By John Dorney

In the early part of the 16^th century the English Tudor monarchs had embarked on a project ot bring all of Ireland for the first time under the control on their Crown.

By the 1590s, the Fitzgerald magnates of Munster had been smashed in the Desmond Rebellions. South Leinster was extensively garrisoned by English troops and in the west ruthless commanders named Drury and Malby enforced a pacification settlement known as ‘composition’ on the local lords.

There still remained one province of Ireland still unoccupied by English garrisons and out of the control of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in Dublin – Ulster.

It was in the northern province that the final, most destructive and most decisive war between the Gaelic lords and the encroaching English state would be fought; the Nine Years War.

A New ‘Prince of Ulster’

Hugh O’Neill, the son of the murdered Lord, Fear Dorcha O’Neill, educated in the Pale and reinstated in Gaelic Ulster by the English, would cast a long shadow over the future of the province. His own story so dominates that of Ulster and  of Ireland in the late 16^th century that it is worth looking at in detail.

The irony of Hugh O’Neill’s early life is that it looked as if his career would be tied to success of English government in Ireland. His father, who was held both the Irish title of O’Neill and the English one of ‘Earl of Tyrone’ was killed and his sons banished from Ulster as a child by his rival Shane O’Neill.

Hugh O’Neill was fostered to a Pale family named the Hovendans. Hugh was supposed to be a model of English reform in Ireland. Like several other Gaelic noblemen of his generation, he had been brought up as an English gentleman and was supposed to bring “civility” with him into Ulster. Certainly, Hugh was capable of operating in the world of the English aristocrat. He attended parliament in Dublin and Court in London and cultivated powerful allies there, both Irish and English, such as the Earls of Ormonde and Leicester.

In 1587, he persuaded Elizabeth I to make him Earl of Tyrone, the English title his father had held. In the 1570s and again in the 1580s he fought with the English against Irish insurgents in Ulster and Munster, where Grey remarked he was, “the first Irish lord to shed blood”.[1]

But if the English were under the impression they had in Hugh O’Neill a man who would faithfully do their bidding, they were greatly mistaken. Hugh, as his actions would make clear, was as attached to autonomy and independent military power as any of his ancestors had been, and more shrewd, innovative and ruthless than any of them.

The real signifier of power in Ulster was not the legal title of Earl of Tyrone, but the position of The O’Neill, still held in the 1580s by the ageing Turlough Lineach. This title gave its holder the right to the obedience of all the O’Neills and their dependents in central Ulster. Turlough Lineach was now an old man and could not on go on forever.

Internecine fighting soon broke out among those O’Neills who wanted to succeed him. The position of tanaiste (second in command and probable successor) was contested by Hugh and the MacShane O’Neills, sons of Shane O’Neill – the late, self proclaimed, Prince of Ulster. The MacShanes name gave them greater prestige than Hugh, and they were the preferred choice of Turlough Lineach. However, their weakness was their lack of allies. The neighbouring clans hated them for the cruelties of their father Shane and had no desire to have one of them as an overlord. Further afield, the MacShane’s dynastic allies, the Fitzgeralds, had been annihilated in the Munster rebellion and could be of no help to them.

Hugh O’Neill, while he had less support within Tir Eoin, made intelligent use of his neighbours’ hatred of the MacShanes by making alliances through marriage with the most powerful of those neighbours. The most important ties he forged were with the O’Donnells of Tir Connell (modern Donegal), in particular a young pretender called Aodh Rua – Red Hugh, and the MacGuires of Fermanagh. From Red Hugh O’Donnell he got a supply of Scottish mercenaries – O’Donnell’s mother, Inion Dubh, was from the MacDonald clan of western Scotland – and a threat to Turlough Lineach’s seat at Strabane.

In return, he supported O’Donnells own claims to chiefdom. O’Neill was equally astute in his alliances outside Ulster. These included the Earl of Ormonde, the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Argyle (in Scotland) and even Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, whom he bribed throughout his tenure in office. As a result, Hugh received money and some soldiers from the English and a willingness to look the other way when he broke English law – as he regularly did.[2]

After much vicious bloodshed within Tir Eoin, Hugh finally forced Turlough Lineach to name him tanaiste in 1592. This made him effective ruler of the O’Neill lands, although Turlough Lineach did not die until 1595.

Hugh had cut his teeth in the utterly ruthless world of Gaelic Ulster’s high politics. The brutality which the now-mature Hugh was capable of included the killing of all of the MacShanes, one of whom, Niall Grabhalach, he was said to have hung with his bare hands over a hawthorn tree. [3]

Within Duiche Ui Neill, Hugh made himself a kind of absolute monarch. Not satisfied with the customary tribute or rents from his fine, he extended his control directly over the territory. Within this domain, he tied the peasantry to the land, making them effectively serfs and guaranteeing his supply of labour. His revenue eventually translated into £80,000 a year. To put this into perspective, as late as the 1540s, the total tax revenue of the Tudor monarchy amounted to about £31,000.[4] While it had expanded since then, it was clear that O’Neill had made himself rich enough to rival the state.

To arm his military, he used his increased cashflow to buy muskets, ammunition and pikes from Scotland and England. Like his predecessor Shane, he made full use of his man-power by pressing all classes into military service. Ultimately, he was able to arm and feed over 8,000 men, unprecedented for a Gaelic lord. Far from introducing “civility” into the north he became the most powerful Gaelic warlord that the Tudors ever encountered in Ireland.[5]

It was inevitable that before long Hugh’s own ambition would collide with the advancing Elizabethan state. By 1587, the English were already suspicious enough to kidnap his ally, Red Hugh O’Donnell and hold him in Dublin Castle, thus temporarily delaying Hugh O’Neill’s victory in the internal power struggle in Tir Eoin.

In December 1591, after a number of failed attempts, O’Neill engineered O’Donnell’s escape (probably through bribery at high levels in Dublin) to the Wicklow mountains. There he found shelter with the Gabhal Raghnail O’Byrnes, whose chief, Fiach MacHugh, was among O’Neills web of allies. An O’Byrne search party found the fugitives near death and covered with snow near Glendalough.

The young O’Donnell lost his big toe to frostbite in the freezing December weather and his companion, Art MacShane O’Neill, died of exposure (although suspicious minds claimed he had been murdered by the O’Byrnes to eliminate him as a rival to Hugh O’Neill). The experience left Red Hugh with a bitter hatred towards the English, which was subsequently reinforced by his contact with Franciscan friars based in Derry. O’Donnell would henceforth be regarded as the most zealous of the Ulster lords. Not that he, or any of the northern lords, needed a personal reason to fear the English state. Events to the south of them provided much more pressing reasons. [6]

Composition

By the early 1590’s, northern Connacht and the southern rim of Ulster was engulfed by Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam’s “reforming” agents who applied the “composition” formula that had been hammered out in Munster and southern Connacht.

There was a short but bloody war in the Mac William Burke  (northern Connacht) country, in 1588, when over a thousand Scottish gallowglass were imported by the Burkes to prevent the introduction of an English sheriff. All of them died in a murderous battle with Bingham, the President of Connacht at Ardnaree.[7] Having pacified Connacht, Fitzwilliam prepared to move on to Ulster.

It was envisaged that Ulster would be governed by a provincial president – probably Henry Bagenel, an English colonist settled in Newry. The first subjects of the composition experiment in Ulster were in Longford, Cavan and Monaghan. In 1591, Fitzwilliam broke up the MacMahon lordship in Monaghan when the Lord (another Hugh) resisted the imposition of an English Sheriff. Hugh MacMahon was hanged and his lordship divided eight ways between his fine.

These were not to be independent political players, but simple landlords on the Queen’s land. Moreover, the freeholders (gradh fheine or free-men in Gaelic terms) were granted property rights to their land. They would pay rent to their local lord and to the Queen (2.5d and 1.5d respectively) but the lords would not have political or legal control over them. [8]

Similar solutions were applied in Longford and Breifne (Cavan) to the O’Rourke and O’Reilly lords respectively. Hugh O’Neill must have looked at these developments with horror. Firstly, the introduction of a sheriff would end his control over Tir Eoin that he had spent the better part of two decades fighting for. Secondly, it would reduce his property strictly to his own demesne, when he was trying to extend it to the land held by his fine. Thirdly, by giving legal status to the free-holders it would completely eliminate all of his personal political power by ending his ability to muster and maintain an army.

What was more, the MacMahon and O’Rourke chiefs had actually been hanged after their lordship was “reformed” and O’Reilly had been driven into exile. It was the threat that this settlement would be extended into his dominion that brought Hugh O’Neill into direct conflict with the English authorities. To the more devout, such as Red Hugh O’Donnell, English authority was not only the eclipse of his power, but also the eclipse of the One True Faith by heresy. The ensuing conflict, known to history as the Nine Years War, shook English rule in Ireland to its very foundations but ended with the final victory of the Tudor state over the old Gaelic order.

By 1592, the year of the two Hugh’s victories in their respective succession conflicts, O’Neill’s alliances had hardened into a confederation of the northern Gaelic chiefs. Even more significantly, since 1591 O’Donnell had been communicating (at O’Neill’s request) with Phillip II of Spain for military aid against the English heretics. His Most Catholic Majesty duly supplied them with arms, money and military advisors.

This was not merely a romantic gesture in support of fellow Catholics but a hard-headed strategic policy on the Spaniard’s part. The minutes of a meeting of Spanish Council of State records the benefits of helping O’Neill and O’Donnell, namely to tie down English troops which could be used against Spain in the Netherlands. Better yet, if Ireland was gained for Spain, it would increase the prestige of the Spanish monarchy, and give the Spanish a say in the choice of the next English monarch.[9]

In 1592, Red Hugh drove a Captain Willis (Sheriff of Tir Connell) out of Tir Connell – he having been more of a freebooter than a lawman in any case. In 1593, Maguire and O’Donnell combined to resist Willis’ introduction as Sheriff into Maguire’s Fermanagh and began attacking the English outposts along the southern edge of Ulster.

A negotiated settlement was still possible though. As yet, O’Neill stood aloof from the rebellion, although he was directing proceedings, hoping as a compromise to be named as Lord President of Ulster himself. Elizabeth I, though, had correctly perceived that O’Neill had no intention of being a civilised English landlord. Rather, his ambition was to usurp her sovereign power and be, “a Prince of Ulster”.

For this reason she refused to grant O’Neill provincial presidency or any other delegation of power which would have given him authority to govern Ulster on the crown’s behalf. She also had scathing words for his ingratitude, he, as far as she was concerned, having been raised into his position by English benevolence. [10]

O’Neill’s treachery was seen by many in London as a personal betrayal. For Hugh however, not to stand up to the English encroachment onto Tir Eoin would probably have been more costly than going along with it. If he had not defended his territory, as The O’Neill was required to do, another of his derbh fhine could have won the support of the O’Neill swordsmen and ousted and killed him.

For whatever combination of reasons, in 1595 Hugh O’Neill joined his confederates in open rebellion by attacking the English fort on the Blackwater river. It was also in this year that Turlough Lineach O’Neill died, so that Hugh was inaugurated The O’Neill at the traditional O’Neill inauguration site at Tullaghoe. It was a formal rejection of English authority. As one contemporary put it, “Tyrone [Hugh’s English title] was a traitor, but O’Neill none”.[11]

A War for Ireland

O’Neill was a politician of great shrewdness. He was anything but a consistent fighter for the Gaels or for Catholicism, in fact he had attended Protestant services up to 1594. In the early years of the war, he wanted a modest, negotiated settlement with the English. But by assuming the role of a Gaelic and Catholic crusader against the English Protestants, he was able to rally disaffected chiefs and lords throughout Ireland to his rebellion.

Moreover, the better things went for the rebels, the more ambitious O’Neill got. In his minimum demands, he wanted freedom of the Catholic religion and all public positions in Ireland to be filled by Irishmen. But later, he came to be fighting for an independent Ireland under Spanish suzerainty. In proclamations issued around Ireland he turned the language of the conquest on its head, saying he fighting for,

“the delivery of our country [from]  infinite murders, wicked and detestable policies by which the kingdom was hitherto governed, nourished in obscurity and ignorance, maintained in barbarity and incivility and consequently of infinite evils which are too lamentable to be rehearsed”.[12]

In O’Neill’s proclamations, contrary to what English discourse had long maintained, it was the English, not the Irish who were the ignorant, murderous barbarians!

The above passage was written for the consumption of the Palesmen, appealing to their sense that the English government was infringing their constitutional and religious liberties by forcing them to pay extra-parliamentary taxes, quarter soldiers and denying them freedom to practise Catholicism.

This traditionally loyalist community generally maintained their political loyalty to the English Crown, despite their discontent. Their loyalty however was shaky and was put under severe pressure during the course of the war. English soldiers were required by decree to be housed by the townsmen of Dublin and they spread disease and forced up the price of food.

