingent in the Curragh had begun to be broken up – this process applied particularly to the Belfast Brigade. This may have been done to defuse a potential mutiny, word of which had even reached Ernie O’Malley of the anti-Treaty IRA:

“I am in touch with a man in the Curragh and I have informed Aiken that I could get a message from him to any of the officers there. In fact some of the Northern men there are disaffected and about 100 of them are disarmed and more or less semi-prisoners.”[37]

By mid-November, there were only 179 men from the 3^rd Northern area left in the Curragh, by now described as the 2^nd & 3^rd Northern Reserve, as it also included 251 men from the 2^nd Northern Division in Derry and Tyrone. In this Reserve, Belfast men were in a minority, only 67 of the total, the remaining 112 being from Antrim and East Down.[38]  107 of this group can be found on the nominal rolls for the various 3^rd Northern units.

The largest group of men from the 3^rd Northern area was in Dundalk, but by then, they were listed as being members of the 5^th Northern Division. Here, there were 247 men from the 3^rd Northern area, all but 19 of them from Belfast.[39]  53 of these can be identified from the nominal rolls.

In Wellington Barracks in Dublin, there was a third substantial group of 106 men from the 3^rd Northern area, with all but 3 from Belfast. Most were still listed as being attached to 3^rd Northern Division, although 13 were in the 2^nd Eastern Division. Only 25 of this contingent can be found on the nominal rolls.[40]

In various other barracks around the country, there were a further 92 men from Belfast, Antrim and East Down, but as only 5 of these can be matched with the nominal rolls, it is likely that these were mainly men who came south independently after the start of the Civil War, rather than as part of the evacuation of the 3^rd Northern after the failed May offensive. Their motivations for enlisting would have varied, covering everything from the desire for a secure wage to a simple sense of adventure.

However, in the case of the two Convery brothers from the Ormeau Road attached to the Dublin Guards in Beggars Bush, it is difficult to see a reason for enlisting other than sheer boyish enthusiasm – Gerald was aged 17 and his brother Patrick was only 16.[41]

Civil War

Members of the 3^rd Northern Division took part on both sides during the Civil War.

Pat Thornbury, Divisional O/C of the Executive 3^rd Northern, brought about 30 men down to Dublin at the request of anti-Treaty Dublin Brigade commander Oscar Traynor during the battle for Dublin in the first week of the Civil War.

This contingent was stationed first in Barry’s Hotel in Parnell St, then moved to the Gresham Hotel in O’Connell St, where they took part in the fighting after the capture of the Four Courts.[42]

Another Executive 3^rd Northern member, Joseph Billings, who had been O/C of the Active Service Unit that mounted the Raglan St ambush in July 1921, was also stationed in Barry’s Hotel, as Barracks Adjutant.

When the hotel was evacuated after the fall of the Four Courts, he was in charge of removing the garrison’s store of weapons to a safe location, but owing to personal circumstances, resigned from the IRA afterwards.[43]

Michael Carolan, an Adjutant of 3^rd Northern Division before the Truce, also opposed the Treaty. He was wounded in fighting on Grafton St in Dublin in July 1922. [44] On recovering from his wounds in the autumn, he took up a position of Director of Intelligence for the anti-Treaty IRA Eastern Command and in November, was promoted to be Director of Intelligence at anti-Treaty GHQ. [45]

On the other side, former 3^rd Northern officers took part in some of the most worst episodes of the Civil War.

In one incident in Wicklow, while supposedly negotiating the surrender of surrounded Republicans, Felix McCorley, Roger’s brother and one-time Adjutant of the Antrim Brigade, was alleged to have suddenly shot their leader in the face and then fired a second round at the prone casualty, killing him.[46]  However, McCorley’s family insisted that “there were different versions of that story.” [47]

In December 1922 the author’s grandfather, Tom Glennon, by then Adjutant of the 1^st Northern Division in Donegal, was in charge of a party which shot and killed a prisoner who was attempting to escape; a second prisoner was wounded and recaptured.[48] The following month, Glennon was a member of the court martial which tried the men who would ultimately be executed as the “Drumboe Martyrs.”

The most tragic incident was the execution of Joe McKelvey in Mountjoy prison on 8^th December 1922. He had been captured in the Four Courts the previous summer, but in reprisal for the killing of a pro-Treaty TD, he was sentenced to be executed, along with three other senior anti-Treaty leaders also in captivity, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Dick Barrett.

The officer in charge of the firing party was Thomas Gunn, who had been an officer in B Company, 1^st Battalion in Belfast – McKelvey was thus to be executed by a firing squad led by one of his own former subordinates. The execution was botched, with McKelvey only wounded; according to Gunn’s grand-daughter, her father:

“…heard from his father that he was present at the death of Joe McKelvey. My Dad remembers his father telling him that the first bullet shot him below the heart and that Joe asked for another and Grandad went up to deliver the shot but his finger froze on the trigger and that Hugo MacNeill delivered a second bullet and that Joe had asked for another.” [49]

The 3^rd Northern men stationed at various barracks at the time of the Army Census were eventually re-formed into one unit; according to Roger McCorley:

“I was sent south to Kerry with a unit which consisted of half Belfast men and half 2nd and 3rd Northern men. We went to Kenmare until March. Then I was fed up. I came back to the Curragh. I wanted to get out of the army or get out of Kerry. The unit then was formed into the 17th Bn., sent to the workhouse in Tralee. Joe Murray, a Belfast man, was in charge of it then.” [50]

There is no suggestion that this unit was involved in any of the atrocities committed by Free State soldiers in Kerry, although news of those events must have contributed to an accelerating sense of disillusion among those men.

Emigration

The nominal rolls provide an additional level of social history in that they allow us to see the extent of IRA emigration from the north between the collapse of the 3^rd Northern and the 1930s.

Some of this was involuntary – internees being released were often served with exclusion orders barring them from living in, or even visiting, the north.

This was the experience of Frank Crummey, one-time Intelligence Officer of the Division. In April 1923, the Free State government appealed for his release, pointing out he had been offered a job at a Dublin school – the RUC City Commissioner for Belfast observed “If this man leaves the Northern area we are better without him”, while the RUC Inspector General declared “It is thought that he ought not to be allowed to be at large in Belfast even for a week.”

At the end of that month, having been served with an order prohibiting him from entering Belfast, Antrim or Down, he was escorted to the border and released.[51]

By the time the nominal rolls were compiled, there were still 2,292 former members of the 3^rd Northern Division alive. Of those, 422 or 18% had emigrated. The emigration figures for the Belfast and Antrim Brigades were very slightly below the divisional average – at 17% and 16% respectively. Perhaps surprisingly, in that it had been the least violent Brigade area, a much higher portion of East Down Brigade members had emigrated, 23%.

Within the Brigades, there were some huge differences. In Belfast, A Company of the 2^nd Battalion, based in Ardoyne and the ‘Bone, had an emigration rate of only 8%, while for B Company of the 1^st Battalion in west Belfast, the figure was 26%. In Antrim, a full third of the entire 4^th Battalion had emigrated, while the 1^st Battalion of the East Down Brigade had the highest emigration figure of any 3^rd Northern unit, at 34%. [52]

Many of those who left, having fought against the creation of the northern state, could not bear to, or felt they would not be let, live peacefully in it. Of course, economic factors and the impact of the Great Depression would have contributed to emigration, as well as political factors, but they do not explain these considerable variances in the emigration rates for different units.

Summary and conclusions

Bearing in mind that the records for some units are either incomplete or non-existent, the material now available shows that the 3^rd Northern Division was considerably larger than had previously been thought, with just over 2,400 men who can be identified as members either before, during or after the Truce.

More than its overall size, the most surprising fact is the rate at which the Division expanded after the Truce. As we have seen, the Antrim and East Down Brigades grew enormously, while in Belfast the number of battalions had to be doubled from two to four.

The two new battalions were formed in August 1921, just a month after the Bloody Sunday rioting in Belfast; that summer, the city had seen a second surge in fatalities after the initial outbreak of the pogrom in July 1920.[53]  It seems clear that the growth of the IRA in Belfast in the late summer of 1921 was a direct response to the latest increase in sectarian violence in the city.

From July 1920 until October 1922, the risk of violent death was ever-present for nationalists in Belfast. During that period, 280 Catholics were killed in the city, of whom 21 or 8% have so far been identified as members of the IRA. A quarter of the IRA fatalities were victims of the RIC “murder gang”, murdered in their own homes, but three-quarters were killed in action, considerably more than has previously been reported.

The period after the Treaty encompasses the more complicated and contested developments: the split in the IRA, the aftermath of the May 1922 northern offensive and the Civil War in the south.

The bitterness of the divisions over the Treaty were echoed in the split within the 3^rd Northern. While up to a third of the Belfast Brigade were listed in the nominal rolls as Executive Forces, the clear majority of 3^rd Northern Division as a whole, 81%, remained loyal to GHQ. This “loyalty” was primarily logistical, rather than ideological – they took orders from whichever side in the south could promise the most guns and ammunition for use in the north.

The failure of the northern offensive saw the Division largely decapitated. While Kleinrichert’s assertion that the initial introduction of internment only saw lower-ranking officers captured is correct, within several months, the Executive 3^rd Northern had experienced the capture of its O/C and its Quartermaster, Pat Thornbury and Hugh Corvin respectively.

On the pro-GHQ side, the risk of internment was compounded by the flight to the Curragh. In Belfast, of 29 Brigade or Battalion staff officers either before or after the Truce, 3 were interned while 10 joined the Free State Army – in other words, the Brigade lost almost half of its officer cadre. In Antrim, the figures were 3 staff officers interned and 12 in the Free State Army, out of a total of 47 – roughly a third. In East Down, of 38 staff officers, 8 were interned while 4 joined the Free State Army – again, almost a third of its senior officers.

Those officers soon learned that staying in the south was a safer option than returning north, as the northern authorities proved to have long memories – Seamus Woods was interned while on a visit home in November 1923 and was the last prisoner to leave the Argenta.

The outbreak of the Civil War accelerated the breakup of the 3^rd Northern Division. By the time the Army Census was conducted, there were 624 men in the Free State Army whose home addresses were in the Division’s area – but only 190 of these can be definitively identified in the MSPC nominal rolls.

The preponderance of men not listed in the nominal rolls suggests that most northern recruits had no prior IRA service before coming south. It appears therefore that the northern units in the Free State Army were mainly composed of inexperienced recruits motivated to enlist for economic or adventurist reasons, built around a small experienced core of pro-GHQ 3^rd Northern men.

Apart from the isolated case of Joe McKelvey in the Four Courts, northern IRA participation on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War was previously thought to mainly involve 2^nd Northern Division men who took part in the fighting in Donegal, and Frank Aiken’s 4^th Northern Division. However, we now also know that the O/C of the Executive 3^rd Northern, along with a small contingent from Belfast, took part in the fighting around O’Connell St in Dublin after the surrender of the Four Courts.

The defeat of the 3^rd Northern Division in the War of Independence prompted a level of emigration by its former members far above the general average for the north. In 1911, 1.25 million people lived in the six counties that would go on to become Northern Ireland and it has been calculated that from 1922-38, net migration was roughly 94,000 or 8% of the 1911 population.[54]

However, the rate of emigration by 3^rd Northern veterans, whether voluntary or government-imposed, was more than double that, at 18% – and included up to a third of the entire membership of some individual units. It is probably safe to attribute the difference between the 8% rate for the general population and the 18% rate for 3^rd Northern veterans to “political emigration” in response to the consolidation of the northern state.

Of those that remained in the north, some continued to be centrally involved in the IRA later in the 1920s and ‘30s. However, the vast majority remembered unfulfilled dreams and broken promises, but above all, learned to endure defeat – in the words of one former officer, “…we in the North found ourselves ‘a lost legion.’” [55]

References

In 1924 the government of the Free State introduced a Military Service Pensions Act, allowing for payment of pensions to men who had served in the IRA for at least three months before the Truce of 1921 and who had served with the National, or Free State, Army during the Civil War. At the same time, an Army Pensions Act offered disability pensions to those who had been wounded, or gratuities to the dependents of those who had been killed. This legislation was extended in 1934 to include anyone who took no part in the Civil War or who had fought on the anti-Treaty side.

To assist the process of assessing claims, Brigade Committees were set up, made up of senior officers from each Brigade of the IRA. One of the tasks they undertook was to compile nominal rolls of the membership of each Brigade, Battalion and Company on two “critical dates”: 11^th July 1921, when the Truce began, and 1^st July 1922, at the start of the Civil War.

These nominal rolls, and the individual files of thousands of applicants, have been released online by Military Archives since 2012 – these constitute part of its Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC).

[1] Commander-in-Chief to O/C 3rd Northern Division, 20^th October 1922, Mulcahy Papers, UCD Archives Department (UCDAD), P7/B/287

[2] Nominal Rolls, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/401-404, 407-412

[3] Applicants Resident in the Six Counties General File, MSPC, Military Archives, SPG/10; Special Investigation of Six County Cases, MSPC, Military Archives, SPG-10A2 (in November 1926, the extent of over one hundred pension claimants’ pre-Truce service was reviewed by a committee of nine former 3^rd Northern Division officers – the application of James Delaney of Balkan St in Belfast was one of those which the committee noted should be rejected, as “This man was a Black & Tan Crossley driver”); Thomas Gunn memoir, ‘Reorganisation in Antrim’, Michael Collins Papers, Military Archives, MA/CP/062/001; 1917-21 Medal recipients, http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/brief.aspx

[4] D/O Reports – Returns for June and July 1921, Mulcahy Papers, UCDAD, P7/A/23

[5] A Company, based in the Ardoyne and Marrowbone, or ‘Bone, areas; B Company in Ballymacarrett in east Belfast, known today as the Short Strand; C Company in the Markets, just south of the city centre; D Company in the New Lodge in north Belfast. The largest unit was B Company, 1^st Battalion, with 179 pre-Truce members; the smallest was D Company, 2^nd Battalion, with only 27.

[6] Roger McCorley interview, O’Malley Notebooks, UCDAD, P17b/98

[7] Nominal Rolls, 1^st & 2nd Battalions, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/403-404

[8] M. McManus to Military Service Pensions Board, 7^th January 1937 in 4^th Battalion, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/406

[9] Nominal Rolls, 1^st & 2nd Battalions, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/403-404

[10] Roger McCorley statement, Bureau of Military History, Military Archives, WS389

[11] O/C 3^rd Northern Division to GHQ, 27^th July 1922, Mulcahy Papers, UCDAD, P7/B/77

[12] O/C 3^rd Northern Division to GHQ, 21^st September 1922, Mulcahy Papers, UCDAD, P7/B/287

[13] Patrick Thornbury, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, MSP34 Ref 07497

[14] Nominal Rolls, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/402-406A

[15] Irish Army Census Return dated 12^th & 13^th November 1922, Portobello Barracks, 2 Eastern Division, Eastern Command, Military Archives

[16] Nominal Rolls, 3^rd Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/412

[17] Denise Kleinrichert, Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta 1922 (Irish Academic Press, 2001), p335-368

[18] Robert Lynch, ‘The People’s Protectors? The Irish Republican Army and the “Belfast Pogrom,” 1920–1922’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (April 2008), p381

[19] Robert Lynch, ‘Belfast’, in John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Mike Murphy & John Borgonovo (eds), Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork University Press, 2017), p631

[20] James Ledlie, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, 1D325

[21] John Walker, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, 2RB4095

[22] George McCaughey, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, DP8007

[23] William Thornton, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, 1D127; see also Alan Parkinson, Belfast’s Unholy War (Four Courts Press, 2004), p274

[24] Charles McAllister, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, DP6008

[25] James McAllister, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, 2D485

[26] Nominal Rolls, 3^rd Battalion, 2^nd Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/410

[27] Kleinrichert, Republican Internment, p21

[28] Ibid, p62

[29] Ibid, p335-368; Nominal Rolls, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/401-412

[30]  Notes of interview with Rory Graham, Louis O’Kane Collection, Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library & Archive, LOK IV B.04

[31]  File on Patrick Barnes, PRONI, HA/5/2181

[32] Nominal Roll, 1^st Brigade HQ, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/402

[33] Nominal Roll, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/403

[34] Administrative list of Northern County Applicants, MSPC, Military Archives, M/MSP-10

[35] File on Patrick Barnes, PRONI, HA/5/2181

[36] Roger McCorley interview, O’Malley Notebooks, UCDAD, P17b/98

[37] Ernie O’Malley to Liam Lynch, 3^rd September 1922, Moss Twomey papers, UCDAD, P69/40

[38] Irish Army Census Return dated 12^th & 13^th November 1922, 2 & 3 Northern Division, Curragh Command, Military Archives

[39] Irish Army Census Return dated 12^th & 13^th November 1922, Dundalk, 5 Northern Division, Eastern Command, Military Archives

[40] Irish Army Census Return dated 12^th & 13^th November 1922, Wellington Barracks, 2 Eastern Division, Eastern Command, Military Archives

[41] Irish Army Census Return dated 12^th & 13^th November 1922, Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin Command and ten other barracks, Military Archives

[42] Patrick Thornbury, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, MSP34 Ref 07497

[43] Nominal Roll, Engineering Battalion, 1^st Brigade, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/406A; Joseph Billings, Pensions & Awards files, MSPC, Military Archives, MSP34 Ref 01089

[44] Ernie O’Malley to Liam Lynch 31^st July 1922, quoted in Anne Dolan and Cormac O’Malley (eds), “No Surrender Here!” The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley 1922-24, (Lilliput Press, 2007), p80

[45] Ibid, p556

[46] Robert Lynch, The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920–1922 (Irish Academic Press, 2006), p199

[47] Author’s conversation with Pearse McCorley, Felix’s son, 4^th April 2013

[48] Irish Independent, 14^th December 1922

[49] Email to author from Cathy Gunn, Thomas’ grand-daughter, 14^th March 2016

[50] Roger McCorley interview, O’Malley Notebooks, UCDAD, P17b/98

[51] File on Francis Crummey, PRONI, HA/5/1791

[52] Nominal Rolls, 3^rd Northern Division, MSPC, Military Archives, MSPC/RO/401-412

[53] Kieran Glennon, From Pogrom to Civil War – Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA (Mercier Press, 2013), p260

[54] http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/search/ and http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/raise/knowledge_exchange/presentations/series3/trew090114ppt.pdf both accessed 6^th May 2018

[55] Joe Murray statement, Bureau of Military History, Military Archives, WS412

When a dock strike called by Jim Larkin brought Belfast to a standstill. By John Dorney

The Belfast docks strike of 1907 has entered into legend in the realm of Irish labour history.

According to the legend, ‘Big Jim’ Larkin, newly arrived from Liverpool, descended on the city like a biblical prophet, uniting Catholic and Protestant workers against tyrannical bosses.

He is supposed to have led joint a parade of Catholic and Protestants, Orangemen and nationalists, together on the Twelfth of July and was so successful an agitator that induced the Royal Irish Constabulary themselves to go on strike in sympathy with the dockers.

Unfortunately, none of this is quite true. Though the Orange parades on the Twelfth were unusually peaceful that year, the mass rally of the Belfast trade unionists took place on July 26, not July 12.  Though the police did go on strike, Larkin had nothing to do with it and was not even in Belfast at the time.

But the Belfast dockers and carters strike of 1907 did indeed see a crack open in that city’s long-standing sectarian divisions and Larkin really did unite Orangemen and Republicans on the same platform, at least for a time, before that window snapped shut again.

For several months the Belfast docks, Ireland’s busiest at that time, were the scene of a violent and bitter struggle that centred on the right of unskilled labourers to organise in unions. The 1907 strike can, indeed, be said to be the opening chapter in the independent Irish trade union movement, and a precursor of the great Lockout in Dublin in 1913.

Belfast

Belfast, at the turn of the twentieth century, was Ireland’s only industrial city of note, and was described by its Lord Mayor as ‘an Elysium [paradise] for the working classes’.[1]

Unlike Dublin, where much of the labouring population lived in appalling slum conditions, Belfast’s working classes generally had more modern and healthy housing.

Whereas 35% of Dublin’s population lived in one room tenements, only 1% of Belfast’s did.[2] Relatively well paid and secure employment was available at the city’s shipyards, and less well paid, but still abundant, work at Belfast’s textile factories.

Yet for the unskilled workers of Belfast, especially on the docks, all was not well. Dockers had no secure contracts, but effectively had to haggle each day for the right to be hired and had no set rate for the work they did. They were to be unsurprisingly receptive to the message of militant trade unionism.

The carters, who drove horse-drawn carts to and from the docks, were slightly better off, but not much. In 1907 there were about 1,500 carters, of whom one third were employed by the Belfast shipping companies but most were employed by small firms belonging to the Belfast Master Carriers’ Association. A carter typically earned between 19 and 22 shillings per week, though they were docked pay if any of their cargo was broken.  [3]

And Belfast also, of course, had deep ingrained sectarian divisions. The shipyards, the bastions of well paid skilled working class jobs were dominated by Protestants and unionists. In 1886, and as recently as 1893, when the House of Commons proposed a Home Rule Bill there was bloody rioting at the shipyards, in which dozens of people were killed and most of the Catholic workers driven out of their jobs. [4]

Nor was it just the shipyards where religion divided the workers. Historian Emmet O’Connor writes, ‘Carting was a superior, more “Protestant” occupation’ than docking. While on the docks themselves, there was a certain amount of sectarian division among the 3,100 dockers. The cross channel dockers were generally Protestant, while the ‘deep sea’ dockers whose work was more casual, were more often Catholic.[5]

The carters were represented up to the early 1900s by the conservative Carter’s Society, but in the first decade of the new century, they were beginning to be superseded by the ‘new unionism’ which tried to combine workers in large unions across workplace and trade.

The dockers, had no union representation whatsoever up to 1907. However, all this was to change with the arrival of James ‘Big Jim’ Larkin in the city. 

Larkin

Larkin, a Liverpool born Irishman, stepped off the ferry in Belfast on 20 January 1907. He was big man, 33 years old, hardened by years of work the Liverpool docks, a committed socialist and a representative of the National Union of Dock Labourers or NUDL. He had been sent to Belfast by James Sexton, the union’s general secretary, to organise the dock labourers there.

Larkin struck contemporaries as an imposing figure. He sported a wide brimmed hat, long black coat and a drooping moustache. He spoke ‘in the approved manner of the English slums’, but among Irish workers he rapidly gained a reputation as a speaker of extraordinary emotional power.

As well as a socialist, Larkin was also a teetotaler and a stern moralist. One of his first priorities was to end the practice of dockers being paid in pubs.

At a series of street corner meetings on the docks, Larkin set about recruiting dockers to the NUDL. Doubtless he argued that they were underpaid and had no job security, that they and their families deserved better. Whatever it was he told them, over a period of just few months, Larkin managed very quickly to recruit almost all, 2,900 out of 3,100, of Belfast’s dockers, both Catholic and Protestant.

It was not just Larkin’s ardour for social change or the conditions of Belfast dockers that made this possible. In 1906, the Liberal Government had reversed a Conservative law of 1901 that made trade unions liable to be sued for financial damage caused by strikes. Now they would again have immunity from legal action and could picket legally. [6]

Secondly, 1907 was an unusually fortuitous time to organise Catholics and Protestants together. The question of Home Rule or Irish self-government, had been shelved since 1893, easing tensions between nationalists and unionists. There had also been a split within the Orange Order, where an independent Orange Order had emerged, a more working class organisation that championed trade unionism and even some sort of Irish self government.[7]

Alex Boyd an Independent Orangeman and city councillor, would be one of Larkin’s key allies during the dock strike.

Strike

Larkin developed a reputation as a firebrand labour leader, willing to call a sympathetic strike at the first hint of a dispute. But in fact, as his most recent biographer, Emmet O’Connor, has argued, he was usually cautious in calling strikes, preferring to gain pay rises and other concessions by careful negotiations. [8]

The trouble on the Belfast docks in fact began as a result of unauthorised grassroots action in April of 1907 when a number of NUDL members working at Kelly’s Coal Quay refused to work with non-union men and walked off the job. Larkin not only disapproved and ordered the men to go back to work, but actually apologised to company.

For the shipping and docking companies, though, led by shipping magnate Thomas Gallaher, the ill-advised strike was a chance to break the new union, and they sacked the men concerned. Larkin called a strike in protest and it spread along the docks when the shipping companies began to lock out union members and to bring in ‘blackleg’ i.e. non-union workers from Liverpool to pass the picket.

Thomas Johnson, a veteran labour organiser, recalled, ‘the Shipping Federation which was an organisation of ship-owning employers…organised ‘blacklegs’ or ‘scabs’ and lodged them in steamship which lay alongside the quays’.[9]

There were extremely violent clashes throughout May between striking dockers and ‘scabs’. Dockers boarded ships by force and in a ‘fusillade of missiles’, prevented the ‘blacklegs’ or strike breakers from unloading their cargo.  Larkin himself was arrested for ‘assault and battery’ for hitting a blackleg named Bamber with a stone after the latter had stabbed three dockers with a knife.[10]

Larkin upped the ante on June 21 when he called a general strike of dockers and also demanded a pay rise. It was at this point that the first carters struck in sympathy with the dockers, with 200 men at Fleetwood Quay going out on strike in protest at having to work with ‘scabs’.[11]

The Master Carriers Association tried to drive a wedge between the dockers and the carters by offering the latter a pay rise if they would go back to work beside the non-union men, but on July 4, over 1,000 carters in over 60 firms went out on strike for the principle of union recognition on the docks.

The strike marked the eclipse of the old Carters’ Society as a representative of the Carters as many of them joined the NUDL.[12]

The employers attempted to bring ‘traction machines’ a kind of steam engine to replace the carters as well as non-unionised carts. This led to bitter rioting all over Belfast as strikers attacked and overturned the ‘scab’ carts.

One striker, Bully Hunter, recalled many years later that the traction engines were halted by throwing heavy planks across their path and that lorries were set on fire or thrown into the river Lagan. One woman ‘scab’ was thrown into a horse trough, ‘she did not try it again’.[13]

Non-sectarian

The strike was a rare case of non-sectarian mobilisation in Belfast. This unity more or less held during the strike despite the unionist press’s claim that Larkin was really a nationalist agitator.

The unionist press even alleged that Larkin was related to Michael Larkin, one of the Fenian ‘Manchester Martyrs’ who were executed in 1867. To allay Protestant fears of ‘Fenian plot’, Larkin even stepped aside in favour of Alex Boyd during a critical point of the strike. [14]

And in the wake of the dispute, the employers even tried to launch an Protestant-only union the Belfast Coal workers and Carters’ Benefit Society, in order to divide the workers along sectarian lines. As it was though the carters struck in protest and the scheme came to nothing.[15]

Larkin, though from an Irish Catholic background in Liverpool, had strong cross community support in Belfast. On the Twelfth of July, 1,000 Orangemen signed a letter stating, ‘it is our fervent prayer that James Larkin may long be spared to work for the emancipation of unskilled workers in his native land’.[16]

On July 26, 1907, two weeks after the Orange Order demonstration on the Twelfth, Larkin led a labour parade, reportedly 100,000 strong, that made its way through the Catholic Falls and Protestant Shankill districts of the city, along with the Independent Orange Order and was applauded in both.[17]

Interestingly, Larkin also seems to have met the ‘advanced nationalists’ of the Dungannon Clubs, a front for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, to secure their support.  Liam Gaynor a Dungannon Club member recalled, ‘Larkin spoke at some length about the importance of organising Irish labour and insisted that this was more important at the time than organising for Irish freedom’.

The separatists were, on the whole, uninterested though, in Larkin’s message of socialism. According to Gaynor, ‘the members of the Dungannon Club earned only a very modest livlihoods but they were confirmed in their view that freedom was more important than improving social conditions.’[18]

Nationalist politicians, including Belfast MP Joe Devlin, generally only became involved in the strike by objecting vociferously to the deployment of British troops to police it.

Police strike

The RIC, partly because they were overwhelmed by the dispute, but also because of a longstanding series of work related grievances of their own, principally low pay and long hours, themselves ‘downed tools’ in protest and went on strike on July 24. Some 600 police officers took over Musgrave Street police barracks and invited strikers in to discuss the dispute with them. [19]

Though Larkin himself was in Liverpool at the time, he has often got the credit in popular memory for getting the police to join the strike.

Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, the most senior British official in Ireland, had taken the view that the government would not intervene in the strike, blaming it on the ‘refusal of the employers to meeting with trade union leaders’. But once the police went on strike the British administration had to act quickly to prevent a complete breakdown of law and order in Ireland’s second city. The result was that over 6,000 British Army troops were drafted into Belfast to ‘restore order’.[20]

While police were trained to deal with public order situations, the military was not and tended to be more violent. Labour historian Desmond Greave commented that while RIC allowed strikers to appeal to strike breakers not to pass pickets,  if a striker grabbed the bridle of a horse taking goods from the docks under military escort, they were ‘clubbed to the ground’ with rifle butts.[21]

Many nationalists thought that the deployment of the military, especially in the Catholic Falls Road, far from the docks, was a deliberate provocation, designed to break the cross-sectarian unity of the strike by starting rioting between nationalists and the Army.

IRB man Liam Gaynor thought that, ‘the authorities became alarmed and endeavoured to break up the solidarity gained by Mr Larkin by introducing sectarianism into the strike. This was done by deliberately placing large forces of British soldiers in the Catholic Falls Road area to incite the people’. [22]

Whether deliberate or not, rioting did indeed result between the troops and the residents of the Falls area. The soldiers ultimately opened fire a stone throwing crowd on the Falls Road, shooting dead two people and wounding five.[23]

Settlement

The violence made the British government anxious to settle the dispute. There was a perception in both government and trade union circles that the dispute had got out of hand. James Sexton the head of the NUDL travelled to Belfast while the government dispatched the negotiation George Askwith who specialised in resolving industrial disputes.

The carters settled before the dockers. On August 15, Larkin and the NUDL national leader James Sexton met the Askwith.

Larkin it seems was excluded from the carters’ settlement. At a subsequent meeting in St Mary’s Hall, Sexton (reportedly carrying two revolvers in case of trouble) persuaded the carters to go back to work in return for a pay ride and shorter working hours, but that they would have to accept working beside non-union men.

The dockers themselves went back to work on August 28, in some cases with pay rises, but in many cases with the sacking of ‘troublemakers’ and all dockers had to accept working with non-union men.[24]

The strike was over, but there was another brief dispute in November when dockers in Belfast refused to handle goods loaded by ‘scabs’ in Newry. This time, Sexton, eager to avoid another potentially explosive dispute, excluded Larkin from the start from negotiations and ordered the men back to work.

Post Script

The immediate fallout from the Belfast strike was inconclusive, the NUDL was established on the docks, though some of its members lost their jobs. Nor was there a pay rise or significant improvement in working conditions for dockers or carters despite all the hardship and violence that the strike had involved.

The policemen who struck in July 1907 were severely punished: one was sacked outright, six others suspended and 150 constables were ‘rusticated’ or suspended for a shorter period of time.[25]

The most lasting consequence of the strike was James Larkin’s decision to strike out on his own found the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) in 1909. Larkin believed that he had not been supported adequately by the NUDL during the dispute, or in his own subsequent court case, where he was convicted of assault on a strike breaker.

Following further disputes with Sexton, after he had authorised two more strikes, contrary to the wishes of the NUDL leadership, in Derry and Cork, he was dismissed from that union. The official charge was that he had embezzled union money, though this was never proved. Henceforth he would argue that Irish workers should join Irish unions only.

The solidarity the strike engendered in Belfast across the sectarian divide did not last. In the wake of the 1907 strike Tom Sloan, the founder of the Independent Orange Order, disowned Larkin, Lindsay Crawford the Independent Orangeman and journalist who had written supportively of Larkin and the strike, was sacked from his position as Grandmaster of the organisation and the other Independent Orange leader, Alex Boyd, though he too repudiated Larkin, lost his seat on the municipal council in 1908.[26]

While Orangemen like Alex Boyd had joined Larkin on platforms throughout the dockers strike, most afterwards came to regard him as a dangerous nationalist. They were particularly opposed to Protestant workers joining the ITGWU, which Boyd called ‘a Sinn Fein [i.e. separatist] organisation that not even a decent nationalist in Belfast would have anything to do with’. [27]

Many Catholic dockers in Belfast joined the ITGWU, but most Protestants stayed with the NUDL (which later became part of the Amalgamated Trasnport and General Workers Union), splitting trade unionism on the docks along more or less sectarian lines.

The strength of Larkin’s new union, that aimed to organise all unskilled workers, would be in the south, particularly in Dublin, not in Belfast.

If 1907 was a false dawn in Belfast, it was, however, the harbinger of a new era of militant trade unionism in Ireland that would go on to help shape the island in the next two decades.

References

[1] John Gray, City in Revolt, Belfast 1907 in Donal Nevin, Ed,  James Larkin, Lion of the Fold, (1998) p.25

[2] Emmet O’Connor, Big Jim Larkin, Hero or Wrecker? (2016), p.23

[3] John Gray,  A City in Revolt, James Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907 (1985), p.7

[4] See Belfast Riots – A Short History.

[5] Emmet O’Connor, Big Jim Larkin, Hero or Wrecker? (2016), p.28

[6] C Desmond Greaves, Irish Transport and General Workers Union the Formative Years, p.8

[7] O’Connor, Big Jim. P.25

[8] O’Connor, Big Jim, p.28-30

[9] Thomas Johnson WS 1755 Bureau of Military History

[10] Greaves, Irish Transport and General Workers Union, p.14

[11] O’Connor, Big Jim, p.30-32

[12] Gray, A City in Revolt, p.7

[13] Nevin, The Lion of the Fold, p.147

[14] Gray A City in Revolt p.79-80

[15] O’Connor, Big Jim, p.36

[16] Gray, in Nevin, Lion of the Fold, p26.

[17] O’Connor, Big Jim p.33

[18] Liam Gaynor WS 183 BMH

[19] Gray, A City in Revolt, p.95

[20] John Gray, in Donal Nevin, ed. James Larkin the Lion of the Fold, p.25

[21] C Desmond Greaves, Irish Transport and General Workers Union the Formative Years, p.16

[22] Liam Gaynor BMH

[23] O’Connor, Big Jim p.34

[24] For settlement of the strike see O’Connor p.35, Gray A City in Revolt p.173

[25] Greaves, ITGWU. P.17

[26] History Ireland, Remembering Larkin and the dock strike of 1907. https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/remembering-larkin-and-the-dock-strike-of-1907/

[27] O’Connor, Big Jim, p.55

July 2018 marks the 170th anniversary of the 1848 Young Ireland Rising. This article explores Irish Confederate activism in south Ulster, 1848, by Kerron O Luain.

In July 1848, the Young Ireland movement attempted an insurrection aimed at toppling British rule in Ireland. It was, in military terms, an utter failure, but the political and social influence of the movement had long term consequences.

The Young Irelanders were a group of, mostly youthful, nationalist activists who began their political careers in the early 1840s as a vocal and sometimes radical cadre who developed theories – particularly in their organ The Nation – of cultural nationalism and civic republicanism within the broader movement to repeal the Act of Union of 1800 which was headed by Daniel O’Connell.

The common perception of the Young Irelanders and their July 1848 rebellion is that of a bungled attempt to lead the peasantry by an inexperienced group of high-minded intellectuals in the midst of the social chaos caused by the Great Famine and British laissez-faire economic policy.

However, what is less well known is that the Irish Confederation, founded by the Young Irelanders in mid-January 1847 after they seceded from Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, made serious attempts to arm and drill its members throughout the country in the months preceding the eventual rising in Tipperary on 28 July 1848.

This held true in Ulster as it did elsewhere. Belfast was to the fore in the province and the city’s Repeal and Irish Confederate history has been addressed already in a number of works, both published and forthcoming.[1]

But the commercialised market towns of south Ulster, including Ballybay, Carrickmacross, Castleblayney and Newry especially, were also places where important attempts were made by the Irish Confederates to move towards physical force republicanism in 1848, particularly in the aftermath of the February Revolution in France that had overthrown the monarchy there and founded the Second French Republic. The collective action of Parisians inspired republicans and democrats across the continent and, equally, struck fear into the aristocracy and the governments of various states.

Additionally, and perhaps as important as the reasons for an upsurge in urban physical force republicanism, the factors which mitigated against the Irish Confederates gaining serious traction out in the countryside are also worthy of consideration.

Rousing the rural masses?

From the spring of 1848 different parts of rural south Ulster and its adjoining districts appeared to be in a state of agitation and preparation for rebellion, while other areas seemed to remain docile. In general, the rural proletariat and peasantry were in a state of ferment and starvation but were without strong leadership at the local level. Nevertheless, rebellious activity was detected on the radars of the authorities in some places.

Sources such as police and magistrates reports are, by their nature, top-down. But they offer one of the few available contemporary snapshots in assessing the sentiment of rural dwellers during 1848 when literacy levels were low and record keeping by the lower class almost non-existent due to the oral Irish language culture which predominated.

Some references to the Young Irelanders can, however, be found in the folklore through the School’s Collection taken in the 1930s. One account found in both Donegal and Mayo was entitled the ‘Land League Alphabet’ and noted, in reference to their educational and propaganda endeavours, that ‘Y is for Young Ireland that is spreading the light’.[2]

Government reports are, nonetheless, clearer in their chronology. One resident magistrate reported that, travelling between Dundalk and Drogheda, County Louth, towards the end of April 1848, he ‘observed in each village along the road groups of men in earnest conference verging in number I should say from 25 downwards’, and ‘between Dunleer and Castlebellingham I saw three men armed with muskets and marching in single file towards Dublin … the men were dressed in great coats … and wore hats and knee breeches’.^[3]

Also in April, Lord Shirley, a Protestant loyalist landlord who owned a vast and congested estate in the largely Catholic barony of Farney in south County Monaghan, received information that pikes in ‘great numbers are being, and have been made in this Barony’.^[4]

In May, in central Armagh, a report from Archibald Acheson, second earl of Gosford who resided at Markethill, also stated that pikes were being made at Meigh in the county.^[5] In another report from the majority Protestant Banbridge, County Down, on 25 July, several days before the eventual rising in the south, John Welsh, a local justice of the peace, declared the area around the town to have been in ‘perfect preparation for an outbreak’.

Welsh went on to state ‘that on a search warrant being granted to search for embezzled yarn, there were found in a miserable cottage with every appearance of abject want no less than three guns’.^[6] Later, in July, crown forces were deployed to Castlewellan, County Down, ‘a locality greatly requiring the presence of a military detachment’.^[7]

John Nugent of Portaferry, County Down, was one of the few circumspect commentators when writing about the threat of rebellion in rural Ulster during 1848 even if he displayed his class biases:

I myself do not apprehend any disturbance, and am doing my best to remove any apprehension on the part of others …  I think the badly disposed are too outnumbered and are of so low a class that they would never think to stir.^[8]

Even Nugent, however, would later recant his cool and measured analysis after conversing with his brother towards the end of July. Nugent had only received sketchy information from his sibling, yet it was sufficient to startle him into making statements about the very real threat of an uprising in his neighbourhood, thus providing an example of how rumour and fear could overcome the more rational commentators when the possibility of insurrection loomed.^[9]

Around the same time a private letter from County Cavan to the Armagh Guardian noted that ‘all is peace and quiet here – everybody anxious to know have we a rebellion in Dublin. They think we are in a frightful state. Statements are, of course, greatly magnified but the people here are not disposed to join the rebel ranks’.^[10]

Rural (non) appeal

Why, then, were many of the peasantry not ‘disposed’ to march under the Young Ireland-led Irish Confederate banner? For one, secret societies – whether the formalised networks of the Catholic, fraternal and mutual-aid focused Ribbonism or the looser, ad hoc agrarian combinations – were widespread in Ulster and, importantly, were viewed as having legitimacy by many of the province’s Catholic lower class.

Counterproductively, in early 1848 the Young Ireland leader Charles Gavan Duffy, when writing an organisational report of the Confederate Clubs, had insisted that one of the duties of the rural clubs ought to be to endeavour ‘to discourage secret societies of all kinds whatsoever’.[11]

Second, the Repeal Association had never taken the issue closest to the peasant’s heart – that of the land – seriously. It was largely left to James Fintan Lalor, the Laois Young Irelander and land agitator, to weld together the land and national questions, when he wrote in The Nation throughout 1847 that the former was the ‘locomotive’ that would drive the latter. As O’Neill has remarked, Lalor ‘understood the power of the tenants, if only they were organised’ and he advocated for a form of dual-ownership where the tenant held ultimate power.[12]

But with landlord and aristocratic figures such as William Smith O’Brien also at the highest echelons of Young Ireland, no consensus emerged on the land question and, consequently, no sustained effort was made to appeal to the peasantry with a coherent programme on land ownership.

In Ulster, only late in the day in August of 1847 during the worst year of the Great Famine did the Belfast Vindicator, a pro-Catholic and pro-Repeal organ, call on the Repeal movement to make tenant right (fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale) a ‘leading question’ alongside the question of Ireland’s constitutional status.[13]

Similarly, the Irish Confederates made attempts to win support on the issue of the land by agitating among the burgeoning tenant right movement. In May 1848 tenant righters held a meeting at Shane Hill, County Down, with the aim of achieving a reduction in rents and a new valuation of land in light of the agricultural depression. Placards advertising the meeting – showing Chartist influence and references to the ‘working classes’ – were posted widely around counties Down and Armagh.^[14]

The United Irishman reported that many of those present at the meeting were Protestants or members of the Orange Order. The Irish Confederate Michael Doheny, a Catholic, addressed the meeting. He spoke in republican, anti-sectarian terms and demanded that the tenant farmer, without mounting an assault on the system of landlordism, have security and ‘an equal right to the fruits of his industry’, which was met with great applause.

Doheny also referred to John Mitchel having been ‘thrust into a felon’s cell’, which elicited disgruntlement directed at the Attorney General from the audience. The Northern Whig counted 500 in attendance and described Doheny’s speech as a call to arms.^[15]

Despite the promising signs of denominational solidarity, the Young Irelanders, like the Vindicator, again only came late to the growing demand for tenant right in Ulster. Moreover, their main objective in speaking at tenant right rallies remained the promotion of Repeal rather than a genuine desire to marry the land and national questions as Lalor envisaged.

Their participation in the tenant right campaign at this point (leaders such as Charles Gavan Duffy and others took part in a genuine fashion later on after the failed 1848 rising) can therefore be viewed as opportunistic and doomed from the outset.

The Catholic Clergy

Having no clear programme on the land and having rejected the conspiratorial impulses of the Ulster peasantry, the only remaining force that the Young Irelanders could turn to in the hopes of mobilising rural dwellers in the approach to rebellion were the priests.

The Irish Confederates could have been forgiven for placing a level of trust in the clergy as in the early summer many priests in the south had entered local Confederate Clubs and attained high ranking positions.

However, when leading Irish Confederate William Smith O’Brien attempted to mobilise the peasantry in south Leinster and Munster in July, many of these same clerics warned their flocks not to follow him.^[16]

At least one tangible instance of clerical and rural Confederate mobilisation in Ulster survives in the sources. In mid-May 1848, at Swanlinbar, County Cavan, Father Philip Maguire informed his congregation ‘of the necessity of enrolling themselves’ in Confederate Clubs.

The instructions for doing so had been contained in a declaration sent by Father James Bermingham of Borrisokane, County Tipperary. Bermingham had been among several clergy in Tipperary who had aligned with the Confederates in 1848 and he would later champion tenant right in the county.^[17]

Bermingham’s instructions urged every man between the age of eighteen and 60 to become members of a ‘national guard’ and to ‘furnish themselves with weapons’. The declaration, along with a speech by Smith O’Brien, were hung on the walls of the chapel and circulated among the churchgoers.

Following the service, Hugh Maguire set up a table and chair in the yard and men began to enrol themselves in the newly formed club. Maguire was subsequently arrested, and papers found in his house ‘shewing the capacity he had long been acting in as Repeal Warden’.^[18]

Though this appears to have been an isolated incident, the ease with which the mass goers signed up to the Confederate cause suggests that had there been similar local leaders elsewhere they could have capitalised on the positive nationalist sentiment on display.

Later, during the July rebellion it was reported that ‘Repeal Clubs’ (confused in this instance with Confederate Clubs) had been formed in Maguire’s house, and that around forty young men marched in military formation nearby. They were led by a piper as they proceeded to a wake. The house the wake was held in was inhabited by ‘a better class of person’ and they did not go inside, but instead went to a barn nearby where they awaited riders from Dublin.^[19]

It is significant that Maguire had received direction from the south before he attempted to mobilise his flock. The Catholic clergy of Ulster had always been more conservative due to a cautious tendency which had developed among them from living in close proximity to loyalist elements.

Many priests in the north were more forthright in preaching obedience to the law to their flocks as they had witnessed the effects of Catholics groups (often led by Ribbonmen) clashing with the better armed Orange musters and usually coming off worse.

Indeed, following the split between Young Ireland and O’Connell in 1846, most Ulster Catholic clerics appear to have remained faithful to O’Connell, including future Bishop of Down and Connor Patrick Dorrian,[20] later a thorn in the side of Belfast Fenians during the 1860s.

The number of priests who entered the ranks of the Irish Confederation in Ulster in 1848 appears to have been very small. Instead, a good deal – including Father Devlin of Donoughmore, County Down and Father Magill of Saintfield in the same county – registered their support in the Irish Felon for the attempted reunification of Old and Young Ireland as represented by the Irish League project, which ultimately collapsed in June 1848.^[21]  

Urban Confederate activism

Urban dwellers were generally less in thrall to the whims of the clergy and it is in the towns of the north that the Irish Confederates gained most traction. The composition of the Newry Confederate Club is likely illustrative of the class backgrounds from which the organisation drew support in the wider south Ulster region.

A police report by Head Constable William Madden regarding a Confederate meeting held in Newry in the days leading up to the rising indicated a working-class rank and file of the Irish Confederation there.

According to Madden, who also recorded the attendance of a local baker, shopkeeper and clerk, about 100 people were present at the meeting, ‘most of whom had the appearance of the labouring class’. The leadership, meanwhile, was dominated by the middle classes, with merchants, professionals and shopkeepers to the fore.^[22]

In the urban centres of mid and west Ulster Confederate efforts were limited to the work of determined individual emissaries such as William Ward. In early March Ward was arrested in Dungannon after he had been agitating in the town. He had carried a placard depicting a French revolutionary image and ‘harangued the persons assembled in the market square, on the late revolution in Paris’.[23] Ward was arrested again only a month later in Belturbet, County Cavan, for selling newspapers ‘calculated to excite the minds of the public’ and having in his possession a similar placard.^[24]

The furthest west in the province the Confederate Clubs seem to have reached is Enniskillen, and only very late and with no remarkable effect.^[25] In Derry, apart from several uncorroborated reports of arms being stored in various houses around the city in the week leading up to the rebellion and a meeting being held on 30 June, the Confederates appear to have had minimal impact.^[26]

But news of more serious activity and arms discoveries reached Dublin Castle from the towns of the south Ulster borderlands such as Dundalk, Ballybay and Carrickmacross.^[27] Not coincidentally, these commercialised towns had been areas of impressive United Irish organisation during the 1790s.

The rebels of Ballybay, for instance, kept up activity after the 1798 Rebellion and into the year 1800, and in 1803 organisers from Dublin were sent to coordinate Emmet’s attempted rising of that year in the south Ulster area, which, according to Brian MacDonald, ‘was still considered to have strong revolutionary potential’.[28]

In June 1848, in Ballybay, a plot to blow up the local gunpowder magazine was thwarted when a hole bored in its wall along with various markings out on the street were discovered.^[29] Previously, in April, John French, resident magistrate in Dundalk, reported that ‘pikes were being made to order’ by a blacksmith in the area and that he had pikes of different descriptions brought to him by the police in the town.^[30]

The same month a number of pikes were seized in Carrickmacross with the blacksmith in whose possession they were found admitting he had made more.^[31] In Castleblayney, meanwhile, in the days leading up to the rebellion a number of pikes and handles were found by the constabulary in the house of a man named Finnigan in the town.^[32]

The Foster Confederate Club, Newry

The aforementioned town of Newry, which straddles the southern portions of the counties of Armagh and Down, had borne witness to frequent Repeal activity and debate from 1846,[33] and it is there that Irish Confederate efforts in south Ulster were focused.

In May 1846 the town’s Repealers had engaged in debate over the policy of abstention from Westminster, which had been adopted by William Smith O’Brien as a tactic to push for Repeal. The Newry Repealers eventually passed a vote of confidence in Smith O’Brien during his term of imprisonment for abstention.[34]

However, other issues, not least among them the theoretical use of physical force, eventually ruptured the Repeal Association both nationally and locally in July 1846 into rival Young and Old Ireland groupings. Following the split the O’Connellite loyalist grouping in Newry’s Repeal Association went into decline and was superseded in terms of activity by the Irish Confederates who held meetings through 1847 and into the first half of 1848.^[35]

Yet, in the wake of the fissure of mid-1846 and throughout 1847 the political affiliation and ideology of both camps remained in a state of flux. The O’Connellite rejection of physical force in Newry, for instance, was shown to be somewhat ambiguous when the Repeal organ in the town, the Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser, offered condolences to United Irishman James ‘Jemmy’ Hope when he was on his deathbed in January 1847.[36]

In spite of the rift, Confederate fortunes fared well in Newry where, on 22 November 1847, a meeting was held that passed off peacefully. At the gathering John Mitchel, a native of Newry himself, argued for independence from the ‘fangs of England’ citing economic reasons such as poor rates, low agricultural prices, ‘pauperism’ and ‘imperial taxes’.

Mitchel highlighted the autocratic nature of the Repeal Association and promised the audience that the Confederation, which he claimed ‘was not a party’ in the traditional sense, would allow for free thinking and not bind its members to the expressions of other members, to resolutions passed or to articles in Confederate journals. The relative success of the assembly caused the Examiner (who despite the split still wrote favourably of those who seceded) to state that the Irish Confederates had ‘won the frontier town of the north to Repeal’.[37]

But tidings of success had been premature on the part of the Examiner. By the spring of 1848 the ‘Old Ireland’ or O’Connellite contingent had rallied and managed to disrupt a Confederate meeting in Newry. On 18 February 1848, the Belfast Newsletter reported on one such assembly held in the town:

It was evident, from the confusion and interruption which prevailed during the whole of the proceedings, that a great portion, if not the majority, of the persons present, accounting to four or five hundred, were hostile to the principles of the Young Irelanders.^[38]

Ultimately, for the Vindicator, the turbulence and factionalism surrounding the meeting was counterproductive and assisted in ‘confirming the prejudices which exist in Ulster against Repeal of the Union’.[39]

The Examiner had reported on same assembly in more favourable terms, however. It noted that a ‘Great Confederate Meeting’ was held in a store room belonging to James Ferguson, a merchant tanner and currier, at 38 Merchant’s Quay.[40]

Merchants and others from the better off classes who led the Irish Confederation were numerous in Newry. Henderson’s Directory of 1854 described the town as ‘an important sea-port, an extensive market town, and Parliamentary borough’. Along the quays there were large and well-built warehouses, while the streets were regular and compact and the shops neat and lighted with gas. There were printers, drapers, publicans and a substantial cohort of large traders and provisions suppliers.^[41]

Other attendees at the meeting included several Young Irelander figures: David Ross, president of the Newry Club; Michael Doheny, who made a speech appealing to the landlord class; John Martin, a Newry Presbyterian, and Belfast man John Rea. A solicitor, Rea later defended John Mitchel after his arrest for treason.^[42]

The crowd was estimated at between five and 800, including some of the town’s upper classes. The Examiner reported that:

On the platform and in its immediate vicinity, as well as in the lower part of the room, we observed several of the most respectable merchants, professional men, and shopkeepers of Newry … on a side gallery were several of the respectable ladies of Newry.^[43]

Despite the discord between Young and Old Ireland in the town and the problems at the meetings, in June 1848 both factions backed the moves towards reconciliation in the form of the Irish League. The Old Irelanders put their trust in ‘whatever our inestimable leader, John O’Connell considers most suitable to the welfare of his native land’.

And at a meeting held in the John Mitchell Confederate Club rooms in the town on 19 June it was also resolved to support the fledgling Irish League.^[44] However, the attempt fell apart on a national level when John O’Connell withdrew his support citing the Confederates’ continued support for the theoretical use of physical force.

Protestant responses

The response among Ulster Protestants to this rise in physical force republican activity and the move towards rebellion by the Irish Confederates was not uniform. Since the early 1840s the Young Irelanders, many of whom were Protestants, had made genuine appeals to their co-religionists for support.

Such attempts were still being made in the period 1847-48 following the establishment of the Irish Confederation.

The Confederation sent delegates to Ulster in 1847 and again in 1848 to canvas Protestant support for Repeal and their efforts probably played a part in the founding of an autonomously operated Protestant Repeal Association in Belfast during May 1848.

However, the Confederates, like the Repealers before them, failed to win mass support among Protestants and many Orange Lodges rallied in reaction to the perceived nationalist threat. The Great Famine had quelled ‘party demonstrations’ such as the Twelfth, with a particularly low figure for 1847. But with the lapse of the Party Processions Act in 1845 and the rise of the Irish Confederation in 1848 hostilities redoubled, with loyalist mobilisation increasing significantly during the course of the year.[45]

In some places the magistracy assisted in mobilising sections of Orangeism on an independent basis. In County Monaghan, Lord Shirley and others met and resolved to call on local loyalists to ‘enrol their names for the purpose of associating for mutual defence.’^[46] Nonetheless, the ever-vigilant Orange Order took the lead. As Allan Blackstock has documented, across Ulster ‘many Protestant gentry re-joined the Orange Order, often renewing familial continuity with the 1790s’.^[47]

In March 1848, in Campbell’s Hotel in Armagh City, the Order passed a resolution in response to the February Revolution in France, that had overthrown the monarchy there and founded the Second French Republic. The Armagh Guardian reported that the Order resolved that it viewed with ‘abhorrence and detestation the sympathy expressed by the disaffected and revolutionary party of Ireland with the anarchists of France.’ ^[48] 

Such resolutions were made within the context of events in Paris and large meetings in favour of revolution that had been held in Ulster towns such as Cookstown, Dungannon, Omagh, Beragh and Belfast.[49]

The remobilisation of some Orange Lodges was accelerated by government connivance in attempting to utilise its networks as a mechanism for counter-revolution, as had been the order of the day in the late 1790s too. Lord Lieutenant Clarendon made overtures to the Orange Order and turned a blind eye to the provision of arms and funding to loyalists. A report carried in the Banner of Ulster in May 1848, noted how ‘arms, accoutrements, and ammunition were forwarded … under military escorts, from this town [Belfast], to Derry, Armagh, and Newry, for the loyalists of those districts if their services be required’.^[50]

Rebellion on the horizon?

By the end of May, and in the wake of Young Ireland leader John Mitchell’s arrest under the Treason Felony Act, the Newry Club had moved to a more radical position. The former President David Ross was ousted by the more militant Patrick Byrne. At a meeting held on the 22 May, Mitchell’s The United Irishman reported that Byrne, on the platform, ‘exhibited two very beautiful specimens of pike-heads, manufactured in Newry’.

Signalling the increased radicalism of the club, Byrne went on to accuse the former president of being an opportunist who would not speak out against Mitchell’s incarceration or support the rebellion that seemed to be approaching.^[51] By June, further evidence of this shift had been noted by the police when it was reported that the Foster Club had recently changed its name to the Mitchel Confederate Club in solidarity with their recently convicted leader.

As the summer of 1848 progressed, the Confederates at a local level felt their hand being forced by government with their national leaders before the courts. As a result, a surge in their organisational endeavours was put in motion, including in Newry. Now local magistrates and police forces followed the lead of their superiors in Dublin in attempting to suppress the Confederate Clubs. By June, Head-Constable William Madden of Newry had been dispatched by resident magistrate Singleton to monitor the proceedings of the John Mitchel Confederate Club more closely.^[52]

In July, the Newry Old Irelanders petitioned the administration to profess their loyalty to the crown and request that they be allowed the opportunity to act as special constables to put down any planned rebellion.^[53] To the delight of the Tory Belfast Newsletter, who cried out that ‘the Repeal agitation was the fons et origo – the nursing mother – of the present widespread and dangerous disaffection’, the Newry magistrates rejected their request.^[54]

As the rebellion approached towards the end of July the merchant James Ferguson (who was by now vice-president of the Mitchel Club) held military drilling sessions on his property in the town at the large commons by the quay. On 24 July a meeting of the club was held in the house of Christopher White in the Mall area of Newry. James Martin, brother of prominent Newry Young Irelander John Martin, chaired the meeting.

According to Head-Constable Madden, ‘many others whose names at present I do not know’ were in attendance. The meeting gave ‘three cheers for Repeal’ and ‘three cheers for all the Irish felons’. An article by Charles Gavan Duffy which commented on the ‘spirit of the people’ in 1848 in comparison to 1843 (the ‘Repeal Year’) was read by a baker named James Fearon.^[55]

An informant by the name of John Boyd wrote to the Castle regarding the meeting to state that it ‘was not large nor were the speeches of a very violent nature’. However, he also reported that ‘the sale of firearms is carrying on to a very great extent here, this day a number of rifles of a very handy kind were sold with bayonets attached’.^[56] On 26 July, two days before the rising, resident magistrate Singleton conducted a search in Newry and found a number of newly fashioned pikes in the attic of club president Patrick Byrne at his residence in Corn Market.^[57]

Hopes dashed

When the rising eventually occurred on 28 July, it remained confined to the south, and, as already mentioned, ended unsuccessfully. Ulster did not rise at all. John Mitchel had been exiled and the other leaders, chief among them William Smith O’Brien, were preoccupied with precipitating rebellion among the peasantry in Leinster and Munster.

In the north, government repression in the form of arrests, the deployment of military detachments to districts where rebellion was anticipated, the equipping of constabulary with additional weaponry and the remobilisation of Orange Lodges also quelled any hopes the Confederate Clubs in Ulster might have had of rising up.

In Newry, in the weeks after the rising in the south the house of William McGuinness, described by the police as a ‘leading officer’ of the Mitchel Club, was searched on 15 August and rifles, bayonets, bullet moulds and three pounds of gunpowder were found.^[58]

Confederate activity in the town gradually fizzled out. One of the last reports concerning the movement there came in September 1848 when two Confederate activists were arrested for dispensing cards marked ‘L’ and ‘G’, standing for ‘liberty’ and ‘glory’, and exclaiming that William Smith O’Brien ‘would be along shortly’.^[59]

But if hopes for a rising were dashed and activism among the Confederates eventually faded, then what was the legacy of the Young Irelanders in south Ulster?

Despite their shortcomings and opportunism on the question of the land, their misguided expectation that an essentially counter-revolutionary body such as the Catholic priesthood would assist them, and their failure to win mass support among Protestants, the Irish Confederates played a major role in democratising Irish nationalism.

The Foster/Mitchel Club in Newry, in particular, had created a lively culture of debate, activism, and, later, military preparation among a section of the town’s middle and working classes. Hitherto, these nationalists had been relegated to the role of onlookers and financial contributors to O’Connell’s élite controlled mass campaigns.

In the revolutionary climate of 1848 they redefined themselves as independent-minded political participants. Or, to use Mitchel’s words, they had become ‘free thinking’ republican revolutionaries.

References

[1] Catherine Hirst, Religion, politics and violence in nineteenth-century Belfast: the Pound and Sandy Row (Dublin, 2002), pp 51-67; Christine Kinealy and Gerard Mac Atasney, The hidden Famine: hunger, poverty and sectarianism in Belfast (London, 2000), pp 147-58; Kerron Ó Luain, ‘Young and Old Ireland: Repeal politics in Belfast, 1846-48, in New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua: a Quarterly Review of Irish Studies (Forthcoming, 2019).

[2] ‘Land League Alphabet’, Tristia, County Mayo & Bredagh Glen, County Donegal (National Folklore Collection, Schools Collection, vol.0133, p.109 & vol.1118, p.105).

[3] Report of RM to Under-Secretary Thomas Nicholas Redington (hereafter Redington), Dundalk, 25 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 20/74).

[4] Lord Shirley to Castle, Carrickmacross, 17 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 23/93).

[5] Earl of Gosford to Redington, 14 May 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 2/112).

[6] John Welsh JP to Castle, Banbridge, 25 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/183).

[7] Armagh Guardian., 31 July 1848.

[8] John Nugent to Castle, Portaferry, July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/184).

[9] John Nugent to Castle, Portaferry, late July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/190).

[10] Armagh Guardian, 7 Aug. 1848.

[11] Charles Gavan Duffy, Report on organization and instructions for the formation and government of the Confederate Clubs (Dublin, 1847) (N.L.I., Pamphlets, P 2007, no. 3, p. 7).

[12] Thomas P. O’Neill, James Fintan Lalor (2nd edn., translated from Irish, Dublin, 2003), p. 119

[13] Belfast Vindicator, 21 Aug. 1847.

[14] The Northern Whig, 27 May 1848.

[15] United Irishman, 27 May 1848.

[16] R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in context: Irish politics and society 1848-82 (2nd edn., Dublin, 1998), pp 15-17.

[17] James O’Shea, Priests, politics and society in post-Famine Ireland (Dublin, 1983), pp 69, 143.

[18] Constable Duggan to Sub-Inspector, 18 May 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 4/204).

[19] RM Holmes to Redington, 28 July (N.A.I., OR 1848, 4/287).

[20] Belfast Vindicator, 23 Sept. 1846.

[21] Irish Felon, 24 June 1848.

[22] Constable Madden to RM Singleton, Newry, July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/181).

[23] J. L. Grahaeus to RM Coulson, Dungannon, 9 March 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, no number); Michael Phillips JP to Chief Secretary William Somerville, Belturbet, 13 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 4/149).

[24] Michael Phillips JP to Chief Secretary William Somerville, Belturbet, 13 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 4/149).

[25] Armagh Guardian, 24 July 1848.

[26] Mayor Alex Lindsay to Redington, Derry, 20 July 1848, (N.A.I., OR 1848, 18/72).

[27] RM French to Redington, Dundalk, 1 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 20/128); RM French to Redington, Dundalk, 15 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 20/147).

[28] Brian MacDonald, ‘South Ulster in the age of the United Irishmen’ in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 232, 235, 242.

[29] Deputy Quarter Master General R. L. Marsden to the Military Secretary, Dublin Castle, 1 June 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 23/126); RM Ruthven to Redington, Ballybay, 27 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 23/146).

[30] RM French to Redington, Dundalk, 22 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR, 1848, 20/72).

[31] Lord Shirley to Castle, Carrickmacross, 17 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 23/93).

[32] Armagh Guardian, 31 July 1848.

[33] See for example Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser, 3 Oct. 1846.

[34] BV, 20 & 30 May & 13 June 1846.

[35] RM Singleton to Redington, 14 March 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 2/57).

[36] Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser, 16 Jan. 1847.

[37] The Nation, 27 Nov. 1847.

[38] Belfast Newsletter, 18 Feb. 1848.

[39] Belfast Vindicator, 17 Nov. 1847.

[40] Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser, 17 Feb. 1848.

[41] James Alexander Henderson, The Belfast and province of Ulster directory; volume ii, published at the news-letter office (Belfast, 1854), pp 681-90.

[42] Ulster Biography, (http://www.newulsterbiography.co.uk) (29/06/2012). Rea was born in West Street, Belfast, in 1822 and became a prominent figure in the city’s political landscape. Rea contested the 1874 general election for Belfast unsuccessfully. He committed suicide in 1881.

[43] The Nation, 19 Feb. 1848; NE, 17 Feb. 1848.

[44] Irish Felon, 24 June 1848.

[45] Return of outrages reported to the constabulary office during the years 1848-1867, N.A.I. [CSO/ICR 1].

[46] Lord Shirley to Castle, Carrickmacross, 17 April 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 23/93).

[47] Allan Blackstock, ‘The trajectories of loyalty and loyalism in Ireland, 1793-1849’ in Allan Blackstock and Frank O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the formation of the British world, 1775-1880 (Suffolk, 2014), p. 119.

[48] Armagh Guardian, 27 March 1848.

[49] The New York Freeman, 15 April 1848, cited in Kinealy, Repeal and revolution, pp 137-8.

[50] Banner of Ulster, 13 May 1848.

[51] United Irishman, 27 May 1848.

[52] Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser, 16 June 1848.

[53] Joseph Loughran to Castle, Newry, 31 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/209).

[54] Belfast Newsletter, 8 Aug. 1848.

[55] Constable Madden to RM Singleton, Newry, July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/181).

[56] John Boyd to Redington, Newry, 25 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 8/182).

[57] RM Singleton to Redington, 26 July 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 2/204).

[58] J. Phawfad JP to Inspector General, Newry, 20 Aug. 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 2/220).

[59] RM Singleton to Redington, Newry, Sept. 1848 (N.A.I., OR 1848, 2/264).

The War between King James and King William in 1689-91, that decided the fate of Ireland. By John Dorney

Every year on July 12, Orangemen in Northern Ireland march to commemorate the victory of William of Orange ‘King Billy’ over the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

In fact the Boyne took place on July 1, 1690 and originally Protestants commemorated the culminating battle of Aughrim, fought on July 12, 1691, on the Twelfth. But no matter, the Boyne is still commemorated because of its symbolism.

For at the Boyne were present two kings, one the Catholic James Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, supported by France of Louis XIV and most of Ireland’s Catholics, representing, supposedly, absolutism and tyranny.

And on the other side was the Protestant William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and claimant to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, supported by the English Parliament, most of Ireland’s Protestants and by a coalition of Protestant powers including Denmark and William’s native Netherlands.

According to the ‘Whig’ (English Liberal) and indeed the Orange tradition, William’s force stood for religious freedom, representative government and the rule of law.

For Irish Catholics or ‘Jacobites’ – supporters of King James – the war was a great defeat – leading to an era of broken Treaties, oppression, and religious persecution. ‘Cuimhnigi Luimneach agus feall na Sassanaigh’ was a popular saying in 18th century Ireland – ‘remember [the Treaty of] Limerick and English treachery’.

It seems curious at this remove that such a war was fought so fiercely and is still commemorated so fervently in Ireland today. Was it not after all, just a squabble between two foreign kings for the throne of England? Indeed in the Irish language the war was known as ‘Cogadh an Da Ri’ or the War of the Two Kings.

But in fact, the fate of Ireland was inseparably bound up with who held power in England and in the 17th century, religious identity was not something that could be avoided. Access to land, political power, and even to the law all depended on one’s allegiance to one or other faction. The Jacobite-Williamite War or ‘War of the Two Kings’ – notwithstanding the mythology it subsequently produced, really was a watershed event in the history of Ireland.

Background

The War of the Two Kings was the culmination of over a century of ethno -religious wars and strife in Ireland.

By the early 17th century the English state had for the first time overcome the independent Gaelic lordships and established political control over the whole of the Kingdom of Ireland – governed by an English administration in Dublin Castle.

Large colonies of English and laterally Scottish, settlers had been ‘planted’ in Ulster, Munster and Leinster, in land confiscated from rebellious Irish lords, to secure the conquest.

With political control came also religious domination. The Protestant Anglican Church was made the established Church of the Kingdom, it inherited all Church property and attendances at is services were made compulsory, with non-attendance punished by fines.

More importantly, deviance in religion meant that Catholics could not hold government posts and opened the possibility of the confiscation of the land of the Catholic gentry.

While most of the new English and Scottish settlers were Protestants, the large majority of the pre-Conquest Irish population, both Gaelic and ‘Old English’ in origin, were Catholics.

In 1641, Catholics rose in rebellion, in an attempt to redress these grievances, triggering a ferocious eleven year war. This ended in Oliver Cromwell’s re-conquest of Ireland on behalf of the English Parliament and the total dispossession of the Catholic land-holding class.

One of the complicating factors of that war was that it coincided with Civil War and Revolution in England itself. Catholics in Ireland claimed to be loyal to the Stuart Monarchy while Protestants allied themselves with the English Parliament.

So when Cromwell died in 1660, the Commonwealth or Republic he had founded fell apart and the Stuart monarchy was restored, Irish Catholics expected to be rewarded for their loyalty and to be returned the lands they had lost.

This did not happen however. Only a minority of high ranking Royalist Catholics received their lands back in the Restoration and Catholics remained excluded from political power.

Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, owed his restoration as King to the Army, many of whom (as part of Cromwell’s New Model Army) had been granted confiscated land in Ireland. Nor was there much sympathy for Irish Catholics in England, where it was believed that the Irish had wantonly massacred thousands of Protestants settlers in the rebellion of 1641. As a result, the Cromwellian settlement, which had eliminated all Catholic landholdings except in the province of Connacht, was largely allowed to stand.

While the war of mid century had in many respects been an ethnic and religious war in Ireland, rather than a contest between King and Parliament, Catholics complained they had been punished for their loyalty to the Crown while Protestants had been rewarded for their rebellion against it.

This all changed when James II, a Catholic, came to power in 1685.  James did not overturn the land settlement in Ireland, but he did allow Catholics to return to political power, appointing one, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell as Lord Deputy of Ireland, effectively the governor of the country. Talbot was far from a Gaelic chieftain, he was the scion of an old English Pale family, but he emerged as the leader of the Catholic political interest.

As Lord Deputy, Talbot not only filled his administration with Catholics, he also re-admitted Catholics to the Army, including the officer corps, arming and training the representatives of a disgruntled and revanchist majority.

Protestants in Ireland feared at best, a Catholic takeover of the government of Ireland and a dismantling of the Cromwellian land settlement and at worst, a repeat of the massacres of 1641, during which they believed that Catholics had attempted to kill or expel their community in its entirety.

James was later painted a potential tyrant who would have been an absolutist monarch in the mould of Louis XIV of France.

However, in at least one respect, James’ reputation as an enemy of ‘civil and religious freedom’ is undeserved. In 1687 he decreed that there would be liberty of conscience for all religions within his three kingdoms, including both Catholics and Protestant non-conformists as well as the official Anglican Church.

However, James II had a difficult relationship with the English Parliament and when his wife gave birth to an heir, they began to intrigue with foreign Protestant powers in order to prevent James founding a Catholic dynasty in England. In 1688 elements of the Parliament offered the throne of England to William of Orange Stadtholder (effectively President for life) of the Netherlands.

William needed the support of England against France as the head of coalition of European powers, including as it happens, the Papacy, worried by Louis XIV’s aggressive expansionism.