The wounded lay in stalls in the streets, in the absence of a proper hospital. In 1597, the English powder store in Winetavern street exploded, accidentally killing nearly 200 Dubliners. The O’Byrnes raided within two miles of the city, at one stage burning the townland of Crumlin, while the Ulster forces looted the north of the Pale repeatedly.[13]

The importance of O’Neill’s proclamations lay in their idea that Ireland should become a state to which its own elite would pledge their first loyalty. This was a huge innovation for a previously fragmented society. The longer the war went on, the more radical the rebels became and the more it became a self-declared Holy war.

In 1600, O’Neill wrote to the Gaelic lords of Munster, announcing his imminent arrival into the province, “I would come to learn the intentions of all the gentlemen of Munster regarding the great questions of the nation’s liberty and of religion”.[14]  By 1601, O’Neill wrote to Florence McCarthy, his ally in south Munster, hoping “that you will do a stout and hopeful service against the pagan beast… our army is to come into Munster and do the will of God”.[15]

But despite their separatist and religious rhetoric, O’Neill and his allies were still traditional Gaelic lords and their objectives were the same as ever; to keep their own personal power and that of their clans intact. Many of them had concluded that the only way to do this was to get rid of the English.

The division between those natives who went into rebellion and those who did not was not in the final analysis cultural, or ethnic or even religious, but between those who could forsee a place for themselves in the new order and those who could not. Lord Barry Mór of Cork, for instance, whose father was imprisoned for life for his part in the Desmond rebellions, rejected O’Neill’s exhortations because he was firmly ensconced in his lands and had secured legal charter to them. He dismissed religious arguments on the grounds that he had never been troubled in the exercise of his religion.[16]

The greater part of the Irish elite flirted with both sides during the war, wanting to be on the winning side, but large numbers of them clearly preferred a future that would be determined by themselves rather than the English.

O’Neill’s years of Triumph

From the outset, O’Neill’s alliances made the rebellion felt far beyond Ulster. Dublin Castle soon realised that they had a nation-wide insurrection on their hands. Indeed, the first English reaction to O’Neills rebellion was to march on Wicklow to try and secure the Pale from Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, who was once again attacking English garrisons and settlements. Equally importantly, O’Neill had learnt the military lessons of the Desmond rebellion. It was not enough to do as Shane O’Neill or the Fitzgeralds had done and use guerrilla tactics, thus exposing your own countryside to destruction as Munster had been during the Desmond rebellions.

Ulster was to be defended at what was then the only points of access for a large army, that is in south Armagh and northern Sligo (the other routes into Ulster were covered by bog and woodland). When, after abortive negotiations in 1596, English armies tried to break into the province, they were met with thousands of musketeers in prepared positions, as well as the traditional Gaelic gallowglass, kerne and horsemen. Successive English offensives were driven back at Clontibret and Yellow Ford. At this last battle in 1598, between 800 and 2,000 English troops were killed, along with their commander Henry Bagenell, having been ambushed on the march to Armagh. [17]

The victory prompted rebellions all over Ireland, assisted by mobile contingents from Ulster. O’Donnell, imposed a sympathetic chief on the MacWilliam Burkes of Mayo and, with the aid of Scottish mercenaries and midlands lords such as Nugent of Westmeath, massacred the nascent English settlement in Connacht. Hugh O’Neill appointed James Fitzthomas Fitzgerald (a nephew of the late Earl Gerald) as the new Earl of Desmond (referred to by his detractors as the sugan or “straw-rope” earl) and Florence MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór.

The disaffected in Munster, and they were many, rallied to them. As many as 9,000 men came out in rebellion. In addition, O’Neill dispatched over 2,000 men from Ulster to the south, partly to aid the rebels, but also to take supplies he would need to sustain his troops throughout the winter. The Munster plantation was utterly destroyed, the colonists, among them Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, fled for their lives.

The Annals tell us, “ in the course of seventeen days [the rebels] left not, within the length or breadth of [Munster] which the Saxons had well cultivated and filled with habitations and various wealth, a single son of a Saxon whom they did not either kill or expel”.[18]

Earl Ormonde, who stayed loyal, complained that most of the colonists had “shamefully” fled rather than try to defend their lands. Only a handful of native lords (Barry, Clanrickarde, O’Brien) remained consistently loyal to the crown and even these found their kinsmen and followers defecting in droves to the rebels. MacCarthy Reagh was able to mobilise only 80 of his closest kinsmen for the English, the rest having sided with the rebels.[19]

In Wicklow, Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne’s long career of raiding was finally brought to a close  when his mountain stronghold at Ballinacor, Glenmalure, was burned and his territory garrisoned. He himself was tracked down and beheaded in a cave in 1597. However, his son Phelim Mac Fiach carried on guerrilla attacks from the mountains of south Wicklow.

Hugh O’Neill, unable to take walled towns, made repeated overtures to the Palesmen to join his rebellion, appealing to their Catholicism and to their alienation from the Lord Deputies and the New English. For the most part, however, the Gaill remained hostile to their hereditary enemies. Nevertheless, the English state in Ireland had never looked more shaky.

It is often assumed in hindsight that the Nine Years War represents a doomed struggle of a backward people against the might of the English state. But it was not so. Elizabethan England did not have a large standing army, nor was the state strong enough to extract enough taxation to pay for long wars – despite it being among the richest countries in Europe. Moreover, it was already involved in a war in the Spanish Netherlands. As it was, the war in Ireland (which cost over £2 million) came very close to bankrupting the English exchequer by its close in 1603.[20]

Had Spanish troops landed in force in 1598, it would have been next to impossible for the English to hold or re-conquer the island. Luckily for the English, they did not. Nevertheless, cooped up in the Pale and the walled towns, the future for the English must have seemed very bleak indeed.

In 1599, the Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with over 17,000 English reinforcements, a huge army for the time and place. He dispersed them in garrisons all over the country to stamp out rebellion in Muster and Leinster, but was unable to meet the Ulster forces in battle, instead signing a humiliating truce with O’Neill. Those expeditions he did organise were disastrous. A sortie into the Wicklow mountains was mauled by Phelim MacFiach O’Byrne, as was a force crossing the Curlew mountains in Sligo by O’Donnell.

Thousands of his troops, shut up in unsanitary garrisons, died of diseases such as typhoid and dysentery, to which the English in Ireland seemed to be particularly vulnerable. As a last resort, Essex challenged O’Neill to single combat to settle the war. O’Neill, icily pragmatic as ever, did not respond. Essex was recalled to England in disgrace in 1600, where he was executed after attempting a court putsch. He was succeeded in Ireland by Lord Mountjoy, who proved to be far more able commander. Tough and ruthless veterans named George Carew, and Arthur Chichester were given commands in Munster and Ulster respectively.[21]

The tide turns

Carew managed to more or less quash the rebellion in  Munster by mid 1601 by a mixture of conciliation and military force. By the summer of 1601 he had retaken most of the principle castles in Munster and scattered the rebel forces.

Fitzthomas and Florence MacCarthy were arrested and sent to the Tower of London, where both of them eventually died in captivity. Most of the rest of the local lords submitted once O’Neills mercenaries had been expelled from the province.

The main war however, was in the north. Mountjoy managed to penetrate the interior of Ulster by sea-borne landings at Derry under Henry Dowcra and Carrigfergus under Arthur Chichester, while trying himself to break through overland through south-east Ulster.

Dowcra and Chichester (the former helped by Niall Garbh O’Donnell, a rival of Red Hugh) used the brutal tactics of the Desmond wars, devastating the countryside and killing the civilian population at random. Their military assumption was that without crops and people, the rebels could neither feed themselves nor raise new fighters. Chichester reported of one such raid;

“We have killed, burnt and spoiled …within four miles of Dungannon…we have killed above 100 people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not. We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it hath bred much terror in the people…The last service was upon Patrick O’Quinn, whose house and town was burnt, wife, son children and people slain”[22].

This report is typical of English tactics all over the country, which deliberately targeted the civilian population. This attrition quickly began to bite, and particularly so after Chichester began launching raids across Lough Neagh into the heart of Tir Eoin. It also meant that the Ulster chiefs were tied down in Ulster to defend their own territories. Although O’Neill managed to repulse another land offensive by Mountjoy at Moyry Pass near Newry in 1600, his position was becoming desperate. 

‘Immense and countless was the loss in that place’ – The Battle of Kinsale and after  

In 1601, the long-promised Spanish expedition finally arrived in the form of 3,500 soldiers at Kinsale, Cork, virtually the southern tip of Ireland.

English commander Mountjoy immediately besieged them with 7,000 men. O’Neill, O’Donnell and their allies marched their armies south in freezing December weather to sandwich Mountjoy, whose men were starving and wracked by disease, between them and the Spaniards.

Kinsale has become an iconic battle in Irish history, and rightly so. It did not end the war and it did not by itself destroy Gaelic culture or the Gaelic aristocracy, but it decide the future outcome of the war and therefore of the English presence in Ireland. The point is, after Kinsale, the chance of an Irish victory had passed, and the question was not whether Ireland would be English, Spanish, or independent, but what terms the rebels could hold out for.

For such a historical turning point it was a rather confused and inconclusive battle. The Irish advanced in a driving thunderstorm, but their attack stumbled on the advancing English cavalry, and part of the Irish infantry panicked and fled. They were then pursued for miles by the English horse who killed several hundred of them. The remainder of the Irish withdrew as did the Spaniards, who surrendered in an orderly fashion days later and were allowed to return to Spain.[23]

The Irish, amid bitter recriminations among their leaders for the defeat, headed home to Ulster to defend their own lands. The Ulstermen lost many more men in the retreat through freezing and flooded country than they had at the actual battle of Kinsale. Eoghan O’Sullivan Beare held out in his territory in Kerry for several more months before fleeing for Ulster himself with his kinsmen and followers.

Hugh O’Donnell left for Spain, where he died in 1602, pleading in vain for another Spanish landing. He left his brother Rory to defend Tir Connell. Both he and Hugh O’Neill were reduced to guerrilla tactics, fighting in small bands, as Mountjoy, Dowcra, Chichester and Niall Garbh O’Donnell swept the country, burning and killing as they went. Mountjoy smashed the O’Neill’s inauguration stone at Tullaghogue, symbolically destroying an order that had lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Famine soon hit Ulster as a result of the English scorched earth strategy. Chichester’s forces found that the locals were reduced to cannibalism, in one instance coming upon five children eating a dead woman. Fynes Morrison, Mountjoy’s secretary, recorded that;

“No spectacle was more frequent in towns and ditches and especially in the wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles”.[24]

  In the midst of this horror, it is not surprising that O’Neill’s uirithe or sub-lords (O’Hagan, O’Quinn, MacCann) began to surrender, the most important of whom was Donal O’Cahan. Rory O’Donnell surrendered on terms at the end of 1602. Nevertheless, despite a large reward being put on his head, and despite being driven to the woods with only his creaghts (cattle herders) and a small armed force, the English found it impossible to track down O’Neill. With a secure base in the large and dense forests of Tir Eoin, O’Neill held out until 30 March 1603, when he surrendered on good terms to Mountjoy. Had he known that Elizabeth I had died a week before, he would probably have struck an even harder bargain. As it was, he wept with frustration on hearing the news.[25]

The End of the War

The really surprising thing about the end of the Nine Years War, considering the enormous cost it took the English to win it, and the outright treason involved – conspiring to give the kingdom of Ireland to a foreign power – is the generosity of the terms which the rebels got on surrendering. At the Treaty of Mellifont, O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other surviving Ulster chiefs received full pardons and the return of their estates.

The stipulations were that they abandon their Irish titles (thus becoming Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell rather than O’Neill and O’Donnell), abandon the Brehon laws, private armies, their control over their uirithe and swear loyalty only to the Crown of England. O’Neill was even given authority over O’Cahan, whom he never forgave for his desertion during the war. In 1604, Mountjoy declared an amnesty for rebels all over the country.

In the short term, it was difficult to work out what all the bloodshed had been for, as disgusted New Englishmen like Arthur Chichester pointed out. The simple truth was that the Crown was broke, it could not afford to carry on the war in Ireland any longer. In the long term, though, the war marked not only the end of the century but the end of the Gaelic order. With the last independent military powers conquered, the true confiscation, Anglicisation and Protestantisation of Ireland could begin.[26]

Counting the Cost

In human terms, the Nine Years War was nothing short of a catastrophe. Most of the country had been fought over at some stage, its land ruined, civilians of all sides killed and looted.

Ulster and north Connacht was utterly devastated, burned and plundered, the people starved, killed and driven to the hills and woods for refuge.

For years afterwards, Ulster was still ridden with “wood-kerne” or bandits who had fought in or been displaced by the war. Munster had had its third war in 20 years, and its young English community had fled. The Pale had been ruined by the quartering of thousands of English soldiers there and the raids of the rebels

How many died between 1594 and 1603? Irish sources claimed that as many as 60,000 people had died in the Ulster famine of 1602-3 alone.[27] Even if this is an exaggeration, counting the unknown number killed in battle or massacred, an Irish death toll of over 100,000 is not excessive. Considering that the population of Ireland at the time was less than 1 million, this means that around one in ten people in Ireland may have died as a result of the war. In addition, thousands of Scottish Gaels fought in the war as mercenaries (mainly, though not only, on the rebel side), several thousand of whom were killed.

For the common people of the west of England and Wales, the war was also a tragedy, for it was their sons and husbands who were, mostly unwillingly, conscripted to fight in Ireland. At least  30,000 English soldiers died in Ireland in the Nine Years War, mainly from disease. O’Neill himself claimed 70,000, “in action and otherwise”.[28] The morale of the English soldiers in Ireland was in general very low. Many thousands deserted and sold their weapons to the Irish. A proverb noted at the time in Chester went, “better to hang at home [for evading conscription] than to die like a dog in Ireland”.[29] When O’Neill (or Tyrone as he then was) travelled through Wales with Mountjoy on his way to the court of the new King James I, he was pelted with stones and mud by the relatives of dead soldiers.[30]

So the total death toll for the war may have been in the region of 150,000 people, if not more. Perhaps the only winners of the Nine Years War were the Spaniards, who, for a relatively small investment, tied down thousands of English troops, and bled their treasury dry. Not only that, but when the war was over, they began to reap a rich harvest of exiled Gaelic Irish nobles and their clan followers who gave over 80,000 men to the Spanish Army in the first half of the 17^th century.

Two highly significant events rounded off the Tudor conquest (which was actually finished under the James Stuart King of Scotland who also assumed the English throne in 1603). The first took place in 1603, not long after O’Neill’s surrender at Mellifont.

The Old English towns of Munster, including Waterford, Cork and Limerick rebelled, expelling Protestant ministers, imprisoning English officials, seizing the municipal arsenals and demanding freedom of worship for Catholics. They refused to admit Mountjoy’s army when he marched south, citing their ancient charters from 12^th century. Mountjoy retorted that he would, “cut King John his charter with King James his sword” and arrested the ringleaders, thus ending the revolt.

The effect of the episode though, was to show just how estranged the Old English had become from the Protestant state. It was an ominous sign for the coming century. [31]

The second defining event of the decade happened in 1607, when O’Neill, O’Donnell and many other Ulster chiefs left for Spain, in what is known as the Flight of the Earls. At first sight it is puzzling why they abandoned such a favourable settlement as they got  at the end of the Nine Years War.

After all, they were returned their lands and given responsible positions in the new order. However, after Mountjoy, with whom O’Neill had a good relationship, resigned as Lord Deputy, he was replaced by Arthur Chichester, who had a much less conciliatory attitude. Chichester harassed O’Neill, forced him to attend Protestant services, accused him of treasonable plotting with Spain, and may even have been trying to assassinate him (O’Neill certainly believed that he was). O’Neill referred to Chichester’s policy as “destruction by peace”.

Recent research done in continental archives shows that the Flight of the Earls was really a “planned tactical retreat” to enlist more Spanish or Catholic help and return to remove the English from Ireland altogether. This proved to be a terrible mistake on their part. O’Neill was told politely that Spain could not help the Irish Catholics right now, as Phillip III was hoping for peace with the new British monarch. O’Neill was not even allowed to enter Spain and died in exile in Rome in 1616.  [32]

In the absence of their Earls, the Gaelic land of central and west Ulster was confiscated en masse and planted with thousands of Protestant English and lowland Scots. The “loyal Irish” (that is those who had fought with the English in the war) received a quarter of the worst land. Two of these, Cahir O’Doherty and Niall Garbh O’Donnell, launched a futile rebellion in protest, which succeeded only in getting themselves hanged.

The new settlements were banned from taking native tenants or employing them as labourers – thus banishing the Gaelic Irish to the worst land in the hills and bogs. In east Ulster, a private plantation occurred on the lands of the Clandeboye O’Neills, which had been almost depopulated during the war. Only the MacDonnells in Antrim survived relatively intact, having good contacts with the new Scottish monarch, James I.

Six thousand Gaelic former soldiers were sent abroad into the Swedish service, although they eventually defected to Catholic Spain. They were followed by thousands of others, whose clan leaders were allowed to return to recruit them – so anxious were the English to get them out of Ireland.[33]

Gaelic Ulster had been changed forever. In Munster, the plantation of the 1580’s was reconstituted, with many of the original settlers returning. The English and Protestant interest in Ireland now had a secure foothold. Nevertheless, a great many of the native Irish elite survived the re-conquest on their own territory, albeit under state military and legal control. It was the coming century that would finally displace them.

References

[1] Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion, The Outbreak of the Nine Years War (1993), p94

[2] Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland the Incomplete Conquest, (1994) p283-286

[3] Sean Connolly, Contested Island, Ireland 1460-1630 (2007) p229

[4] Roger Schofield, Taxation under the early Tudors, 1485-1547, p70

[5] Nicholas Canny,   Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and the Changing Face of Gaelic Ulster,        Photocopy 9262 UCD Library.

[6] Lennon p289

[7] Lennon p254-255

[8] Stephen Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (1998), p298

[9] Constantia Maxwell, Irish History From Contemporary Sources (1509 – 1610), George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London 1923, p674

[10] Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion p177-178

[11] Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion p189,

[12]Hiram Morgan, Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland, The Cambridge Historical Journal, 1993, 21-27

[13] Lennon, p295

[14] McCarthy Daniel The Letter Book of Florence MacCarthy Reagh, Tanist of Carberry, p227

[15] O’Neill to Florence MacCarthy, 27 January 1601, (Cal. S.P Ire 1601-1603, p.392)

[16] Calender of State Papers Ireland 1599-1600, p493-494

[17] Lennon p296

[18] Annals of the Four Masters

[19] Ormonde to Queen Elizabeth, October 1598, McCarthy, Letter Book p.177

[20] Lennon p302

[21] Lennon p297-298

[22] Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, Vol CCVII, pt 2, p91

[23] Connolly p 252, Lennon p300-301

[24] Connolly p254

[25] Lennon p301

[26] Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650, p166-169

[27] Michilene Kearney Walsh, Destruction By Peace, p205

[28] John McCavitt, The Flight of the Earls (2002), p51

[29] John McCavitt, The Flight of the Earls, p8

[30] Ibid. p54

[31] McCavitt, p53

[32]  McCavitt, p89-91

[33] Padraig Lenihan, Consolidating Conquest, Ireland 1603-1727, p48

By John Dorney

In a famous scene of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, set in turn of the twentieth century Dublin, the protagonist Stephen Daedelus, a nationalist, has a testy conversation with Deasy, his unionist employer.

Deasy regretfully states, ‘You think me an old fogey and an old Tory’, before concluding ruefully, ‘You Fenians forget some things’.[1]

In the context of ‘Ulysses’, both parties knew what ‘Tory’ meant; a supporter of the Union with Britain, the Crown and the Established Church, as well as, of course, of the Conservative and Unionist Party, popularly nicknamed the ‘Tories’. The British Conservative Party, at the time of writing painfully struggling with how to leave the European Union, still hold the nickname today.

When Joyce has Deasy say ‘you Fenians forget some things’ he meant that ‘high Tories’ had once supported the Union against the Orange Order, some of whom were against it. But more curious still, and equally forgotten in popular memory, is that the term ‘Tory’ itself is a word of Irish origin and once meant the very opposite in political terms, of its current usage.

‘A tory hack him, hang him’

Tory is the Anglicisation of the Irish word toiraidh, literally ‘pursued men’ or more figuratively ‘men on the run’. Particularly in 17^th century Ireland, it referred to bandits or outlaws, often those driven from their lands by the Plantations that accompanied the Tudor and Stuart conquest of Ireland.

In the early 1600s, the more common name for Irish bandits in English was ‘wood kerne’ – derived from the traditional Gaelic soldiers known as ceathern or ‘kern’. But by mid century, during the Confederate and Cromwellian wars, the term ‘tory’ had become more widespread for irregular fighters or bandits.

A Gaelic poet recalling the speech of Cromwellian troopers in the 1650s as they tried to put down the ‘tories’ remembered them saying;

A tory, hack him, hang him, a rebel,

a rogue, a thief a priest, a papist.

But there was already a secondary meaning. ‘Tory’ meant not only a bandit but also a guerrilla fighter on behalf of the Catholic cause. Many of the ‘tory’ bands were actually quite large and well organised bodies led by men who had held commissions for the Confederate Catholic regime – that is the kind of provisional government set up by Irish Catholics after the rebellion of 1641. Cromwell and his generals ultimately negotiated formal terms of surrender with many of the tory leaders.[2]

And here we begin to see shift in the meaning of the term. The Irish wars of the 17^th century were part of a wider series of civil wars and revolutions in what contemporaries called ‘the Three Kingdoms’ (England, Scotland and Ireland). The King fought a bitter civil war against the English and Scottish parliaments in the 1640s over who would control taxation, the making of laws, but also, crucially, the nation’s religion.

To be royalist meant supporting the authority of the monarch but also his right to dictate the teachings of the established Church. To be an English Parliamentarian or Scottish Covenanter meant vindicating the rights of parliament, yes, but, also opposition to a Catholic style Church, with Bishops and a prayer book approved by the King.

The Irish Catholic cause, involving though it did matters such as halting and reversal of the confiscation of Catholic owned land and self-government for Ireland, also involved loyalty to the Stuart monarchs. Kings Charles I and II in mid-century and James II in the 1680s and 90s drew Irish Catholic support because they were perceived to be less hostile to Catholicism than the ‘fanatics’ and ‘heretics’ as Catholics termed the supporters of the Parliament.

Irish Republicans of modern times were uncomfortable with this legacy. IRA leader Ernie O’Malley mused in prison in 1924, reflecting on the republican defeat in the Civil War of 1922-23, that ‘Ours was a country of broken tradition… the laws of aristocratic tradition were in our teeth. We favoured the royalists in the English civil war.’[3]

But in the 17^th century Irish Catholics were proud royalists for the most part and even celebrated the Gaelic ancestry of the Stuart Kings. The Confederate Catholics signed a formal treaty aligning themselves with the cause of Charles I in 1649.

Thus the term ‘tory’ – an Irish term for bandit applied to the Catholic guerrillas who caused Cromwell’s force so many problems in the early 1650s – crept into English discourse. They English royalists, supporters of King and Church against Cromwell and his Commonwealth regime, could be derided with the term – guilty by way of association with the despised Irish Catholic brigands.

The English republican regime collapsed after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the monarchy was restored in 1660.

Whigs and Tories

However, the term ‘tory’ truly stuck to conservative royalists in the late 17^th century when the Catholic James Stuart assumed the thrones of England Scotland and Ireland. Supporters of the succession of James in England – again, conservatives who supported the authority of the monarch, social order and of the established Church began to be referred to, at first derisively, as ‘tories’ linked to the Irish Catholic fighters of mid century.

Their opponents, supporters of the rights of parliament and of non-conformist religion, were, equally offensively, labelled ‘whigs’ after Scottish cattle drovers, implying a lower class status. Eventually, the Protestant William of Orange, with the approval of the English parliament, deposed the Catholic King James in the so-called Glorious Revolution. Though known in Britain as a bloodless revolution, the change of regime in fact sparked a bloody war in Ireland where Catholics again fought doggedly and in vain, for the Stuart monarch.

It is something of a historical irony then, that Irish Catholics and the original ‘Tories’ were on the same side in the seventeenth century, as for most of subsequent history, it was the Tories who were most hostile to Irish Catholic and nationalist aspirations.

Ireland had its own (albeit all Protestant) Parliament and politics during the whole of eighteenth century, and the terms Whig and Tory were used there. As in England ‘Tories’ tended to mean supporters of Royal authority and the established church while ‘Whigs’ tended to mean those who favoured greater power for the Irish parliament and tolerance for non-conforming Protestants (though not for Catholics).[4]

The Conservative and Unionist Party

After the Act of Union, passed by the Tory Prime Minister William Pitt in 1800, the Irish parliament was abolished. And ‘Tory’ afterwards, in Ireland became associated primarily with support for the Union with Britain as well as support for the traditional, Protestant, Irish ruling class. In Britain itself the Tories had become the party of ‘Order’ and of the old land owning elite, against ‘radicals’ who wanted electoral and social reform.

Irish Catholics under Daniel O’Connell, agitating first for Catholic Emancipation – that is making Catholics full citizens – and later for Repeal of the Union or return of Irish self-government, naturally turned for allies to the Whigs. The latter were by now seen as the party of democratisation, supporting an extension of the franchise, Catholic emancipation and the abolition of slavery.

As it happened Catholic emancipation was finally agreed to by a Tory government and while the Whigs, did initiate significant reform in Ireland, it was they were militarily put down O’Connell peaceful campaign for Repeal of the Union.

Moreover, during the Great Famine of the 1840s, it was the Whigs under John Russell, who came to power in 1847, in thrall to free market ideology and therefore against state aid to the starving, were actually less generous and caused worse hardship than the paternalist Tories under Robert Peel, who had distributed free food to the destitute.

Nevertheless, the nationalist-liberal alliance tended to endure. Later in the century, the Liberal Gladstone began a long series of land reform in Ireland and disestablished the Church of Ireland. He also attempted to pass Home Rule for Ireland in 1886 only to be stymied by the Tories (now officially referred to as Conservatives) as well as rebels in his own party. Later attempts to pass Home Rule were blocked in the Tory dominated House of Lords.