And so in 1688 William invaded England with a strong Dutch Army. Elements of the English Army defected to William after his landing and James fled the country for France after minimal resistance. The Parliaments of England and Scotland judged James to have abdicated and declared William to be King and his wife, James’ daughter Mary, to be Queen.

But in Ireland the Jacobites – Catholic supporters of James – were not only the majority but they also controlled the Army. They quickly secured most of the fortified towns and cities in the country and declared that James was still the rightful King of Ireland.

The stakes in Ireland were higher, in a sense, than for most in England or Scotland. In Ireland both Catholics and Protestants believed that their lands, political futures and even their lives depended on having their coreligionist as King.

The Siege of Derry

Protestant resistance to the Jacobite regime was initially crushed. Justin McCarthy, Viscount Mountcashel put down a Protestant Williamite (supporters of William) rebellion at Bandon, County Cork and in Dromore, County Down a rising of local Williamites was also easily defeated.

Only in the walled city of Derry, in the north west, did the Protestant Williamite minority hold out.

Derry or Londonderry was an almost exclusively Protestant town, having been founded during the Ulster Plantation with funds from the banks of the city of London. Now its citizens closed the city’s gates to the Jacobite Army that approached it and went on to endure a four month siege by Jacobite forces.

However, in July 1689, Derry was relieved by ships from England that sailed up the river Foyle, breaking the Jacobites’ blockade of the city. The Williamite resistance at Derry was strategically not terribly important, but psychologically it was a great boost to Protestant Wiliamites, their first victory of the campaign in Ireland. The siege is still annually commemorated and is the origin of loyalist slogans such as ‘No Surrender’.

Not long after the siege was broken, the Jacobites were driven from north west Ulster altogether, when their forces were routed by local Williamite militias, at a battle at Newtownbutler, near Enniskillen.

Meanwhile, it had become clear that Ireland would become the battleground where the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland would be fought over.

James himself arrived in Ireland, along with French money and 6,000 troops, sent by Louis XIV of France, in a first step to recover his throne. William sent a Dutch general, Schomberg, together with a contingent of English and Dutch forces, to put down Jacobite resistance, landing at Carrigfergus in north east Ulster, where Protestant settlement was largest and Williamite support was strongest, in August of 1689.

There followed a period of inconclusive campaigning around southern Ulster and Dundalk in the autumn of 1689, in which both Jacobite and Williamite armies circled around each other but did not come to battle. Nevertheless, thousands of Schomberg’s troops died of disease in his insanitary camps and he was forced to retire to winter quarters.

William of Orange decided that he had to come to Ireland to finish the job himself and arrived with further reinforcements at Carrigfergus in June of 1690.

Jacobite Ireland

While James had little interest in Ireland in and of itself, viewing it mainly as a means of recovering the throne of England, for his supporters, the Irish Jacobites, it was a chance to reverse more than a century of English and Protestant domination. There were some Protestant Jacobites, who viewed James as the lawful King and William’s accession to the throne as an illegal putsch, but by and large this was an Irish Catholic movement.

At both elite and popular levels, there were clear signs that this was a kind of ‘proto-nationalism’. At an elite level this was manifested in the Irish Parliament that met from May to July 1689. It was a conventional parliament of the era, elected by a highly restricted franchise of landowners, containing both a House of Commons and of Lords, whose purpose was not to govern but rather to debate and ratify new laws and new taxation.

But, as well as officially recognising James as the legitimate monarch of the Three Kingdoms, the parliament also attempted to advance the Irish Catholic cause.

It overturned the Cromwellian land settlement, restoring to Catholics all lands confiscated since the 1650s, removed both religious and political discrimination against Catholics and dissenters and passed a law stating that the English Parliament could no longer pass laws relating to Ireland without the consent of the Irish parliament. If not quite a declaration of independence, it was certainly an insistence on Ireland’s equality within the Stuart Kingdoms.

If Irish Williamites may have been comforted by the fact that the Jacobite parliament had favoured freedom of religion over Catholic supremacy, they were probably less so by the fact that a further Bill named 2,000 Williamites as traitors and rebels against their lawful sovereign, whose lives and property were to be forfeit in the event of a Jacobite victory.

At a more popular level, it is also possible to discern public engagement with Jacobite cause. It was popularly taken up in the Irish language poetry of the day and outside of the formal Jacobite armies, marauding bands of guerrillas known as rapparees – some led by characters such as Hugh Baldearg O’Donnell, who claimed to be the rightful heirs of the old Gaelic lords – also harassed Williamite forces.

With all that said, the short-lived Jacobite administration in Ireland was plagued with problems.   They were perennially short of money, dependent on French subsidies to keep their armies in the field and resorted to increasingly desperate measure in order to fiance the war.

Initially they tried to enforce a property tax and then, when that failed to collect enough money, they attempted to mint their own currency, derisively termed ‘gun-money’ by their Williamite enemies, as it was supposedly composed of melted down brass from cannon barrels. Nevertheless Jacobite soldiers were rarely paid and were badly supplied and equipped.

The Battle of the Boyne

The turning point of the war came when William marched south on Dublin with a large army of over 36,000 men in June of 1690.

James’ forces, outnumbered by about 3-2, offered resistance at the river Boyne, just to the west of the town Drogheda. On July 1, 1690 the Williamites successfully crossed the river at a number of points and forced the Jacobites into retreat.

Though there was some hard fighting in and around the river crossings, notably at the village of Oldbridge, casualties were fairly light on both sides. The Jacobite army retreated but was not pursued effectively due to determined counter attacks by Jacobite  cavalry.

It might well be pondered, then, why the battle of the Boyne is viewed today as such a decisive turning point in Irish history. Neither army had been destroyed or even greatly weakened. The Williamites had crossed the river but still had yet to approach, let alone take Dublin.

The main reason for the Boyne’s significance is that it precipitated a collapse in James’ confidence. Witnessing the repulse of his army at the Boyne and the subsequent disorderly retreat to Dublin, he despaired of victory and within days had ridden to the port of Duncannon and from there took ship back to France. In other words, the defeat at the Boyne convinced James, quite prematurely, that he had lost the war.

James’ flight temporarily discomfited the Jacobites, who abandoned Dublin without a fight and retreated west of the river Shannon. William entered the Irish capital in triumph on July 27, about four weeks after his victory at the Boyne.

In spite of this, the Jacobites in Ireland fought on, not so much in the hope of James’ restoration now, as in safeguarding some of the gains they had made regarding Catholic landownership and freedom of religion.

Neither of these was mentioned by William in peace terms he published at Finglas, just before he entered Dublin, in which he offered pardon to the Jacobite rank and file but not the ‘desperate leaders of the rebellion’.

Contrary to William’s hopes, the anticipated large scale surrenders did not materialise. Rather the Jacobites managed to reform their army and took up quarters in and around the city of Limerick, in the west.

Sarsfield and the Siege of Limerick

Wanting to to get the campaign in Ireland over with, William marched west to besiege Limerick. However his artillery train was ambushed and destroyed by a daring cavalry raid carried out by the emerging Jacobite leader Patrick Sarsfield.

When more big guns were brought up from Waterford, the Williamites battered a breach in Limerick’s walls and mounted a direct assault on August 27.

In subsequent fierce fighting in the breach, the Williamites crack Dutch and Danish troops suffered severely, up to 3,000 being killed and wounded by close range musket and cannon fire and even stones and other missiles hurled by the townsmen and women of Limerick.

After his repulse at Limerick, William withdrew his forces east of the Shannon, though the Williamites did successfully besiege and take the ports of Cork and Kinsale on the south coast. William himself left Ireland and put his forces under the command of a Dutch general Godert de Ginkel.

The objective of the French in Ireland had always been, not so much Jacobite victory, still less the restoration of Catholicism there, as prolonging the war and diverting English and Dutch resources from war fronts in continental Europe. And for this reason, after the Jacobites’ defence of Limerick, Louis XIV sent more troops, money and a new commander, the Marquis of St Ruth, to Ireland in late 1690.

The battle of Aughrim and the end of the war

Warfare in the 17th century was very much dependent on the seasons. Large armies simply could not be moved or fed in the winter months and so it was not until the following summer of 1691 that the Willamite forces under Ginkel again tried to smother the Jacobite enclave in the west of Ireland.

Following a hard fought siege at Athlone, which commands the main crossing over the river Shannon, the Williamites marched towards Limerick. The Jacobites met them at the village of Aughrim, a hamlet astride the roads towards the towns of both Galway and Limerick.

There followed an all-day battle, on July 12, 1691, perhaps the bloodiest in Irish history, in which the Jacobites resisted numerous Williamite attacks, until the death of their commander St Ruth – his head was taken off by a cannon ball- and the flight of their cavalry forced them to give way. Much of their army was destroyed in the subsequent rout, cut down by pursuing Williamite horsemen. Thousands of bodies lay unburied on the hillside at Aughrim for months afterwards.

The Jacobites retreated to Limerick again, but this time they were greatly weakened and with their morale shattered.  After enduring a siege for several months, during which Richard Talbot Earl of Tyrconnell died of disease, Patrick Sarsfield ousted the French commanders and negotiated a surrender.

‘Remember Limerick’

Sarsfield signed the Treaty of Limerick, with Ginkel, under which Sarsfield and over 10,000 Jacobite soldiers were to leave for France to continue to serve King James there.

More importantly, the Treaty gave guarantees that no more Catholic owned land would be confiscated and no more discriminatory legislation would be passed against the Catholic religion than had existed prior to James’ accession to the throne.

And so the ‘War of the Two Kings’ was ended in a relatively orderly and humane manner. There were no massacres of the defeated and fairly conciliatory terms for former Jacobites as long as they pledged allegiance to William. William after all, and his Dutch generals had little particular interest in Irish affairs. Their only real motivation was in a prompt end to the war in Ireland and to its use as a military base by James and the French.

However, the now all-Protestant Irish Parliament that met in 1692 was a very different proposition. They most certainly had an interest in making sure that no attempt would again by made to overturn Protestant supremacy in Ireland. They quickly set about confiscating land from former Jacobite supporters and from 1695 onwards, passed series of Penal Laws against Catholics that, aside from religious provisions against the Catholic Church, also barred Catholics from holding public office, serving in the Army, bearing arms and owning land over a certain amount.

All of which was indeed quite successful at making sure that there were to be no more Jacobite rebellions in Ireland in the coming century, even when they broke out in Scotland in 1715 and 1745. By the late 18th century only a fragment of the Catholic land owning class survived.

Thus, Catholics generally considered, in the decades that followed, that the terms of the Treaty of Limerick had been broken, indeed, treacherously so.

Legacy and memory

The ‘War of the Two Kings’  was the major military conflict of what is known in British history as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, in which Britain was, according to the national narrative, saved from absolutism and the monarch was forced to govern through a parliament and while respecting a bill of rights.

Obviously, when applied to Ireland, this narrative fits rather awkwardly. The war may have played a part in founding constitutional government – the Irish Parliament was to be a much more important institution throughout the 18th than before – but it also disenfranchised the majority of the population, not only Catholics but also Protestant ‘dissenters’ such as Presbyterians.

Ireland in the 18th century was ruled by a small class of landowning Anglican Protestants, mostly of English stock.

It is therefore not surprising that the war was celebrated by the victorious Williamites and their descendants as a ‘deliverance from Popery and tyranny’. However the modern Orange tradition that keeps alive the memory today is in fact the product of a much later and more tangled history.

Throughout the 18th century, Irish Protestants commemorated the outbreak of the rebellion of 1641, when they believed their community had only just escaped extermination, more than the battles of Aughrim or the Boyne.

It was not until the 1790s, at a time when Catholics were again agitating for political rights and the Republican revolutionaries the United Irishmen were preparing for insurrection, the Orange Order was founded in Armagh. Its history of marching on the Twelfth of July in commemoration of the battle of the Boyne dates from this era and not from the 1690s.

Nevertheless even today the Orange Order states that it commemorates William’s ‘victory over despotic power laid the foundation for the evolution of Constitutional Democracy in the British Isles’.

On the other side, memory of the Jacobite cause was more complex. James II himself was mocked by Irish poets as ‘Seamus a chaca’ – ‘James the shit’ the cowardly English King who had ‘lost Ireland’. But there was also a nostalgic genre of Jacobite poetry and songs throughout the 18th century that pined for the return of the ‘true king’, with the ‘Wild Geese’ or Irish soldiers who had left for French service, who together would who would rescue Irish Catholics from ‘slavery’.

The later Irish nationalist tradition would also rehabilitate many Jacobite heroes such as Patrick Sarsfield as fighters for Irish freedom and the nationalists like Thomas Davis and later Charles Gavin Duffy would christen the Jacobite parliament of 1689 as the ‘Patriot Parliament’ for its assertion of independence.

But unlike the Orange tradition, modern Irish nationalist and particularly Republican narratives tend to be uncomfortable with the Jacobites’ loyalty to an English monarch, let alone with ideas such as the divine right of kings, which James Stuart held to.

The War of the Two Kings, was a time when Ireland was briefly at the centre of European-wide struggle for power and also a decisive turning point in Irish history.

Edited by Dermot Meleady

Published by Irish Academic Press, 2018.

Reviewer: Diarmuid Bolger

John Redmond, the Wexford-born leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1900 until 1918, is one whose place in the history, and historiography, of Ireland has always been convoluted.

As Dermot Meleady makes clear by the second page of John Redmond: Selected Letters and Memoranda,1880 – 1918, much of the initial history written about the constitutional nationalist leader came from what the author calls ‘the Sinn Féin permeated political culture’.

This can perhaps be seen as one of the reasons why, after his death, Redmond never received the same level of recognition as other constitutional nationalist leaders received; most notably Daniel O’Connell and Redmond’s mentor Charles Stewart Parnell – both of whom have statues and streets named after them in the centre of Dublin.

These two men had the same  advantage, in term of popular memory, as their primary nationalist opponents (the Young Irelanders/anti-Parnellites) never coming to power, meaning that their place in the historical narrative of nationalist Ireland would never become as damaged as that of John Redmond.

Throw in the unpopularity of the First World War, Irish participation in which Redmond championed, as well as the intensive post-independence effort to downplay the memory and idea of Irishmen fighting for the British Army – a stance which has now thankfully ended – this all meant that John Redmond was always going to be seen almost akin to an enemy of the fledgling independent state.

In this edited collection of Redmond’s letters, Meleady has attempted to give Redmond a form of memoir; which allows the reader the opportunity to see matters such as the Home Rule crisis, formation of the Irish Volunteers, the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party following the Parnell divorce scandal, the Easter Rising, the War movement and more through the eyes of one of the most important and later controversial political figures in the history of Irish nationalism.

Through this series of letters, the reader gets an insight into the political thinking and philosophies of the man so belittled and thrown-aside after independence, yet described as ‘the idol of his race’ in 1912 by the Irish World, who also believed that ‘his place is coming to be assured in the history of Ireland. At the present time he is almost as great a figure as O’Connell and Parnell’.

It is worth saying that the letter’s presented in this text, like any primary source in history, should always be taken in the context of both their time, but also who they are written to. Letters, especially political ones like these, offer an insight into the thinking of Redmond, but they are of course tailored to their recipient, and so will often have a bias or a particular slant added in order to speak more diplomatically. However, reading through them, one can get a sense of the personality of Redmond, as well as the respect he received from many who wrote to him.

For the historian, this book perhaps does not offer the strict academic styled analysis associated with writings on Redmond; to which Meleady himself has published John Redmond: The National Leader and Redmond: The Parnellite.

However, it is the small details buried in his selection of material which makes the text so engaging. One good example that becomes increasingly apparent is Redmond’s clear animosity towards Eoin MacNeill during the Volunteer movement in 1913-1914; describing him as a man ‘unfitted for action, less fit to lead others….Eoin MacNeill is meant for a scholar’s life and for that alone’.

Eoin MacNeill, a lecturer in University College Dublin had established the Irish Volunteer Movement in November 1913 – primarily as a defence against the Ulster Volunteer Force established in January of the same year – and soon had gathered close to 150,000 men. However, with the initial provisional committee’s thirty man panel consisting of 12 (later 16) IRB men, Redmond naturally viewed this republican element with suspicion and became desperate to create a united nationalist front, based around the Irish Parliamentary Party being represented and, arguably, in control of the Volunteer movement.

In his letters to MacNeill, the tension and distrust Redmond feels towards the academic becomes apparent (during the negotiations he informed John Dillon that MacNeill is ‘a most exasperating man to deal with’ – Dillon later agrees, calling him ‘hopelessly impractical’).

However, one of the most interesting letters actually comes from Roger Casement, who is desperate to ensure that the Volunteers are armed – calling for Redmond to get a General into the Volunteers to train the men, who would then of course have the backing of the Irish Volunteers. Casement, who would famously travel to Germany with the hope of receiving weapons and a German army for the rebels during Easter Week, asks the question to Redmond of ‘what sort of Ireland will it be if “Ulster” is to keep a large armed force….and the rest of Ireland is to be without arms?’.

While this letter may present an image of Casement supporting Redmond – he also states ‘I feel that any friction between the Volunteers and yourself is a bad thing for the country’, this attitude would have changed entirely by 1915.

While visiting POW camps in Germany in an effort to recruit captured Irish soldiers to fight in “Casement’s Brigade” in the upcoming rebellion, he gave one impassioned speech which called Redmond ‘a traitor’ and attacked Home Rule. The response, instead of agreement, was for the captured soldiers to attempt to attack him, and the German sentries needing to intervene in order to protect him.

This particular story is worth referencing because it also shows the commitment of many of the Irishmen who answered Redmond’s call in 1914 to fight for the British in the War effort. His famous speech at Woodenbridge on 20 September calling on Irishmen to go ‘wherever the firing line extends’ led to the Volunteers splitting, with 92.8% voting in favour of his stance, leading to the newly-named National Volunteers.

It would be many in this small minority (named the Irish Volunteers) who the IRB would later use for their rebellion in 1916, with Joseph McGarrity writing to MacNeill to state that ‘I would rather see your committee with 5,000 adherents who were true to Ireland than 200,000 trimmers’. McNeill ironically would actually be against the rebellion and would famously call on Volunteers not to fight on the original starting date of Easter Sunday 1916.

However, by having the majority of Volunteers backing his stance, Redmond would be able to make his claim for a specific Irish Brigade to be fighting in the war, akin to the 36^th Ulster Division which was largely made up of Ulster Volunteers, as well as a Home Defence in Ireland to protect the island. The letters in this text show his determination to make this a reality; informing Asquith that ‘it would be lamentable if anything were to be done to damp the rising enthusiasm in Ireland’ at the beginning of the war. He later also presented him with a memorandum entitled Recruiting in Ireland which stated that

‘the delay in the formation of the Irish Brigade….has had a most injurious and disheartening effect. For many weeks the Irish people have had paraded before them the fact that Sir Edward Carson and his friends had succeeded in obtaining an Ulster Volunteer Division…..and, on the other side, a tacit refusal on the part of the authorities to allow the formation of an Irish Brigade for the South and West’.

However, what is as interesting about the selection of letters is not just what Redmond deliberates in them, but also what topics fail to make any real appearance. The best example of this comes from the lack of discussion around the suggragette movement. Perhaps this is unsurprising; Clíona Murphy recently described him as the ‘Irish personification of anti-suffragism’, and he himself once told a delegation of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (established by Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, as well as Margaret and James Cousins in November 1908) that he would not support the idea of votes for women.

While most of the encounters he experienced with suffragettes were purely verbal, his physical encounters were perhaps more entertaining – including famously being hit with a hatchet thrown towards Herbert Asquith (then Prime Minister) as the two men crossed O’Connell Bridge in a carriage in on 19 July 1912.

He was also once slapped in the face and had a bag of flour poured over him while riding on a train to Newcastle in November 1913. Through reading Redmond’s letters, one can see clearly the lack of concern for this particular issue; however the problem with a text like this is that, being so strictly based around Redmond’s letters, this is an angle which cannot be properly discussed.

For the general reader, it is perhaps the section which covers Redmond’s experiences during the 1916 Easter Rising which are the most interesting. What can clearly be seen is the panic amongst the constitutional nationalist leaders as they attempted to come to grips with what was occurring.

This is perhaps most evident by the letters sent to Redmond by John Dillon; who unlike Redmond was actually in Ireland during Easter Week and as of such had a much stronger feel for the attitudes and perceptions of the Irish public as the week progressed. Perhaps most tellingly, Dillon writes to Redmond the day the Rising ends urging him to convey to the British Government the catastrophic effects that executions could cause amongst the attitudes of the public. Dillon stated that

‘The wisest course is to execute no one for the present…if there were shootings of prisoners on a large scale, the effect on public opinion throughout the country might be disastrous to the extreme. So far the feeling of the population in Dublin is against the Sinn Feiners. But a reaction might very easily be created’.

John Dillon is perhaps most famous during this period for his well-quoted speech in Westminster during the executions, where he stated that the British Authorities were ‘washing out our lives work in a sea of blood’.

However, the inevitability of these executions are actually hauntingly mirrored to Redmond by Bernard MacGillian from Chicago, who on 6 March 1916 informed Redmond that of ‘the intention…to format a ‘rising’ in Ireland next summer, which, of course, would be drowned out in blood’.

Throughout this particular chapter, it is evident to see Redmond’s panic as the Rising continues, however what also becomes apparent is his desire to make interventions of behalf of some of those arrested at the end of the Rising, including MacNeill and Kathleen Lynn, the chief medical officer with the Irish Citizen’s Army during the rebellion.

However, this is not a book purely written for those with an in-depth knowledge of this period, with constant historical backgrounds contained inside every few pages, in order to give the reader a complete understanding of what is being talked about. Its content lends itself to being neither sympathetic nor damning; instead the text weaves its way through the many key political, and some more personal, moments of Redmond’s life.

While not a memoir, it still reads like one, with Redmond’s personal views appearing clear as the text progresses, and his words do not get lost in the occasional density that academic writing can sometimes produce. Ultimately, a series of letters cannot fully capture the essence of any figure, and will always be told with somewhat of a one-sided slant – even if the letters written by political enemies and oppositional characters are presented as well.

Meleady has succeeded in finally giving John Redmond his own voice in the historiography of Ireland; both for the matters he wished to discuss, and the evidence of those which he didn’t.

By Patricia Byrne

Published by Merrion Press, Newbridge, 2018

ISBN: 9781785371721

Reviewer: Gordon O’Sullivan

“His was a crusade that failed to touch the sinews of empathy, as a powerful vision dissolved in sectarianism and a praiseworthy idealism was seduced by the commercial dictates of landlordism and property management.”

Patricia Byrne’s book, The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland is as ‘living’ as history gets. The Achill Mission is a scar almost as livid on the island today as when Reverend Edward Nangle settled permanently at Dugort Bay in 1834. In an absorbing narrative history of the Mission, its fervent supporters, and its strident critics, Byrne has laid bare a fascinating episode of 19th century Irish history.

Nangle’s Protestant colony would eventually grow to include well-constructed cottages, schools, an infirmary, and even an orphanage. It also became a tourist attraction for Protestant evangelicals and foreign journalists.

However, the Achill Mission, despite doing considerable good, would always remain a symbol of the ills of landlordism in Ireland. In particular, Nangle’s behaviour during the Famine, he was accused of pressurising starving Catholics to choose between religion and food, left a stain on his reputation that still resonates on Achill today.

A fundamental proselytising Protestant, Edward Nangle, in those first years, was fired by his own righteous sense of mission to transform the island of Achill, a place of “ignorance and barbarism, of intellectual and moral degradation”. He was also determined to take on “the forces of religion, imperialism, famine and landlordism”. To do so he would have to fight against both his own volatile temperament and his arch rival, the prelate of the title, Catholic Archbishop and fiery preacher, John McHale of Tuam.

Although the book’s title gives equal weight to the preacher and the prelate, Nangle is undoubtedly the main character here. He and his manifold shortcomings come alive through Byrne’s assiduous research and even-handed narration. Nangle was a fanatic in the true sense of the word; almost maniacal in his vicious attacks on what he saw as the islanders’ devilish Catholic rites.

The author contends that Nangle suffered from “acute manic depression, what would nowadays be termed bi-polar disorder”. Certainly, his mental and physical health were constantly at issue throughout his life.

Even before he came to Achill, his mental health was in question. He suffered a breakdown that left him “prostrate on his drawing room sofa, unable to speak, using sign language like one deaf and dumb.” Crucially, in the middle of the Famine in 1846, his health failed completely, “his collapse was total – physical, mental, and psychological”. The author asserts, quite correctly, that his mental dysfunction contributed hugely to the ultimate failure of the Achill Mission.

Nangle’s stated ambition was to save the souls of the island’s inhabitants from hunger, illiteracy, and as he saw it, the “filthy and blasphemous absurdities” of Catholicism. He would reward converts with education, proper housing, and employment, a formula that Byrne characterises as “break the hold of Catholicism on the tenants, promote evangelical education with good moral living, and improved estate efficiency would follow.”

While he was helped by his genuinely Christian friend, and a friend to the islanders, Dr Neason Adams, the Mission was always hamstrung by the volatile character of Nangle. He was completely immoderate in his views, disparaging of opposing views and openly mocked the Catholic faith. In addition, even though Nangle learned Irish so that his mission could be preached in the islanders’ native tongue, he showed no empathy for the people and lacked any sympathy for their culture.

His own character limitations were compounded by the arrival of the hard-hitting Archbishop McHale inspired by Catholic Emancipation and determined to throw his spiritual weight around. McHale’s goal on Achill was clear; the Mission’s destruction by any means possible.

He called upon Catholic islanders to “make a solemn promise…not to have anything to do with the Achill Mission people” and characterised the Mission as “no place outside of hell which more enrages the Almighty”. He quickly became Nangle’s adversary in the vicious public battle that now ensued, ably abetted by Father James Henry who according to McHale had “the zeal of a saint and the soul of a hero”.

While none of these personalities are overly sympathetic, they did share some significant similarities. Byrne asserts that both Nangle and McHale were alike “in terms of skills and characteristics”. They shared “an ability to deliver powerful rhetoric not tempered by prudence, restless energy, combative natures and an unshakeable belief in their version of the truth.” Tellingly, she also contends that they both showed “a dangerous propensity for egomania and narcissism”.

The quarrelling pair had a liking for public slagging matches, often through their respective pet papers, The Tablet and Nangle’s Achill Missionary Herald. This public dispute was unrelenting and rancorous, not surprising considering their extreme characters. Their confrontations had at least one good outcome though, “the explosion of new schools in 1830s Achill was remarkable”.

Nangle was a gifted propagandist and the Achill Missionary Herald, an important source for Byrne, “was his most important instrument in sustaining his Achill enterprise”. Proclaimed by the fundamentalist Protestant community to be the “Apostle of Achill” and like “another Luther”, Nangle was a proto-televangelical.

He attracted enthusiastic support from a worldwide audience of fellow believers whose subscriptions of up to £6,000 annually were the foundations upon which the Achill Mission was sustained. Eventually though, converting islanders became a distant second to paying for the Mission’s infrastructure.

As for saving souls, Nangle had limited success and this didn’t pass unnoticed in some sections of the Protestant world. Writer-journalists Samuel and Anna Maria Hall, for example, found his methods “lacked ‘that gentle, peace-loving, and persuasive zeal’ that should characterise true Christian charity”.

Other influential Protestant figures concluded that it was “a complete failure…No good has arisen or can possibly arise from the Colony conducted as it is.” American visitor Asenath Nicholson, who particularly infuriated Nangle, was highly critical. She was “appalled at the converts holding in their hands Protestant prayer books which they were unable to read”. This criticism stung as Nangle and his family had suffered greatly in his mission.

He lost his long-suffering wife, Eliza and ten of his children during his mission years. Eliza was “totally destroyed by the experience”, and Nangle’s fundraising absences from Achill for months at a time didn’t help. Despite this criticism and suffering, the author contends that good work was done by Nangle and his Mission. Land was reclaimed, jobs given to converts and schools were established on the island. That, however, was before the calamity of the Famine.

While Nangle saw the Famine in typically biblical terms as “divine vengeance, the finger of God”, Byrne draws a more nuanced picture. Nangle’s impressive energy and vigour combined with “the organisational structure and tools to respond” that the Mission possessed meant that he met the challenges of the growing catastrophe of the Famine head-on.

Nangle was very active during this terrible period, buying a shipment of grain for the islanders, “raising money, doing what needed to be done and getting food to the hungry”. His critics, Protestant and Catholic, however, felt the Famine brought out his worst qualities.

The nub of the charges against Nangle was that “it is at his discretion to starve poor Catholics into Protestantism, or, failing that to let them starve”. He countered that he intended “to feed all the children who have been in attendance at our schools, during the scarcity”. However the reader evaluates Nangle’s behaviour during the Famine, island folk memory has him clearly tagged as a black-hearted villain.

Although fundraising remained almost as lucrative as it has been before the Famine, the tide slowly began to turn against the Mission. The purchase of the O’Donnell estate in 1850 put a huge financial strain on the Mission’s finances. Nangle also left Achill for Skreen in County Sligo and married for a second time. After 1852, he never took as active a role in the Mission again.

A decline set in; Protestant emigration, bitter internal legal disputes, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Wars all contributed to a slow irreversible decline. When Edward Nangle died in 1883 it was plain that the Mission had failed in its primary purpose; it had not converted a significant number of Catholics on the island. Of those who had been converted, many emigrated to North America or eventually returned to their former Catholic rites.

Patricia Byrne says that the story of the Achill Mission fascinated her from the moment she first heard of it and was amazed that “something that happened 200 years ago could still be so alive and the trauma was so live.” From this gripping history of bitter religious conflict in 19th century Ireland,  Byrne has told a dramatic tale with a fiction author’s pace and panache. The Preacher and The Prelate is an extraordinary and important read and for this reader, a fascinating one.

The influence of the Danish ‘folk high school’ movement in 1930s Ireland. By Barry Sheppard.

The early decades of Irish independence have often been associated with insular cultural nationalism and economic protectionist policies which set the state adrift somewhat from the wider world.

The charge of being insular could also be applied to the Northern Irish state.  Despite being part of a Union which still had interests across the globe, it was still very much a parochial society, especially in rural communities.

While there is little doubt that in the main, the focus of the burgeoning Irish Free State was squarely on domestic matters, it is unfair to label it completely adrift of wider international concerns or influences.

The same can also be said of the Northern state, which willingly adapted outside influences, despite its focus on provincial matters. Transnational influences were to be increasingly found in a number of areas of public life on both sides of the Irish border in the first half of the twentieth century, not least when it came to rural matters.  This was especially true during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s.

The Aftermath of the Crash

Motivated by the effects of high unemployment and a severe lack of opportunities since the economic crash, individuals and organisations across Europe began to look beyond their borders for answers on how to alleviate societal problems in rural communities.

On the island of Ireland a number of individuals who were motivated by promoting rural life, active citizenship, and a means of making a living from the land, came to prominence in both states. Not only this, they actively sought out international examples which could be adapted to suit Irish conditions.

The negative effects of the depression years on rural areas in both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were quite similar.  In Northern Ireland there were approximately 100,000 small holdings scattered across the state, many farming on a subsistence basis.[1] While in the southern counties there were approximately 258,000 farms, with 230,000 of them under 100 acres and experiencing similar conditions as their northern counterparts.[2]

Across the island poor productivity, and a lack of knowledge in modern farming methods were major factors in the desperate state of the smaller holdings, with the majority of small farms being classed as ‘uneconomic’. The 1923 Irish Land Act in the Free State attempted to address the ongoing problem of poor productivity by acquisition and redistribution of larger lands.  The act, described as an ‘ambitious attempt to solve the land question once and for all’ ultimately stalled.

The slow progress of land acquisition and division soured relations between the electorate and the Cumann na nGaedheal government in the 1920s.^[3]  While this work significantly increased under Fianna Fáil after 1932, it too slowed considerably after 1936, leading to a notable decrease in support for the party among small farmers in the west.[4]

A decade after the 1923 Land Act, the picture didn’t look good for the many small holdings, with little prospect for any improvement.  Areas such as Dunfanaghy in Co Donegal were said to be ‘little removed from the subsistence level’ in 1933.  This was the case in many areas down the western seaboard, and in many other parts of the country small holdings were still squeezed by livestock farming, which had almost doubled in size since the mid-nineteenth century.[5]

In Northern Ireland, land reform schemes which had begun under the same acts as those in the south from the late nineteenth century, were being wound down in the early years of the state’s existence by new legislation.  A 1925 Land Act saw the compulsory purchase of any remaining tenanted land in Northern Ireland.  Under this legislation the remaining 38,500 tenants purchased their holdings until the scheme was finally wound down in 1935.[6]

However, like provisions in the 1923 Land Act, the 1925 Northern Ireland act prohibited the confiscation of untenanted land in certain situations, making precious resources unattainable for some landless people, leaving emigration a more viable option.

One individual who was determined to stem the rural decline, and introduce a new form of adult education to rural dwellers was William Stavely Armour, journalist, educator, and the founder of the rural organisation The Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster.  Armour had travelled extensively in the first two decades of the twentieth century seeking out new educational experiences which he would attempt to introduce back home.

One destination in particular was to have a profound effect upon his efforts, Denmark. It was here he was introduced to the ‘Danish Folk High School Movement’ founded by Bishop Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783 – 1872).

Grundtvig and the Danish Folk High School movement

Grundtvig was an educational reformer who railed against the established system in his country. He witnessed a system which catered for the elite, and those who could afford a formal university education. A country where Latin had been placed over the mother tongue for centuries.

Grundtvig saw this education system as failing the rural population.  While his concerns were wide, he was particularly scathing of the Latin Grammar Schools which, in an echo of Pádraig Pearse’s ‘the Murder Machine’ in Ireland, labelled them ‘The Schools for Death’.[7]

Grundtvig engaged in developing a community education system which worked for the rural population, farmers, and workers in Denmark.  His movement by and large represented the interests of the ‘disenfranchised majority’ of nineteenth century Denmark, and ‘sought to build democratic egalitarian societies where none would starve or be forced to emigrate for lack of opportunity or human dignity’.[8]

Grundtvig envisaged a community school system with popular education as its primary focus. A movement against the prevailing Danish conservative versions of both education and culture.  It was at its heart it was a community movement against the ideals ‘of literacy and book-learning, of language unknown to common people and of learning where the primary relation was between the individual and the book alone’.[9]  Discussion alongside national culture would be important factors in generating a rural community spirit which reinvigorated a rural population who had limited resources and opportunities.

This vision was given life in an informal atmosphere where people could temporarily live together, including teachers, and learn from one another in practical agricultural matters and Danish nationalist poetry and culture.   It was a place where dialogue would be the tool of instruction, and where no formal tests would be taken. In this ‘school’ a live-in term would last no longer than three or four months.  Students would work together on physical enterprise projects, and were encouraged to carry on the dialogue into everyday rural life.[10]

Back on Irish soil Armour became convinced that Grundtvig’s ideas of ‘people’s universities’ could one day be applied to Ireland.  Writing in the official history of the Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster in 1978, S. Alexander Blair tells how greatly interested Armour was in this endeavour, and the more he read about Grundtvig himself, the more impressed he became.