It was for their joint opposition to Home Rule with Ulster unionists that the Conservative Party became the Conservative and Unionist Party in 1886. Lord Randolph Churchill (Tory leader, father of the more famous Winston) famously coined the slogan “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’.[5]

Another Liberal government, this time under Herbert Asquith, depending for support on Irish nationalists attempted again to pass Home Rule in 1912-14. But even after the Bill passed in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party, both tacitly and explicitly supported armed unionist opposition to it. If bloodshed was averted in the short term in Ireland, it was only because the First World War intervened.

The partition of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Treaty were actually negotiated by a coalition Liberal and Conservative government in 1920 to 1922. Nevertheless, the parliamentary alliance between Conservatives and Unionists (now in Northern Ireland) persisted.

The Unionist Party sat with the Conservatives at Westminster until 1972 before finally parting ways with them in 1985, when Margaret Thatcher’s government signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic’s government some say in the affairs of Northern Ireland.During the Northern Ireland conflict, the Tories were always considered to be more hardline unionists than the Labour Party, notably in Margaret Thatcher’s decision to let the Republican hunger strikers die in 1981.

And finally in 2017, needing extra votes in the House of Common, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa may formed an alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party in return for their support in the Westminster Parliament. This has led to some extent to the current impasse over ‘Brexit’ or the British withdrawal from the EU – with May committing to no ‘hard border’ in Ireland and the DUP refusing to countenance any special deal for Northern Ireland.

The original tories, many of whom negotiated their passage to Catholic France and Spain as part of their surrender to the Cromwellian authorities in the 1650s would no doubt have been confused by the term’s long and sometimes contradictory history since.

References

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annotated_%22Ulysses%22/Page_031

[2] Padraig Lenihan, Consolidating Conquest, Ireland 1601-1727, p132-134

[3] Ernie O’Malley the Singing Flame, p.278

[4] Lenihan, Consolidating Conquest, p.207-210

[5] http://www.irelandseye.com/aarticles/history/events/dates/ulster.shtm

By John Dorney

On January 21 1919, the First Dail – the rebel parliament of the unilaterally declared Irish Republic – met in Dublin’s Mansion House.

One the same day, a party of Irish Volunteers ambushed two Royal Irish Constabulary policemen who were escorting a quantity of gelignite explosive to a quarry, at Soloheadbeg county Tipperary. It appears that when challenged, the constables reached for their guns and were both shot dead.

The Soloheadbeg ambush has taken on disproportionate importance due to its coincidence with the meeting of the first Dail and is commonly presented as the ‘first shots of the War of Independence’. Dan Breen, one of the ambushers, in later years went out of his way to present the Soloheadbeg ambush as a premeditated act, designed to provoke a military conflict and to prevent political compromise to prevent the Volunteers (soon to be renamed Irish Republican Army or IRA) becoming a mere auxiliary to the political party Sinn Fein.

But Breen had his own reasons for doing this. One was merely self-aggrandisement; asserting his role in changing the course of Irish history. Another was perhaps to justify his anti-Treaty stance in the Civil War of 1922-23 –  that the ‘soldiers of the Republic’ had at the outset of the independence struggle not waited for permission from the Irish parliament but had forged ahead on their own towards securing complete Irish independence.[1]

Other Volunteers at the time and since doubted that Soloheadbeg was more than an operation that went wrong. They thought that the Tipperary men had expected the RIC to surrender their arms and explosives and opened fire when the police refused and went for their own weapons. The account of Seamus Robinson, the Volunteer from Belfast who was actually in command of the ambush party that day, essentially backs up this version. [2]

Violence in 1917 and 1918

Whatever one thinks exactly happened at Soloheadbeg however, there are a number of other problems with the idea that incident marked the ‘first shots of the war of independence’. One problem is that it did not mark the beginning of political violence in post-Easter Rising Ireland, nor even a significant escalation of it.

In 1917 and 1918 rioting became common between the Volunteers and police, due to the banning of public demonstrations and military style drilling under the Defence of the Realm Act. And this type of violence did produce fatal casualties.

A Dublin Metropolitan Police Inspector died in a riot in 1917 after being hit over the head while breaking up a republican meeting. The Republican roll of honour ‘The Last Post’ records two Volunteers killed by the RIC in rioting 1917 and two more who died after being bayoneted by British troops in rioting in 1918 [3]

Volunteer leader Tomas Ashe died of force feeding while on hunger strike. Another Volunteer in Clare was shot dead by the police during a ‘cattle drive’ in 1918. 

Secondly, in the context of the Conscription Crisis of 1918, which witnessed a mass mobilisation in Ireland against the attempt to impose conscription, and the ‘German Plot’ in which most of the senior Sinn Fein figures were arrested, the revitalised Volunteers began raiding the RIC for weapons in order to try to rearm the organisation. In most cases policemen were disarmed without loss of life, but as it did at Soloheadbeg this activity too produced fatalities in 1918 Two Volunteers were shot dead in a gun battle with the RIC at Ballymacelligot in Kerry in an arms raid on a police barracks.[4]

There were also widespread arrests of republican activists. Of the 73 Sinn Fein MPs elected in the General Election of December 1918, all but 27 were imprisoned when the Dail opened in January of the following year.

Thirdly, the shootings at Soloheadbeg did not mark a sea change in Volunteer or IRA strategy in early 1919. Richard Mulcahy the Volunteer chief of staff was extremely unhappy with the killings, believing that, being unauthorised, they showed indiscipline and risked undermining popular support for the republican movement. [5]

Michael Collins, the Director of Intelligence and President of the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood thought otherwise, sheltered the Tipperary men in Dublin and employed them on other operations along with Dublin Volunteers who went on to form his ‘Squad’ or assassination unit. That he overruled Mulcahy (his notional superior) says something about the behind-the-scenes power that the ‘Big Fella’ was amassing.

Assassinations

There were a further 19 people killed in political violence in 1919, most being selective assassinations by Collins’ men.

The most prominent victims included several G Division detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Collin’s decision to begin assassinations of DMP detectives in September 1919 – the first Detective Patrick Smyth was killed on September 8 1919 – marks a much clearer watershed than the ambush at Soloheadbeg. Directly in response to the shooting of Smyth, the British banned the Dail as an illegal assembly.

DMP detectives complied intelligence on separatist organisations and identified republican figures for arrest. None were killed before September 1919 but five were shot dead by Collins’ men by the end of the year and a further three detectives were dead by March 1920, effectively disabling the G Division.[6]  Collins also attempted to kill the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir John French near his residence in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in December 1919, but the only victim of the shootout was a Volunteer, Martin Savage.

A handful of other shootings, such as the celebrated Knocklong train ambush in which two policemen were killed – were local affairs aimed at freeing prisoners. A total of 11 RIC policemen and one British Army soldier were killed in 1919 by the IRA.[7]

On the other side, seven Volunteers as well as a number of other civilians were killed by British forces in 1919. [8] This was still, notwithstanding Collins’ campaign of assassination, a constrained level of political violence.

War: 1920-1921

However, in early 1920 Collins and Mulcahy made the decision to direct all Volunteer or IRA units to go on the offensive and to attack local police barracks wherever they could. In contrast to 1919’s relatively low figures for fatal political violence in Ireland, the IRA lost 252 Volunteers killed in 1920[9] while over 200 policemen [10] and 62 British soldiers were killed.[11]

Furthermore, about two thirds of these deaths took place in the second half of the year, after the British government had taken the decision to raise and deploy new paramilitary police corps and to put down the insurgency rather than to negotiate with Sinn Fein. The following year up until the truce of July 11, 1921, would be bloodier still.

In terms of a ‘war’ 1920 was the real start of the War of Independence. But rather than look for single moments when ‘war’ proper started, it is more realistic to see the conflict as a series of escalations on both sides.

Political violence never went away after the Rising of 1916. The mass arrest of Sinn Fein activists in early 1918 raised the stakes further as did the increased militancy of the Volunteers during and after the conscription crisis. Soloheadbeg –an arms raid with unusually bloody results -can probably be fitted better into this pattern than as a premeditated plan to ‘start a war’.

Collins’ attempt to decapitate the DMP detective division led to the banning of republican political organisations, leading in turn to his and Mulcahy’s orders to attack barracks all over the country in early 1920. Finally the apex of violence was reached when Lloyd George’s government decided to put down what they called the ‘murder gang’ by force in the summer of 1920.

Violence escalated further until both sides agreed to a truce and to negotiations in the summer of 1921. Dan Breen, in short was not as important as he thought.

References

[1] For Breen’s account see his BMH statement WS1739

[2] See Daniel Murray, Seamus Robinson’s War of Independence.

[3] The Last Post p97-99. Abraham Allen of Cork ’died of wounds inflicted by the RIC’ 26//61917, Daniel Scanlon of Ballybunion’shot by the RIC during victory celebrations’ [presumably of Sinn Fein victory in the Clare by election] 11/7/1917. Thomas Russell of Balyferriter, Kerry, ‘stabbed to death by British Army’ 30/3/1918, Patrick Duffy, Castleblaney Co Monaghan, ‘Murdered by British forces, stabbed to death’ 4/6/18

[4] Ibid. John Brown and Richard Laide.

[5] See Marian Valiulis, Richard Mulcahy, Portrait of Revolutionary (1992) p38-39. Mulcahy remarked that the ambush was ‘outrageously propagandised’ and that ‘bloodshed should have been completely unnecessary in light of the kind of episode it was’. For Collins’ reaction, ibid. p47-48

[6] See DMP Roll of Honour http://www.policerollofhonour.org.uk/forces/ireland_to_1922/dublin/dmp_roll.htm

[7] RIC Roll of Honour http://www.policerollofhonour.org.uk/forces/ireland_to_1922/ric/ric_roll.htm

[8] The last Post p99

[9] The Last Post p99-113. A further 300 were killed in 1921.

[10] See the RIC roll of honour http://www.theirishstory.com/2018/04/24/a-declaration-of-war-on-the-irish-people-the-conscription-crisis-of-1918/#.XEXOFmngrIU

[11] This site has a list of all British Army casualties in Ireland in the period. https://www.cairogang.com/soldiers-killed/list-1921.html

By Alison Martin

Recently, the series Resistance, based on the Irish War of Independence has aired on Irish national broadcaster RTE. In the lead up to the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, RTÉ commissioned its predecessor, a five part drama series Rebellion which depicted the events of the Rising and its aftermath from the perspective of various fictional characters.

Fifteen years prior to this, the Rising had been depicted in another drama series Rebel Heart. Unlike Rebellion however, this series focused on events from the Rising up until the start of the civil war. Rebel Heart had been the brainchild of Robert Cooper, head of drama at BBC Northern Ireland.[1]

Production

During the summer of 1994, Copper asked Ronan Bennett, an award-winning author and screen writer to write a drama series about the Easter Rising and the War of Independence. [2] Bennett wrote an outline of the story and was then introduced to Malcom Craddock, an independent producer.[3]

Bennett’s own life story is interesting, as it most likely informed his writing of the series. Born in 1956, Bennett was raised in Belfast and was a teenager during the early years of the Troubles. [4]

In 1974 at the age of eighteen, he was arrested and wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer during an Official IRA bank robbery. [5] Bennett served around eighteen months in Long Kesh, before being acquitted after his conviction was overturned on appeal. [6] Following his release, he was arrested in England and charged with ‘persons unknown’ of conspiring to cause explosions. [7]

Once again however, he was eventually acquitted. In 1987, Bennett completed a PHD at King’s College London. Further controversy surrounded him in the autumn of 2000, when during an interview with Boris Johnson, who was then editor of The Spectator, Bennett suggested that he would not turn in the Omagh bombers if he knew their identity (see endnote). [8] Bennett later claimed that he had also said that ‘if there was evidence to bring the bombers to justice, do it. Convict them. Absolutely.’ [9] However, this was not reported in the Daily Telegraph at the time. [10]

Bennett had written several novels by the time he was asked to write the screenplay for Rebel Heart. Even with Bennett on-board however, it would be several years before Rebel Heart found a director and went into production. The series was made independently by Picture Palace Films but received significant funding from the Irish state broadcaster and An Bord Scannan. [11]

With a budget of around six million pounds, it was one of the most expensive productions to have ever been made in Ireland. [12] The drama was shot on one hundred and fifty different sets in Dublin, including the GPO and featured one hundred and eight speaking parts. [13] The participation of around three thousand extras was also required. [14]

As Rebel Heart was a co-production between RTÉ and the BBC, it was scheduled to be shown on RTÉ in January 2001 and then repeated on BBC during the following month. [15] The scheduling was deliberate as it meant that the drama would be broadcast in the lead up to the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Rising, thereby giving it additional significance. It was originally broadcast in four parts.

Plot

Rebel Heart focuses on the experiences of fictional character Ernie Coyne (James D’Arcy), during the tumultuous years from 1916 until 1922. The series begins with Coyne, an idealistic eighteen-year-old member of the Irish Volunteers, reporting for duty on Easter Monday.
Whilst stationed inside the GPO, Coyne is introduced to Tom O’Toole and Albert Kelly, two members of the Citizens Army.

Despite trying to impress them, the two older men are mildly amused by Ernie’s youthful idealism about fighting for Irish freedom. Moreover, class tensions are evident when O’Toole informs the middle-class Ernie ‘you already have what you need to be free, money.’ [16]

Despite their differences however, Ernie gradually befriends the two men. He also comes into contact with several real life historical figures, such as Patrick Pearse and Michael Collins, played by Downtown Abbey’s Brendan Coyle. Whilst delivering a dispatch for Collins, Coyne is assisted by Ita Feeney (Paloma Baeza), a young Cumann na mBan member from Belfast.

He is deeply impressed by her and much of the series focuses on their developing romantic relationship. Following Coyne’s arrest for his role in the Rising, his father expresses disappointment in him before urging him to take up a place at Trinity College.

His speech however, does little to deter Coyne. In 1919, at the request of Collins, he travels to Belfast in order to survey the situation with regards to the strength of the local IRA units.

During his visit to Belfast, Coyne is re-united with Ita. However, whilst staying the night in her family home a group of RIC men raid the house before shooting dead Ita’s Father and five brothers.

This further hardens Coyne’s resolve and as the War of Independence escalates, he travels to West Cork in order to organize local resistance there. The final episode focuses on the divisions caused by the Anglo-Irish Treaty. When the agreement is signed, Coyne is torn between his loyalty to Collins and his devotion to Ita, who is worried about the consequences of the Treaty for her remaining relatives in Belfast.

When Coyne is sent by Collins to defuse an inflammatory situation in Dublin, he finds himself pitted against some of his former friends, including Kelly who chooses the anti-treaty side. Once the fighting begins however, Coyne’s old loyalties prevail and he helps Kelly to escape. During a subsequent encounter Coyne and O’Toole mortally wound each other. In the end both men reconcile with each other, before eventually succumbing to their wounds.

Critics’ reaction

Critics’ reviews of Rebel Heart were generally mixed. The Irish Times described it as ‘extremely watchable’ and praised its’ portrayal of real life historical characters, despite admitting that their time on screen was limited. [17]

When the drama was shown on BBC America, it received relatively positive reviews, with the New York Times describing it as ‘a handsomely mounted romantic drama.’[18] Not all critics were as positive however. The writer and historian Robert Kee for instance, expressed some misgivings about its historical accuracy. [19] He also questioned whether Bennett had ‘let his historical emotion overflow into the present.’ [20]

The series was also strongly criticised by David Trimble, who was then First Minister of Northern Ireland. In a letter to Sir Christopher Bland, Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Trimble voiced his objection to the BBC’s choice of Bennett as writer. [21] He then went on to claim that Bennett’s forays into writing were ‘hopelessly one-sided.’ [22]

Moreover, although Trimble later denied that he had asked for the programme to be banned, he did question whether the BBC should fund and broadcast ‘such a film by such a writer’, during what he regarded as a sensitive political time. [23] The programme was broadcast just three years after the signing of the Good Agreement and Trimble feared that the positive public mood would be soured by ‘glamorous representations of political violence.’ [24]

The Chairman of the BBC however, denied such allegations. Furthermore, a representative from the broadcaster claimed that they were ‘very proud’ of Rebel Heart. [25] Bennett also suggested that Trimble had criticized Rebel Heart before actually watching it. [26]

When the drama was first aired in Britain, it attracted an audience of around 3.9 million viewers, therefore gaining a fifteen per cent share of the audience. [27] Such viewing figures may have been slightly disappointing considering that The Treaty, a made for television docudrama about the negotiations that lead to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, had managed to reach a respectable 5.3 million viewers when it was shown on ITV in 1991. [28]

Despite this however, the drama had many positive attributes. The drama does not shy away from depicting the brutality of events during the revolutionary period. It also highlights issues such as class tension.

For instance, when Ernie takes up his place at Trinity College following his release from prison after the Rising, he finds himself further alienated from the working-class O’Toole and Kelly. Inter-generational conflict over politics is also evident, when Coyne’s father appears to disagree with his son assisting Sinn Féin during the 1918 election campaign.

Furthermore, Ita’s character is used effectively in order to provide a northern nationalist perspective on the conflict. The drama’s director, John Strickland, won the coveted Nymphe D’Or Award for Best Director at the Monte Carlo Television Festival in 2001.[29]

Following on from Rebel Heart, Bennett went on to write several successful novels including Havoc, in its Third Year (2004), which won the 2004 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Irish Novel of the Year. [30] It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. [31] Bennett has also written screenplays for film and television, one of the most notable being the screenplay for the film Public Enemies (2009), starring Christian Bale and Jonny Depp. More recently he wrote the three-part BBC drama Gunpowder, broadcast in 2017.

References

[1] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[2] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[3] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[4] The Guardian, 27 Oct 2001.

[5] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[6] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[7] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[8] According to an account in the Daily Telegraph, during the conversation, Bennett said he ‘had a major problem’ with the concept of the armed struggle. However when asked whether he would turn in the Omagh bombers if he found out who they were, Bennett said ‘No.’ He added: ‘Turn them into the RUC? Turn them in to a completely discredited force?’ When Johnson suggested they be turned into Special Branch, Bennett replied ‘Turn them in to courts that have no juries? Do that? Turn anybody in to that situation? That is a very hard thing to ask a Nationalist to do.’  The Daily Telegraph 6 Oct 2000.  In December 2000, Bennett said he was sorry if his remarks had offended the relatives and surviving victims.  He also said ‘I believe those responsible should be brought to account.’ The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[9] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[10] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[11] Mark McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Rising: Explorations of History-Making, Commemoration & Heritage in Modern Times (Farnham, 2012), p. 344.

[12] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[13] McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Rising, p. 344.

[14] McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Rising, p. 344.

[15] McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Rising, p. 344.

[16] Quote from the drama.

[17] The Irish Tines 30 Dec 2000.

[18] New York Times, 14 Mar 2003.

[19] The Guardian, 7 Jan 2001.

[20] The Guardian, 7 Jan 2001.

[21] The Daily Telegraph, 1 Dec 2000.

[22] The Daily Telegraph, 1 Dec 2000.

[23] The Daily Telegraph, 1 Dec 2000.

[24] The Daily Telegraph, 15 Jan 2001.

[25] The Daily Telegraph, 9 Jan 2001.

[26] The Guardian, 3 Dec 2001.

[27] The Daily Telegraph, 9 Jan 2001.

[28] Alison Martin, ‘The Treaty- the forgotten Michael Collins film,’ Ireland’s Own (Christmas annual, Dec 2018.)

[29] https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2001/0223/393056-rebelheart/

[30] Troubles Archive, (http://www.troublesarchive.com/artists/ronan-bennett.)

[31] The Guardian, 4 Dec 2004.

By Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Twenty Nineteen marks the centenary of the appointment of Constance Markievicz as Minister for Labour in Dáil Éireann.

This was a remarkable event in Irish history, not only because there wasn’t another female minister appointed to an Irish Government until Maire Geoghan–Quinn in 1977, but also because Markievicz was the first female cabinet minister in Europe. The recent celebrations of Marckievicz’s political rise has placed a renewed focus on the role of women in the Irish Revolution of 1913 -1923.

Over the last few months, several other important milestones in the history of women’s struggle in Ireland have just passed with significant fanfare – most notably the centenaries of the extension of the vote to women and the election of Markievicz as the first female M.P. So far there has been a lot of fuss about this in media and political circles and in the coming months we can expect to see more hype about celebrating a hundred years of the active involvement of women in politics.

Of course any advances in the cause of equal political representation between men and women is something that deserves celebration – but spare a thought for the handful of Cumann na mBan women who died for that same cause, but who are now largely forgotten. 

Cumann na mBan: a military force?

Following the enrollment of women in the Irish Citizen Army in 1913 and the formation of Cumann na mBan in 1914, female republicans were eager to carry arms and take the same risks as their male comrades. However, during the 1916 Rising republican women were usually confined to cooking, first aid, messaging and signalling duties in support of male combatants.

Although some women, such as Constance Marcievicz and Margaret Skinnider, claimed a full role as combatants, they were the exception and no female combatants were killed during the 1916 Rising. Despite numerous claims to the contrary Nurse Margaretta Keogh who was killed by the British Army during the fighting at South Dublin Union though frequently cited as a republican casualty, was a civilian nurse and not an active member of the republican garrison nor a member of Cumann na mBan.

Women undertook dangerous work transporting arms and explosives during the War of Independence but the only occasion that women were permitted by their male comrades to play a direct role in attacking the enemy appears to have happened during the IRA attack on Kilmallock RIC Barracks when one IRA Volunteer recalled “The Cumann na mBan women … used a rifle and boiled kettles as required.”[1]

Although forbidden from fighting on the battlefield, republican women were still at risk of serious injury from their encounters with the British Forces and at least two Cumann na mBan women – Josie McGowan and Margaret Keogh were killed during that conflict.

Josephine McGowan

McGowan was the first of several Cumann na mBan women who died during the struggle to establish an Independent Irish Republic. Markievicz struggled for freedom – McGowan died for it, yet Markievicz is widely remembered and McGowan is almost totally forgotten and the centenary of her death passed without any of the pomp and ceremony we saw marking the 100^th anniversary of Markievicz’ election.

“Josie” McGowan was from Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin and had served as a member of the Marrowbone Lane Garrison during the 1916 Rising.

On the 22^nd September 1918 McGowan attended a Cumann na mBan rally at Foster Place to protest against the internment of republican prisoners jailed as part od the so-called “German Plot”. The Dublin Metropolitan Police baton charged the assembly and during their onslaught a DMP Constable struck McGowan several times on the head with his baton.

McGowan’s comrades rescued her from the assault and took her to their medical outpost in Ticknock. She died there on the 29^th September 1918 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. Her father suffered a huge emotional trauma at his loss and died a week later aged just 46 years. They are both buried in the same grave plot in Glasnevin. Over two decades later McGowan was posthumously awarded a War of Independence service medal, which included a ‘Comhrac’ bar  – an award normally reserved for male combatants.[2]

Cumann na mBan deaths in the War of Independence and Truce

The second member of Cumann na mBan killed was Margaret Keogh a nineteen year old printer’s assistant. Keogh was fatally wounded by a gun shot in her home at Stella Gardens, Ringsend, Dublin at 11.15 pm on the 10^th July 1921 during a series of raids by the British Crown forces on the eve of the truce which ended the War of Independence.

She died of her wounds the day after the ceasefire began. If there was one woman who embodied all of the various strands entwined in the Irish Revolution it was Margaret Keogh.

Keogh was the Captain of the Croke Ladies Hurling Club, a member of the Irish Clerical Workers Union and was an active member of Cuman na mBan. A year prior to her death, Keogh had been arrested by the British forces for refusing to give her name in English when questioned about her fundraising activities for Conradh na Gaeilge which was then a proscribed organisation.

Her funeral took place at Glasnevin Cemetary, on the 14^th  July 1921 and she was buried with military honours by her comrades in Cumann na mBan. Today her grave is marked by a humble headstone bearing the inscription ‘MARGARET KEOGH – DIED FOR IRELAND’.[3]

During the Truce period a further three members of Cumann na mBan were killed. Margaret McAnaney was accidentally shot dead by an IRA Volunteer whilst delivering dispatches at Burnfort, Donegal on the 31st May 1922. The same day Margaret McElduff died of an accidental gunshot wound whilst transporting a gun for the IRA in County Tyrone. Another member of Cumann na mBan Nóra O’Leary died in similar circumstances the same year when she was accidentally shot dead in her home when IRA Commandant Denis Reen accidentally discharged his rifle.[4]

The Civil War

Either because of political idealism, or more likely – military necessity, women were allowed to play a fuller military role during the Civil War.

For example; Elizabeth Maguire acted as a quartermaster for the IRA’s Dublin Brigade and was involved in twenty eight attacks on Free State troops. Sighle Humphries led an armed Cumann na mBan unit in a raid on a hospital in October 1922 in an attempt to free a wounded IRA Volunteer guarded by Free State soldiers.[5] The following month she was involved in a gun battle with Free State Army when they captured Ernie O’Malley the IRA’s Assistant Chief of Staff. It is unsurprising therefore that Cumann na mBan fatalities doubled during the Civil War.[6]

The first member of Cumann na mBan killed in that conflict was Mary Hartney from Limerick city. On the 4^th August 1922, the Free State Army used artillery to drive the IRA from the town of Adare, County Limerick. The Dunraven Arms Hotel, where the republicans had set up their military headquarters, suffered a direct hit during the opening barrage.