‘He (Stavely) agreed with the concept of the Folk High Schools as ‘people’s universities’, and was convinced that the high standard achieved in Danish agriculture resulted from work done in these schools’.[11]

It was said that Grundtvig identified a growing democratic need in society – a need of enlightening the often both uneducated and poor peasantry. This social group had neither the time nor the money to enroll at a university and needed an alternative. The aim of the folk high school was to help people qualify as active and engaged members of society, to give them a movement and the means  to change the political situation from below and be a place to meet across social barriers.[12]  This philosophy was to be found in the Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster motto ‘Better Farmers. Better Countrymen. Better Citizens’.

While Armour’s experiences in Denmark would bear fruit in the foundation of the Young Farmer’s Clubs, he was by no means the only one to see the merits of the organisation.  Back in Belfast the Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University, Dr R.W. Livingstone spoke on the merits of the Danish Folk School model in a speech on education reform at the annual Belfast Royal Academy prize giving ceremony of 1929. The Belfast Newsletter reported that Dr Livingstone stated that the solution to adult education in the province lay with the Danish movement.[13]

‘An invaluable lesson and example to Ireland’

In the early 1930s a series of lectures took place in Northern Ireland on the merits of the movement. In the Ulster Museum and Art Gallery, the Danish movement was debated in a lecture on ‘the most useful parts’ of adult education.[14]

While the aforementioned Dr Livingstone hosted a ‘principal’ of one of the Danish High Schools, Herr Niels Klostergaard in March 1930 for a lecture on the movement.[15]

Even before Stavely implemented Grundtvig’s ideas in Northern Ireland, they had been much debated throughout the island as a way of reinvigorating rural communities.  A full decade before Stavely founded the Farmers Clubs, the merits of the movement were debated in Irish newspapers. The Nenagh Guardian in 1919 championed Denmark, and in particular Grundtvig’s ideas as ‘an invaluable lesson and example to Ireland’.

The Folk Schools’ combination of the principals of agriculture and emphasis on cultural education were a powerful combination to Irish eyes. Indeed the emphasis on the history, literature, songs and folk traditions of its native Denmark was a powerful example for those who had grown up in the Irish cultural revival a few decades previously.[16]

Denmark and Ireland

In terms of agriculture, there have been a number of comparative historical studies of Ireland and Denmark over the years, highlighting the similarities between the two nations. Both were mainly agricultural and competed for the lucrative British agriculture market.

As far back as 1908 the agricultural reformer Horace Plunkett had felt that comparing Ireland to Denmark was good practice for rural reformers.[17] Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that others would look to Denmark, when looking for guidance in relation to Irish rural matters.

Away from explicitly agricultural matters there were parallels to be drawn between Ireland and Denmark in terms of cultural nationalism and language revival.   Indeed, it is arguable that the two countries had similar traits which saw them as ‘a place apart’ from mainstream European cultural history.

It was suggested that Danish cultural history had ‘never quite been woven into the fabric of continental cultural history’.  Factors such as the geographic position of Scandinavia in relation to the major continental centres, the small population, and the rural economy contributed to a form of isolation and distinctiveness, which was seized upon as sources of nationalist pride by Grundtvig. [18]

This of course mirrored what happened in Ireland in the late-nineteenth century in terms of cultural revival, especially in Irish-speaking districts.  They were almost treated as a place apart by revivalists, ancient and removed from mainstream European and especially British cultural history.   For cultural enthusiasts the Danish experience was an example to admire, especially when it came to the prominence they placed on native culture and language.  It was stated that Grundtvig was ‘bound up with the idea of a Danish national character’ with a ‘mystic conception of the Danish language as an expression of Volkgeist (national spirit)’.[19]

Cultural nationalism

The nationalist leanings of Grundtvig’s movement found a willing audience in an Ireland fuelled by cultural nationalism which had fed so much into its recent revolutionary period. In 1926 the president of the Gaelic League, Seaghan P. MacEnri would endorse the Danish Folk movement as an example of a vehicle for promoting the native language and pastimes of Ireland. He stated:

“When Ireland was Irish-Speaking and had a practical monopoly of the English food markets, Denmark, with its barren soil, was plunged in poverty. Its upper classes despised their native language and sought “a sound French and German education.” Bishop Grundtvig changed all that when he founded the Danish Folk Schools where farmers’ sons and daughters were taught the language, history and folklore of their own country.

He said that to make good farmers he must first make good Danes, proud of their country and anxious-to promote its prosperity instead of having their eyes continually fixed across the frontier. He succeeded. Foreign influences were eliminated. Danes, from the king to the peasant, became more and more Danish in spirit and language”.[20]

During this same period the Irish Monthly journal would feature a number political figures writing on what the Danish Folk Movement could teach rural Ireland, indicating that intellectual and political circles were seriously taking notice.

This was mirrored on the ground among some farming communities. In 1926 a recommendation to the Co. Council of Mayo to establish a People’s High School for the area ‘on the lines of the Danish folk schools’ was unanimously passed at a conference of representatives of Mayo Co. Council. Co. Technical Committee and Co. Agricultural Committee.[21]

Despite the prevailing notion that those who were either promoting ‘Irish Ireland’, or concentrating on rural matters in Northern Ireland were loath to take on outside influences, there was a desire on both sides of the border to look beyond the island for inspiration in relation to rural reform and adult education.

It is significant that Grundtvig’s ideas would transcend internal borders on the island of Ireland, given that people who may have been diametrically opposed on matters of nationhood found common ground around the Danish bishop’s approach.  This resulted in some cross-border cooperation among rural groups at a time when there was very little contact between the two jurisdictions at a state level.

Education

The central need of adult education, incorporating agricultural techniques and community cohesion which Grundtvig advanced in the Folk High Schools was also paramount for Irish rural organisations such as the Young Farmers’ Clubs, Macra na Feirme, and Cannon John Hayes’ organisation, Muintir na Tire.

The Ulster Farmers’ Clubs sought to ‘promote the education and training of young people in agriculture and rural occupations’.[22] They did this in a similar way to the Danish Schools, with instruction being given in, sometimes purpose-built central community halls by an array of teachers and experts.

Like the Danish Folk Schools, Macra na Feirme also fostered ‘the constant interchange of ideas’.^[23] It was noted: ‘As in Denmark with the High Schools, as in Antigonish with the university extension courses, (in Macra na Feirme) the result of education has been a realization of problems and an effort to deal with them’ as many rural problems couldn’t be fixed by legislation or Acts of Parliament.^[24]

Armour’s ‘Farmers Clubs’, once they had established their own ‘people’s universities’ would reach out to their southern counterparts Muintir na Tire and Macra na Feirme.   In 1942, a delegation from the Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster, headed by Armour’s successor Mr. William Rankin, attended Muintir na Tire’s annual education gathering, ‘Rural Week’ to make connections with like-minded rural organisations, and to promote their own organisation.

At this event it was reported that Rankin ‘was welcomed not as an outsider, even though he was new (to Muintir na Tire)’, and that ‘he brought to (Rural Week) all the drive, vigour, and practical attitude to life of the North-East corner’.  Rankin’s personality was said to have left quite the impression on members of Muintir na Tire, as well as the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, for whom he sang two comic songs to ‘gales of laughter’ from the assembled attendees.[25]

The benefits of the Farmers’ Clubs was well known to the gathering’s attendees, as a telegram was read from an unnamed ‘influential person’ advising that Muintir na Tire founder, Fr Michael Hayes should follow the lead of the Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster, in that he should begin a Muintir na Tire high school on the lines of the Danish Folk Movement.[26]

This was echoed by Mr Rankin. Writing in the official Rural Week record for that year, he explained the educational approaches of the Young Farmers’ Clubs in Ulster and stated that if ever those in the South were to establish clubs in their jurisdiction they could ‘count on the friendly cooperation and assistance of the Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster’.[27]  Indeed, this is what happened, with regular educational and social exchanges and trips between Macra na Feirme and the Ulster Clubs right up until the beginning of the Troubles.

The Spread of Ideas

In the immediate years after Rankin’s appearance at ‘Rural Week’ there was a heightened interest in the Young Farmers’ Clubs south of the border.  It is unclear if the appearance by the Rankin of the Young Farmers at the 1942 Rural Week had a direct bearing on the farmers clubs which had been forming in various counties, as newspapers and periodicals had discussed the benefits of establishing such organisations since the late 1910s.  Nevertheless, action overtook discussion after the Rural Week appearance.

The earliest Farmers Clubs formed in the South in 1942 or 1943, with a small growth over the ‘Emergency’ years.[28] The Munster Express reported in March 1945: ‘A branch of the Young Farmers’ Organisation was formed at a representative meeting held in the City Hall, Waterford, on Wednesday night last, at which Mr. Maurice Murphy presided’.

The attendance included representatives of another branch of the Young Farmers’ Clubs which had recently been established in the town of Mooncoin, Co. Kilkenny.  The report continued: ‘The Chairman said that the meeting had been called for the purpose of organising a Young Farmers’ Club for Waterford and district. The club would be non-political and non-sectarian, (echoing the rules of the Young Farmers Clubs in Ulster) and would be the fourth of its kind established in this country’.[29]

While there was an appetite for this kind of organisation, expansion was slow to begin with, having established competition in Muintir na Tire. The call for Young Farmers’ Clubs would also be made by some of the leading politicians of the day.

In December 1945 Erskine H. Childers TD gave a speech at the Thomas Davis Centenary Celebrations in Athlone, in which he lamented that groups such as Muintir na Tire, successful as they were, had not made an even greater impact in Irish life.  He argued that if there were several thousand Young Farmers’ Clubs in England, then why not ten times that amount in agricultural Ireland?[30]

A national executive of Farmers’ Clubs in the South formed in 1944.  It has been suggested that the Second World War brought forward the need for Young Farmers’ Clubs in Ireland: ‘The war of 1939-45 highlighted the importance of the agricultural industry in Ireland and the pressing need to move away from the Cinderella image it had developed. In particular it was vital that proper agricultural education should be provided for those young people destined to work the land’.[31]

A report in the latter part of the 1940s argued that the growing organisation of the Young Farmers’ Clubs (Macra na Feirme) were willing to go ‘beyond their own borders in the search for information and truth’.  It further stated that representatives of the organisation had gone to England, to Norway, to Denmark; and in turn, had ‘arranged for English, Danish and Norwegian farmers to visit this country’.

The report also emphasised the lengths the organisations had went to in exchanging information, organising lectures and discussions with other bodies, in an effort to further their aims.[32]

This in some ways completed a journey which began midway through the previous century. Grundtvig’s idea of rural education attracted educators like William Stavely Armour to Denmark to learn more about this non-traditional form of education, this in turn spread throughout the island of Ireland, before returning to Northern Europe and Denmark in particular.

The transfer of ideas across time and borders show an Ireland at the heart of rural educational reform across Europe and beyond, and go some way to dispelling the notion that Ireland was a place a part in a modernising Europe.

References

[1] S. Alexander Blair, “Ulster’s Country Youth”: the First Fifty Years of the Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster (Belfast, 1979), p. 13.

[2] T. W. Freeman, ‘Emigration and rural Ireland’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol. XVII, Part 3, (1945/1946), pp 404-422.

[3] Terence Dooley, ‘Land and Politics in Independent Ireland, 1923-48: The Case for Reappraisal’ in  Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 134 (Nov., 2004), pp. 175-197

[4] Ibid.

[5] Freeman, T. W. ‘Emigration and rural Ireland’. – Dublin: Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol. XVII, Part 3, 1945/1946, pp404-422

[6] Olwen Perdue ‘Confiscation or regeneration? Land purchase in the North of Ireland 1885 – 1925’

[7] M. Lawson, N.F.S. Grundtvig, in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education vol. XXIII, no. 3/4, 1993, p. 613–23.

[8] Rolland G. Paulston (1980) Education as Anti‐structure: non‐formal education in social and ethnic movements, Comparative Education, 16:1, 55-66

[9] A brief history of the folk high school: https://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/history/

[10] Clay Warren, ‘Andragogy and N. F. S. Grundtvig: A Critical Link’ in Adult Education Quarterly, Vol 39, Issue 4, 1989.

[11] S. Alexander Blair, Ulster’s Country Youth: The First Fifty years of the Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster, (Belfast, 1978), p. 18.

[12] A brief history of the folk high school: https://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/history/

[13] Belfast News Letter, 31 Oct. 1929.

[14] Belfast News Letter, 3 Dec. 1931.

[15] Belfast News Letter, 22 Mar. 1939.

[16] Nenagh Guardian, 27 Sept. 1919.

[17] Cormac Ó Gráda ‘The beginnings of the Irish creamery system, 1880–1914’ in

Economic History Review 30, (May, 1977), pp. 284–305.

[18] E. F. Fain Nationalist Origins of the Folk High School: The Romantic Visions of N.F.S. Grundtvig in British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Feb., 1971), pp. 70-90

[19] Ibid

[20] Meath Chronicle, 2 Jan. 1926.

[21] Irish Independent, 9 Jun. 1926.

[22] (P.R.O.N.I., Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster Reports 1943-1946, ED/13/1/2121)

[23] Louis P. F. Smith, The Role of Farmers Organizations in An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 44, No. 173 (Spring, 1955), pp. 49-56

[24] Ibid

[25] Irish Independent, 21 Aug. 1942.

[26] Irish Independent, 21 Aug. 1942.

[27] ‘MNT Rural Week Record 1942’ (Printed by the Limerick Leader, Limited) p 98.

[28] Michael Shiel, The Quiet Revolution: The Electrification of Rural Ireland 1946-76 (Dublin, 2003), p.183.

[29] Munster Express, 16 Mar. 1945.

[30] Longford Leader, 22 Dec. 1945.

[31] M. Shiel, The Quiet Revolution, p. 182.

[32] Kilkenny People, 17 Dec. 1949.

By John Dorney

On July 31, 1922, men in the green uniform of the Irish Free State entered the Grand Hotel, in the seaside town of Skerries, north of Dublin. They were looking for Harry Boland, an anti-Treaty Republican activist, embroiled by now in Ireland bitter civil war over the Treaty.

According to one Republican activist, they were out to kill him, ‘as Harry had been very active in trying to bring about a reconciliation between the two sides and had been meeting Mick Collins for that end.’[1]

Harry Boland and Michael Collins had indeed been close friends and colleagues prior to the split over the Treaty. But Collins was now commander in chief of the Free State’s National Army and Boland was now quartermaster of the anti-Treaty IRA Dublin Brigade. With Boland at the hotel in Skerries was Joe Griffin, the IRA’s Director of Intelligence.

It is not exactly clear what happened when the Free State troops burst into Boland’s and Griffin’s hotel room. According to the Irish Times, Boland was ‘shot while resisting arrest and was hit in the right abdomen.’ [2] Some reports suggested that Boland tried to seize the gun of one of the arresting soldiers and then ran down the corridor of the hotel to get away. The troops, according to this account, fired two shots in the air and then one, the fatal one, to his body.[3]

He died two days later in St Vincent’s hospital Dublin. Joe Griffin was arrested unharmed.

Who Was Harry Boland?

Harry Boland was born, like many nationalist revolutionaries of his generation, into Dublin’s lower middle class, in the northside suburb of Phibsborough. He followed a familiar trajectory through the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Easter Rising of 1916 into gaol at the high security prisons of Dartmoor and Lewes. On his release he threw himself into political activism with Sinn Fein, for whom he was elected TD for south Roscommon in the historic election of 1918.

In 1919 he and Michael Collins only narrowly escaped arrest when the rest of the members of the underground Dail government were imprisoned by the British. The two worked closely together thereafter in Dublin, raising money for the ‘Republican loan’ a system of voluntary taxation that kept the rebel Republican government afloat.

Later in 1919, Boland was nominated by Eamon de Valera the President of the Republic, as special envoy to the United States. While the popular film ‘Michael Collins’ this is depicted as a Machiavellian move by de Valera to weaken Collins’ control over the movement, it can equally plausibly be seen as a logical extension of Boland’s fund raising activities in Ireland.

And while de Valera himself returned from the United States in early 1921, Boland in fact stayed there, coordinating Irish Republican publicity, fund raising and – more secretly – arms purchasing and smuggling until early 1922.

Treaty and peace efforts

By then, all had changed utterly. Collins and his colleagues had signed the Anglo Irish Treaty, de Valera and his followers had refused to accept it. The movement was split from top to bottom

Boland was from the start adamantly against the Treaty which he viewed as surrender of the Irish Republic they had declared in 1918. He was recalled from America to participate in the Treaty debates, where he declared, ‘I rise to speak against this Treaty because, in my opinion, it denies a recognition of the Irish nation…

I object to it on the ground of principle, and my chief objection is because I am asked to surrender the title of Irishman and accept the title of West Briton. I object because this Treaty denies the sovereignty of the Irish nation, and I stand by the principles I have always held— that the Irish people are by right a free people. I object to this Treaty because it is the very negation of all that for which we have fought.’[4]

The Treaty was carried in the Dail but de Valera and his followers, including Harry Boland, walked out in protest. This might not by itself have been fatal to Irish nationalist unity as, after some persuasion de Valera re-entered the Dail.

What was more fatal was that in a convention of March 1922, the majority of the IRA the guerrilla army of the Republic, voted to refuse to accept the Treaty. Harry Boland attended the convention as representative of the Dublin Brigade.

Despite his friendship with Collins therefore, Boland was a militant anti-Treatyite. However, he also attempted to prevent the outbreak of Civil War.

As early as March, 1922, Boland, proposed a stop to public meetings by either side and to ‘get Dev, Collins, [Arthur] Griffith and [Cathal] Brugha on one platform on the Ulster Situation’ [i.e. to try to unify them on the one matter they agreed upon, Irish unity and the end of Northern Ireland]. They were to campaign together in the first Free State election ‘with a certain percentage of seats allotted to them’ [the anti-Treatyites].

Richard Mulcahy, by that time Free State military Chief of Staff, agreed in principle if Boland ‘could get Dev and Cathal [Brugha] to agree’.[5] In a number of meetings in May, an agreement was patched up along these lines between Collins and de Valera, and it was agreed that the ‘general lines of the constitution’ of the Free State would be agreed upon.

While this helped to ensure a fairly peaceful election in June 1922, the pact did not hold. The pro and anti-Treaty wings of Sinn Fein ultimately fought the election as hostile parties. After the pro-Treaty victory, Collins and his colleagues came under increasing pressure from the British to attack the anti-Treaty IRA garrison o nthe Four Courts in the centre of Dublin.

After a series of provocation by both sides – the arrest of anti-Treatyite Leo Henderson and Free State general Ginger O’Connell – Collins did indeed open fire on the Four Courts on June 28 1922 and Civil War did indeed break out throughout the country.

Civil War and death

Whatever Boland’s peaceful intentions may have been before the Civil War broke out –and it appears as if he did all he could to avoid a violent confrontation – he seems to have become a determined participant in the Civil War thereafter.

He participated in the fighting in Dublin city from June 28 to July 5 1922 and thereafter n some skirmishing near Brittas along the Wicklow- Dublin border.

And even after the Republican defeat in that battle he seems to have been determined to wage guerrilla war on the Free State.

He saw, as many anti-Treatyites did, the Provisional Government of the Free State and the temporary ‘war council’ set up by Collins, comprising himself Richard Mulcahy and Eoin O’Duffy, as a military dictatorship. In a letter of July 27 Boland wrote that ‘dictatorships is [sic] now the rule’ and that ‘Mick, Dick and Owney… have attempted to usurp the function of parliament.’ [6]

His enemies, though, were beginning to close in on him.

On July 28 1922, detectives from the Free State’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) raided the Republican political head where they arrested senior anti-Treaty TD Sean T O’Kelly [later to serve as President of Ireland].[7]  He had on him a letter from Harry Boland, now serving as Dublin IRA Quartermaster, asking O’Kelly to go to America and re-establish contact with Clan na Gael, the Irish American affiliate of the IRB and to bring back weapons and ammunition.

If Boland was trying to make peace at this point there is certainly no sign of it in this correspondence.

Boland wrote, ‘This fight is likely to be long drawn out and we shall require money and material … Bring back Thompsons [submachine guns] revolvers, .303, .45 [ammunition] etc.’ Come to 31 Richmond to talk, 6 pm. HB’.[8]

Collins refused to allow the closure of the Republican offices on Suffolk Street, despite the arrest there – ‘we are not out to suppress political opinion’, he wrote to WT Cosgrave, but did order the arrest of Boland. [9]

Boland however was located two days later in a hotel in Skerries and during his arrest was shot and mortally wounded.

He is often counted as the first of what would be many targeted killings of anti-Treaty fighters in Dublin. [10] However there is reason to believe that his killing was not in fact an assassination but rather a botched arrest.

Republican historian, Dorothy Macardle, later wrote that his shooting was not premeditated. ‘The soldiers who shot him seemed unaccustomed to firearms and distressed by what they had done’.[11]

Michael Collins seems to have regretted his friend’s death very much. He wrote to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan, “I passed Vincent’s Hospital and saw a crowd outside. My mind went in to him, Harry lying there dead and I thought of the times together . . . I had sent a wreath. Nevertheless, I suppose they would return it torn up.”[12]

Meanwhile Ernie O’Malley, head of the IRA Eastern Division reported unemotionally to his Chief of Staff Liam Lynch:

The arrest of senior officers has generally played havoc with this command. Harry Boland who is acting QM [Quartermaster], and the D/I [Director of Intelligence Joe Griffin] have been arrested last night. Harry was shot through the spine and stomach … Michael Carolan Adjutant of 3rd Northern Division [Belfast] … was wounded on Grafton Street. They seem to be concentrating on officers. The result will be that the Brigade here will be without officers.[13]

The thousands of arrests – O’Malley himself was to be caught about three months later – did indeed ultimately cripple the anti-Treaty IRA’s campaign.

Boland’s life and death, at the age of just 38, have been popularised by Neil Jordan’s 1996 film Michael Collins, which used the device of the friendship between Boland and Collins to show the tragedy of the Treaty split and the Civil War.

For all the film’s dramatization and simplification – for instance it has Boland being shot in a sewer in the aftermath of the Four Courts battle –  there is a note of genuine pathos in the deaths of Boland and then his former friend Collins just four weeks later in County Cork.

Harry’s brother Gerald later became a senior minister in the governments of Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail in the 1930s and 40s.

References

[1] Eileen McGrane BMH WS 1752

[2] Irish Times August 25, 1922

[3] Irish Times, August 5, 1997

[4] Dail debates 7 Jan 1922, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1922-01-07/2/

[5] Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/B/192.

[6] Report on arrest of Seán T O’Kelly, submitted 11/8/22 Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/B/4.

[7] Report on arrest of Seán T O’Kelly, submitted 11/8/22 Mulcahy Papers UCD P7/B/4.

[8] Captured letter Boland to O’Kelly27/7/22 Ibid.

[9] Captured letter, Boland to O’Kelly 27/7/22, ibid.

[10] The Last Post, p. 136.

[11] Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 709.

[12] Irish Times August 5, 1997

[13] Ernie O’Malley to Liam Lynch, 31 July 1922, in Dolan and O’Malley, No Surrender Here!, p. 80.

By Mairead Carew

Published by: Irish Academic Press, 2018.

Reviewer:Timothy Ellis

Every now and then, it does historians good to take a step back and ask an important question: “How does our own time influence our writing of history?”

Mairead Carew’s Quest for the Irish Celt is a lively meditation on this question. As she reminds the reader frequently, archaeology in the Irish Free State was, very much, a product of its own time. In the 1930s, a team of anthropologists and archaeologists from Harvard University visited Ireland to study its people; past and present.

The ‘Harvard Irish study’ incorporated archaeology, physical anthropology and social anthropology. The social anthropological investigations of this expedition, conducted by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, which examined rural life in County Clare, is well known. Arensberg and Kimball painted a picture of a conservative society, marked by gerontocracy, emigration and sharply defined gender roles.

For many, Arensberg’s and Kimball’s observations epitomise the conservative insularity of the Irish Free State.

Historians and the general public have long regarded the Free State as a conservative, rural backwater to Europe, which had forgotten the revolution that had created it, and thus remained isolated from the radical influence of the Interwar period.

However, Carew argues that, in fact, in Irish archaeology and anthropology in this period, intellectual influences from Germany and the United States were very strong. Whilst the social anthropology strand of the Harvard Expedition is well known, its archaeological excavations and investigations into the physical anthropology of the Irish people has not attracted as much attention. Yet both these strands were immensely significant, not least because both were influenced by contemporary thought on racial ‘science’ and eugenics.

The Harvard Expedition

The Harvard expedition was managed by Earnest Hooton, who had contributed much to these pseudoscientific fields. Similarly, the Director of the National Museum of Ireland, who advised the expedition, Adolf Mahr, was the Leader of the Nazi party in Ireland. Carew highlights the ways in which multiple factors; political, economic, cultural and social, influenced the Harvard team’s research in Ireland, and illuminates multiple intellectual connections between Ireland, Europe and the United States in this period.

Chapter 1 explores how popular understandings of archaeology informed Irish political ideologies and vice-versa. As Carew argues, ‘Monuments and artefacts applied a sense of concreteness, permanence and longevity to the abstract concept of nation.’ Douglas Hyde, the apostle of ‘Irish Ireland’ himself, argued that ‘our antiquities can best throw light upon the pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe.’

Nonetheless, as Tom Nairn argues, nationalism is Janus-faced: it looks both forward and back.  Carew notes that the ‘scientific’ authority of anthropology and archaeology was deemed appropriate to serve a distinctly modern state, which was looking to define itself in relation to a community of European nations.

The Irish state itself gave support to Irish archaeology through the 1930 National Monuments Act and commissioned a Swede, Nils Lithberg, to write a report on the purpose of the National Museum. One of his recommendations was that, collections should be “firmly based on Ireland’s native culture.”

Archaeologists would also prioritise and emphasise the importance of objects from the Early Christian period, so as to underline the state’s Catholic credentials. Both the democratic and nationalist inclinations of the Irish state and de Valera’s government, in particular, fed into the Lithberg report, and he recommended that the Museum’s collections should ‘embrace all classes’.

The second chapter hones in further on the institutional aspects of Irish archaeology during the Harvard Mission, and explores the process by which the Harvard Mission chose Ireland as a research site. Whereas previously, archaeology had been practised by amateur ‘dilletante’ Anglo-Irish antiquarians, by the 1930s, archaeology was becoming increasingly professionalised. The state looked for expertise from Europe, thus undermining the long-held authority of Anglo-Irish ‘experts.’

A German, and a member of the Nazi party, Adolf Mahr was appointed as Director of the National Museum in 1934, something which the Ulster archaeologist, Estyn Evans regarded as illustrating “the hatred of all things British prevailing in Éire in the years following partition.”  As Carew argues, Mahr’s own eugenic beliefs were not dissimilar to those of members of the Harvard team.

The quest for the Celts

The third chapter explores the main research question for the Harvard team: establishing when then Celts first came to Ireland. Mapping out the racial origins of the Irish people naturally appealed to Irish Americans, some of whom funded the Harvard Mission.

At a time when non-European migration into the United States was heavily restricted, the Irish diaspora were keen to emphasise their credentials as white Europeans. Research on the “Celtic” origins of the Irish people was thus helpful in this respect. Earnest Hooton had a strong interest in anthropometry: the physical measurement of facial/bodily characteristics in order to classify racial origins.

Racial classifications made through anthropometry were used to justify American immigration laws, and it was believed that undesirable behaviours such as criminality, laziness and drunkenness could be ascertained through physical attributes.

As Carew notes, ‘Simian-type stereotyping of the Irish Celt, with negroid features, had been popular in American and British newspapers published in the nineteenth century.’  However ‘scientific results obtained by the Harvard academics rivalled those imaginative and discriminatory depictions,’ and thus painted a picture of the Irish people as being far more akin to white Northern Europeans, with Scandinavian features.

Archaeological excavations also pointed towards particular racial origins. A particular area of interest for the archaeological strand of the Harvard Mission was the excavation of Crannógs (lake dwellings). Three crannógs were excavated in Counties Meath, Westmeath and Offaly.

We see in Chapter 4 how crannógs were chosen as sites for excavation for ideological, as well as scholarly, reasons. Crannógs were lake islands which offered their inhabitants defence and protection against invaders, and as Carew notes, their perceived importance reflected ‘a Darwinian view that cultural change and adaptation to the environment is essential to survival.’

Although the Harvard team were keen to paint a picture of racial purity amongst the ancient Irish, they had to be careful not to over-emphasise cultural continuity.  As Carew argues, ‘a lack of cultural change could… suggest a lack of progress and in-adaptability to a changing environment.’ Indeed ‘the “more Irish than the Irish themselves” motif in Irish history accommodates the idea of invasion with that of cultural continuity.’

A story of both invaders and natives adapting to changed circumstances thus maintains a degree of cultural continuity, but also emphasises adaptability and the ability to survive. Within the excavations themselves, the archaeologists were keen to highlight objects which suggested the presence of invaders, particularly those who were ‘racially superior’, i.e. Northern Europeans. At the Crannóg at Ballinderry, for instance, a Viking gaming board was a ‘star find.’

Chapter 5 follows on by exploring the excavations at the Lagore crannóg, and here, Carew examines the ways in which the excavations at this particular site were interpreted to suit certain narratives and ideologies. Hugh O’Neill Hencken, Director of the Archaeological Strand of the Harvard Mission, for instance, argued the inhabitants of the Lagore Crannóg were undoubtedly Christian.

Nonetheless, at this site, the team did not recover any ecclesiastical objects, and there was no evidence of Christian burial practices. Moreover, whilst at Ballinderry, the excavators were happy to highlight ‘Norse’ artefacts, at Lagore, items which were of ‘Roman’ provenance were readily explained away, lest it threaten a nationalist narrative of Ireland’s stance as a small, independent against the Roman Empire.

The archaeologists were not keen to offer evidence which contradicted pre-existing documents and texts. Since the crannóg came from a period which had long been dubbed ‘early Christian,’ Carew argues that the Harvard archaeologists could ‘not penetrate the thickness of the walls of a well-established Irish antiquarian tradition.’

Chapter 6 examines the Harvard mission’s work in Northern Ireland and how this also fed into Irish nationalist ideology. Adolf Mahr, of Sudeten German origin, naturally saw strong parallels between his homeland and Ulster. Mahr believed that prehistoric, ancient boundaries were more authentic than ‘modern’ ones (i.e. those boundaries drawn after the First World War).

Whilst the Harvard team were keen to highlight objects which suggested the existence of ‘Irish culture’ in Ulster, they were afraid of finding particularly old skeletons in the province, lest it suggest that the ‘first Irishmen’ had settled in Ulster, and had thus most likely come over from Great Britain.

Conversely, the Ulster archaeologist, Emyr Estyn Evans wrote of ‘saints and sinners alike moving to and from across the turbulent seas between western Scotland and the north of Ireland,’ so as to promote a British Unionist ideology.

Archeology and the de Valera’s Ireland

The following chapter highlights another area where political ideologies influenced academic questions: that of economic policy. During the 1930s, as a result of the Great Depression, governments across the world experimented with economic interventionism, in particular the sponsorship of public works schemes. This was true of both Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, in the US, and Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government in Ireland.

The Harvard expeditions in Ireland used unemployed labour to assist with digging and excavations, and the 1930s thus marked ‘the first time that archaeological excavations were not just carried out for cultural reasons, but were used by the government in a broader social and economic context.’  Public work schemes at these archaeological digs were ‘important community initiatives in archaeology which provided work for the local people and gave them a sense of ownership and pride in monuments in their locality.’

This chapter, in highlighting, more pragmatic socio-economic factors, as well as nationalist ideology, in influencing the excavations is particularly interesting. It would have perhaps been good to have perhaps a little more detail here on the ways in which de Valera’s economic policies influenced the archaeological practices of the Harvard Mission.

As previously mentioned, nationalism looks both forward to the future, and back to the past. In the Irish Free State, politicians were keen to construct Ireland as a ‘modern’ state as well as arguing for the sanctity of the Irish past. In the same way, the Harvard Mission injected ‘modern science’ as well as a restoration of past glories into the Irish cultural landscape.

Chapter eight examines the ways in which the Harvard team utilised scientific approaches, which marked a departure from older, more ‘antiquarian’ methodologies that had previously been used in Irish archaeology. There was a shift away from collecting exotic artefacts for their own sake, to thorough, careful excavation, which preserved as much of the archaeological record as was practicable. As one of the archaeologist noted, workers on the sites had to learn ‘that they are not digging for buried treasure and that a post-hole is as important as a portable find and that they must exercise care at every stage.’

The Harvard mission employed new techniques involving theodolites, quadrants and photography, as well as pollen and charcoal analysis, for the first time in Ireland. Nonetheless, as we have already seen, older, more established intellectual frameworks did endure, and Carew argues that ‘embedded notions about Celtic or Christian identity… [remained] neither explored nor challenged.’

The final chapter explores the project’s engagement with Irish audiences on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Carew argues that the Harvard Mission was part of a wider sea-change in Irish-American’s self-image. Whereas ‘the term “Celtic… was a term of racist abuse for the Irish in the English and American media in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’ it became increasingly associated with Irish and diaspora nationalism.

The findings of the project were widely disseminated to a wide audience, using the resources of both the modern media and nation-state. Radio programmes on both sides of the Irish border discussed the Harvard Mission, and the Irish government published a booklet National Monuments of the Irish Free State, which incorporated the project’s finds.

Interestingly, it did not cover any archaeological finds in Northern Ireland. Hugh O’Neill Hencken’s article ‘Harvard and Irish archaeology’ featured in the catalogue of the The Pageant of the Celt, a re-enactment of episodes in Irish history at the Chicago World Fair in 1934.

This ‘pageant’ was pitched at Irish Americans, and sought to ‘awaken in them a just pride of race and a faith in racial destiny.’ As Carew reminds us ‘the discourse on the Celts was primarily around the issue of race, which was the prominent ideology of the times.’ Although the Harvard project concerned itself with the internal question, equally, as Carew concludes, it was also eminently ‘modern’ and sought to define Ireland’s place in the modern world.

A valuable contribution

The Quest for the Irish Celt takes an under-explored subject and offers an accessible, inter-disciplinary analysis. Mairead Carew comes from an archaeology background, yet succeeds in writing a book which professional archaeologists, experienced historians of Ireland and general readers, alike, will find both fascinating and informative. One does not need much expertise in archaeology to appreciate and understand this book’s arguments.

Carew simultaneously writes about abstract theory and concrete examples lucidly. There is an effective balance between detailed discussion of the archaeological excavations and analysis of a wider socio-economic, cultural and political context.

The research behind this book is also of a high quality. Carew has consulted the archives of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard and the National Museum of Ireland to offer considerable detail on the archaeological digs.

She has also clearly done large volumes of research in the Archives of University College, Dublin and the National Archives of Ireland, which has aided her research into the Harvard Mission’s political, social, economic and cultural context. As mentioned previously, the latter body of sources might have been used a little more extensively in Chapter 7 to draw out connections between the Harvard Mission and dominant economic ideologies in the 1930s.

The monograph is well laid-out and presented, and is handsomely illustrated with well-chosen images. Some minor tweaks to the structure might have improved the ‘flow’ from chapter to chapter. For instance, Chapter 7 (which explores links between the Harvard mission and de Valera’s economic policies) might have complemented some of the points made in the first and second chapters (which discuss the broader role of the Irish state in Irish archaeology).

That said, this book makes several important contributions to Irish historiography. One of these contributions is obvious, though by no means insignificant: Carew offers us a history of Irish archaeology in a transformative period. Whilst cultural historians in Ireland have written extensively on education, language, literature and theatre, there has hitherto been little work which places Irish archaeology in a historical context.

Whilst the influence of the politics of Irish nationalism on Irish historiography has been extensively documented and debated, Carew sheds considerable light on its influence on Irish archaeology, and in turn the writing of early Irish history. Carew also considers another difficult topic: that of race. Surprisingly little has been written on the place of race and ethnicity in Irish nationalism.

As Carew suggests however, in the early twentieth century, constructions of Irish nationhood and nationalism were heavily predicated upon notions of European heritage and culture, and above all, whiteness. Some of the passages on Adolf Mahr, and on the eugenic beliefs of the Harvard Mission make for quite uncomfortable reading, especially when we consider the broader international context to Ireland in the 1930s.

Nonetheless, Carew tackles these topics courageously, and make good stimulating food for thought in the present day, as the issues and problems of nationalism figure heavily in the political landscape.

By Dieter Reinisch

January 30 2018 marked the 50^th anniversary of the launch of the “Tet offensive” in 1968 by North Vietnam forces and the National Liberation Front against the South Vietnam Army and the US military presence.

The offensive not only facilitated the changing public opinion in the USA on the Vietnam War and heralded revolutionary unrest throughout the world in 1968, twenty years later, the idea of a Tet-like offensive resurfaced in Ireland.

This piece will argue, however, that rather than a credible scenario, it was a wide-spread myth among the Irish Republican prisoners’ population that facilitated the departure of the IRA from Armalite to the ballot box.

In the 1980s, the Northern Irish conflict was in full swing. The high hopes of experiencing a “year of victory” in the early 1970s had disappeared among Irish Republicans as the conflict turned into what became known as the “Long War.” The hunger strikes in 1981 brought previously unknown public support for Provisional Republicans, one of the two Republican factions that originated from the split of the IRA and Sinn Féin in 1969/70.

By then, the Provisionals were the main Republican faction and had been boosted by electoral victories. Among those was the election of Bobby Sands as MP in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-elections while lying on his deathbed in the H-Blocks. Shortly after his election, Sands had died on hunger strike for political status. Tens of thousands packed the streets of Belfast on the day of his funeral.

The Armalite and the Ballot Box

These electoral victories were used to push for a new strategy that Belfast Republican Danny Morrison called “the Armalite and the Ballot box” at the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis (AGM) in 1981.

In a historic speech, he said: “Who here really believes that we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand, and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?” These few words were to become the summary of the political program of the Republican movement.

One of the obstacles on the way to parliamentarism was abstentionism. This was a long-standing Irish Republican strategy. It meant that since Republicans did not recognize the parliaments in Dublin, Belfast, or London as legitimate representations of the will of the Irish people, their candidates, even if elected, would abstain from taking their seats in these assemblies. While the strategy worked well in earlier decades of the 20^th century, by the 1980s a new generation of Republicans, mainly from the Belfast area, saw it as an obstacle to electoral breakthrough.

The debate on abstentionism dominated Sinn Féin until the split of the party in 1986. At the 1986 Ard-Fheis, a majority of delegates voted to drop abstentionism to the Dublin parliament. As a result, a much smaller faction, led by former Sinn Féin President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, walked out and regrouped under the name “Republican Sinn Féin.”

In early 1986, the Provisionals were at a crossroads. The Northern organization, led by a faction of Belfast Republicans, among them Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison and others including Martin McGuinness of Derry, were pressing for abandoning abstentionism. This group won the above mentioned factional struggle within the movement later that year – in part because they received the support of the Republican prisoners throughout these years.

Prisoners

Among the IRA prisoners, there were reservations over parliamentary politics. Three factions arose within the H-Blocks of HMP Maze.

HMP Maze, formerly known as Long Kesh, and still referred to by that name by Republicans, was the high-security prison west of Belfast where most of the paramilitary prisoners were held. The first and largest group consisted of mainly Belfast Republicans in favor of dropping abstentionism.

The second group, relatively influential outside the prisons but tiny in the H-Blocks, was supportive of the outside faction headed by older, Southern Republicans.

This group represented the staunch advocates of abstentionism but was weakened by the departure of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh from the position of President of Sinn Féin in 1983. The third group was a bunch of leftwing prisoners headed by Tommy McKearney. The latter campaigned for a Marxist orientation and the formation of syndicalist Trade Unions. They later formed the short-lived League of Communist Republicans.

In 1985/86, the first position was already the dominant one in the movement, both inside and outside the prisons. Nonetheless, some IRA volunteers leaned towards the second faction because they opposed parliamentarism. Among them were members of the East Tyrone Brigade, in Northern Ireland, and other areas like County Monaghan or North Louth, both in the Republic of Ireland. These areas were important pieces of the IRA’s war effort.

The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most active and effective units of the Provisionals at that time. One of their members, Jim Lynagh, who was killed in an ambush at Loughall in 1987, had actively campaigned among IRA prisoners against the dropping of abstentionism during his five-year spell in Portlaoise Prison, the Republic of Ireland’s high-security prison.

While these people were also a minority in the Northern IRA, established IRA members like Lynagh could have given the increasingly isolated pro-abstentionist faction in the South a more militant outlook. To be sure, the abstentionist Southern Republicans were portrayed as ageing politicians by the younger anti-abstentionist Northerners. The support of militants for the pro-abstentionist faction would not have changed the outcome of the split in 1986, but it could have made it more damaging for the Provisionals.

In order to weaken the possible damage of the split, the rank-and-file volunteers and the prisoners had to be won for the electoral strategy by taking the bread out of the mouth of the abstentionists. It is at this point that the idea of an “Irish Tet offensive” comes into play.

The Irish Tet

Journalist Ed Moloney writes that “the IRA in 1986 was in the midst of organizing a military venture which, if successful, might have had as much a sickening effect on British public opinion [as a Royal assassination].”

He continues:

“By 1986 the IRA was well advanced in planning and organizing a massive military offensive, nicknamed an IRA ‘Tet’ by some, using Libyan-supplied weapons and explosives as well as cash. Like the effect of the Vietcong’s ‘Tet offensive’ of January 1968 on American public opinion, the IRA’s campaign was intended to weaken British resolve to continue fighting in a war it no longer had belief in winning or ending.”

In the 1980s, the Provisionals re-established close links they previously held in the early 1970s with the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi provided the IRA with plastic explosives Semtex, Millions of US-Dollars and various kinds of arms such as its first RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

In autumn 1987, the biggest cargo on board the Eksund was intercepted and the plans for an “IRA Tet offensive” vanished. Nonetheless, it had a lasting impact on the Republican prisoners. The rumours that the launch of the Tet-like offensive was imminent was taken as evidence by the majority faction that the dropping of abstentionism did not mean a road to parliamentarism. Instead, a large-scale military assault on the British army would be accompanied by election campaigns.

In an interview with me in his flat in West Belfast on 28 July 2015, Gerard Hodgins, a Republican prisoner in the H-Blocks at that time, remembers:

“In 1986, most people followed [Gerry] Adams because there were rumours that we were going to have a ‘Tet offensive’ like the Vietnamese and there were rumours that a lot of gear was coming in. We hadn’t actually got it yet, we hadn’t got the Libyan gear. It was not there for use, but the plan was supposed to be that when the Eksund was coming – the one that was caught – the gear would come North immediately, and have it and we just shoot, attack everything and sustain it for as long as possible.

We accepted we’d have a lot of casualties because it was going to be a different kind of warfare, but we were up for it. That was why Adams could carry the whole movement, he was promising, on the one hand, we were driving them out because we finally had the international connections and the gear and that’s how he carried them. Even I voted for abandoning the abstentionism because I saw it as a political obstacle.”

Over the past decade, journalists and historians discussed the chances for success of an “Irish Tet offensive” if the Eksund would have made it to Ireland. We do not know and discussing it is a fruitless attempt at counterfactual history. Indeed, the biggest impact the “Irish Tet offensive” had, was the myth it created among the prison population.

In the late 1980s, many Republicans naively thought that military victory was on the horizon and with the electoral support that had grown since the hunger strikes, the British army could be driven from Northern Ireland, the island of Ireland finally reunited, and their own Irish Cuba established off the coast of Britain. It was this vision that brought them to support Gerry Adams.

Socialism in the H Blocks

To be sure, it was not only the name used for these plans by the IRA, “Tet offensive,” that resembled admiration for the North Vietnamese Forces.

Irish Republican prisoners were familiar with the Vietnamese struggle since becoming in contact with anti-imperialist literature in the internment camps and prisons during the 1970s and 1980s. Among other literature like Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Antonia Gramsci, prisoners read Ho-Chi Minh and General Giap.

In an interview with me on the 31 March 2014, former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre remembers about his time in the Long Kesh internment camp:

“There were all these documentaries about Communism and Chile, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and they all were reading General Giap, Che Guevara, [and] discussing strategy. I thought they loved it, there was a lot of talks. Some of these people were very committed and they wanted to learn more and Adams held a strong IRA commitment in there. And they held a strong anti-leadership position in there. They thought that the [Southern based] leadership should be overthrown and they were talking left-wing.”

In the prisons, the IRA prisoners organized their own classes and reading groups. Influenced by Marxist and anti-imperialist literature they became fascinated by guerilla struggle, the Cuban revolution, and Mao’s long march. In Vietnam, a guerrilla army had fought the militarily much more advanced United States to its knees.

For many Republicans, the situation of the North Vietnamese was similar to their own in the fight against the British Army. Hence, the “Tet offensive” became their beacon. However, the illusion of the Irish Republican prisoners was soon crushed by another international event: the fall of the Berlin wall.

The fall of the Berlin wall was a dramatic event for the Republican prisoners. Over the previous seven to eight years, the prisoners had developed their own interpretation of “Socialism” and the events in Berlin, the fall of the Soviet Union, and, what they considered the defeat of their newly found international allies, made no sense to them. Danny Morrison, in an interview with me in his Andersonstown house on 28 July 2015, says that

“I do think when the [Berlin] wall came down in Germany in 1989, a lot of them got their eyes opened and there was a move away from this purist ideological approach to a more pragmatic form of politics.”

The South African example

The Berlin wall had fallen and removed the illusion of a Socialist future from the Republican prisoners. At the same time, the conflict in Northern Ireland started to wind down and the peace process gained momentum. In this situation, the prisoners were looking for new guidance and new ideology to understand the world.

Once again, as the fall of the Berlin wall, it was an international event that had a lasting impact on the political views of the Republican prisoners. Only months after the collapse of the GDR, on 11 February 1990, ANC leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Nelson Mandela was in many ways a role model for Republican prisoners in Ireland. He was a freedom fighter, he fought injustice and discrimination. To be sure, a similar social, cultural, and political oppression the Catholics felt in Northern Ireland was fought by Mandela on behalf of Black Africans, but, moreover, he had served a long sentence such as most of the Republican prisoners sentenced after 1976. For many prisoners, an end to the conflict and a release from prison was possible by following Mandela’s example.

Yet, for most of the Provisional prisoners, following Mandela’s example meant accepting compromises, and preparing prisoners for these compromises following years of waiting for an “Irish Tet offensive” meant unchaining them from radical thinking and embracing pragmatism and the peace process.

The 1970s and 1980s were characterised by a turn to left-wing literature and understanding of the prisoners. While the idea of an “Irish Tet offensive” never materialised, it created a myth that, ultimately, served the purpose of facilitating the departure of the Irish Republican movement from armed struggle to parliamentarism.

Instead of building a united democratic Socialist Republic, they entered the newly created Northern Ireland Executive, a regional government, in a coalition with their Unionist opponents in Stormont – in a still divided island. Despite the hopes for an “Irish Tet offensive” and revolutionary sentiments in the H-Blocks, it was only because of the support of the IRA prisoners that this process was successful and, thus, Gerard Hodgins looks back and asks himself: “It’s only when you look back, you recognise this in hindsight. You look back and you say to yourself: How the fuck did I not notice?”

Dr Dieter Reinisch is a Historian at the European University Institute in Florence and Editorial Board member of the journal “Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies” (Florence University Press). He teaches History and Gender Studies at the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg. He tweets on @ReinischDieter and blogs on me.eui.eu/dieter-reinisch.

Edited by Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward

Published by: Irish Academic Press, 2018 (Revised edition)

Reviewer: Timothy Ellis

The current ‘decade of centenaries’ has greatly enlivened and stimulated Irish historiography. Commendably there has been much recent research on the role of women in the Irish revolution. This is also partly due to the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain and Ireland this year, and the appearance of a ‘fourth wave’ of the feminist movement as seen, for instance, in the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment of the Irish Constitution.

It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that Louise Ryan’s and Margaret Ward’s edited collection should be republished this year, a decade after its original release. Linda Connolly offers an insightful foreword to the new edition.

She situates the work in a new context, reminding us that the ‘decade of centenaries’ must include ‘critical reflection’ on ‘gender issues, equal citizenship and the kind of society Ireland is and has become.’ The essays in collection cover many different themes: suffragist ideology, tactics employed and tensions within the movement.

 Ideology

The first essay, by Mary Cullen, a respected and experienced scholar of Irish women’s history, traces the concept of ‘citizenship’ in Irish feminist political thought from the eighteenth century, to the early twentieth. ‘Citizenship’ within classical republican thought entails active, free participation of citizens in society, exercising their “rights” and  carrying out their “duties”.

It was a central concept in enlightenment political thought, and influenced the writings of the early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, which were read by Martha McTier and Mary Ann McCracken (sisters of prominent members of the United Irishmen). Over the nineteenth century, women increasingly participated in public life, through philanthropy.

The vote became desirable for women, as Isabella Tod argued, because it was “‘a necessary means for performing duties.” By the twentieth century, the  suffragist Irish Citizen newspaper spoke in several ‘languages’, such as feminism, socialism, nationalism and pacifism. Nonetheless, its masthead also referred to the ‘rights and duties’ of citizenship, thus drawing on the classically republican language of ‘citizenship.’

As Louise Ryan argues, ‘citizenship,’ for suffragist women entailed participation actively in what Jurgen Habermas terms the ‘public sphere’. By participating in the ‘public sphere’, suffragists sought to problematise the Victorian notion of separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ spheres.

Feminist campaigners against sexual and domestic violence, for instance, contended that the notion of ‘privacy’ in the home, only protected male abusers, who were often either acquitted, or given excessively lenient sentences. Suffragists contended that this inequity in sentencing for sexual crime, stemmed from a ‘double standard.’

Whilst men supposedly had ‘natural’ biological urges that could be explained away, women with a ‘purer’ moral disposition were supposed to know better. If then, women indeed had a “purer” moral disposition, they could purify and enrich public life. They should therefore be allowed to scrutinise the legal process, and even act as attorneys and judges, in order to promote fairer sentences of perpetrators of sexual abuse and violence.

For Margaret Cousins, her public duties included celibacy and vegetarianism. She tied these commitments closely to her suffragism. Holding esoteric, mystical beliefs, she believed that humankind could transcend its ‘animal’ existence and reach a higher, spiritual form. Abstention from sexual intercourse and consuming meat, would allow women to shake off their animalistic, slave-like status.

As Catherine Candy argues, however, Cousins’ beliefs were somewhat elitist. She believed that the spiritual reform of humanity could only be spearheaded by the middle classes. Her vegetarianism drew on a Hindu tradition which associated vegetarianism with social discrimination in favour of the brahmin caste (the top layer of the traditional Indian social order).

The ‘duties’ of citizenship remained central to suffragist discourse well beyond 1922, as Catriona Beaumont demonstrates. After the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, discrimination against women was institutionalised in various forms, most notably in the 1937 Irish Constitution which prescribed the ‘proper’ place of women to be the home.

This discrimination was nonetheless resisted by Irish veterans of the suffrage movement. In their resistance, Irish feminists utilised the same language as the earlier suffragist movement. They resisted the 1924 Juries Act (which sought to make jury service voluntary for women), for example, by arguing that “women had no right to evade any duties and responsibilities involved in citizenship.” 

Activities

As Carmel Quinlan notes, the early Irish suffragist movement was predominately Protestant and middle-class. The Quakers, in particular, dominated the movement. Although there was sporadic activism in Dublin from 1861 onwards, it was not until 1876 that a permanent organisation, the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (DWSA) was formed.

It cultivated close links to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and its leader Millicent Fawcett. Its chief methods were constitutional, law-abiding and ‘respectable,’ namely parliamentary lobbying, petitioning public meetings and disseminating publications. Its progress was slow, but not without results.

When women were allowed to stand as Poor Law Guardians and Rural district councillors in 1896 and 1898, respectively, the DWSA worked to persuade the public of the need for women to serve in these roles, and to publicise the achievements of women in these roles, thus lessening fears about female participation in public life. As Quinlan argues, the DWSA ‘worked within the existing power structures’ but also challenged ‘the very fundamental tenet that political life was the prerogative of a male government.’ 

Lobbying, public meetings and petitioning were not the only tactics employed by suffragists. In December 1913, ’Dublin suffrage week’ offered a conference, debates, music, lunches, teas, a Christmas fair and a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm. As Paige Reynolds argues, the week was dominated by ‘theatricality.’

The most popular event of the week was a debate between a supporter and an opponent of women’s suffrage, a lively, colourful and emotive event. The fact that the debate was the best attended event of the week suggests, as Reynolds argues that ‘the fusion of drama and information remained the suffragists most effective tool.’

Clíona Murphy argues that humour was also a useful tool for suffragists. It made suffragist arguments memorable, communicated points succinctly and allowed suffragists to negotiate difficult subjects. It countered anti-suffragists who themselves humorously mocked the “shrieking sisterhood” and “howling viragoes.”

Suffragist journals published caricatures of their opponents. Humorous suffragist writing deconstructed the absurdities of gendered roles. The Irish Citizen, published a sketch in 1914 which mocked the notion of the “womanly woman.” Suffragette public meetings often entailed much ‘banter,’ which both speakers and audiences enjoyed.

Over time, imprisonment and hunger strikes became a useful political tactic for both Irish suffragettes, and, then later, male Irish republicans. Initially, members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), who were imprisoned for misdemeanours, had a conciliatory relationship with prison authorities.

They treated imprisonment as an inconvenience to be negotiated with in good nature. However, the imprisonment of members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1912 in Ireland shifted Irish suffragist perceptions of prison.

Some IWFL women consequently joined them in solidarity. The situation escalated over 1913, as the WSPU focussed more of its efforts on Ireland as the Home Rule continued. The unpopular ‘Cat and Mouse act’ was introduced, which allowed suffragettes to be temporarily released when on hunger strike, and then to be returned to prison to complete their sentences. Irish prison authorities introduced a tougher prison regime, seeking to make suffragettes more isolated whilst in prison.

Unsurprisingly, relations between suffragettes and prison authorities deteriorated; and protests and hunger strikes continued, and as Murphy notes ‘the polite, if determined approach of the IWFL had receded.’ This, however, gave the suffragettes a bigger public profile, and they increasingly regarded imprisonment as a desirable political tool. Some republican men recognised the political capital of imprisonment and hunger-strikes, yet they were initially

reluctant to copy suffragette tactics too closely, due to their association with a British organisation, the WSPU. This highlights the tensions between ‘British’ suffragism and Irish republicanism.

Tensions

In examining the career of Rosamund Jacobs, Lane suggests we should avoid viewing disagreements as ‘divisions’, but rather as ‘tensions.’ Whilst some sources, such as journalism, speeches and autobiography, are more likely to highlight apparently stark divisions, other, more private sources, such as diaries are more likely to bring up a more complex picture.

Suffragists could maintain respectful friendships with those they disagreed with. These friendships could be sustained and nurtured by ‘other’ areas of activism, such as cultural revival. For example, although Jacobs did not join the IWFL because it “did nothing but import English speakers,” she remained a friend of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and both shared a commitment to Irish republicanism.

Equally, whilst Jacobs was an ardent republican, she critiqued nationalist organisations such as Cumann na mBan, for merely relegating women to a ‘subordinate’, ‘auxiliary’ role. 

Whilst some Irish republicans supported suffragism, others opposed it, or felt that the national struggle had to take precedence. Provincial Ireland had a similarly ambivalent relationship with the suffrage question. Provincial suffragists, still, nonetheless, found ways to negotiate these difficulties. As Mary Clancy shows, Galway city, despite its relative isolation did develop a suffrage organisation.

The Connacht Women’s Franchise League (CWFL) operated in the city and was successful in the small towns of the county. It built a suffrage library and distributed suffragist arguments to the press. Its public meetings were also well-attended.

Less success was achieved with visiting public speakers from Great Britain, however, who did not tailor their arguments to an Irish context. Indeed, Clancy argues that these arguments were better ‘suited to industrial and urban environments than a small town in the west of Ireland.’

As Margaret Ward notes, the First World War further intensified divisions within the British and Irish suffragist movement. In Ireland, although some continued the fight for the vote, many, like their British comrades, threw themselves into supporting the war effort. Others, such as Charlotte Despard and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, combined their pacifism and Irish republicanism in their critiques of the war.

Significantly, Irish pacifist suffragists were allowed separate representation at a women’s anti-war conference in the Hague; a great propaganda coup for nationalist suffragists. Interestingly, although Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was a pacifist, she drew a distinction between pacifism and the notion that “resistance to all violence is wrong,” supporting the Irish volunteers. The Easter Rising challenged existing attitudes further, and lead to the rise of “a new generation of female activists who argued that women’s rights could only be achieved with national independence.”

Suffragists in Ulster encountered the most tensions. Here, the suffrage issue was complicated by both two competing ‘nationalisms’ and the issue of class, in what was Ireland’s only true industrial, working class city: Belfast. As Myrtle Hill notes, suffragist women in Ulster, were initially, not unlike their middle-class, Protestant, social reformer contemporaries in Dublin. Yet their Presbyterianism gave their ideology a distinct colouring.

Many opposed Home Rule, arguing that ‘Catholic’ rule from Dublin would spell, in the words of Isabella Tod, “the stoppage of the whole of the work of social reform for which we had laboured so hard.” By the 1910s, suffrage activism in Ulster became particularly contentious. The Home Rule crisis stimulated both militant and non-militant activism.

In 1913 one senior unionist politician indicated that he would possibly support women’s suffrage under an Ulster Provisional Government. This naturally excited Irish suffragists, and the WSPU began to focus its efforts on the region. Militant suffragettes also drew strength from parallels between their movement and armed resistance to Home Rule in Ulster, and some Ulster suffragists closely tied their national  and gender identities together.  As Hill notes, however, ‘in accepting the principle of self-governance for Ulster, such a move could not fail to exacerbate the underlying political divisions.’

Denise Kleinrichert examines how class contributed another layer of tension into the Ulster suffrage movement. Middle-class suffragists were not adept at couching their arguments in a way which would have resonated with working-class women, and had little to say of wages and working conditions. Indeed, the campaign for a limited female franchise on a propertied basis, offered almost nothing to working-class women.

Moreover, many of the female workers in Belfast’s mills were extremely young and lacked life-experience, making them less receptive to arguments about the vote. Sectarian differences prevented the political solidarity between Protestants and Catholics that might have underpinned a united movement for suffrage and labour rights. Nonetheless, Winnifred Carney made a valiant effort to organise the working women of Belfast.

Carney was committed to republicanism, suffrage and labour. She participated in the Easter Rising, and was the only woman present at the initial occupation of the GPO. She was not rewarded handsomely for her efforts however, and contested the Belfast Victoria Seat in 1918, with limited support from her party, Sinn Féin; a fact which highlights republicanism’s broader ambivalence about feminism.

Conclusions

Commendably, this book adopts a multitude of perspectives on women’s suffrage in Ireland. The research spans from the end of the eighteenth century, to the middle of the twentieth. There is also a range of geographical perspectives.

Although Dublin, was very much the centre of Irish suffragism, perspectives from Waterford, Galway and Belfast in this collection. Catherine Candy and Margaret Ward also consider Irish suffragism in a wider international context. The focus on the subtitle ‘Becoming citizens,’ nonetheless remains consistent. Each essay explores how ‘the vote’ was conceptualised not simply as an end in itself, but rather a means to an ultimate end of ‘citizenship’ which would benefit  both individual women and society as a whole.

This collection engages with a wide body of sources in great detail. Its editors schools are clearly apparent. Margaret Ward, both an experienced historian of women in modern Irish politics and feminist activist, brings much research expertise to this work. Louise Ryan, meanwhile,  uses her background as a sociologist to give this work considerable inter-disciplinary  reach and theoretical reach.

With an edited collection, there will always be topics which are left out and this work is no exception. Although suffragism’s difficult relationship with Irish nationalism features prominently in this work, there, perhaps, might have been more on the complex relationship between women’s nationalist organisations, such as the Ladies Land League, Inghinidhe na hEireann and Cumann mBan, and women’s suffrage.

Whilst these organisations were indeed ‘nationalist before suffragist,’ they represented an important entry point for women into the public sphere, allowing them opportunities to demonstrate that they were capable of exercising the franchise. As the ‘decade of centenaries’ draws on, we shall hopefully see more research on these complex and contested, yet vital connections.

How the Catholic Church and lay organisations capitalised on the visit of Pope John Paul II. By Barry Sheppard

On the 21^st August this year Pope Francis will visit Ireland for the 9^th World Meeting of Families.  It will be the first Papal visit since the much-recalled visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979.   Francis, of course will arrive in a very different Ireland to that which John Paul arrived that September almost forty years ago.

Much has changed in Ireland in those four decades, with a significant acceleration in the past ten years.  Nevertheless, there has been understandably much reminiscing of late about the previous Papal visit, and the impact it had on Catholicism in Ireland.

An Ireland which has had such a strong tradition of lay organisations participating in what was broadly termed ‘Catholic Action’.  While there are many who still adhere to that ethos, it is greatly diminished due to rapid secularisation, the fallout from decades of church scandals, and the catalogue of evidence showing the severe mistreatment of children on a grand scale in the various state institutions which fell under the control of the Catholic Church.

Pope’s Francis’ impending visit affords us with an opportunity to reflect on the Ireland of 40 years ago at the time of the last Papal visit. Showing that the evangelical zeal of the Catholic Action movement which exploded in the 1930s still loomed-large in public life, and was in fact reinvigorated in the aftermath of the visit, targeting the familiar old foes of popular entertainment and cinema as agents of the decline of Irish morals.

‘Greatest Event since the Congress’

When the visit of Pope John Paul II was announced in July of 1979, after weeks of intense speculation, the sense of jubilation in the press was palpable.

Reflecting on the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, the last occasion that they eyes of the world’s Catholics were on Ireland, the visit was billed as the “GREATEST EVENT SINCE THE CONGRESS”.[1]

This was a natural comparison, one which would be made many times over those couple of months in mid to late 1979.  Although, in heightened expectation of what was to come, it was claimed that the Congress would be dwarfed in emotional significance by the coming of John Paul II.[2]

The Primate of All-Ireland at the time, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich was under no illusion as to the visit’s historical significance and drew many comparisons to the 1932 Congress, stating that those who remembered the Congress would be able to look upon the Papal visit as ‘the fulfillment of an impossible dream’.[3]

The Eucharistic Congress of 1932 was a huge success for Ireland, religiously and politically, and its impact was felt for decades afterwards.  Being chosen to host such a prestigious world event, only a short number of years after the founding of the state led to an increase in religiosity among Irish Catholics.  It provided lay religious groups and individuals with a spiritual boost which inspired them to impose their faith convictions on the very fabric of the state at a ground level.

At a top-down level, the Catholic Church at the time of the Congress, was already ‘rigid and authoritarian in its governance, conversionist in its attitude to Protestants, Marian in its devotional emphasis and strongly focused on external religious practice rather than interior spirituality’.[4]

The Congress legitimised the Catholic Church as the ultimate authority in the land, and bolstered the ‘external’ practice, while at the same time providing lay groups with the spiritual environment to carry out their own missions in line with Papal teaching laid out in the various encyclicals.   Irish society was now being held together in the grip of Catholicism from above and below.

Catholic Lay Organisations

Throughout Ireland, Catholic Action groups, inspired by the ‘great social encyclicals’ Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, were active in almost all aspects of public, and private life.  In Dublin, agents of Catholicism had a ‘major effect on and input into the life of the people of the city from baptism to burial’.[5]

The lay organisations in Ireland which helped make up ‘Catholic Action’ at the time of the Congress were, in a number of cases already well-established.  The Legion of Mary was founded in 1921, the Catholic Truth Society in 1900, while St Vincent de Paul was introduced to Ireland as far back as 1840.

They were a small section of the more prominent groupings.   Nevertheless, the organisations became galvanised in the wake of the 1932 Congress, with an explosion of new names emerging over the next number of years, such as ‘the League for Social Justice, the Guilds of Regnum Christi, Muintir na Tíre, the Irish Christian Front, Christus Rex and Maria Duce’.[6]

A ‘Catholic Action’ pamphlet released in the year of the Congress emphasised what the movement was and what its mission should be: “Pius XI, putting into more specific form what was already said by his two immediate predecessors, has called for the organised co-operation of the laity in the work of the apostolate, and in calling it “Catholic Action”, he has made the term the watchword of a new Crusade”.[7]

The ‘Crusade’ would cover many areas of public life.  However, popular entertainment in the form of dances, music, and the cinema would, in particular draw the ire from the nation’s new moral guardians.

Future Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, a career-opponent of cinema, in a sermon in Cavan on 13 March 1931 warned of worldwide Jewish and Masonic plots and that the modern Press and Cinema were the direct outcome of the ‘virulent document’ (the Declaration of the Rights of Man), which ‘after the manner of Satan, sets man in the place of God’.[8]

While, in 1937 a Rev. Boylan of Dun Laoghaire spoke on the need for the ‘full organisation’ of Catholic Action to be established as soon as possible in Ireland.  Boylan was gravely concerned about the influence which cinema had, with discussion on the best way to ‘purify’ the threat it posed.[9]

Occasionally, cinema was tied in with the other bane of the Catholic foot soldier, Communism.   In a clearly paranoid editorial in the Kerryman newspaper in 1937, the Rev. W. B. Hannon spoke of cinema as just one arm of the many-tentacled Red menace sweeping over society.  Hannon had believed that the 1932 Eucharistic Congress had ‘irritated the Russian paymasters of the Communistic Cells in Belfast, Dublin, Kilrush etc.’ and that the cinemas of the large towns were ‘instruments of godless propaganda’ which Communists employed to infiltrate Irish society.[10]

Attacks on the immorality of the cinema would continue unabated through the middle decades of the century. In 1960, the Bishop of Kilmore, Austin Quinn stated that ‘cinema and like mediums’ were forms of modern propaganda which taught that liberty was unrestrained, and provided ‘extensive knowledge of licentious living’.[11]

The ‘Crusade’ envisaged by that 1932 Catholic Action pamphlet lasted decades, and impacted generations of Irish men and women.  Despite falling numbers in lay ‘Catholic Action’ groups, organisations like the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland disseminated ‘millions of its booklets’ right into the 1970s.   According to Maurice Curtis the influence of ‘Catholic Action’, despite being rebranded to the less-militant sounding ‘lay apostolate’, was to be felt right through to the 1980s and 90s ‘in leadership, personnel and ideas’.[12]

A Catholic Counter attack

As Ireland opened up economically and culturally, there was a weakening of Catholic Action from its zenith in the 1930s and 40s, although still very much visible.  However, the Papal visit of 1979 offered an opportunity to recoup ground lost to liberalism.

A ‘liberalism’ which had struck its latest blow a mere two months previously, with the passing of the Health (Family Planning) Act, 1979, which allowed for legal contraception.  With this event still fresh, John Paul’s Irish trip was “was to be the catalyst in a conservative Catholic counter-attack against liberalisation which would dominate political debate in Ireland down to the 1990s”.[13]

Interestingly, in light of the recent referendum on the Eighth Amendment coming a short matter of months before Francis’ visit, it was suggested that ‘The papal visit by Pope John Paul II in 1979 was the springboard for the campaign to insert a ‘pro-life’ amendment into the Irish Constitution’ in 1983.^[14]

The fierce debate around the Eighth Amendment Referendum of 1983, afforded religious lay organisations a new target to take aim at, the metropolitan press and their perceived liberal bias. It was felt that ‘the anti-amendment views of many Dublin-based journalists strongly coloured their presentation of the pro-amendment case’.[15]

A Catholic lay report into the perceived bias of Dublin journalists in relation to the referendum contained echoes of previous ‘buy Irish goods’ and censorship campaigns of the 1930s and 40s.

The report claimed that ‘Most of the foreign – and especially British – publications on sale in Ireland and covering the referendum, were strongly anti-amendment in content and tone’, and that ‘Anyone walking into a Dublin newspaper shop looking for a pro-amendment newspaper or magazine and seeking to avoid publications with an anti-amendment bias faced a long search’.[16]

 ‘Crusade for family prayer’

Like the Congress, the 1979 event was a moment of ‘national triumph’ symbolising the ‘victory of Faith and Fatherland’, where according to Tomas O Fiaich the cosmhuintir (ordinary people) had come into their own’.[17]  Indeed, in the aftermath of the visit, connecting with the cosmhuintir and inspiring them to continue in the same vein as their Catholic Action forebearers was foremost on the Cardinal’s mind.

In a 1980 interview on the legacy of the Papal Visit, O Fiaich said that they decided on a ‘crusade for family prayer’.  Perhaps reminiscent of the proactive Catholicism of Cardinal Cullen’s ‘Devotional Revolution’, it was decided that the Diocese of Armagh would ‘revive a grand old custom’ of priests visiting every house in their parishes to pray with families, this time bringing especially commissioned souvenirs of the Papal Visit in order to maintain spiritual momentum.[18]

Both during and after the visit, the word ‘crusade’ became synonymous with the visit and what the legacy of that visit would be.  The Irish Independent conjured up medieval imagery, labelling the Pope’s brief stopover an ‘arduous spiritual crusade in Ireland’.[19]

Clergy would promote their crusade by reaching out to their audience through newspapers, instructing the flock on how to go forth and spread the Pope’s message.  In an article produced two weeks after the visit, which was carried in a number of regional newspapers across Ireland, Fr. G. Ffrench gave explicit instructions on what ‘Crusaders’ could do to enact what the Pope intentions were for the Irish flock.[20]

As with previous moral crusades in the 1930s, cinema was a familiar target for Irish Crusaders, concerned with the liberalisation of the state.  However, the more modern crusade, unlike that of the 30s and 40s had the added targeted the relatively newer Irish medium of television.

Lamenting the decline of morality in RTE programming, Fianna Fáil Senator Micheál Cranitch pointed his Seanad Éireann colleagues to the recent Papal Visit as a moral standard to which Irish television programming should look to for guidance.