A short time later a correspondent from the Free State Army’s Publicity Department reported that ‘… all the rooms in the building were found to be bespattered with blood, showing that there must have been fairly severe casualties amongst the irregulars’. In fact only one member of the garrison had been killed – Mary Hartney. She had been working as part of a First Aid unit was killed instantly in an explosion caused by the shellfire. Hartney was buried in the Republican Plot of Mount St. Lawrence Cemetery, Limerick on 7^th August 1922.[7]

The next member of the Cumann na mBan killed by the Free State army was Lily Bennett from Aughrim Street, Dublin. The Republican Prisoners Defence Committee held a public rally each Sunday in O’Connell Street. On 18^th November 1922 Lily Bennett was attending the demonstration when Free State troops passing by in a motor convoy attacked the protesters.[8]

An eyewitness told the Irish Times “The meeting had only lasted about five minutes when a lorry of National troops attended by an armoured car , came along from the direction of Parnell Square and halted beside the gathering.  … An officer ordered the meeting to disperse … revolver shots rang out … evidently fired by supporters of the meeting. The huge crowd began to break up amid great confusion … a machine gun was trained on the crowd, and an unnerving rattle of fire was next heard and people trampled on one another in their flight.”

Charlotte Despard who had been addressing the meeting later insisted that the Free State Army had opened fire without provocation. Seven people were seriously wounded in the attack including Lily Bennet who had been shot in the back and died a short time later.[9]

Another member Cumann na mBan, Margaret Dunne from Cappaleigh South near Castletown in West Cork, was shot dead by the Free State Army six months later. On the 8^th April 1923 a Free State soldier was wounded during a gunfight with two IRA Volunteers at Adrigole. Approximately ten minutes later the Free State troops spotted Dunne conversing with a third IRA Volunteer who had not been involved in the attack.

In an apparent act of reprisal for the wounding of his comrade, Captain Hassett of the Free State Army drew a gun and opened fire on the pair, shooting Margaret Dunne dead. Throughout the Civil War Cumann na mBan had rendered military honours at the funerals of IRA Volunteers killed in action – but for Dunne’s funeral the situation was reversed as the men of the IRA came out of hiding and risked capture and execution to pay tribute to their fallen female comrade.[10]

The final member of Cumann na mBan to die as a result of the conflict appears to have been Annie ‘Nan’ Hogan from Cratloe in County Clare. Hogan had organised safe houses during the War of Independence and was leader of the East Clare Brigade of Cumann na mBan.

Late in 1922 the republican prisoners in Limerick prison had organised an escape attempt by digging a tunnel. However the plot was betrayed and on the night of the escape attempt Free State soldiers arrested seven Cumann na mBan women outside the prison including Annie Hogan. Hogan was interned without trial in Kilmainham Gaol and went on hunger strike in March 1923 for better conditions and prisoner of war status.

Eventually the hunger strike was called off when it became obvious that the Free State authorities would not concede their demands. Unfortunately, this development was too late to save Annie Hogan. She was released in September 1923 and died a short time later. Her family and friends attributed the twenty four year old’s premature death to her hunger strike and the conditions she had suffered in prison.[11] 

Written out of History?

The idea is often put forward that women were deliberately “written out of history” and there was a recurring suggestion during the 2016 Centenary celebrations that the role of women in the republican struggle was somehow a “hidden history” which was only coming to light for the first time a century later.

But there is little foundation to these suggestions – at least forty books have been written specifically about the role played by women during the Irish Revolution and many of these books were published well in advance of the 2016 Centenary of the Easter Rising.

Numerous female veterans of the struggle including Kathleen Clarke, Madame Czira, Margaret Skinnider, Nora Connolly-O’Brien, Maud Mitchell, Kathleen Keyes McDonnell, Maud Gonne, Lil Conlon, Brigid Dirranne and other female activists had their own biographies published during their lifetimes.

Furthermore history books focusing specifically on republican women have been continually published since the 1960s and female historians such as Dorothy McArdle, Ruth Taillion and most notably Margaret Ward brought the role of women in the conflict to public attention in popular history books decades before the 2016 centenary. So the role of women in the Irish Revolution was never “hidden”, “lost” or deliberately “covered up” through the machinations of some unnamed conspiracy.

What is certain though is that the deeds of the women who fought for Irish freedom were frequently overshadowed by the martial feats of their male counterparts. Women in the revolution (with a few notable exceptions mentioned above) were confined by their male comrades to a very strictly defined gendered and traditional role i.e. – signalling, delivering despatches, first aid work, cooking and cleaning. Some women succeeded in breaking this mould to provide vital support to the IRA’s campaign including intelligence work and the transporting of arms and explosives.

Inevitably when the romantic ideal of armed struggle by the “good old-IRA” came to be portrayed in stage dramas, television programmes and popular history books of the 1950’s and 1960’s the emphasis was always going to be on the young men who took up rifle and revolver to go into battle with the British foe.

When tokenism demanded that women be mentioned the easiest thing was to focus almost exclusively on Constance Markievicz about whom numerous books and articles had already been written and to ignore the ordinary women who served under her in the rank and file of Cumann na mBan.

What is surprising though is that in the numerous histories of Cumann na mBan there is very little mentioned of the women who died for the struggle and who are the focus of this article. Apart from notable exceptions such as Sinead McCoole’s “No Ordinary Women” which mentions the deaths of Hogan and Dunne, and Mary McAuliffe & Liz Gillis’s “We Were There – 77 Women of the Easter Rising” which details the death of McGowan, almost all histories of Cumann na mBan ignore the sacrifice of these women.

For example Ann Matthew’s 2012 book “Dissidents” which charted the history of Republican women in the Civil War period stated emphatically but mistakenly that “no Republican women died as a result of the conflict”.

Most recently the 2014 book “Cumann na mBan – 100 years defending the Republic” by Líta Ní Chathmhaoil failed to mention any of the women who had died in defence of the Republic in the years 1918 – 1923. Instead Ní Chathmhaoil’s book focuses on the members of Cumann na mBan or female Provisional-IRA Volunteers killed during the more recent conflict in the North of Ireland.[12]

The most likely reason why the stories of the republican women killed during the Irish Revolution have not been more widely recorded is that the majority of the Cumann na mBan women killed died during the Truce Period and Civil War which have often been neglected by scholars in favour of the War of Independence, furthermore throughout the period it is often to distinguish Cumann na mBan fatalities from female civilians killed in the conflict.

Today the men of the Irish Republican Army who fell in the struggle for Irish freedom are honoured by hundreds of monuments throughout Ireland. The boys of Na Fianna Éireann are commemorated by a monument dedicated to them in Stephen’s Green. – But what of the women?

There are currently four statues of Constance Markievicz (one in County Sligo and three others in the capital) with Dublin City Council reportedly planning a fifth statue of her. There is also an information plaque in Wynn’s Hotel Dublin marking it as the place where the inaugural meeting of Cumann na mBan was held. But as we pass the centenaries of the death of Josephine McGowan and her comrades in Cumann na mBan who died for Irish freedom, the question now arises why no national memorial has ever been erected commemorating all of the women of Cumann na mBan and the girls of the Clan na nGaedheal Girl Scouts who sacrificed so much for the same cause? Hopefully something will be done to rectify this national oversight before the centenaries of the death of Margeret Keogh in 2021 and Annie Hogan in 2023.

Dr. Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc is the author of several books on modern Irish history and is a contributor to the Atlas of the Irish Revolution. – Many thanks to Dr. Andrew Bielenberg, Sam McGrath, John Dorney and Micheál Ó Doibhlin for their assistance with this article.

References

[1] James Maloney, Bureau of Military History, Witness Statement.

[2] Irish Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin. Medal Application for 1917 -21 Service Medal No.  MD10018 for Josephine McGowan

[3] Ó Ruairc, Pádraig Óg, Truce – Murder, Myth and the last days of the Irish War of Independence, (Cork, 2016), pp. 240-9.

[4] Irish Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks Dublin. Military Service Pension Applications No.  DP6606 for Margaret MacAnaney, DP5886 for Annie McElduff and SP. G10 for Nóra O’Leary.

[5] Dorney, John, The Civil War in Dublin – The Fight for The Irish Capital 1922 to 1924, (Dublin 2017) p.162

[6] O’Malley, Ernie, The Singing Flame (Cork, 2016)

[7] O’ Callaghan, John, The Battle For Kilmallock (Cork, 2011)

[8] Dorney, John, The Civil War in Dublin – The Fight for The Irish Capital 1922 to 1924, (Dublin 2017) p163

[9] Irish Times, 19^th November 1922

[10] Keane, Barry, Cork’s Revolutionary Dead 1916 -1923, (Cork, 2016)

[11] McCoole, Sinead, No Ordinary Women – Irish Female Activists during Ireland’s Revolutionary Years 1900 -1923, (Dublin, 2003)

[12] At least thirteen such women were killed in the Northern conflict, namely; Maura Meehan, Dorothy Maguire, Julie Dougan, Maura Drumm, Anne Parker, Vivien Fitzsimons, Pauline Kane, Anne Marie Pettigrew, Ethel Lynch, Laura Crawford, Rosemary Blakely, Margaret McArdle, Mairead Farrell. Some of these women were shot by the British Army or assassinated by Loyalist paramilitaries, but the majority were killed by premature explosions whilst on bombing missions. For more details see:- “Lost Lives – The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles.”

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney discuss the historic election of 1918.

We discuss:

Politics in Ireland before 1918, the restricted franchise, Home Rule and the dominance of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

The Impact of the 1916 Rising, the Conscription Crisis and the rise of Sinn Fein in 1917-18.

Voting in 1918, votes for women, candidates standing in multiple constituencies, violence at election time.

The historic consequences of Sinn Fein’s victory and declaration of Irish independence in January 1919.

By Evan Comerford

When interviewed by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1955, an elderly Galway farmer recalled vividly the neighbours from his youth that lived on a tiny farm consisting of poor bogland next to his own home.

They had ten children, seven of whom emigrated to the United States and regularly sent money back home to Galway. Eventually, the family at home were able to use the money to purchase a better farm nearby and send the youngest son into the priesthood.[1]

Such familiar anecdotes about the unique phenomenon of Irish emigration exist in the oral genealogy of families across the country. However, the interesting part of this story is not so much the Galway farmer and his land, but the fiscal contribution made by his emigrant children.

The money that emigrants sent back to Ireland ensured the survival of family farms and often provided funds for other family members to emigrate themselves. These ‘remittances’ became a routine part of the embedded process of emigration in 19^th and 20^th century Ireland.

But the individual emigrants that sent money home did so at great personal sacrifice and in doing so provided a genuine lifeline against poverty to their families. With the relationship between Ireland and the diaspora soon to come under the microscope ahead of the 2019 diaspora voting rights referendum, it’s worth examining the historical record to consider what was often the ‘invisible’ impact of emigrants on Ireland in the post-Famine period.

The American Money

The impact of the Great Famine was the initial impetus for both large scale emigration from Ireland and the sending of remittances in vast amounts to Ireland. Those that could afford a passage ticket and who survived the journey to America were hugely forthcoming when it came to sending part of their meagre earnings to their desperate relatives at home.

The flow of cash back to Ireland was so large that the British Government began to gather statistics on Irish remittances in 1848 through money orders and bank drafts sent via financial institutions. But even their figures underestimated the total sum, which included untraceable amounts of cash stuffed into envelopes or through pre-paid passage tickets for relatives.[2]

The demand for facilitating remittance transfers was so high by 1850 that a group of enterprising Irish emigrants in New York established the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank to provide a reliable credit transfer system for emigrants who wished to get money back to Ireland. They charged a low commission rate and even established an office in Dublin to complete the transactions. In 1860 alone, over $600,000 in remittances to Ireland passed through their books.[3]

‘Gale’ Day

The donations of Irish-Americans to the cause of Irish nationalism has dominated the narrative of remittances in Irish history. But most cash remittances were sent in small amounts to individual families.

Most frequently, they were received in advance of the ‘Gale Day’ to help pay rent owed to landlords by tenant farmers. Rent was the single most vital expense for rural farming families in 19^th century Ireland and paying it was the difference between keeping the land and losing it. In 1908, the village of Clifden, Co. Galway received £10,000 in remittances, which was half the entire rent owed by the over 3,000 inhabitants of the district.[4]

Irish patriots decried the reliance on ‘American money’ for the simple fact that ended up in the pockets of landlords. But for the families of tenant farmers remittances from emigrant children had become an effective and reliable method of survival.

The need for immediate additional income was often the sole motivator for emigration in the first place. For example, rent records from the Clonbrock estate contain comments which noted specific tenants who had emigrated to send home money on account of a farm animal dying. Shopkeepers were known to supply credit to poorer families who had children in America on the promise that they would pay their tabs once remittances were received.

Other less frequent uses included funding improvements to a families’ modest cottage or being put towards the purchase of another farm. It was also common practice for parish priests to collate names and addresses of locals who had emigrated in order to solicit them for additional funds to build a parish church. Nevertheless, the overwhelming need for remittances was clearly amongst the very poor with the aim of keeping the bailiff from the door.

The ‘Mailboat’ Generation

In post-independence Ireland, reliance on the wages of a family member abroad for survival continued unabated.