Taking aim at a number of RTE’s programmes, including the almost sacred Late Late Show, he stated: “I have lots of objections to some of the things portrayed on what is normally a very popular programme, “The Late Late Show” on Saturday nights. Various representations have been made to me in relation to some of the things that were displayed and some of the things that were done on the very first programme subsequent to the visit of Pope John Paul II. People came to me and wrote to me about that and they want to know what can be done about it”.[21]

The Late Late Show was also in the firing line of a ‘counter attack’ by a coalition of Catholic lay organisations, concerned about the ‘increasing permissiveness in Irish society’ and the tacit consent given to it by governmental and semi-state bodies.[22]

It was argued the show’s presenter Gay Byrne (and RTE), was desperate to compete with the BBC and ITV, and were therefore going after ‘unrepresentative spokesmen and women for Gay Rights, Sperm Bank donors to women whose husbands are impotent, strident divorce lobbyists, and promoters of abortion’.[23]

Among the organisations in this concerted counter-attack were The Irish Family League, Pro Fide, and the League of Decency, organisations which Diarmaid Ferriter has described as having titles with ‘echoes of 1920s zeal’.[24]

‘An unending stream of sex-oriented films

Of course, one part of the ‘counter attack’ on liberalism was to bombard the print media with protest and warning letters. The head of the League of Decency’s Parents Committee, in such a publicity letter laid the blame for the debasing of Irish society at the feet of the cinema and RTE, who seemingly shared responsibility for an increase in sexual crime in Ireland.  The strongly-worded warning seemed to give the impression that 24 hour programming was already a well-established feature on Irish televisions: ‘Our cinemas show an unending stream of sex-oriented films, as does our national television network’.[25]

A number of controversial cinemas drew much publicity, especially those which had even the slightest of religious tones.  Of the plethora of unsuitable celluloid offerings to Irish audiences, two films dealing with matters of sanctity caused uproar during the next decade, The Life of Brian and the Last Temptation of Christ.

The Irish press followed the publicity of the movie being banned in a number of countries with great interest, in anticipation of what decision the Irish Censor would take in relation to it.  Finally as it was banned in Ireland some newspaper titles announced the decision in decidedly joyous tones.  It was perhaps inevitable that the film would be banned after the controversy it generated in many local council areas in Britain.  The fact that it was to be released so soon after Pope John Paul’s visit, made clerical concerns all the more pronounced.

While Brian didn’t escape the censor’s net, the sound-track recording somehow slipped past the eagle-eyed moral guardians, and went on to sell particularly well in record stores.  A televised debate on the matter in which calls were made to ban it, heard of the shock that the record contained “four letter words and obscenities”, leading one journalist to comment that in Ireland ‘the opportunity to ban a play, film, book or gramophone record has always been like a red flag to a Papal Bull’.[26] The eventual banning of the record was welcomed by celebrity cleric Fr. Brian D’Arcy, who called it ‘a mockery of God’s word’.[27]

A few years later, the impending release of Martin Scorsese’s controversial study of the final days of Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ caused no small degree of upheaval in Ireland, as in a number of other countries.

Like ‘Brian’ short of a decade previously, the controversy ahead was anticipated in the press for weeks before it reached Irish shores.  However, there seemed to be noticeable softening of the stance of large sections which was not happening in the wake of the release of Life of Brian.

Although the Churches were united in Ireland against it, calling it a ‘banal’ movie, the public at large were more vocal in their opinions that people should be able to judge for themselves.[28]  Was this an early sign of a wedge being driven between the church hierarchy and the masses?

If ordinary people had a ‘wait and see’ attitude about the movie, lay Catholic groups were not so laid back.  In their perpetual mission to combat the liberalisation of society the Knights of Columbanus announced a recruitment drive and a more visible presence in Irish social life, including applying direct pressure on cinema owners who were intending to show the Last Temptation of Christ.^[29]

Despite mounting pressure from the Catholic Church and lay organisations, the censor, Sheamus Smith allowed the film to pass, albeit with two stipulations, which the Irish Press dryly referred to as ‘two new Commandments’.^[30]  Audience members were expected to be over eighteen years of age, and to have taken their seats before the film began, in order to read the disclaimers that the film was not based upon the Gospels, but was ‘a fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict’.  Cinemas were also required to display this statement on posters, at least the same size as posters advertising the movie.^[31]

The Role of the Media

The role the media played in generating publicity for the film was called into question by a number of figures within the Church hierarchy.  In particular, the Bishop of Ferns Dr Brendan Comiskey lambasted the media for hyping what would otherwise have been ‘an obscure film, playing in some small clubs’.^[32]

Comiskey was the chair of the hierarchy’s Commission of Communication, a position from which he led a crusade against the media, in what Mark O’Brien calls a ‘generational clash’ between younger journalists who were willing to discuss many formally taboo subjects, and the Church hierarchy, which sought to combat such liberal viewpoints.  One of Comiskey’s frequent clashes with the media centred on the role journalism played in Scorcese’s movie.

In an echo of McQuaid’s warning about the dangers of cinema over fifty years earlier he concluded that there existed ‘a conspiracy by the entertainment and media industries to use the Church in an attempt to increase box office receipts and newspaper sales’.^[33]

Spiritual Dividends?

One would perhaps have expected the increased fervour among the masses who were moved by the Papal visit to stimulate generate new recruits for the religious orders in Ireland.  In his 1980 interview on the visit’s legacy, Cardinal O Fiaich said that he thought it would have an impact on recruits to the religious orders, and that he was sure the Pope himself would be disappointed if that wasn’t the case.[34]

The Rev. Niall Coll has recently stated that those in the seminary in 1981 and 82 were known as ‘John Paul vocations’.[35] However, regardless if the classes of 81 and 82 were directly inspired by Papal intervention, more people continued to turn their backs on the religious life.  Ordination numbers in Ireland declined significantly in the early to mid-1980s to the low 120s from the 159 ordinations in the year before John Paul’s visit, with numbers plummeting even further in recent years.[36]

The visit of Pope John Paul II was an international event, with the eyes of the world upon Catholic Ireland for those few days, something which Irish clerical and lay groups wholly embraced.  After the dust settled however, there was a swift focus to the familiar inward-looking Catholicism, which so categorised the 1930s, 40s and 50s. At the peak of Catholic Action in the aftermath of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, there was an atmosphere of both economic and spiritual protectionism which to a certain extent isolated Ireland from the wider world.

By the late 1970s economic protectionism was a distant and perhaps an uncomfortable memory for many, yet there was a concerted effort by a number of Catholic lay organisations to replicate the spiritual protectionism which defined Irish society for decades.

Liberalism and foreign influences were loudly challenged, just as Communism and ‘foreign imports’ had been a rallying point generations before.  As with previous generations of religious activism, Irish cinemas became an ideological battleground for those who wished to stem the tide of liberalism.

That battle, along with the wider fight was (very) slowly being lost.  However, the arrival of Pope John Paul II gave fresh impetus to the fight, and a renewed confidence among Catholic Action groups, which looked to the 1930s as a golden period from which they could draw strength.   It is highly doubtful that next week’s visit can generate the same input.

References

[1] Ulster Herald, 28 July 1979.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ulster Herald, 28 July 1979.

[4] Irish Times, 2 June 2012

[5] Eamonn Dunne, ‘Action and Reaction: Catholic Lay Organisations in Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s’ in Archivium Hibernicum, Vol. 48 (1994), pp. 107-118

[6] Maurice Curtis, ‘Miraculous meddlers’: the Catholic Action movement, in History Ireland, Issue 5 (Sept/Oct 2010), Volume 18

[7] Rev T.F. Ryan, Catholic Action in Ireland – “Irish Messenger” Penny Series, 1932.

[8] John Cooney, John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland, p. 70.

[9] Irish Independent, 23 June, 1937.

[10] The Kerryman, 9 January, 1937.

[11] Fermanagh Herald, 19 March, 1960.

[12] Maurice Curtis, ‘Miraculous meddlers’: the Catholic Action movement, in History Ireland, Issue 5 (Sept/Oct 2010), Volume 18

[13] Martin McLoone, NATIONAL CINEMA AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: IRELAND AND EUROPE.

[14] Tony O’Brien in Ellie Lee (ed.) Abortion Law and Politics Today, p. 111

[15] Timothy O’Sullivan, ‘Fair and Accurate’? The Amendment and the Press, Veritas Publications 1984.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Dermot Keogh, Ireland and the Vatican: the politics and diplomacy of church-state relations, 1922-1960, p. xvi

[18] Richard Deutsch, The Impact of Jean Paul II’s Journey to Ireland by His Eminence Cardinal O’Fiaich, in Etudes irlandaises  Année 1980  5  pp. 207-220

[19] Irish Independent, 2 October, 1979.

[20] Connacht Tribune, 19 Oct, 1979.

[21] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1979-12-13/7/?highlight%5B0%5D=pope%27s

[22] Southern Star, 5 December 1981.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000, p. 716

[25] Irish Examiner, 28 July, 1980.

[26] Sunday Independent 17 February, 1980.

[27] Irish Independent 18 January, 1980.

[28] Irish Press 24 Sept, 1988.

[29] Irish Independent, 26 Sept, 1988.

[30] Irish Press, 21 Oct, 1988.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Irish Press, 1 Oct, 1988.

[33] Mark O’Brien, The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland, pp 211-212.

[34] Richard Deutsch, The Impact of Jean Paul II’s Journey to Ireland by His Eminence Cardinal O Fiaich

[35] Niall Coll, ‘The Great Sending Out’ in The Furrow, Vol. 64, No. 9 (September 2013), pp. 486-490

[36] John A. Weafer, ‘A Review of National and International Trends’ in The Furrow, Vol. 39, No. 8 (Aug., 1988), pp. 501-511

John Dorney and Cathal Brennan of the Irish History Show discuss the history of the Orange Order and the Twelfth of July.

We Discuss:

• The historic origins of the Orange tradition in the Jacobite-Williamite War of 1689-91 between James Stuart and William of Orange.
• The founding of the Orange Order in 1795 against a background of sectarian faction fighting in south Ulster.
• The Order’s growth from an unruly plebian organisation in the early 19th century to one of the pillars of Ulster unionist by the late 1800s.
• The Twelfth of July and the Orange Order’s parades through the centuries.

Directed by Lance Daly

Written by PJ Dillon, Pierce Ryan, Euguene O’Brien, Lance Daly

Starring: Hugo Weaving, James Frechville, Stephen Rea, Jim Broadbent, Barry Keoghan

Reviewer: John Dorney

It was with some curiosity that the Irish Story received an invitation to a screening of the new film Black 47 set during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. While we have reviewed films with an Irish historical content before, this was the first time we had been invited to a critics’ screening of a Hollywood film.

Moreover, reviewing say, a biopic of 1930s IRA leader Frank Ryan or Ken Loach’s film on left wing activist Jimmy Gralton, or indeed a documentary on RUC collusion into the 1994 Loughlinisland massacre are very different propositions from reviewing a wholly fictional film.

Which begs the question, what is the purpose of a history site reviewing a fictional film? Nitpicking on points of historical accuracy is somewhat pointless, unless there are grave errors that entirely skew the viewer’s  understanding of the past. Nor is there much point in citing plausibility or otherwise of the plot – it is after all supposed to be fiction.

So perhaps the best approach to take is this: firstly, does the film create a reasonable depiction of the past? In other words does it feel real and give the viewer a reasonable impression of the time it depicts?

Secondly, the historical reviewer is bound to ask, what cultural buttons in the present is the film trying to push? How does it represent the Famine to the modern viewer? And thirdly, as film, does it work?

Django in Ireland

The first thing that struck me about this film was how odd it felt. Essentially it is a kind of revenge western epic – imagine a cross between Clint Eastwood’s the Outlaw Josey Wales and Quentin Tarnatino’s Django Unchained – but set in Famine era Ireland.

Feeney, the main character played by Australian actor James Frecheville, is a deserter from the Connaught Rangers who arrives home to Connemara to find his family home destroyed, his mother dead of the famine fever and his sister and her children evicted and starving.

He proceeds to go on a murderous rampage against all those who oppress the people – the Irish Constabulary who enact eviction orders, the middlemen who grab land from those too poor to pay the rent, the judges who sentence starving men to death or transportation for theft and of course the landlord – ‘Lord Kilmichael’ (one wonders here if the reference to he 1920 IRA ambush is deliberate?) who extracts rents, evicts tenants and exports food under police protection.

Chasing him is Hugo Weaving,  a former soldier turned policemen (I could not shake the memory of his role as Agent Smith in the Matrix) and a young British officer, full of contempt for the Irish and along the way they pick up Stephen Rea, who plays a knowing Connemara peasant. Bloody shootouts, gruesome murders and ultimately double crosses ensue.

So, to grapple with my first question, does the film do a good job in representing the background of the Great Famine? Yes and no. The stock images of the famine are all here, the evictions, the food convoys with armed guards heading out of the country, the cruel landlords.

Quite a bit of the dialogue – quite correctly for the time and not only in Connemara – is in Irish and even the non-Irish actors do a reasonable job at the correct pronunciation and inflection. The locations in Connemara appear suitably bleak but beautiful.

But in the end the film holds back from the true horror of the events. There are no piled up corpses in the workhouses, no cannibalism. The starving look poor but not dying. Some things are just too much for a film of this type to depict.

Some might object also that the film does not go into the complexities of the era. How, for instance, the Conservative government of Robert Peel went some way towards controlling the death toll by distributing free food, while the Liberals, traditional allies of Irish O’Connellites and reform in Ireland – made the crisis much worse by their belief in free market economics. The government of Sir John Russell discontinued the free soup kitchens and transferred all the burden of famine relief onto the Irish tax payer in 1847 – which went a long way towards that year being dubbed ‘Black 47’ in popular memory.

But this, I feel, would be asking too much of a film of this type. No, the discordant note is rather the premise, that an Irish avenging angel could appear right all the wrongs of the people. When depicting such an unredeemed tragedy as the Great Famine, this just seems to strike the wrong note.

Modern references

Moving on to the second question, what cultural significance in the present does the film have?

Feeney tells us that he served in Afghanistan and does some of his killing with a Kukri knife – the Ghurka’s weapon. Is the anti-imperial sentiment of film, perhaps, informed by the more recent western intervention in Afghanistan and in the wider middle east? It would seem so. And also the graphic depictions of violence might owe something to the images that have leaked out of the present day wars in Syria and Iraq.

Interestingly also, while the film’s message is basically a pro-Irish nationalist one – the British are to blame for the famine – it is not a pro-Catholic one. Rather, perhaps reflecting the rapidly secularising drift of Irish society, Protestant and Catholic clergy are shown in an equally bad light and our protagonist, Feeney, is equally hostile to both.

Thirdly, it is probably fair to say that to a degree the film caters to a degree to the residual anti-Britishness of an American audience. In the end, Feeney advises his comrade ‘don’t fight them, go to America’.

Entertainment, not history

Finally, turning to my last question, as a film, is it any good? Walking away from the film I was not quite sure how to answer this, overcome with the oddness of a western revenge thriller set in the Great Famine.

Certainly the acting is good, from a strong cast. The fighting sequences are appropriately blood pounding and bloody, the chase plot is genuinely exciting and the plot twists unexpected. On the other hand, the characters are not terribly deeply drawn and some appear to have changes of heart for no immediately explicable reason.

As entertainment, however, Black 47 works quite well. As an introduction to the famine it is no more than a pastiche, a setting for an Irish western. But that is perhaps the most that can be expected from a film of this type.

The death of Michael Collins, by John Dorney.

Michael Collins was the IRA Director of Intelligence, Minister for Finance of the underground Republican government of 1919-21 and, unofficially, the leading figure in the independence struggle against the British.

After he, Arthur Griffith and the other negotiators had signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty however, in December 1921, he found himself  head of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, on the opposite side of bitter split with former comrades, who held out for a fully independent Irish Republic.

He tried earnestly to avoid armed conflict breaking over the Treaty in the first six months of 1922. But on June 28 1922, when he ordered Free State forces to open fire on the anti-Treaty stronghold of the Four Courts in Dublin, he found himself leading pro-Treaty forces in a fratricidal Civil War.

It was these circumstances that led to his death at Beal na Blath on August 22, 1922.

Civil War

Free State forces secured Dublin city after a week of hard fighting from June 28 to July 5 1922 in what Collins hoped would be a swift and decisive end to armed opposition to the Provisional Government.

Unfortunately for Collins, the anti-Treaty IRA under Liam Lynch, occupying most of the provinces in the south and west, now dug in for a long war.

Though it was clear by the second week of July that the Civil War could not be confined to Dublin, Collins and his lieutenants still hoped to wrap it up in short order with a swift offensive to retake towns and cities held by the anti-Treaty IRA. Gearoid O’Sullivan, the Army Adjutant General told Cabinet that, ‘the Irregulars all over the country could be disposed of in a week or a fortnight’.[1]

A whirlwind campaign in July saw anti-Treaty positions across most of the country, from Drogheda to Donegal to Waterford fall to Free State troops.

On July 26^th, that Collins was able to write to his colleagues, ‘we may congratulate ourselves that everything has turned out so well… we have taught the rebels lessons… which appeals to reason or patriotism failed to teach them’. It remained to dislodge the ‘Irregulars’ in their stronghold of Cork and Kerry and Collins hoped to do so by a swift knock down blow that would ‘save the good fighting men of Cork from barrenness of their leaders’ who ‘have shown themselves to be without an objective’. [2]

The Cork and Kerry Landings

To this end, he and Army commander Emmet Dalton planned two seaborne expeditions to Cork and Kerry in the first week of August 1922, landing on the southern coast outflanking the ongoing fighting line in counties Limerick and Tipperary.

The National Army duly landed by sea, first in Kerry on August 3^rd and then at three points near Cork city on August 8^th.

Several thousand troops were landed on the southern coast and though there was some hard fighting, within a week Cork city and most of the important towns in south Munster were in government hands, though at a cost of 18 Free State soldiers killed and dozens more wounded.

Michael Collins found the funeral ceremonies at Glasnevin Cemetery for the dead soldiers, killed in the Cork and Kerry landings, most trying, and was particularly upset by the grief of the mothers of some of the young soldiers. Still, he and his colleagues now assumed the war was over. Surely the ‘Irregulars’ would now come in, hand over their weapons and respect the authority of the government?

The problem was that his opposite number, anti-Treaty IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch, was not at all pessimistic. From the start he had anticipated a return to guerrilla warfare to bring down the Free State.

In response to peace feelers on August 4^th Lynch wrote to Collins; ‘defensive action will cease when the Provisional Government attacks on us cease’. To which Collins replied, ‘’The time for face-saving is passed, the choice is between the return of the British and the Irregulars sending in their arms to the people’s government’.[3]

There may have been an anti-Treaty policy to try to kill Collins. In Dublin the week before the fatal ambush at Beal na Blath, his official car (though he was not in it) was caught in an ambush at Stillorgan south of the city; a gun and grenade attack in which his driver was wounded in the hip. Collins indignantly dashed off a note to the National Army Publicity Department enquiring why the incident was not publicised. He had told a Government meeting he complained, ‘but apparently it was not of sufficient interest for publication’.[4]

The ambush at Beal na Blath

The Commander in Chief in the meantime had travelled to Cork and had been inspecting the recently secured countryside in his native county.

He seems also to have hoped to use his personal contacts with Republican guerrillas for peace talks to, ‘put an end to the damned thing’. ‘The three Toms’ he said (Tom Barry, Tom Hales and Tom Malone) ‘will fix it’[5].

Collins was on a return journey from Bandon to Macroom in West Cork, when he fell into an ambush commanded by Liam Deasy.

Deasy noted in his report to Liam Lynch that Collins, in a motorised convoy of 30 soldiers, accompanied by an armoured car, passed the townland of Beal na Blath early on the morning of August 22 and ‘Michael Collins travelled in the touring car and ‘made himself very prominent’.

Deasy, with 32 guerrillas, barricaded the road and set up an ambush position on the overlooking hillside, in the hope that Collins’ party would make the unwise decision to return to Bandon by the same route. They lay in ambush all day until 7:45 that evening when, on hearing that their target had gone to Clonakilty, most of the anti-Treatyites retired for the night. Only six IRA men were still at the ambush sight when Collins’ column indeed appeared and was held up at the barricade.

The six guerrillas opened fire. While the other ambushers scrambled to get back to the firing line, most of them were pinned down by machine gun fire and ‘unable to render any real assistance’.

According to Deasy, ‘the firing was terrific, the enemy relied chiefly on his machine gun. Now and again you could hear the cracking of rifle fire from the little party… the engagement lasted one hour. The enemy managed to remove the barricade… [and] they beat a retreat’.

‘I have since learned the Collins was shot dead during the engagement’. Our casualties were nil.’[6]

Collins’ convoy had a Rolls Royce armoured car in which he would have been perfectly safe from bullets during the firefight, or they could, as Emmet Dalton advised at the time – have simply ‘driven like hell’ out of the ambush site – going back the way they had come if the way forward was blocked.

For some reason Collins did neither, ordered his men to stop and fight and got out of the armoured car join in the firefight himself. While firing away with a rifle, he was hit by bullet in the head, probably a ricochet, and died almost instantly.

There are an almost infinite number of theories on who fired the fatal bullet and whether there was some sort of grand conspiracy between the Republicans, Free State troops and the British. But it seems most likely that the Collins was just hit by a random bullet in a fire fight, according to Meda Ryan’s research, it was fired by a local man named Dennis “Sonny” O’Neill.[7]

Collins body, brought back to Dublin by sea, after a tortuous overland trip to Cork city, saw one of the city’s largest ever public funerals, a huge crowd lined the route to Glasnevin cemetery, where he was interred after volleys of rifle shots were fired over the grave by National Army troops.

Reactions: ‘The Big Fella is Dead’

In public at least, many anti-Treaty Republicans regretted Collins’ death. Liam Lynch wrote, ‘it is indeed a regrettable National Position – which nothing could better illustrate – that makes the shooting of such leaders and with such a splendid previous record necessary’[8].

Liam Deasy wrote in his memoir in later years, ‘his death caused nothing but the deepest sorrow and regret and brought about in many of us a real desire for the end of the war’[9].

In private though, many anti-Treaty Republicans were upbeat. The death of Collins and upsurge in guerrilla attacks around the country in late August and September 1922, made all sides in the conflict think that the Free State was on the ropes.

In Mountjoy Prison, imprisoned anti-Treaty leader Joe McKelvey wrote to Ernie O’Malley, ‘All seems to be going well outside. The Free State here are terribly cut up about Mick. They seem to be absolutely lost.’ The Deputy Governor of the Prison Paudeen O’Keefe said, ‘the British would be back in a week. He was quite serious’.[10]

The British military, still with a substantial garrison in Dublin and the ‘Treaty ports’ at Cobh and Bearhaven, concurred, one Intelligence officer in Dublin reporting that in the wake of Collins’ death, ‘The P.G. [Provisional Government] officers are very despondent’.

WT Cosgrave, in their estimation, was ‘capable and sincere’ but not up to the job of restoring order’. By September they were reporting, ‘Having crushed the massed resistance of the Republicans, PG troops now find themselves faced with a guerrilla campaign which every day becomes more effective.’[11]

As it happened, however, power in the Free State had passed to a young, but tough and ruthless leadership. Richard Mulcahy took over as Commander in Chief of the Army and WT Cosgrave, who had been Minister for Local Government, as head of Government. Patrick Hogan, Minister for Agriculture and Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Justice also rose to prominence in Collins’ and Arthur Griffith (who had died the week before)’s absence.

They, much more than Collins, would prove ruthless in their use of executions and internment to crush anti-Treaty resistance by May of 1923.

In later years, Collins, who lost his life just short of his 32nd birthday, has attained the status of the great lost leader to some and as that of a traitor to others. While some think of him as the great peacemaker who would have led Ireland to peaceful and progressive modernity, or perhaps to a united Ireland, others, less convinced of his peaceable and democratic intentions, see him as a potential military dictator in the making.

But on the day itself, the most common reaction, certainly among his own men, was shock and grief.

Bernard O’Byrne recalled, ‘it was like the end of the world, something that you loved and believed in was gone’. Emmet Dalton asked Piaras Beaslai, the Free State’s Director of Publicity when telling him of Collins’ death, ‘what on earth am I to do?

Gearoid O’Sullivan broke down in tears telling Army officer Charlie Dalton, ‘Charlie the Big Fella is dead’.[12]

References

[1] Ernest Blythe BMH

[2] Collins memo on General Situation 27/7/22 Mulcahy Papers, P/7/B29

[3] De Valera Papers P150/1647

[4] Letter from Collins 19/8/1922 Kathleen McKenna Papers, National Library of Ireland NLI MS,22,779

[5] Meda Ryan, Tom Barry, IRA Freedom Fighter, p.179

[6] Deasy’s report to Lynch, dated 27 August 1922 is located in the Twomey papers, UCD and is reproduced in ful in Brian Hanley, the IRA, A Documentary History, p.48-49

[7]Meda Ryan, The Day Michael Collins was shot, p125

[8] Cormac KH O’Malley, Anne Dolan (ed.s), No Surrenders Here! The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, p135

[9] Liam Deasy, Brother Against Brother p81

[10] Mulcahy Papers P7/B/83 McKelvey to EOM 28/8/1922

[11] British Intelligence reports August to September 1922 in De Valera Papers P150/1646

[12] Boyne, Emmet Dalton, p235-236

By Bryan Fanning

Published by UCD Press, 2018

Reviewer: Barry Sheppard.

This new work by Bryan Fanning, Professor of Migration and Social Policy at UCD is a very important and welcome addition to the history of migration in relation to Ireland.  It is important for a number of reasons.  Firstly, Irish historiography has long been concerned with the migrant.

However, it has overwhelmingly been concerned with outward migration, often forced, and the lamentable images which it conjures up in the popular imagination.   For the most part, Irish historiography has been less-concerned with inward migration, more often than not addressing the subject in relation to invasion or plantation.

Secondly, the book comes at a time when populist anti-immigration movements are on the rise across the globe.  Such groups are by-and-large fuelled by half-truths and misinformation, preying on people’s fears, and in an alarming number of countries resulting in opportunist politicians framing the debate in dubious terms such as ‘taking control of our borders’.  Not least in the neighbouring island.  This is inextricably linked to the migration which this book, in part deals with.  The book invites conversation.  Conversations which urgently need to happen in any number of countries in these troubled times.

The opening chapters deal with a topic which has been long in popular memory, yet as this book shows, much misunderstood, invasions.  Chapter two challenges many accepted notions on the waves of invasions which have shaped Ireland, both physically, and in the national psyche.  Mythology around Norse and Norman invasions is challenged by showing how commercial, cultural and religious links between the south of Ireland and England pre-dated the Norman invasion.

By the time Henry II gained control, Dublin already had a well-established international merchant class from Norse countries, what is now the Netherlands, Wales and various parts of England.  In relation to the well-known accounts of Viking invaders mercilessly raiding monasteries in the land of Saints and Scholars, Fanning shows that fellow-Irishmen raided more monasteries in the same period than Vikings ever did.

Plantations and transplantation

On the much-vexed topic of Plantations, Fanning meticulously shows the reader that plantations of Ireland were not uniform, but made up of many varying schemes, both forced and voluntary, as well-as non political and internal plantations with people from different parts of the island.  Pacification as well as colonisation took place alongside one another to great effect.

The legacy of colonisation is, of course still argued over passionately to this day. Pacifications, where land was confiscated and given over to other native Irish families, as happened with McMahon land in Monaghan, rarely features in these debates.   Another fact lost to the mists of time was that in the seventeenth-century plantations it was estimated that 20 per cent of Scottish planters settled in Ulster were Catholic.  The notoriety of plantations in popular memory is surely in need of more popular inspection.

The chapter on Transplantations is fascinating.  Irish historiography has often been accused of focusing on the forced migration of the poor and hungry Irishman and woman who have become familiar figures in the nation’s history as they left their home to occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder in another country.

Fanning bucks this particular trend by providing a fine account of those who have taken the less-traditional route in making up Ireland’s vast diaspora.  Military migrations make up a large part of transplantations, with tens of thousands of Irish soldiers of all ranks scattered across continental Europe, enlisting in the armies of a number of countries in the seventeenth century.   Migrations of religious clerics and Gaelic nobles, and the impact they had on Spanish society are also addressed, and do much to challenge the picture of the helpless famine migrant which has continued to be the dominant figure which people associate with Irish migration.

Without doubt, the most controversial aspect of Irish transplantations in recent years has been the furore surrounding ‘Irish slaves’, which has contributed to fierce online debate and the protest culture among the ‘Alt-right’ in Trump’s America.  This grotesque misrepresentation of the past, employing grossly exaggerated numbers has been used as a historical stick to beat embattled African-American communities who are still trying to assert their right to equal citizenship.

While this episode of transplantations and their modern-day political impact has been confronted quite admirably by historians such as Tipperary’s Liam Hogan, the political controversy is not directly addressed in Fanning’s work.  He does, however, cut through the exaggerations which the ‘Alt-right’ cling to, showing realistic numbers of forced transplantations and the autonomy which many of the transplanted Irish had.[1]

Minorities

The varying fortunes and experiences of a number of historical minority groups in Ireland are explored, such as Huguenots, Palatines, and Quakers.  Although Quakers are the most lasting of these minorities in Ireland their contribution to Irish society is relatively under-researched.

The Palatines were small in number and relatively short in time span in terms of Irish history, nevertheless their experience getting to Ireland draws parallels with those of migrants to Ireland in more recent times.  Indeed, Fanning highlights the fact that they were housed in temporary camps, and their lack of proficiency in the English or Irish languages as something which resembles the experiences of early twenty-first-century immigrants to Ireland. Fanning’s assertion, in relation to Palatines, that ‘assimilation writes diversity out of history’, can equally be applied to the majority of the minorities covered in this book.[2]

The chapter on emigrations is arguably the one aspect of migration which most people are familiar with.  Poor famine migrants and deportations to Australian Penal Colonies have long occupied a prominent position in popular history, contributing much to the story of the worldwide Irish diaspora.

Despite the Irish diaspora holding an almost mythical space in the Irish psyche, the vast majority of Irish historiography has focused upon what has taken place within the confines of the nation state. Enda Delaney has addressed the treatment of both the nation and the diaspora in Irish historiography in ‘“Our island story”? Towards a transnational history of late modern Ireland’.

He states that ‘the existence of the Irish diaspora has been acknowledged, if then just as swiftly ignored. Historians chart the causes and extent of emigration in synthetic surveys, but the coverage invariably ends with the tearful farewells at Irish ports’.[3]

Fanning not only charts the causes and extent of emigration, he also provides fine accounts of the onward journey.  Further than that he deconstructs the never-ending stream of Irish emigrants in categories based on religious persuasion.  This is a useful approach, given that religion often played an enormous part in reasons for leaving, and indeed on just where and how people within these groups progressed once they left Irish shores.

The chapter on emigrations is complimented by the eighth chapter on Expatriates.  Reading this chapter, one gets the sense of just how many, often young and unskilled Irishmen and women left their homes in times of political and economic turmoil.  The most interesting aspect of this chapter charts the decline of Irish in America and the growth of the diaspora in Britain in the mid-twentieth century.  Fanning’s use of emigration statistics is phenomenal which take us right up to the present day.

The tribute to emigrants within his own family, may at first seem awkwardly placed, nevertheless I believe it is a fitting tribute which gives a human account of the fortunes of the different generations who were compelled to leave their home country.  It is a story which many will recognise within their own extended families.

Refugees

The plight of refugees across much of the world today is never far from the news. Therefore the work within this book offers a timely reminder about previous waves of refugees which sought solace in Ireland.  The chapter covers the experiences of Jews and other groups who sought sanctuary in Ireland before, during and after World War II.  Further to this it covers Hungarians, Chileans, Vietnamese, Bosnians and Kosovars, and refugees from Northern Ireland who were forced from their homes at the outbreak of the Troubles.

One of the more interesting refugee settlement programmes pre-World War II involved the transportation of Jewish teenagers under the age of seventeen to Northern Ireland.  Under the Kindertransport programme young Jewish refugees were set up in hostels and a derelict 70 acre farm on the Co Down seafront where they worked the land throughout the course of the war.

Fanning states that no such programme existed in the Irish Free State, and that only a small number of young Jewish refugees were granted temporary status;  a decision harshly criticised by hero of the Holocaust, Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld.

The short passage on refugees from Northern Ireland is interesting, and a reminder of just how chaotic and bloody the early years of The Troubles were. Refugees who fled intimidation, violence, and the threat of internment were placed in refugee camps in Meath and Donegal, which were modelled on those which held Hungarians over a decade previously.

Migration in the modern era, and specifically the Celtic Tiger years show the fortunes of the various ethnic groups who contributed and continue to contribute to the Irish economy, North and South.  One can’t help but recall previous eras of Irish outward migration when reading about unscrupulous bosses taking advantage of non-English-speaking migrants, racist attacks, and low-paid and irregular employment.

One cannot challenge the fact that many minority migrants have been unfairly treated, and have been the victims of racist attacks. However, in many cases there have been very large and coordinated protests in support of attacked or badly-treated migrants and asylum seekers, especially in the North.

This omission can give the reader the impression that they have little support among native populations.  Indeed, in the concluding chapter Fanning states that in the North ‘immigrants have experienced fallout from the still-festering sectarian divides’.  While this is undoubtedly true, the level of support which sometimes-embattled migrant communities in the North have faced dwarfs those who would seek to exploit or victimise them.  This is evidenced in the many cross-community rallies and initiatives to support victims of racism.

As before, when writing in a previous chapter about his relatives who made the outward journey from Ireland, Fanning humanises his subject by including real life experiences of migrants, with names and back stories.  It is perhaps easy to forget, especially when dealing with vast numbers of statistics as this book does, that each one is a human being with families, often facing tremendous pressure to survive in a land that isn’t their own.  He does this to great effect for Sikhs, Chinese, Brazilians, Poles, and Muslims.  All who have helped shape Ireland in the last few decades.

African Migrants and Direct Provision

The chapter on African migrants is very interesting, as it is not a new issue. As far back as the 1960s Ireland had a small African population, many who came as medical students.  Many of their experiences were not positive, with many racist attacks being reported in Dublin on Nigerian students outside dancehalls and in the street.

As well as attacks on African students, Fanning reports on what has become all too familiar, institutional abuse of children.  In this instance mixed race children born of Irish mothers and African fathers.  The reflections of some African-Irish children of their time in industrial homes are shameful and heartbreaking, in an era already littered with shameful accounts of abuse.

The fact that Dublin had some 300 Nigerian students studying in the city is further evidence of the opening up of Irish society in the 1960s.  This is something which is also found in Northern Ireland.   Dr Eric Morier-Genoud of Queen’s University Belfast has also been researching the influx of African migrants to Belfast in the 1950s.  This is surely a topic which merits more attention.

The scandals of Direct Provision centres, the privately owned shelters for asylum seekers are laid bare for all to see.  Female victims of sex trafficking placed alongside male inmates, overcrowding, and dire sanitary conditions in an ‘alienating and dehumanising’ system are a disgraceful reminder of how some of the most vulnerable are treated.   Incidents such as this are in direct parallel with examples which have long been rallying points for people recalling the many injustices against Irish emigrants of previous generations.

This book is a fascinating look at migration in relation to Ireland.  It is as complete a study as you are likely to find. At many times it uncovers historical facts which some will find uncomfortable.  It certainly displays many contemporary truths which people should find uncomfortable.  Its scope is at times breath-taking.  As one would expect of a project this size, the array of sources used go far beyond any regular historical venture.  It would not be amiss to say that almost each of the chapters could be a complete book in their own right.

Although the latter chapters go beyond historical study, they fit seamlessly with the earlier chapters in giving an overall experience of migration which has shaped the island of Ireland over the past number of centuries.

The book will be a very important work in the field of Transnational History, spearheaded by the likes of Enda Delaney, Ciaran O’Neill and others, which show that even from the earliest modern period Ireland was more open culturally, economically, and socially than previously admitted.

References

[1] Bryan Fanning, Migration and the Making of Ireland, p. 49.

[2] Fanning, p. 62.

[3] Enda Delaney ‘Our Island Story’, p. 600

The story of sixteen Glasgow based Irish Volunteers 1916-1923. By Thomas Tormey

At Easter 1916 sixteen members of the Glasgow unit of the Irish Volunteers fought in Dublin during the insurrection. [1]

A part of Scottish life for 200 years, Scotland’s Irish community has also been part of the global Irish diaspora during that time. As such it has played a role in the transnational movements associated with the campaigns for various forms of Irish independence. This was vividly illustrated during the 1916 Rising when Volunteers travelled from the west of Scotland to join the rebellion.

What follows below is a short history of the revolutionary involvement of those members of the Scottish unit of the Irish Volunteers who fought in Dublin in 1916, through the guerrilla campaign by the Irish Republican Army [IRA] against the British from 1919-21 and during the Irish Civil War that followed the split in the IRA over the Treaty with the British government.[2]

These sixteen are a small proportion of the roughly 250 Irish Volunteers in Scotland in 1916. This latter figure rose to around 2,500 by the time of Truce between the Republicans and the British in 1921.[3] According to Gerard Noonan roughly 250 members of the Scottish Brigade of the IRA fought in the Irish Civil War on the pro-Treaty side and five died. While roughly 50 fought on the Republican side.[4]

Of course, these figures are dwarfed by the numbers who fought in the Great War. Elaine Mac Farland states that 30,000 Glaswegian Catholics were in the British armed forces in 1916.[5] While Géraldine Vaughan quotes a figure of 15,000 Irish Catholics from Scotland for 1915, that is before conscription had been introduced.[6]

Given that around a fifth of these men had joined Irish Regiments, and that these regiments were heavily involved in British efforts to supress the Rising, it is possible that there were more Glaswegian Catholics voluntarily fighting for the British than against them in Dublin in 1916. Stephen Coyle lists three Crown Forces fatalities of the fighting with Glasgow addresses.[7]

Why did they go to fight in Dublin?

Why did only 16 of the 250 active Scottish Volunteers travel to Dublin to fight in the Rising?

It is worth noting at this point that the size and, indeed, the seeming militancy of this sample may have been affected by the strong anti-insurrectionist cadre within the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB] in Scotland.

Several leading Glasgow Fenians appear to have disapproved of plans for a Rising and to have both avoided participation themselves and disrupted attempts to enlist support for it.[8] One leader resigned over the plans to hold an insurrection while another withheld orders from Dublin telling the Scottish members to travel for the uprising.

Thus, the sample may be taken to be more militant than other groups of 1916 veterans, consisting, as it largely does, of men who left Glasgow on the run due to their participation in raids for arms and explosives in various quarries and shipyards.  [9]

Of this cohort of sixteen, listed above, eight appear to have been Scottish-born or living in Scotland from a very young age, seven had grown up in Ireland and had migrated to Scotland, leaving one that, so far, cannot be traced. Five of those who had grown up in Ireland were from Dublin. Emphasising the close connections between these two port cities in this era of ferry travel.

A Family affair

This same group illustrates how membership of the Irish Volunteers was often a family affair. It contains two sets of brothers. One set of brothers, the McGalloghys, grew up in Glasgow, one set, the O’Flanagans, in Dublin.

The O’Flanagan’s of Moore Street were a staunchly republican family whose father had been involved in the IRB for many decades. Four O’Flanagan brothers, including two who had not been resident in Glasgow, were ‘out’ during Easter week.[10]

The other set of brothers, the McGalloghlys, were Lanarkshire born. John, the youngest, had never been to Ireland, prior to travelling to Dublin for the Rising. The familial nature of Irish Republican activism in Scotland remained a constant throughout the revolutionary period. According to Gerard Noonan, the Scottish Brigade contained at least 22 sets of brothers during the 1919-21 period.[11]

To underline this point about family recruitment, a further two members of the group had brothers who were in the Volunteers but who either were not members of the Scottish unit or did not travel to Dublin for the Rising.

One such Volunteer, who was to prove the most prominent of the Glasgow men in the Independence struggle, was Séamus Robinson, who had been born in Belfast but moved to Scotland as a teenager. Having briefly been a monk, he left the religious life to join the Irish Volunteers and IRB with his brother Joe in 1913.

Séamus’s witness statement noted that he was never formally attested to the Volunteers. They and he simply took each other for granted. Joe Robinson did not serve in the Rising, having been arrested for arms smuggling along with Scottish Republican Séamus Reader in January 1916.

Francis Scullin’s brother, Patrick Scullin, is listed as being Glasgow-based in Séamus Robinson’s bureau statement. However, no evidence could be found to suggest that Patrick was ever a member of the Irish Volunteers in Scotland.[12]

It is probable that Patrick was mistakenly included in Robinson’s list. Likely he was associated with the Glaswegian contingent during the period leading up to the Rising when many Volunteers from Britain lived together in billets around Dublin (including the fabled ‘Kimmage Garrison’, one of whom was Michael Collins) and also during the Easter week itself and the period of internment which followed.[13]

Interestingly, of those Volunteers who had a brother in the Volunteers, but not in our sample, one grew up in Glasgow, one was a recent immigrant.

In Dublin in 1916

The Glaswegian contingent lacked neither militancy nor valour when compared to the local Republican units in Dublin during the Easter Rising.

There is absolutely no sense of them being tourists, of it not being ‘their fight’, or of them being in Ireland simply to avoid conscription, which had been introduced in Britain in early 1916.

One set of brothers, the O’Flanagan’s, were heavily involved in the fighting around North King Street, the second heaviest battle in the Rising, after that at Mount Street. Another O’Flanagan brother, Patrick Joseph, better known as Padjoe, who had been resident in Dublin rather than Glasgow, was killed defending ‘Reilly’s fort’ at the corner of North King Street and Church Street.[14]

Most of the rest of the Glasgow contingent helped to clear O’Connell Street after the Rebels had taken over the General Post Office, their accents causing understandable confusion amongst local civilians.[15] Seán Hegarty was responsible for raising the flag of the Irish Republic above the GPO. Charles Carrigan, a Scottish-born member of John Wheatley’s Catholic Socialist Society was one of the last rebel casualties of Easter week. Carrigan died having being caught in the open by British machine gun fire following the evacuation of the GPO.[16]

Internment

All of the Glasgow contingent were captured following the Rising, perhaps they lacked the local knowledge that allowed so many Rebels to escape. All but one were eventually interned in Frongoch prison camp in north Wales before being released with the other internees in various batches during the second half of 1916.

Séamas Robinson was moved to Reading jail from Frongoch having been blamed for a strike in which some internees demanded trade union wages for the road-making work the War Office were attempting to force them to do.[17]

The only Glasgow Volunteer to be sentenced, rather than interned, was John McGalloghly. McGalloghly was convicted for holding up an officer, Lieutenant Stanhope King of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.[18] This is a noteworthy incident: a Scottish born-and-bred Catholic rebel holding up an Irish, almost-certainly Protestant, officer of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers Regiment of the British Army.

Of the sixteen who travelled from Glasgow to Dublin to fight, two died before the War of Independence, Carrigan, killed in action during Easter week, and Alexander Carmichael. Carmichael died of Addison’s disease in 1920 and was buried at his own request in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.[19] Often referred to as Sandy or Alec, Carmichael had been prominent during the arms raids of 1915 and was a company captain from 1917, having played a leading role in the re-organisation of the Volunteers in Glasgow after the mass release of prisoners from Frongoch in late 1916.[20]

In terms of post-Rising activism, all, including McGalloghly were involved in re-organising the Volunteers upon their release in late 1916 and early 1917. By the time of the Truce with the British on 11 July 1921 only 3 of the 14 who remained alive had completely dropped out of the IRA. That gives a 21% drop out figure with 79% who were still members.

This compares to a roughly 47% drop out figure for Irish Citizen Army veterans of the fighting in Dublin. Usually the proportion of Irish Volunteers who have some post-rising involvement in the military side is around 60%, significantly lower than in this sample.[21] In this sample it is at least 70%.

As mentioned above, it is likely the militancy of the group dealt with here has been increased by the reduced numbers who travelled from Scotland to take part in the Rising as a result of the disruption caused by senior IRB men there.

The stories behind the numbers

Of the three who were no longer militarily active at the Truce in 1921, two were still politically active. Cormac Turner remained a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Turner had dropped out of the IRA in 1919. Bernard McMullen dropped out to become a trade union organiser having moved to Limerick for work.

While many revolutionaries joined different units as they migrated for economic reasons, as can be seen repeatedly in the case of the IRA in Scotland, the partly social nature of Volunteer activism meant that many did not, so McMullan’s actions were not unusual. The only Volunteer who appears to have completely dropped out by the time of the Truce was Barney Friel. Friel had served a three-year sentence of imprisonment having been arrested for arms smuggling in 1918.

Some of our cohort took a behind the scenes role in armed resistance. Volunteers could have such activity recognised as military service if they were “key men” providing support to “fighting men” in areas where armed resistance was taking place.[22]

Patrick Mahon was involved in the transport and storage of arms. Frank Scullin, in his regular occupation as a lamp-lighter with Dublin Corporation, was sometimes called upon to extinguish lights in certain areas in order to hinder the British and/or facilitate IRA operations.

Another former member of the Glasgow unit, Michael O’Flanagan, used money paid to him by the Green Cross, a Republican prisoner’s welfare association, to open a poultry business in Dublin’s south inner city. The business became an arms dump and a post-resante centre for IRA General Head Quarters. O’Flanagan also won the contract for supplying poultry to the local British Army barracks.

The fact that a man who had to leave Glasgow on the run in 1915 and fought in the Easter Rising could be awarded such a contract says much about British intelligence failures or perhaps complacency in this period.[23] Although it should be noted that Michael O’Flanagan and his brother Francis were arrested in the latter part of 1920.

Francis O’Flanagan was one of two Volunteers to see actual combat in the War of Independence. Francis O’Flanagan had come over to Dublin in 1916 later than his brother. Francis was involved in the attack at Monk’s Bakery, September 1920, in which three very young British soldiers of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment were killed after resisting an IRA attempt to relieve them of their arms. This was the attack for which republican icon Kevin Barry was executed.[24]

Francis was also involved in an attempted rescue of Kevin Barry that was called off because of the crowds surrounding Mountjoy Prison where he was held. Barry was the first Republican to be executed since 1916 and the three soldiers were the British Army’s first fatal casualties in Dublin since 1916.

Both O’Flanagan brothers had joined C Company of the 1^st Battalion of the Dublin Brigade on their return from Glasgow. Francis had moved unit to the newly established H Company as a section commander in 1918. H Company was established as C Company was simply getting too big. This was a common experience for ordinary rank-and-file Rising veterans who regularly moved up the ranks and were used as experienced cadres to stiffen newly organised units in the Dublin Brigade. This phenomenon continued to 1923 on both sides of the Treaty divide.

The most active Volunteer of the Glasgow contingent was Séamus Robinson. Séamus Robinson was an ordinary Volunteer prior to his brother Joe’s arrest in January 1916. Séamus campaigned on his brother’s behalf following the arrest. This appears to have radicalised him to a degree as well as convincing other leading Republicans of his bona fides and competence. Having fought in the GPO during Easter week, Séamus Robinson travelled to Tipperary to help organise the Volunteers there after his release from post-Rising internment.

Appointed officer commanding the Third Tipperary Brigade of the IRA, a particularly militant unit, Robinson led the IRA action responsible for the first Crown Forces casualties of the War, the shooting of two policemen at Soloheadbeg on 21 January 1919 and was involved in several other well-known incidents, including the Knocklong train rescue.

Soloheadbeg and Knocklong occurred early in the conflict before Ireland became inured to violence and when there were few other events competing for attention. Robinson stated that he had been trying to start a guerrilla war, he did not think that the war had ended at the surrender in 1916, rather he felt that this was the same war that had been ongoing since 1172 (i.e. the Norman invasion of Ireland).

Robinson felt that, as an outsider he never got the credit he deserved in either written history or in the local folklore of the War in Tipperary. He believed that this was because his upbringing in Belfast and Glasgow meant that he was seen as an urbanite, rather than as Scottish.[25]

In Scotland

Séamus Robinson’s brother, Joe, along with the man he was arrested with in 1916, Séamus Reader, were leading figures in the Scottish Brigade of the Irish Volunteers/IRA between their release in 1917 and 1921. It is noticeable, however, that none of the veterans of the Dublin fighting who had travelled from Glasgow were involved in the IRA/IRB gun-running activities there, which were led by Joe Vize and Joe Furlong.

These operations were the main Volunteer effort in Scotland and were often kept apart from the routine work of the Scottish Brigade which continued to drill and train in a similar manner to IRA companies in the quieter parts of Ireland.[26] John Carney acted almost as a dummy o/c Scotland and often toured the central belt inspecting companies and liaising with political support groups.[27]

Perhaps the most famous incident that took place in Scotland during the Irish independence struggle was the ‘Smashing of the van’ incident – so named for its similarity an attempted prisoner rescue in Manchester in 1867 that led to the hanging of the Manchester Martyrs.

In the ‘Glasgow Smashing of the Van’, on May 4, 1921, local IRA members mounted an ambush on a police prison van in an attempt to free Frank Carty of the Sligo Brigade who had been on the run in Scotland before his arrest. Two Scottish policemen were shot and one killed in the failed rescue attempt, which prompted a crackdown on Irish Republicans in Scotland. IRA GHQ, and some members of the local battalion, had disapproved of the action, fearing just such an outcome.[28]

Of the Rising veterans, Paddy Morrin and Patrick Maguire are listed as members of the Scottish Brigade, but they are not listed as being heavily involved in the gun-running or as being arrested for the ‘smashing of the van’ incident, although they were active with their companies.[29]

Indeed, only one of our sample, Séamus McGalloghly, was arrested for the shooting incident during the attempt to free Frank Carty in Glasgow.[30]

The McGalloghly brothers had left the Clydeside unit of the Volunteers in 1917 following the split that had been engendered by arguments over the senior Scottish Republicans opposition to the Rising. Both however re-joined in Manchester, although there is contradictory evidence as to when exactly.

Both were involved in arms smuggling as the IRA units in Great Britain moved from operating through Clydeside to using Liverpool docks and the Manchester Brigade became a key link in the chain. Séamus McGalloghly was taken ill while on a run in Scotland and ended up in a Glasgow hospital where he was arrested.

Upon release, he was moved to Dublin to convalesce although he did die from his illness in 1924. His brother John was arrested in May 1921 during a police round up that followed a burst of IRA sabotage activity in the Lancashire countryside.

Lastly, it not entirely clear what role Seán Hegarty and John Lafferty played in the War of Independence. Obituaries for Hegarty, carried in both the Irish Independent and Irish Press, mention or imply his involvement. The Press tribute is a little opaque as a result of that paper’s reluctance to draw a distinction between the pre and post-Truce IRA; it described Hegarty as “an active member of the IRA from the Rising in 1916 until the ‘Cease Fire’ order”, meaning Frank Aiken’s order of 1923.

The Independent recorded that Hegarty “took an active part against the Black-and-Tans and later opposed the Treaty”.[31] John Lafferty appears to have been a member of his local company without engaging in any major activity until 1922 when he was enrolled in the National Army in Donegal as in anticipation of the so called ‘Joint IRA offensive’, the attack on Northern Ireland involving both pro-and anti-Treaty IRA members that was conducted in the spring of 1922.

Civil War

There was little support for the Treaty among the Glasgow Volunteer veterans of 1916. Lafferty and Cormac Turner, who had dropped out of the Volunteers in 1919 but remained in the IRB in Dublin were the only two of the group to ever join the pro-Treaty National Army.

This is significant given the number of Scottish Volunteers who fought with the National Army in the Civil War. Indeed, the majority of the Scottish Brigade from the War of Independence, including much of the more active portion, backed the Treaty.[32]

This was possibly due to the personal loyalty the IRB gun-runners felt towards Michael Collins.

John Lafferty found himself in an awkward situation following the beginning of the Civil War as he was being trained as a member of the National Army but did not support the Treaty or the new Provisional Government. A company of Volunteers who travelled from Coatbridge, six miles east of Glasgow, to Dublin found themselves in this situation also.[33]

Neither Cormac Turner nor Lafferty can properly be considered to have ‘fought’ in the Civil War: Turner only joined a rear echelon unit of the National Army in 1923. Lafferty was confined to barracks for much of 1922 having refused orders from leading Ulster pro-Treatyites Dan McKenna and Seán Haughey to attack the anti-Treaty IRA in Donegal.

The soft support for the Treaty among this group is emphasised by the fact that the lone National Army member of 1923, Cormac Turner, was a prominent member of Fianna Fáil in later life.[34] In this Turner was unusual but not exceptional. Indeed, the path from a National Army background to the ‘Soldiers of Destiny’ was also trod by Seán Haughey’s son, Charles James.

Another five of the Glasgow veterans of Easter week avoided taking sides in the Civil War. Barney Friel stayed neutral having dropped out on his release from imprisonment. Bernard McMullen also remained neutral although he was imprisoned in Dundalk for a period by the pro-Treatyites in 1922.

John McGalloghly, having moved to Ireland in February 1922 following his release from imprisonment, refused to take sides in the IRA split that was calcifying during that spring. McGalloghly’s brother Séamus was in Dublin’s Four Courts building, which was occupied by the anti-Treaty IRA in April 1922 and attacked at the start of the Civil War on June 28. However, Séamus was in a non-combatant role due to his sickness.

Like John McGalloghly, Michael O’Flanagan had also resolved to stay neutral during the split in the IRA in 1922. O’Flanagan found himself rendering some assistance to the anti-Treaty forces, putting his car at the disposal of elements of the Dublin Brigade and later providing food and shelter to Séamus Reader and a group of Glasgow Republicans who had travelled Dublin to fight in the Civil War. Reader and his crew had escaped from the fighting in Dublin City Centre following the collapse of Republican resistance and later returned to Glasgow on a normal civilian boat.[35]

Seven of our cohort opposed the Treaty as members of the IRA. Although Patrick Morrin and Patrick Maguire remained with their companies for the Civil War they do not seem to have travelled to Dublin with Reader. Four others, Seán Hegarty, Patrick Mahon, Frank O’Flanagan and Frank Scullin, all took part in the fighting in Dublin city centre at the start of the Civil War in June and July 1922.

All four saw much more combat during the Civil War than they had in the War of Independence. Their arrests: Patrick Mahon on surrender, Frank O’Flanagan a month later and Frank Scullin in early 1923, after taking part in a large number of guerrilla actions in Dublin, are typical of the broad range of experiences of anti-Treaty Volunteers in Dublin, many of whom saw more fighting in the Civil War than before the Truce.

Hegarty, Mahon and Frank Scullin took part in the great prisoners’ hunger strike in late 1923, Scullin lasting 35 days before giving up. Hegarty’s health was affected in later life by his involvement in at least two hunger strikes during the revolutionary period.[36] Mahon was among the last group of Republicans to be released.

Séamus Robinson spent much of the Civil War working as aide-de-camp to Éamon de Valera, then the political leader of the anti-Treaty side. Robinson is a fitting veteran to conclude with as he is an extremely good example of the integration of the Scottish sections of the Irish Republican movement into the wider whole. He was later a Fianna Fáil senator, a board member of the Bureau of Military History, and a referee for the military service pensions board, and thus intimately involved in the production of a great deal of the source material for this article.[37]

Context and conclusion

Overall, the Volunteers in this sample, that is those who were members of the Glasgow Regiment of the Irish Volunteers and who travelled to Dublin to fight in the Rising, differ from the Irish-based Volunteer veterans of Easter week in three important respects.

Firstly, very few of them drop out, and even those that do are relatively active. Two of the three that dropped out before the Truce remained politically active and the third only dropped out having served a three-year jail sentence. Secondly, very few of them serve with the Scottish Brigade in the War of Independence.

Usually the figure for Volunteers moving brigade is about 5%.[38] Although in this case the situation is not directly comparable given the number of the sample who were Dubliners who had only been in Glasgow on a temporary basis. Lastly, only one of the group aided the pro-Treaty side during the Civil War. This is deeply ironic given how many active members of the Scottish Brigade in the War of Independence later joined the National Army. However, in spite of the well-known examples of split friendships and families, IRA members tended to make up their minds on the Treaty issue along social or familial lines.[39]

The stories of the Glasgow Volunteers of Easter week run like a thread through both the War of Independence and Civil War. This highlights very well the integration of the Scottish section of the Irish diaspora with the wider separatist movement. From brigade commanders to ordinary Volunteers, from political activists to gun-runners; from ‘key men’ to ‘fighting men’, and on to hunger strikers, their lives ran the gamut of militant republican activist experience.

Séamus Robinson’s demand for ‘trade union wages’ for internees in Frongoch, allied to Brian McMullen’s labour activism, and indeed Charles Carrigan’s membership of the Catholic Socialist Society indicate that the Irish in Glasgow of this period had strong links to the left-wing sections of Irish Republicanism and were themselves more left leaning than other Irish Volunteer veterans. This befits Clydeside’s radical reputation.

Also, Séamus Robinson’s comment about 1172 places these Volunteers very much in the nationalist milieu of early twentieth century Europe. Indeed, it could be argued that this cohort of Easter week veterans resemble very much the veterans of the Great War.

Robert Gerwarth has described how a culture of defeat, either military in the case of the Central Powers, or diplomatic in the case of Italy drove the paroxysms of violence that plagued continental Europe in the period following 1918.[40]

It might further be argued that there are definite parallels between the reactions of those soldiers to the outcome of the war, the “the mobilizing power of defeat”, which included a refusal to accept the reversal, and the reaction of those Volunteers who travelled from Glasgow to Dublin in 1916 to their defeat in the Rising, the failure to gain recognition for the Irish Republic at Versailles, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922.

References

[1] Although some claims put the number of Scottish based Republicans who travelled to Ireland for the Rising as high as twenty-eight, a recently published book lists twenty who fought overall and seventeen Irish volunteers who fought in Dublin. All bar one of my list are in this book. See Stephen Coyle ‘Biographical Dictionary for the members of A Company Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan, Glasgow, who fought in the Easter Rising’ in idem and Máirtín Ó Catháin (eds), We will rise again: Ireland, Scotland and the Easter Rising (Glasgow, 2018), pp 40-60. I am extremely grateful to Stephen Coyle for making some of this information available to me in advance of the publication of his book.

[2] Of this cohort of sixteen Volunteers, thirteen were awarded pensions and medals by government of independent Ireland. Therefore, it has been possible to use their pension application files in the online Military Service Pensions Collection available through the Military Archives of Ireland website. Furthermore, three of these pensioners gave witness statements to the Bureau of Military History. Some death notices, a commemorative booklet from the fiftieth anniversary of the rising in 1966 and a list written by a Scottish IRA commander that is held in the Eithne Coyle-O’Donnell papers in UCD have also been used: UCD Archives Department, Eithne Coyle-O’Donnell papers, P61/13; John M Heuston, Headquarters battalion, Army of the Irish Republic, Easter week 1916 (Dublin, 1966), pp 64-5; Irish Press, 23 Sep. 1933 and 25 Sep. 1933, Irish Independent, 25 Sep. 1933. (Seán Hegarty obituaries and reports on funeral); Irish Press 23 Nov. 1938 (Patrick Morrin obituary).

[3] Irish Military Archives [IE/MA], Military Service Pensions Collection [MSPC], IRA Membership Series, Roll file of the Scottish Brigade, RO 603. (http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Membership/8/MA-MSPC-RO-603.pdf).

[4] Gerard Noonan, The IRA in Britain 1919-1923: ‘in the heart of enemy lines’, (Liverpool, 2014), p. 230.

[5] Elaine W. McFarland “Our country’s heroes’: Irish Catholics in Scotland and the Great War’ in Martin J. Mitchell (ed.), New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2008), p. 137.

[6] Géraldine Vaughan, The ‘local’ Irish in the West of Scotland, 1851-1921 (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 123.

[7] Stephen Coyle ‘The fire of revolt, from Clydeside to Dublin’s GPO’ in idem and Ó Catháin (eds), We will rise again, (Glasgow, 2018), pp 18-20.

[8] BMH WS 222 and 272 (Daniel Branniff); BMH WS 828 (James Byrne); John Carney pension file, IE/MA, MSPC, MSP34REF993; Coyle ‘Confused counsels’ in idem and Ó Catháin (eds), We will rise again, pp 34-8.

[9] Unless otherwise stated the information in this article come from these listed files. The reference is IE/MA/MSPC and the references above. The files are searchable at http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/search.aspx. James/Séamus McGalloghly is referred to as McGaleagly on his pension application although the other form is used also. For clarity, I have chosen used the same style as his brother in the text.

[10] BMH WS 800 (Michael O’Flanagan).

[11]  Noonan, enemy lines, pp 65-7. This figure may be higher if one counts those members of the Scottish Brigade who had a brother in other units.

[12] BMH WS 156 (Séamus Robinson) and Leo Patrick Scullin pension file, IE/MA, MSPC, MSP34REF21722.

[13] Ibid; see also Ann Matthews, The Kimmage Garrison: making billy-can bombs at Larkfield (Dublin, 2010).

[14] Patrick Joseph O’Flanagan pension file, IMA/MSPC, 1D94; BMH WS 800 (Michael O’Flanagan).

[15] An t-Óglach, 1 May 1926.

[16] Iain Patterson, ‘The activities of Irish republican physical force organisations in Scotland, 1919-21’ in The Scottish Historical Review, lxxii, no. 172, p. 49; Coyle, ‘Biographical dictionary’, pp 42-3; Jimmy Wren, The GPO Garrison, Easter week 1916: a biographical dictionary (Dublin, 2015), p. 33.

[17] BMH WS 1721 (Séamus Robinson).

[18] The [UK] National Archives, Easter Rising Courts Martial files, Trial of William Pearse, John McGarry and John Doherty, WO 71/358.

[19] Coyle, ‘Biographical dictionary’, p. 41.

[20] BMH WS 627, 933 and 1767 (all Séamus Reader); BMH WS 648 (Catherine Rooney née Byrne).

[21] These figures relate to my own unpublished research into the veterans of 1916.

[22] Patrick Brennan, ‘Active service: changing definitions’ in (no eds given) Guide to the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection (Dublin, 2012), p. 70. Available to download from the Military Archives website: (http://www.militaryarchives.ie/fileadmin/user_upload/MSPC/Guide_to_the_Military_Service_%281916-1923%29_Pensions_Collection.pdf).

[23] BMH WS 908 (Michael O’Flanagan).

[24] BMH WS 493 (Séamus Kavanagh); BMH WS 1154 (Séan O’Neill); for an account of the ambush and its importance see John Ainsworth ‘Kevin Barry, the incident at Monk’s Bakery and the making of an Irish Republican legend’ in History, lxxxvii, no. 287, pp 272-87; This article is open-access here: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/247/1/Ainsworth_Kevin.PDF

[25] For a discussion of Robinson’s fractious relationship with the brigade see http://www.theirishstory.com/2014/12/08/a-bitter-brotherhood-the-war-of-words-of-seumas-robinson/#.W3Etm-hKguE

[26] Máirtín Ó Catháin, ‘Michael Collins and Scotland’ in F. Ferguson and J. McConnell (eds), Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2009), pp 168-9.

[27] John Carney pension file, IE/MA, MSPC, MSP34REF993.

[28] BMH WS 933 (Séamus Reader).

[29] IE/MA, MSPC, RO 603 (Roll file of the Scottish Brigade, IRA) (http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Membership/8/MA-MSPC-RO-603.pdf). See also Coyle, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp 49-53.

[30] Stephen Coyle, High noon on High Street: the story of a daring ambush by the IRA in Glasgow in 1921 (Glasgow, 2008). Irish Military Archives [IE/MA], Military Service Pensions Collection [MSPC], IRA Membership Series, Roll file of the Scottish Brigade, ‘Scottish Brigade Press Cuttings’, RO 603A. http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Membership/8/MA-MSPC-RO-603A.pdf.

[31] Irish Press and Irish Independent, 25 Sep. 1933.

[32] Irish Military Archives [IE/MA], Military Service Pensions Collection [MSPC], IRA Membership Series, Roll file of the Scottish Brigade, RO 603. (http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Membership/8/MA-MSPC-RO-603.pdf).

[33] Noonan, The IRA in Britain, p. 230.

[34] Jimmy Wren, The GPO Garrison, pp 354-5.

[35] BMH WS 908 (Michael O’Flanagan).

[36] Irish Press, 23 Sep. 1933 and 25 Sep. 1933, Irish Independent, 25 Sep. 1933. (Seán Hegarty obituaries and reports on funeral).

[37] Marie Coleman, ‘Séamus Robinson’ in Dictionary of Irish biography, (online edition) (http://dib.cambridge.org/).

[38] Figures from my own PhD research.

[39] Peter Hart, The IRA and its enemies: violence and community in Cork 1916-23 (Oxford, 1999), pp 264-6; Thomas Tormey, “The parting of the ways’: The 1922 split in the Dublin IRA and the foundation of the modern army’ in The Defence Forces Review (2016), pp 45-53. (http://www.military.ie/fileadmin/user_upload/images/Info_Centre/documents/Annual_Reviews/Defence_Forces_Review_2016.pdf)

[40] Robert Gewarth, The vanquished: why the First World War failed to end, 1917-1923 (London, 2016), pp 12-5.

By Gemma Clark

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Reviewer: John Dorney

In this book, the author, Gemma Clark, attempts to quantify and explain ‘everyday violence’ in the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. By this she means violence primarily against property and sometimes against the persons, of civilians, rather than military clashes between the combatants during the war over the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

This is a subject of much interest, considering that the Civil War, coming at the end of the Irish Revolutionary period of 1916-23, involved fairly small scale military encounters but very widespread destruction of infrastructure and property. The author has also summarised her arguments in a chapter of the recent ‘Atlas of the Irish Revolution’.

She certainly has a provocative argument. ‘Was the Civil War’ (p.58), she asks, ‘a military and political campaign to destabilise the Free State? Or did the Civil War provide the conditions for the final reckoning of ancient enmities, settling local scores and purging the community of the old enemies, tyrannical landlords, ex-servicemen, southern Unionists and Protestants?’

She reiterates in her conclusion (p.197) that the purpose of anti-Treaty violence was to ‘regulate community relations and purge Munster of unwanted persons’.

In other words, the war between Free State forces and the anti-Treaty IRA was just a cover for a low level campaign to drive out southern Protestants and unionists and other unwanted minorities.

Sources

This book grew out of the author’s PHD, which was a study of three Munster counties, Limerick, Waterford and Tipperary. Specifically it is based on the compensation claims of ‘southern Irish loyalists’ who applied for compensation to the British government for damage or injury inflicted during the Irish revolution, and of compensation appeals to the Irish Free State, for losses incurred by its supporters at the hands of anti-Treaty or Republican forces.

Therein lies the first problem. These sources only tell us about the ‘everyday violence’ inflicted on supporters of the British or Free State governments and nothing about that suffered by Republican supporters, either before the Truce of July 1921, or, particularly, those who supported the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. As a result, this is a very lopsided picture of the violence borne by civilians in the period.

Moreover, those applying for compensation, in order to receive it, had to show that the damage wrought on their property was as a result of their loyalty to either the British or the Free State governments.

The period of the Civil War was a highly anarchic time, in which one state, Britain, departed, with its armed forces and police, and another, the Irish Free State, was born under the most chaotic conditions imaginable. In this vacuum of law and order, thousands of local disputes, mostly agrarian or labour related, as well as settling of scores from the preceding War of Independence, flared.

In the south and west particularly there was an epidemic of land occupations and ‘cattle driving’ and, at the same time, strikes, mostly by agricultural workers and particularly in the south east, often turned to violence.

All of this, in truth, was only very tenuously related to the conflict over Irish independence and yet it was undoubtedly responsible for much of the violence against property in the period.

And yet farmers who had their hay ricks burned or their land occupied by the landless, or their cattle driven off by the small farmers who wanted to work the land, or creamery owners whose property was occupied by striking workers, had to present this as the work of the ‘Irregulars’ or anti-Treaty IRA, if they wanted compensation.

Agrarian, labour and political violence

In some areas of course there was a crossover between disgruntled smallholders or strikers and IRA members, but for the most part these were separate phenomena.

However Clark appears to take at face value the claims in the compensation files that all the violence of 1922-23 that was attributed to anti-Treaty Republicans was in fact carried out by them. This is a very problematic assumption, which colours much of the rest of the book.

To illustrate this, the counties that Clark chooses, Limerick, Waterford and Tipperary, were in fact the centres of very intense labour struggles. Limerick and Tipperary saw a wave of factory and creamery occupations in early 1922 by workers protesting at wage cuts and lay-offs. The red flag of socialism briefly flew over these ‘Soviets’ before they were eventually seized and handed back to their owners by the Free State’s National Army.

Similarly, rural County Waterford saw what amounted to a general strike by agricultural workers in the summer of 1923 – after, it should be noted, the IRA ceasefire of May 1923. To put the strike down, the Free State declared Waterford a ‘special military area’ and deployed the Special Infantry Corps – a unit raised to put down social disorder, or as Kevin O’Higgins put it, ‘passive irregularism’. As, for instance Gavin Foster has shown, the Special Infantry Corps and a farmers’ strong-arm organisation calling itself the ‘White Guards’ took to burning strikers’ houses as ‘the only way to stop the labour burners’. [1]

None of this can be found in Clark’s book. Which is a pity because it leads to confusion on Clark’s own part as she fails to separate violence into categories from which it may be understood – i.e. violence relating directly to the political conflict, local land disputes, agrarian strife and labour conflicts. Nor can any straightforward connection be made between such violence against property and sectarianism.

Clark appears to recognise these arguments at times, writing for instance, that the normally Catholic ‘grazier’ or big cattle farmer was a more common target of land hunger than the stereotypical Protestant landlord: (p.115) ‘it was mostly a campaign for redistribution directed at the grazier and medium sized farmer’.

She writes of the perpetrators of labour related violence (p.93), ‘clearly not all incendiary gangs were the anti-Treaty IRA’ and notes that the IRA, especially in the Truce period before the Civil War, usually condemned violent land agitation and often re-possessed illegally seized land. (p.135)

Despite this, her conclusion is still that violence was used ‘to clear out minorities’ (p.100).

Simply put, the evidence she herself presents does not bear this out. Of the houses and property she found burned in the three counties of her study, only 19% were deemed ‘attributable to allegiance the United Kingdom‘.

If much low level violence against property in the period was not carried out by the IRA or even by their supporters, and if former unionists (let alone Protestants as whole) were only a minority of victims, does it not disprove the theory that the Civil War was really a concealed ‘ethnic conflict’, under the cover of the war against the Treaty?

Was it not in fact the opposite, that the Civil War, caused by the split in Republican ranks over the Treaty, heralded a period of anarchic violence in the absence of state power, that involved multiple actors – agrarian, labour and others, as well as the Republican guerrillas?

Big House burnings

The burning of the ‘Big Houses’ or the Anglo-Irish gentry class, was unquestionably an action carried out by the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War.

Clark again attributes this (p.67) to the destruction of ‘strongholds of British agents, that is of loyalists left behind by Britain to sabotage independent Ireland once the war was over’. Again, this is the idea that the Civil War was just a cover for a more fundamental objective.