National sovereignty was not a cure to Ireland’s social and economic ills, progress was slow in this regard and high levels of emigration continued, particularly in the post-war period when Britain needed rebuilding. According to CSO estimates, the ‘mailboat’ generation who left Ireland for the UK between 1940 and 1970 sent the equivalent of £4.8 billion to Ireland.[5]

Even into the 1960s when Ireland was beginning to build a modern economy, remittances continued to flow into the rural economy at an astonishing rate. In 1961 alone, an estimated £13.5 million was sent to Ireland by emigrants in the United Kingdom, which almost equalled the entire education budget of £14 million.[6] Throughout this period, the need to contribute financially to the family home remained a constant in the experience of the Irish emigrant.

While publicly the spiralling emigration rates of the 1950s were described by Irish politicians as a ‘national tragedy’, government departments continued to quietly recognise an unofficial pro-emigration policy.

High emigration solved what would otherwise have been crisis levels of unemployment for the Government and remittances provided the poorer classes with a reliable income stream. The Report of the Commission on Emigration and other Population Problems, published in 1954, even admitted that ‘the ready outlet of emigration has provided the remaining population with a reasonably satisfying standard of living and this has been responsible for an acquiescence in conditions of under-development….’.[7]

The experience of Irish emigrants in their adopted homes was one of hardship, homesickness and discrimination for a century after the Famine. While their employment was predominantly in low skilled jobs, it did offer them regular, reliable work that could not be obtained at home.

The available evidence suggests that the huge numbers of people who left Ireland contributed an equally enormous sum through remittances that played a big role in everyday life for many people. Most of those transactions were not large, one-off payments to great national causes, but small amounts of cash in an envelope, sent when help was requested to relieve debts and ensure family survival.

In a rational sense, remittances were part of the economic safety valve of the Irish emigration process. However, such broad strokes mask the great emotional sacrifice for the emigrants who were doubly burdened with the need to send money home along with finding their way in a foreign land.

David Fitzpatrick’s analysis of letters from 19th century Australia to Ireland reveals a combination of longing and guilt among Irish emigrants there[8]. Sending remittances was a way to establish a living, practical link with their homeland.

The individual amounts sent were small and left little in terms of historical records, but they weren’t small or insignificant to the people who sent and received them. Perhaps it is the invisible nature of remittances that has allowed the impact they had and the generosity shown by the Diaspora to have gone somewhat under appreciated.

References

[1] Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900, (Minnesota, 1958) p 116.

[2] Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900, (Minnesota, 1958) p 106

[3] Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900, (Minnesota, 1958) p 109

[4] Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the exodus to North America, (New York, 1985) p 401

[5] The Journal.ie, April 4^th 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-emigrant-remittances-uk-1405087-Apr2014/

[6] Diarmuid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, (London, 2005) p 480.

[7] Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948- 1954, (1955)

[8] David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of consolation: personal account of Irish migration to Australia, (Dublin, 1995)

By Padraig Og O Ruairc

Introduction – Ignoring faith and misrepresenting history?

The official state commemoration marking the centenary of the Soloheadbeg Ambush and the start of the War of Independence began with a Catholic mass celebrated the Archbishop of Cashel Kieran O’Reilly.[1]

Archbishop O’Reilly’s prominence at the commemoration was interesting given that when the ambush occurred  his predecessors including Monsignor Ryan, the Parish Priest of Tipperary, denounced Soloheadbeg as a criminal act perpetrated by a gang of murders: – “God help poor Ireland if she follows this deed of blood. But let us give her the lead in our indignant denunciation of this crime against our Catholic civilization.”[2]

The day after the Soloheadbeg commemoration another state ceremony was held in Dublin’s Mansion House to mark the centenary of the inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann. This commemoration was criticized by Gabriel Doherty, a historian who lectures at University College Cork, because Doherty claimed that the Catholic Church had played an “important role” during the 1916 Rising that the important role of the church during the War of Independence is was being overlooked because of “the reaction against the Church in recent decades.”

Doherty’s main argument was that ‘The Democratic Programme’ adopted by Dáil Éireann in 1919 contained sentiments that were “Catholic all over” but that the historians and politicians involved in the commemoration were ignorant of this.

Although Doherty acknowledged that Thomas Johnson the leader of the Irish Labor movement wrote the original draft, he claimed that “he [Johnson] wasn’t the author of the text which was endorsed by the Dáil”.  Doherty suggested that the credit for the document should go to Seán T.O’Kelly a Sinn Féin T.D. who was allowed to edit the final draft of the document.

Furthermore Doherty suggested that the imprint of Catholic social teaching was evident in the document and warned that “Ignoring the role of faith in the fight for Irish freedom misrepresents the history of the struggle.” The Irish Catholic newspaper published Doherty’s comments on the front page of its 24^th January issue under the headline “Call to honor Church’s key role in the fight for independence.”[3]

David Quinn, leader of The Iona Institute and a former editor of The Irish Catholic, wrote a piece for the Sunday Times which was published on 27^th January echoing Doherty’s claims that “the positive influence of the Church should not be overlooked” and stated that “Catholic clergy played a big part in 1916 and many of the rebels had a strong Catholic faith.” -However Quinn expanded on this by suggesting that there should be a stronger emphasis on “nationalism” in commemorations and that the struggle to set up an Irish Republic had a lot in common with “the impulse behind Brexit”.

These calls to celebrate the contribution that the Catholic Church allegedly made to the cause of Irish freedom come at a crucial juncture when Irish people are starting to give serious consideration as to how to commemorate the centenaries of the War of Independence. Doherty and Quinn’s calls for a focus on Catholicism in upcoming commemorations are reminiscent of a similar call by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmaid Martin. Archbishop Martin wrote a piece in the Irish Times published on the eve of the Centenary of the 1916 Rising which criticized the “clinically secular concept of the way 1916 will be marked” and claimed that the contribution Catholic priests made towards the Rising was being ignored.[4]

An effort is being made to re-write, or at least re-interpret the history of the Catholic Church during the 1916 Rising and War of independence to promote a more positive interpretation of the Catholic Church’s role in the struggle for Irish Independence. The purpose of this article is to examine the specific claims of Doherty, Quinn and Archbishop Martin before assessing the history of the Catholic Church’s attitude towards Irish Republicanism, and its role during the 1916 Rising and War of Independence.

The Democratic Programme

Regarding Doherty’s claim that Sean T. O’Kelly was the author of the final draft of Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, It has always been known that Johnston a Socialist wrote the initial draft of the Democratic Programme and that O’Kelly watered down some of its stronger left-wing sentiments.

However, the final draft adopted by the Dáil was still quite radical and left-wing in its ideology.

Johnston was present at the inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann and was reported to have been so happy at witnessing the approval of the final draft that he wept tears of joy – so there can be little doubt that the core substance of Johnson’s socialism remained despite O’Kelly’s editing.

Suggestions that O’Kelly was more significant in writing the Democratic Programme than Johnson are tantamount to stating that J.K. Rolling’s editor was more responsible than she was in writing Harry Potter!

Rather than restoring O’Kelly, an Irish-Catholic, to his rightful place in history, Doherty’s interview with The Irish Catholic downplays the important role of Johnson, an English-born Protestant (Unitarian), and perpetuates an oversimplified history which associates Irish Republicanism with Catholicism. Doherty’s suggestion that modern day hostility to church in an increasingly secular Ireland has led to a cover-up of the Church’s “key role” in the struggle for Irish freedom is questionable.

The Catholic Church has a long record of opposing Irish Republicanism stretching back to the 1790’s and continuing throughout the 1916 Rising and War of Independence – the only “cover-up” was the one which decades later sought to gloss-over the church’s collaboration with the British.

Concerning David Quinn’s claim that nationalism “was the dominant motive behind Irish independence” during the Irish revolution of 1913 -1923; I would suggest that the ideology of Irish Republicanism was the dominant motive behind the establishment of the Irish Republic.

There is a significant difference between the politics of ‘Catholic-Nationalism’ and ‘Irish-Republicanism’. It is remarkable that Quinn managed to write a lengthy article about the foundation of the Irish Republic without mentioning Republicanism once but he managed to cram numerous references to ‘Nationalism’ and Brexit into his article.

Quinn’s analogy between the War of Independence and Brexit is unsound. It is not a valid comparison to equate Britain’s colonial project in Ireland which the Irish were forced to fight a war to exit, with the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union which the British public chose to enter, and later leave by the simple means of a referendum.

The Catholic Church and the British connection.

As far back as the 1798 rebellion Catholic clergy in Ireland actively supported British rule. The clergy were appalled by the secularism of the United Irishmen’s leaders like Robert Emmet whose proclamation called for the abolition of church tithes and the nationalization of all church property.[5]

John Troy, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, denounced the United Irishmen as an anti-religious conspiracy whose aim was “To destroy the salutary influence of our clergy in this kingdom.”[6]

Meanwhile the British government helped to establish the Catholic Seminary at Maynooth College in 1795. In the words of Lord Russell : “Britain has tried to govern Ireland by force and conciliation and failed No other means are now open to us except those we are now using, namely, to govern Ireland through Rome.”[7]

When the Fenians plotted an uprising in the 1860’s the church was amongst their staunchest opponents.   The Fenian Proclamation of 1867 called for “the complete separation of church and state”.[8] Cardinal Paul Cullen declared that the church would “wage an unrelenting war on the [Fenian] organization”[9], while Bishop Moriarty of Kerry invoked: “God’s heaviest withering, blithing, blasting curse on these Fenian bastards… Hell is not hot enough, nor eternity long enough for such miscreant!!”[10] Pope Pius IX issued a decree in 1870 condemning Fenianism as “… the enemy of the Church and the [British] State” effectively excommunicating all Catholic Fenians.[11]

For the Catholic Church the key to battling Irish Republicanism with its inherent sedition, secularism and anti-Clericalism was control of the education system. The Fenian’s fiercest opponent Archbishop Cullen declared in the aftermath of the 1867 Rising: “This ought to convince the British Government that education without religion is will promote revolution.”[12]

And Indeed the Catholic Church was largely granted control over the education of Irish Catholics after 1831. In that year the British Government established the National Board of Education for Ireland and the Catholic Church gained control of the new National School system which they used to indoctrinate future generations with the tenets of the Catholic faith. While it was often alleged that the Church education encouraged Irish militant Irish nationalism, the education children in Catholic run National schools received was Catholic in religion, predominantly English in culture, and was actively hostile towards the Irish language.

Cork IRA leader Tom Barry, recalled: “The Jesuits taught us to rhyme off the names of the Kings of England but nothing of Wolfe Tone or 1798.”[13] Where nationalist history was taught its was given a distinctly Catholic flavour. Dublin IRA volunteer Todd Andrews, was educated by at the Christian Brothers just before the 1916 Rising:

“Contrary to an assertion often made, the Brothers did not deliberately indoctrinate their pupils with hostility to Britain. …We were taught much about the saints and scholars and … we heard rather less about Wolfe Tone and not much about the Fenians. It was a very simplistic history. … Fr Murphy had become a symbol of faith and fatherland. The fact that he was a rare almost unique example of clerical participation in the 1798 rebellion was never referred to; the general opposition of the Church to the rebellion was conveniently forgotten.”

The 1916 Rising

The 1916 rising is often portrayed as an event steeped in Catholicism because its leader, Patrick Pearse, was a devout Catholic and the insurrection coincided with the Christian holiday of Easter. However the fact that many Protestant-Republicans, veteran Fenians, Suffragettes and Socialists were involved shows that the 1916 Rising was inspired more by radical political ideals than religion.