This brings us to a second and related problem of sourcing. Clark laments (p.159) that there are ‘sparse’ sources available from Republicans dealing with the conduct of the Civil War. In their place she cites several Republican memoirs – some of which, such as Tom Barry’s ‘Guerrilla Days in Ireland’ do not in fact deal with the Civil War period at all.

There is also some very problematic use of fiction, including Colm Toibin and Sebastian Barry’s novels (written since the 1990s) as a source to illustrate IRA thinking.

However, in reality there is no paucity of primary sources from within the anti-Treaty IRA. The Twomey Papers, which are to be found in the archives of University College Dublin, contain all the IRA Chief of Staff correspondence of the Civil War period, including communication with every regional Brigade, IRA Intelligence files and more. In these can be found often painstakingly detailed reports of actions at the most local level conducted by the anti-Treaty guerrillas.

These include most categories of ‘everyday violence’ carried out by the anti-Treatyites, including house burning, road and rail destruction, fines imposed on civilians and seizure of property, as well as the more dramatic ambushes and assaults on Free State positions.

They were simply not consulted for this study. As a result, Clark’s insights into anti-Treaty IRA motivations are, at best, limited.

Nevertheless, Clark’s argument about the Big House campaign is not entirely incorrect. The IRA and in particular, its Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch did see ‘Big House unionists’ as ‘imperialists’ and he sometimes also referred to former unionists in general as ‘the enemy civilian garrison’.[2] Lynch assumed that the owners of Big Houses were automatic supporters of the Free State and what he considered the betrayal of the Irish Republic that the Treaty represented.

However the burning campaign against the Big Houses, as Lynch’s General Orders make clear, was a product of the Civil War, not a part of some grand design to purge Irish society of unwanted elements.

There was one spate of burning in the late summer of 1922, when anti-Treaty forces abandoned their fixed positions and were ordered by Lynch to burn military and police barracks and any other building – including workhouses and country mansions – that could be used as garrisons for Free State forces.

There may have been some symbolic effect attached to this as Clarke suggests, but it was mainly a military decision of a guerrilla army based on denying garrisons to their enemy.

However, those represent a minority of Civil War house burnings. Almost all the Big House burnings occurred after December 1922, when in reprisal for the Free State execution of four senior Republicans in Mountjoy Prison, Lynch issued a general order to all units that ‘all Free State supporters are traitors and deserve the latter’s stark fate, therefore their houses must be destroyed at once.’[3].

On 26 January 1923, the anti-Treaty IRA Adjutant General Con Moloney, issued the following order:

1. Houses of members of ‘Free State Senate’ in attached list marked A and B will be destroyed.
2. From the above date if any of our Prisoners of War are executed by the enemy one of the Senators in the attached list … will be shot in reprisal.[4]

Many members of the Senate were of the old gentry class. Some others who were targeted were simply presumed to be ‘Imperialists’ because of their background. There was certainly an element of social and sectarian prejudice at work in targeting what the Adjutant General of the IRA described as ‘imperialists and freemasons’[5].

But to ascribe a simple sectarian motive to the house burning campaign is to radically over simplify.

First of all, the house burning campaign was intended not as a campaign of ethnic cleansing but as a reprisal to deter executions (in which it failed). Nor were all of those identified as ‘Imperialists’ Protestants.

Take the case of Senator Bryan Mahon, whose house at Ballymore Eustace was destroyed by the IRA in February 1923. Mahon was identified by the IRA as an ‘imperialist and freemason’. He had been commander of British forces in Ireland from 1916-18 and had commanded the 10th Irish Division at Gallipoli before that. But he was in fact a Catholic, born in Galway.

Secondly, ‘small houses’ were targeted as often as big ones, notably that of TD Sean McGarry, whose seven year old son Emmet died in the blaze, and of  government ministers WT Cosgrave of Kevin O’Higgins. And these burnings of ‘Free Stater politicians’ homes were often much more violent than those of the Big Houses. O’Higgins father was killed when his house was burned, as was Cosgrave’s uncle in a raid on his business.

The evidence suggests that those carrying out the Big House burnings were not motivated by hatred or personal animosity for the most part, but rather felt they were simply carrying out orders, however distasteful.

IRA men in Kildare, for instance, charged with setting alight Palmerstown House told Lord and Lady Mayo they were going to burn the house in reprisal for the executions of their men that day at the Curragh but intended them no harm.

‘Are you going to shoot me?’ Lord Mayo asked. “No, my lord: we are not going to shoot you, but we have our orders to burn the building.”  “It is only right to say”, Lord Mayo recalled, “that the raiders were excessively polite”. [6]

In Louth, the IRA burned six ‘Big Houses’ in retaliation for six executions at Dundalk in early 1923. One victim of the arsonists, John Russell who was a county sherrif, asked the burners if he was targeted because he was a Protestant.  They replied that they ‘cared nothing for religion’ and the burning was in retaliation for the executions and because he was a ‘government official and sympathiser’.

In March 1923 the IRA in Louth burned Knock Abbey, the stately home of William O’Reilly, a Catholic. It was rumoured locally that they had been ordered to burn a Catholic owned home in response to allegation of sectarianism.[7]

In short the house burning campaign was an effort at reprisal at Free State supporters, real and perceived, not a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

And if the anti-Treaty IRA was bent, as its primary aim, on eliminating Protestants in general and the landed upper class in particular, from southern Irish society, it seems odd that so many of the members of this class were involved at senior levels in the Republican movement, including anti-Treaty, post 1922, Republican, movement.

Erskine Childers (executed by the Free State in November 1922) was one. His fellow member of the Treaty negotiating team, Robert Barton was also of this class. Famous republican propagandist and activist Constance Markievicz (nee Gore Booth) the scion of the aristocratic Gore Booth family from Lisadell House, was too. So was David Robinson (Childers’ cousin), who commanded anti-Treaty guerrillas in Kerry until his arrest, and so was Charlotte Despard (the sister of Sir John French the Commander in Chief of the British Army in 1914 and last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland), who organised the Republican prisoners’ benefit campaign.

All of which is not to suggest that there was no sectarianism or class prejudice in anti-Treaty Republican ranks; there was. Nor is it to suggest that the campaign against the Big Houses in particular was not in part motivated by prejudice.

But it is to suggest that sectarianism in no way comprised the main thrust of the Republican political or military efforts either in the independence struggle or in the subsequent Civil War and that even in the campaign against the Big Houses, reprisal, not ‘purging’ was the goal.

Violence against people

Of course, the most significant violence in the Irish Civil War, or in any conflict, was violence against people.

Here, Clark’s book is informed by the work of Stathis Kalyvas, whose ‘The Logic of Violence in Civil War’, based on a study of the Greek Civil War of the 1940s, argues that civil wars degenerate into local feuds, that essentially become cyclical and divorced from politics or ideology.

Clark, correctly, in my view, disagrees with this thesis in respect of the Irish Civil War, writing, (p.179) ‘The IRA did not use the breakdown of law and order caused by the Civil War to perpetrate unfettered violence  on civil society’ and (p.186) ‘there is little evidence that serious violence against and between civilians friends and neighbours became commonplace’.

Summing up, she writes:

(P.194) ‘The anti-Treaty IRA in Munster certainly waged a costly war and succeeded for a time in undermining the authority of the new government. The insurgents did not, by contrast, regularly use lethal force against persons to control or coerce the population’.

However, perhaps hemmed in by her original thesis of the Civil War as an ethnic or sectarian conflict, she also writes (p.186) that the IRA wanted ‘to drive from Ireland the local enemy (Protestants, landlords, graziers and Fee Staters)’.

But surely both things cannot be true. If the IRA did not commit widespread lethal violence on civilians but rather focussed most of its attacks, shootings and bombings on the Free State’s National Army (who lost about 900 killed and thousands more injured in the war), then surely that, the military campaign against the pro-Treaty government, was the main focus of the Civil War? Violence against civilians was a by-product, not a driving force of events.

There are a number of other issues I wish the book had explored further. The first is that in the Civil War there was far less targeting of civilians by all sides than in the preceding War of Independence (1919-21). In the war against the British, the pre-split IRA systematically shot informers and alleged informers: around 200 being killed, mostly in the first six months of 1921.

It was here that in some areas, most notably Cork, the thesis of sectarianism has some weight. Protestants were overrepresented in the IRA’s killings of informers in Cork in 1921, according to Thomas Earls Fitzgerald’s figures, who states that eight out of ten informers shot by Tom Barry’s Third Cork Brigade in January and February 1921 alone were Protestants – well out of line with their share of the population (about 16 per cent) in West Cork.[8]. Whether this was due to their activities as informers or whether the IRA wrongly suspected them based on their religion remains a topic for debate.

The salient factor about the Civil War however, was that the anti-Treaty IRA shot very few civilians of any religion as informers: around 6 in County Cork for example compared to about 70 before the Truce.

In fact there were general orders from Liam Lynch, issued in September 1922 that civilians could only be shot if IRA GHQ gave explicit permission and that would only be given if their actions had resulted in the death of a Republican Volunteer.[9] In this respect Lynch was much more discriminate than his predecessor as IRA Chief of Staff, Richard Mulcahy had been.

These orders eventually rescinded after the Free State began executing prisoners. But such killings of informers never came remotely close to the level of executions of informers in the ‘Tan War’. The Tipperary units, whose IRA commander Dan Breen was exceptionally ruthless, in this regard, killed five civilians as spies in the Civil War compared to 16 such killings there before the Truce.[10]

Similarly while British forces before the Truce of July 11 1921 systematically destroyed property in reprisals for IRA attacks and frequently killed civilians too, there was no such policy by Free State forces in the war of 1922-23.

Which is not say that Free State forces were innocent of wrongdoing. In Tipperary, one of the counties chosen for study here, by my count the National Army killed seven civilians and nine anti-Treaty prisoners as well as executing four judicially. In counties like Dublin and Kerry their record was considerably worse. But as the focus here is on Republican violence only, state violence is not discussed in ‘Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War’.

The Phoney war

And a third distinction that I felt should have been made was singling out of the period between the Dail’s ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922 and the start of the Civil War on June 28 1922. In this six month period, British forces departed but squabbling Irish forces only partially took their place as upholders of law and order.

This was the time when violence in newly created Northern Ireland was at its height, where Catholic civilians were being killed and expelled in relatively large numbers and when, south of the new border, some voices blamed southern Protestants for the ‘pogrom’ on Northern Catholics.

For instance notices threatening ‘For every Catholic murdered in Belfast two Orangemen will be killed in Monaghan’ were posted in Clones.[11] Brian Hanley has shown that in one locality in Tipperary at least, it was pro-Treaty IRA Volunteers who were guilty of harassment and intimidation of Protestant farmers in this period.[12]

It was in during this ‘phoney war’ while pro and anti-Treaty factions shaped up to each other and violence raged in the North, that most of those instances of serious violence against southern Protestants that Clark catalogues, such as the gruesome gang rape of Harriet Biggs near Nenagh in June 1922 by anti-Treaty IRA members, took place. (Incidentally, one of the perpetrators of this crime, Michael Hogan, was later killed himself during the Civil War, abducted and killed by Free State forces in Dublin in March 1923).

The infamous shooting dead of thirteen Protestant in West Cork in April 1922 also took place in this time frame of heightened sectarianism, indiscipline among all the armed forces on the ground and a power vacuum.

It was also this period that saw most of the attacks on former RIC policemen, which Clark also sees as an attempt to drive out the reminders of British rule. Though as John Regan noted in his review of ‘Everyday Violence’ it would be more correct to say that killing of ex RIC men in early 1922 was motivated more by revenge for actions they had committed during the War of Independence than as part of some wider plan to purge Irish society of unwanted elements.[13]

The point is though, that these type of attacks were in fact much more common before the Civil War than during hostilities themselves and were often condemned, however ineffectually, by both sides of the Treaty divide. A fact which does nothing to excuse the perpetrators but does rather complicate the argument that they were the main focus of, let alone the reason for, the Civil War.

Conclusion

Clark suggests that the violence catalogued in the compensation files, taken together with the decline in the southern Irish Protestant population after 1922, shows that victimising the minority was ‘unavoidably’ part of the Irish Civil War. She compares this at one point with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from what became Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

I would argue that this argument is profoundly mistaken and misleading. Though sectarianism was present in various ways among Irish Republicans in the 1920s, it was by no means their central organising principle. In fact they repudiated it publicly and regularly.

During the Civil War itself of 1922-23, civilians were targeted much less frequently by both sides than in the preceding War of Independence and the large majority of deaths in the war over the Treaty were combatants.

The main goal of the anti-Treaty IRA campaign was indeed to bring down the Free State government and the Treaty and not to purge Irish society of unwanted elements. Nor was there a concerted campaign by them to kill or expel southern Protestants.

The ‘everyday violence’ of the Civil War came from numerous sources – including State forces, the land hungry and labour militants as well as anti-Treaty guerrillas.

Clark’s book is important and challenging if, in the opinion of this reviewer, ultimately problematic.

References

[1] Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society, (Palgrave. 2015) p.140-141. For the ‘White Guard phenomenon, see Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland (Cork University Press, 2009), p. 206-207.

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

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

[4] O’Malley and Dolan, No Surrender Here!, p. 533.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Dooley, Terence, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland p 174, Leinster Leader, February 3, 1923 and 12 December 1925

[7] Jean Young The Big House in County Louth, 1912-1923, in County Louth and the Irish Revolution, edited by Donal Hall and Martin McGuire. P.158-163

[8] Fitzgerald, Thomas Earls, ‘The Execution of Spies and Informers’, in Fitzpatrick (ed), Terror in Ireland, pp.184-185

[9] IRA General Order No 6, issued 4 September 1922, in No Surrender Here the Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, Edited by Anne Dolan and Cormac O’Malley, (Lilliput 2007) p.505

[10] See Casualties of the Civil War in Tipperary: http://www.theirishstory.com/2017/04/28/civil-war-casualties-in-county-tipperary/#.W5RJ9PknbIU

[11] Anglo Celt, 6 May 1922.

[12] One of the victims, Richard Pennefather, was a substantial farmer who had ‘got a lot of trouble in the years 1922 and 1923’ when a number of Pro-Treaty IRA men from nearby Turraheen had fired shots into his home, broken his windows and commandeered his car on several occasions, apparently trying to make him abandon and then seize his farm. Brian Hanley, ‘July 1935: Remember Belfast – Boycott the Orangemen!’, The Irish Story, 2013. http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/01/07/july-1935-remember-belfast-boycott-the-orangemen/#.V5TlrqLwruZ. Accessed 31/03/17.

[13] Regan’s review in Irish Historical Studies is available here. https://www.academia.edu/26751115/John_M._Regans_review_of_Gemma_Clarks_Everyday_Violence_in_the_Irish_Civil_War_Cambridge_2015_in_Irish_Historical_Studies

See also Gavin Foster’s review in Dublin Review of Books, http://www.drb.ie/essays/ordinary-brutalities

By Mark Holan

American journalist William Henry Hurlbert traveled to Ireland in 1888 to report on “the social and economical conditions of the Irish people as affected by the revolutionary forces which are now at work in the country.”^[1]

For six months, he considered “things great and small, and people high and low”^[2] as he crossed the country by rail and jaunting car; from private offices in Dublin Castle to remote cabins in Donegal; from troubled estates in Cork and Kerry to Orange halls in Belfast.

Hurlbert’s arrival coincided with a period of resurgent agrarian agitation, what historian Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr. later called “The Second Land War.”^[3] The period 1886 to 1891 was known as the ‘Plan of Campaign’, in which the Irish National League, headed by nationalist leader Charles Stuart Parnell, agitated, through rent strikes and boycotts, against evictions, and for reduced rents for tenant farmers.

Violence flared on both sides, with destruction of landlords’ property and sometimes killing of landlords and their agents on one side and government repression on the other.

The British government had begun to enforce tougher coercion laws, under which suspects could be imprisoned by a magistrate without a trial by jury and ‘dangerous’ associations, such as the National League, could be prohibited. The 1887 Coercion Act was passed the previous summer to stop violence and stymie political activism. The legislation was prompted, in part, after The Times of London published its sensational “Parnellism and Crime” series, which sought to link to the Irish Parliamentary Party leader to the 1882 murders of two British officials in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

During Hurlbert’s travels, Pope Leo XIII issued a decree warning his Irish flock against boycotting and the rent-withholding Plan of Campaign. American diplomats in Ireland corresponded with their superiors in Washington, D.C., about the alarming rise of westbound emigrants,^[4] while Hurlbert questioned the role of the Irish already in America with the affairs of their homeland. His trip ended as the special judicial commission in London began hearings on the allegations against Parnell and other Irish nationalists.

Hurlbert’s diary-style, social-political travelogue, titled Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, was published in late summer 1888. In America, The Literary World explained to its readers: “The rule of the Land League is, in Mr. Hurlbert’s opinion, the only coercion to which Ireland is subjected; and the title of his volume has reference to this view.”^[5] Reviews on the east side of the Atlantic reflected the late 19th century politics of their respective journals.

The Times, organ of Britain’s ruling Tory party, described Ireland Under Coercion as an “entertaining as well as instructive …. collection of evidence on the present phase of the Irish difficulty, the genuineness of which it would be idle to impeach.”^[6]

The pro-Parnell United Ireland called it a “libelous book on Ireland … fit to take its place amongst other grotesque foreign commentaries.”^[7] Father Patrick White, a pro-tenant priest whom Hurlbert interviewed in Clare, complained the American journalist “libeled me, and libeled me unsparingly,” in his scathing, 32-page reply pamphlet, Hurlbert unmasked: an exposure of the thumping English lies of William Henry Hurlbert in his ‘Ireland Under Coercion’.^[8]

Much of Hurlbert’s political analysis was soon upended by the revelation of Parnell’s extramarital affair, rupture among constitutional nationalists, and the “long gestation”^[9] that followed the death of Ireland’s “uncrowned king.”

Hurlbert, a witness to the bloodshed of the American Civil War 20 years earlier, correctly anticipated that “establishing the independence of Ireland against the will of Ulster” was “little short of madness.”^[10]

Ongoing agrarian reforms in Ireland quickly dated his ardent pro-landlord views. Culturally, he recognized and praised the talents of the young W. B. Yeats, who had four poems in the just-published Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, and also noted Douglas Hyde’s contribution of a poem about the four-year-old Gaelic Athletic Association.

By 1891, after publishing a similarly-styled book about France, Hurlbert’s once respected reputation as a New York City newspaper writer and editor began to wane. He was tarnished in a tawdry courtroom melodrama, which exposed his adulterous affair that began the year before his trip to Ireland. In this regard, his fate was similar to Parnell. Hurlbert died in Italy in 1895, aged 68.

During his 1888 Ireland travels, Hurlbert interviewed many of the leading characters of the day: Chief Secretary of Ireland Arthur Balfour; agrarian agitator Michael Davitt; Fenian John O’Leary; estate owner Charles Talbot Ponsonby and other landlords, including the limbless Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh; Father White and other pro-tenant priests; Members of Parliament; and ordinary citizens, most of them left unnamed.

He did not interview Parnell, son of an American mother, whom he disdained as a political opportunist. In the 130 years since Ireland Under Coercion was published, Hurlbert’s work has been sparingly cited by Curtis, Myles Dungan, and a few other historians.

Ireland Under Coercion also is included in Travellers’ Accounts as Source-Material for Irish Historians, a reference by Christopher J. Woods, and The Tourist’s Gaze, Travellers to Ireland, 1800 to 2000, edited by Glen Hooper. Hurlbert’s book is a mosaic of 1880s Ireland. In some passages, he poetically described Irish landscapes, such as Donegal’s “glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath,” where he visits a “warm and comfortable” cabin with “a peat fire smouldering, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours.”^[11]

He detailed many still surviving landmarks, including the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Drogheda viaduct, Blarney Castle; Kilkenny Castle; Sir Walter Raleigh house in Youghal, County Cork; Botanic Gardens, Belfast, and numerous churches and ruins.

But Hurlbert’s thoughts on the agrarian agitation and nationalist movement are the core of Ireland Under Coercion. His interactions with Balfour and Davitt, in particular, illustrate his views.

DUBLIN ARRIVAL

Hurlbert arrived in Ireland on 30 January 1888, accompanied by Lord Ernest Hamilton, who was elected three years earlier as MP for North Tyrone. A dockside news vendor who recognized the conservative politician “promptly recommended us to buy the Irish Times and the Express,” then “smiled approval when I asked for the [nationalist] Freeman’s Journal also,” Hurlbert wrote.

His attention was drawn to the Freeman’s report about the previous evening’s nationalist demonstration in Rathkeale, County Limerick, about 20 miles southwest of Limerick city.

Thousands of men from counties Limerick, Kerry and Clare attended the rally to hear a speech by Davitt. To Hurlbert, it was “chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the nationalist orators and newspapers.”^[12]

Arthur Balfour was the Chief Secretary for Ireland, head of the British administration in the country. He was much resented by nationalists for his strict enforcement of the Coercion Act. Four months earlier, police had fired on a crowd of demonstrators in County Cork, killing three, in what became known as the ‘Mitchelstown massacre’, earning him the nickname ‘Bloody Balfour’.

According to the Freeman’s coverage, Davitt said that Balfour:

“…is not a man who cares very much about the names he is called, and calling names, let me add, is not a very scientific method of fighting Mr. Balfour’s policy. Calling him ‘bloody Balfour’ may be a truthful description … but its constant use in newspapers and on platforms is becoming what the Americans term a ‘stale chestnut.’ … What we have got to recognize is the policy of this man, and what we have got to do is, to beat that policy by cool, calculating resistance.”^[13]

Hurlbert wrote that “Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader … bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine … this can be done without the consent of Democratic England [and he knows] that to abuse an executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make him popular.”^[14]

In fact, Davitt also criticized Balfour during the Rathkeale speech. Davitt noted that at the current pace of arrests under the 1887 coercion law, it would take the chief secretary more than 500 years to imprison all the supporters of Irish nationalism and tenant rights:

 

“If we judge of what he can do to save the life of Irish landlordism by all he has performed up to the present, we need have very little apprehension about the final result. … He will discover, if he has not done so already, that imprisonment will not beget loyalty, nor plank beds gratitude to the power he represents. It is with a nation, as with an individual, a tussle with persecution brings out great qualities of endurance, the courage of conviction, and a faith which scorns to abdicate to brute force.”^[15]

 

MEETING BALFOUR

Within hours of his arrival, Hurlbert visited the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour at Dublin Castle. The American described the seat of the British government administration in Ireland as “no more of a palace than it is of a castle … People go in and out of it as freely as through the City Hall in New York.”

Balfour, then 39, was in the job less than a year after being appointed by his uncle, Prime Minister Salisbury. He was “in excellent spirits; certainly the mildest mannered and most sensible despot who ever trampled the liberties of a free people,” Hurlbert wrote, tongue only partly in cheek. “He was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him in speeches and in the press.”

Hurlbert asked Balfour about Davitt’s statement the previous evening at Rathkeale, where he suggested his supporters to stop using the phrase “bloody Balfour.”

“Davitt is quite right, the thing must be getting to be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take them to be,” Balfour replied. “One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had to invent a special sign for the phrase ‘bloody and brutal Balfour,’ it is used so often in the speeches.”^[16]

This sounds a little dubious, perhaps the self-aggrandizing anecdote of an up-and-coming politician to the foreign journalist. It appears from this passage of the book that their interview did not last long. Hurlbert later insisted that Balfour had “obviously unaffected interest in Ireland.”

Curtis has noted that Balfour accommodated Hurlbert’s Ireland visit in the hope his reporting would have some influence in America.^[17] “For Balfour the struggle in Ireland was between the forces of law and decency on the one hand and those of organized rebellion and robbery on the other,” Curtis wrote. A week after Hurlbert’s visit, Balfour wrote to a colleague, “To allow the latter to win is simply to give up on civilization.”^[18]

Hurlbert also sought an interview with Davitt, “who was not to be found at the National League headquarters, nor yet at the Imperial Hotel, which is his usual resort.” He admitted to “sharing the usual and foolish aversion of my sex to asking questions on the highway” as he got confused by the transition of one of Dublin’s main boulevards from Sackville Street to O’Connell Street.^[19]

HOME RULE

In 1880, Davitt and Parnell partnered in an effort to link agrarian reform and domestic political autonomy for Ireland, called Home Rule. Both men visited the United States that year to generate financial and political support for their cause from the Irish in America.

Six years later, despite support from then Liberal British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, unionist MPs defeated Home Rule legislation. In Ireland Under Coercion, Hurlbert wrote that the 1886 bill would have made Gladstone and the British government “the ally and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr. Davitt, [American socialist] Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organizations of the United States.”

Hurlbert also recognized the Home Rule effort was not over:

“How or by whom Ireland shall be governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and thereby, the close, intimate, and increasing connection between the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect the future of my country. …

[In the wake of the failed 1886 bill] ‘Home Rule for Ireland’ is not now a plan–nor so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland, however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. … [It] has unquestionably been the aim of every active Irish organization in the United States for the last twenty years … [and] Parnell is understood in America to have pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to impede.”^[20]

During his stay in Dublin, Hurlbert met with several members of the Balfour administration and MPs who opposed any reform to the 88-year-old Act of Union. One unidentified Catholic unionist from southern Ireland told him it would be “madness to hand Ireland over to the Home Rule of the ‘uncrowned king’ (Parnell).” Hurlbert also attended a speech by Colonel Edward James Saunderson, MP for North Armagh, who asked his audience whether they could ever imagine being governed by “such wretches” as the Parnellite nationalists.

“Never,” the crowd replied in what Hurlbert described as “a low deep growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog.” It was a response echoed 97 years later by Ian Paisley and his unionist supporters outside the Belfast City Hall.^[21] 

MEETING DAVITT

“Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me today, and we had a most interesting conversation,” Hurlbert reported in the 15 February 1888, entry of Ireland Under Coercion.^[22] The American journalist connected with the agrarian activist during a short side trip to London; having been called away from his travels in Ireland for reasons left unexplained in the book. Perhaps his affair?

Hulbert wrote that he had followed Davitt’s career “with lively personal interest” since they met during the Irishman’s first visit to America in 1878. Davitt had just received his “ticket of leave,” or parole, from Dartmoor Prison, where he had served half of a 15-year sentence for treason related to his Fenian activities. He returned to Ireland in 1879 to help found the Irish National Land League.

As editor of the New York World at the time, Hurlbert said he dispatched a correspondent to Ireland to interview Davitt. He quoted Davitt from the nine-year-old interview as saying “the only issue upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land Question.” (Davitt wrote at least one column about the Land League for the New York World, on 4 June 1884, a year after Hurlbert’s departure as editor due to a change in the newspaper’s ownership.^[23])

In the 1888 London interview, Hurlbert reported that Davitt, then 42, was supporting English poet and writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in an upcoming by-election in Deptford, England. Blunt had become a supporter of Irish nationalism a few years earlier. According to Hurlbert’s account, Blunt told Davitt that Balfour “meant to lock up and kill” the four “pivots” of the Irish movement: William O’Brien, Timothy Harrington, John Dillon and Davitt.

“How did you take it?” Hurlbert asked.

“Oh, I only laughed, and told him it would take more than Mr. Balfour to kill me, at any rate by putting me in prison,” Davitt replied. “As for being locked up, I prefer Cunninghame Graham‘s way of taking it, that he meant ‘to beat the record on oakum.’ ”^[24]

Graham was a journalist, socialist and Scottish nationalist MP who spent six weeks in prison for participating in the November 1887 Trafalgar Square Riots against unemployment and coercion in Ireland. He reportedly displayed great stoicism while incarcerated and refused to accept special privileges.

As for oakum, the hard labor of unraveling old ropes was a common punishment in Victorian prisons. It was work Davitt had done during his long days in Dartmoor, despite having lost one arm in an industrial accident at age 11.

Blunt lost the by-election two weeks after Davitt’s interview with Hurlbert. In his own book about the Land War period in Ireland, published in 1912, Blunt recalled his first meeting with Davitt in 1886 at the Imperial Hotel in Dublin. He described the Mayo native as “a most superior man, with more of the true patriot about him than any of those I have yet met.”^[25]

Hurlbert also praised Davitt:

“If all the Irish ‘leaders’ were made of the same stuff with Mr. Davitt, the day of a great Democratic revolution [in Ireland] … might be a good deal nearer than anything in the signs of the times now show it to be. … I have always regarded him as the soul of the Irish agitation, of the war against ‘landlordism’  … and of the movement towards Irish independence. Whether agitation, the war, and the movement have gone entirely in accordance with his views and wishes is quite another matter. … [But] he has never made revenge and retaliation upon England either the inspiration or the aim of his revolutionary policy.”^[26]

OTHER ISSUES

Hulbert recognized that Davitt was not going to divulge to him the latest strategies of the Irish agrarian and nationalist movements. “I could neither ask, nor, if I asked, could expect to get from him,” he wrote.^[27] Based on the five pages Hurlbert devoted to his one-hour interview with Davitt, it appears the American journalist focused his questions on other issues.

Hurlbert reported that Davitt’s thoughts were occupied with managing a wool export business, which the author believed could penetrate the American markets despite a tariff at the time. “He has gone into it with all his usual earnestness and ability,” Hurlbert wrote of Davitt. “This is not a matter of politics with him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already secured very large orders from the United States.”^[28]

The day before meeting with Hurlbert in London, Davitt wrote in his diary: “Attended Woolen Co. meeting. While doing fairly well in America, orders not as large as expected though. Visit was another loss for season.”^[29]

The Irish Woolen Manufacturing & Export Company was established in spring 1887 with backing from about 20 Dublin business men. Davitt told the Freeman’s Journal that the enterprise would buy wool from small mills, pay owners on delivery of orders, “and in that way increase their confidence and help them to extend their works, improve the workmanship of their goods, and gradually multiply their hands.”

Hurlbert also suggested that Davitt was “quite awake” to the possibility of developing granite quarries in counties Donegal and in his native Mayo. “This bent of his mind towards the material improvement of the condition of the Irish people, and the development of the resources of Ireland, is not only a mark of his superiority to the rank and file of Irish politicians–it goes far to explain the stronger hold which he undoubtedly has on the people of Ireland.”^[30]

The American reporter recognized Davitt’s interest in cultivating native industries. Davitt wrote a series of articles between November 1885 and January 1886 for the Dublin Evening Telegraph that “advanced practical proposals on industrial rejuvenation at a time when Dublin industries were moribund,” historian Laurence Marley has noted. Marley continued:

“Davitt had spoken of the need for Irish industrial development after his release from Dartmoor [prison]. … He undertook a number of industrial ventures, incurring considerable financial costs. His practical interventions met with little success, but the ideas which he expounded were nevertheless significant.^[31]

DAVITT RESPONDS

Davitt did not mention his interview with Hurlbert in his diary, which includes such mundane notations as “Sick” and “At home gardening all day” and “Wrote 25 letters since 8 last night.”^[32] He did pay attention to other press coverage, including of his 29 January 1888, speech in Rathkeale, the one noted by Hurlbert upon his arrival in Ireland. In his next day entry, Davitt wrote:

“Splendid report in yesterday’s London Times of my Rathkeale speech. Freeman[’s Journal] had left out references to boycotting etc. Times leader strangely complimentary–which means, if it has any meaning–put this man in Tullamore.”

Within weeks of Ireland Under Coercion’s publication, Davitt blasted Hurlbert’s book as “a plagiarised, but venomous attack upon the Nationalists of Ireland.” In the 9 September 1888, speech at Knockaroo, Queens County (now Laois), Davitt suggested that four years earlier Hurlbert had tried to secure the U.S. ambassadorship in London through some of Parnell’s friends in America. When that didn’t happen, Hurlbert turned on Parnell and Irish nationalists.^[33]

Ireland Under Coercion was “stale abuse of Mr. Parnell and Home Rule, in praise of Mr. Balfour and the Irish landlords,” Davitt said. “English society’s hatred of us will even go so far as to adopt an American adventurer when he qualifies for its salons.”

In his October 1889 testimony before the Special Commission on “Parnellism and Crime,” Davitt made a passing reference to Hurlbert as having attended a July 1882 speech he gave in New York City. He described the American journalist as “at the time editor of a New York newspaper, now Coercionist chronicler for Mr. Balfour in Ireland.”^[34]

In his 1904 book, The fall of feudalism in Ireland, Davitt again briefly mentioned Hurlbert, by then dead for nine years. Davitt seemed to back off his 1888 assertion about the ambassadorship:

“Ireland Under Coercion… was intended to show that Mr. Parnell and the National League, not Mr. Balfour and Dublin Castle, were the true coercionists in Ireland. What the purpose or motive of the book was has remained a mystery.”^[35]

See Mark Holan’s 2018 blog series Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited. He can be reached at markaholan@gmail.com.

^{© 2018 by Mark Holan}

References

^[1] William Henry Hurlbert, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, (IRELAND UNDER COERCION) The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1888, page 10. (The book was originally published in two volume, then combined into this single edition, available through the Internet Archive.)

^[2] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 8.

^[3] Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr., The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845-1910, UCD Press, Dublin, 2011, page 130 (chapter title).

^[4] Bernadette Whelan, American government in Ireland, 1790-1913: A history of the U.S. consular service, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2010, page 236.

^[5] The Literary World; a Monthly Review of Current Literature, 19 January, 1889, page 22.

^[6] Times of London, 18 August, 1888, page 12.

^[7] United Ireland, 25 August,, 1888, (Page number missing from my notes of 22 February, 2018, microfilm review at National Library of Ireland.)

^[8] Page 7 of the pamphlet, reviewed on loan from University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries.

^[9] W.B. Yeats, “The Irish Dramatic Movement”, Nobel Lecture, 15 December, 1923.

^[10] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 405.

^[11] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 80 and 103.

^[12] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 38.

^[13] Freeman’s Journal, 30 January, 1888, page 6

^[14] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 39.

^[15] Freeman’s Journal, 30 January, 1888, page 6

^[16] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 45.

^[17] Lewis Perry Curtis Jr., Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880-1892, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1963, page 263, citing 13 August 1888, letter from Balfour to E. Barrington.

^[18] Ibid., page 408, citing 6 February, 1888, letter from Balfour to J. Roberts.

^[19] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 42-43.

^[20] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 10.

^[21] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 60.

^[22] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 159.

^[23] George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 2015, pages 258-259.

^[24] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, 160-61.

^[25]Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Land War in Ireland: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, S. Swift & Co., London, 1912, page 50.

^[26] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 162.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 159

^[29] The Papers of Michael Davitt Collection, IE TCD MS 9547-52, Diaries and notebooks 1877‐1906. Reviewed by author, 21 February, 2018 at Trinity College Dublin.

^[30] IRELAND UNDER COERCION, page 163.

^[31] Laurence Marley, “Davitt and Irish economic development: ideas and interventions” chapter of Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur, Four Courts Press, 2007, pages 130 and 156-158.

^[32] The Papers of Michael Davitt Collection, Trinity College Dublin.

^[33]Leinster Express, 15 September 1888, page 7

^[34]The Times Parnell Commission Speech Delivered by Michael Davitt in Defense of the Land League, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1890, page 152.

^[35] Michael Davitt, The fall of feudalism in Ireland; or, The story of the land league revolution, Harper & Bros., London, 1904, page 559.