The Catholic hierarchy certainly did not view the Rising as a Catholic rebellion. Michael Kelly, the Irish-born Arch-Bishop of Sidney denounced the 1916 Rising as “anti-Patriotic, irrational and wickedly irreligious.”[14] Seven other Catholic bishops based in Ireland emphatically condemned the 1916 Rising.[15]

Throughout Ireland Catholic priests condemned the insurrection and at the British inquiry into the rebellion Inspector Gelstone of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) testified “Any of the priests who had Sinn Féin tendencies were young. The older priests and the parish priests spoke against the movement.”[16] The Vatican continually telegraphed the Irish bishops during the Rising urging them to use their influence to get the Republicans to surrender.[17]

That the leader of the Rising Patrick Pearse had a deep Catholic faith is not in doubt – but as the son of a Catholic-Irish Mother and a Unitarian-English Father who espoused Freethinking, Pearse’s own views on religion and its role in society were complex and nuanced.[18]

Pearse’s play “The Singer” set in Galway during the 1798 Rising was critical of the church’s role in political matters. The character Maolseachlainn tells the audience: “Some [priests] said there was irreligion in them [the rebels] and blasphemy against God. But I never saw it and I don’t believe it, but there are some [Catholic bishops] who would have us believe that God is on the side of the foreign oppressor.”[19]

Interestingly Pearse himself was later accused of blasphemy by a Jesuit for having declared that the grave of the Protestant-Republican Wolfe Tone, was “the holiest place in Ireland, Holier even than where Saint Patrick sleeps in Down.”[20] Pearse understood the views of others and joked that: “The prospect of the children of [Belfast Protestant district] Sandy Row being taught to curse the Pope in Irish with a Belfast accent is rich and soul satisfying”[21]

Another of the 1916 leaders James Connolly espoused secularism in politics and stated that “Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Freethinker, Buddhist and Muslim will cooperate together … to abolish the capitalist system [and build a Socialist-Republic]”.[22] Connolly had continually condemned the interference of the Catholic Church in Irish politics and stated “the church has always accepted the establishment … and denounced every revolutionary movement … yet allowed its priests to deliver speeches in eulogy of those movements a generation afterwards.”[23]

At least one of the republican leaders, Thomas Clarke, a Fenian veteran, went to his death without spiritual aid and in conflict with the Catholic Church. Hours before his execution a Catholic priest refused Clarke the sacraments of absolution and communion unless he would first accept the church’s teaching that the rebellion had been wrong and sinful. Clarke’s wife who met both him and the priest immediately after the execution recalled Clarke telling her: “I told him [the priest] to clear out of my cell quickly… To say I was sorry would be a lie and I was not going to face my God with a lie on my tongue.”[24]

There is no doubt that the leaders of the Rising were Catholics who had a deep personal religious faith, but equally all of them were Irish Republicans who were opposed to the Catholic Church’s interference in political matters. All of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, with the sole exception of James Connolly, were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood whose constitution (Article 18) supported the separation of church and state – “In the Irish Republic there shall be no state religion but every citizen shall be free to worship God according to his conscience, and perfect freedom of worship shall be guaranteed as a right and not granted as a privilege.”[25]

The pluralism of the leaders of the 1916 Rising is also reflected in the 1916 Proclamation, which stated: “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally”.[26]

Following the 1916 Rising the IRB’s constitution was updated in 1918 with the insertion of another clause that guaranteed class equality: “There shall be no privileged persons, or classes, in the Irish Republic. All citizens shall equally enjoy equal rights therein.”[27]

When the War of Independence began in January 1919 many of the Sinn Féin TD’s elected to the First Dáil and several members of the IRA ambush party at Soloheadbeg were also members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – their concept of a republic was one which embraced religious freedom and would not give the church a privileged status in a free Ireland. 

The Catholic Church’s condemnation of Sinn Féin.

Throughout 1917 and early 1918 the Irish republican struggle was more political than military in nature as the newly reformed Sinn Féin party stood candidates in several by elections in 1917 before winning a landslide political victory in the 1918 General Election in Ireland.

The East Clare By-Election of July 1917 was one of the first electoral contests facing Sinn Féin and their candidate, the 1916 Rising veteran Eamon de Valera, faced stern opposition from many of the local Catholic priests.

One of the leading anti-Republican Clerics in the county was Father Michael Hayes, The Parish Priest of Feackle, who denounced Sinn Féin as having “a policy of socialism, bloodshed and anarchy which struck at the root of authority, peace and Christianity” and he condemned Sinn Féin for posing “a great danger to our country and our religion”.[28]

A few of the younger priests in Clare did support de Valera, but the more senior Parish Priests were solidly behind de Valera’s opponent. The Catholic Bishop of Killaloe Dr. Fogarty steadfastly refused to comment on which candidate should be supported until after the result was announced when Bishop Fogarty swiftly broke his silence to announce he had voted for the winning candidate – de Valera!

In the Kilkenny City by-election of August 1917 Sinn Féin faced opposition from the Bishop Brownrigg of Ossary, who wrote to the press attacking Sinn Féin. The people ignored the Bishop, and the Sinn Féin candidate won by a landslide.

Following the series of Sinn Féin victories in the 1917 by-elections it was obvious that there was a groundswell of support for Sinn Féin and that many senior clergy were out of touch with their flock. In early 1918 the “Conscription Crisis” forced Sinn Féin into a temporary political alliance with the Catholic Church and the Irish Parliamentary Party who all had a common platform in opposition to the extension of British military conscription to Ireland.

By December 1918 the Irish Parliamentary Party were a spent force throughout most of southern Ireland and it seemed likely that Sinn Féin were destined to sweep the electoral boards. It was a different story in Ulster however where the Irish Parliamentary Party still had a great deal of support and the Catholic Church in the north brokered an electoral pact between the two parties in an attempt to prevent conflict and guarantee their candidates did not split the Republican-Nationalist vote to the advantage of the unionists.

By the time of Sinn Féin’s landslide victory in the 1918 General Election in Ireland Catholic criticisim of the party had become more muted but even after this there were still occasional outbursts of criticism from the clergy.

In April 1919 Bishop Kelly of Ross condemned Constance Markievicz, Richard Corish and other Sinn Féin TD’s for expressing support for the Russian Revolution and declared that Irish Republicanism would lead to the “devastation and destruction”. Bishop Kelly had a few weeks earlier Bishop Kelly had banned the saying of prayers in churches in his diocese for the Sinn Féin T.D. Pierce McCann who had died in an English prison.[29]

The Catholic clergy’s condemnation of the IRA during the War of Independence.

Whatever ambivalence the Catholic clergy showed towards the rise of Sinn Féin, they were unequivocal in their condemnation of political violence in pursuit of the Irish Republic in the years afterwards.

The Sunday after the Soloheadbeg Ambush Cannon Ryan, the Parish priest of Tipperary, condemned the IRA as “murderers with blackened faces and blackened hearts who gave their victims no chance .[30]

Father Slattery of Soloheadbeg condemned the ambush as “a shocking criminal affair” whilst his colleague Father Keogh condemned the attack as “ a frightful outrage … worse than the crimes of Bolshevik Russia”.[31]

Another priest Father Condon declared; ‘No good cause would be served by such crimes which would bring on their country disgrace and on themselves the curse of God.’ One of the participants in the ambush Dan Breen later stated “It’s a terrible pity that we didn’t shoot a few bishops!”[32]

Condemnation of the IRA’s military campaign by the clergy did not end with Soloheadbeg, it continued week after week for the next two years.  Bishop Gaughran of Meath condemned the IRA as “criminals … as savage as the bushmen of the forest.”

Father John Burke of Menlough, Galway ridiculed the IRA as “tin-pike soldiers who think they can beat England”. Father Enright of Miltown Malbay, Clare denounced the IRA’s struggle as “absolute insanity” and proclaimed that “It is folly to make an attempt to overthrow the power of the British Government”. Bishop MacRory of Down and Connor stated that the IRA were “atheists and nihilists”.

Father Gleeson of Lohrra placed a “curse” on the IRA: “May the curse of Cain, The Curse of the Priest and the Curse of God fall on these [IRA] murderers!”[33] Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam also denounced the IRA as “murderers” and cursed men “…who must answer before the bar of divine justice”.[34]

Excommunication –  denying IRA Volunteers the Sacraments and Christian burial.

The clergy also used their spiritual authority to try and break the IRA’s resistance to British rule. On the 11^th of December 1920 the IRA killed an RIC Auxiliary Cadet during an ambush in Cork City. That night members of the British forces retaliated by assassinating two IRA members and burning the centre of Cork.

The following morning the Bishop Conlahan of Cork, issued a pastoral decree, directed not at the British Forces, but against the I.R.A.. It declared that anyone taking part in an ambush was guilty of murder and would be excommunicated.

Given that the overwhelming majority of the IRA’s Volunteers were Catholics the bishop’s decree sparked outrage amongst republicans. A Sinn Féin member Cork City Corporation Councillor Ó Cuill attacked the Bishop saying; “He stands now only where his people [the clergy] always stood – in the wrong.”

The threat of excommunication and the refusal of sacraments were also widely used by priests in an attempt to break the will of IRA prisoners in British custody. Todd Andrews remembered Catholic priests visiting the republican prisoners on hunger in Mountjoy using their religious and social position to try and force them to end a hunger strike: “I had a visit from the prison chaplain.  … he warned me that I was wilfully endangering my life which was an immoral act totally forbidden by the Commandments. … The chaplain was  doing the dirty work required by his British employers.”[35]

Not content with merely demoralizing republican prisoners in British custody the Catholic Church were also involved in incarcerating some of those involved in the Republican movement – For example; Maria Bowles a thirteen year old girl  whose older brother Mick Bowles was the IRA Quartermaster of the Colgheen Company of the IRA in Cork was captured by the British Forces whilst trying to hide arms in January 1921.

Bowles’ punishment for her assistance to the IRA was imprisonment in a Magdeline Laundry run by the Catholic Church. [36]Fortunately, Bowles comrades managed to secure her transfer and eventual release. Given  the Catholic Church’s record in the War of Independence and Civil War it is unsurprising that the republican newspaper An Phoblacht was the only Irish newspaper in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s which openly condemned the exploitation of children in the Catholic Church’s institutions.[37]

Another method used by the Catholic clergy in an attempt to undermine the republican struggle was the refusal to hold funeral services for IRA Volunteers killed by the British forces.

Father Andrew Nestor, the Parish Priest of Ennistymon in Clare,  refused to allow the funeral of IRA Volunteer Michael Conway who had been shot dead by the British Army to enter his church.[38] Likewise the Parish Priest of Murroe a Father Dwane had initially refused to allow the burial in the local graveyard of two IRA Volunteers who had been killed by the British Army in May 1921.[39] Throughout Ireland it was a common for the funerals of  IRA Volunteers to be barred from entering Catholic churches on the orders of the clergy.

The month of December 1920 was key in the clergy’s attitude toward the IRA – that month two Catholic priests were killed by the British forces and in the aftermath of these shocking murders condemnation of the IRA by the church hierarchy either tailed off or became more nuanced in the final months of the war.

For example on the 20^th March 1921 Bishop Finegan in Cavan called for prayers for the IRA volunteers IRA killed at Selton Hill in Leitrim and executed by the British in Dublin, whilst issuing a call condemning violence by both the British and IRA: ‘To be “shot while getting away” [the killing of IRA prisoners in British custody] and ambushing is murder. Ireland is not at war. Shooting of police and soldiers [by the IRA] is murder.’[40]

Spies, Informers & Priests – The Catholic Clergy and British Intelligence.

One of the most important military aspects of the War of Independence was the ‘Intelligence War’ waged between the IRA and the British forces. During the conflict the British Forces regarded Catholic Priests as a valuable asset and source of intelligence information:

“The informer is throughout Ireland held in abhorrence. This feeling made it very difficult to obtain information during 1920 – 21, … the bulk of the people were our enemies … [however one] class which could be tapped [for intelligence information] were, the clergy who generally are safe in Ireland whatever their religion.”[41]

One of the most notorious Catholic priests to become an informer during the conflict was  Father Hayes, the Parish Priest of Feakle in Clare. Thomas Tuohy a local IRA Volunteer recalled: “Fr. Hayes, a violent imperialist, strongly denounced the I.R.A. from the pulpit. He referred to us as a murder gang, and declared that any information, which he could get, would be readily passed on to the British authorities and that he would not desist until the last of the IRA murderers was strung up by the neck.  … for some time afterwards services at which he officiated were boycotted by his congregation.” [42]

The Parish Priest of Newmarket-On-Fergus, Cannon O’Dea gathered information for the British Army and had it communicated directly to Captain Kelly the Intelligence Officer for the British Army’s 6^th Divison. Father Flatley the Parish Priest of Aughagower, Mayo also spied for the British but the local IRA leader Thomas Heavey was refused permission to execute him by IRA Headquarters.[43]

Father Collins, a Dominican priest in Tralee, wrote letters to the local RIC Inspector identifying a woman who attended mass at his church as a republican sympathizer. Her home was subsequently burned by the Black and Tans.[44]

Tim Kennedy the IRA Volunteer charged with executing the Dominican for spying refused to do so even though he had previously executed two other spies. Kennedy’s comment in refusing was “I would submit myself to be put against the wall myself before I would do my ‘duty’ on a priest, no matter how bad he was”.[45] The likelihood is, as the British suggested, many priests throughout Ireland were informers but very few of them were ever exposed by the IRA.

Father Michael O’Flanagan and Republican priests.

A very small minority of priests who actively supported the IRA most notably Father Michael Griffin who was murdered by members of the RIC Auxiliary Division in 1920, and also two Capuchin Friars – Father Albert Bibby and Father Dominic O’Connor who were both transferred out of Ireland as a punishment for their political activities.

The most prominent priest who supported the Republican struggle during the War of Independence was Father Michael O’Flanagan from Roscommon.

O’Flanagan who was appointed Vice-President of Sinn Féin in 1917 was suspended from his priestly duties in 1918 because he canvassed for Sinn Féin in Cavan East by-election during which the local Bishop had called for the Irish Parliamentary Party to be elected unopposed.

O’Flanagan saw his political activity as a strictly secular civic duty stating “It is true that I am a priest, but I was an Irishman for twenty-four years before I became a priest … and the duties that the law of nature placed on me the law of no religious institution … can take away from me”.[46]

Throughout his life O’Flanagan was withering and unstinting in his criticism of the interference of Catholic bishops, priests and even the Pope in secular and political matters. “The judgement of Irish bishops may be excellent in religious matters but they are usually wrong when it comes to politics” O’Flanagan declared that the Catholic Church as an institution was being used as a weapon “to bludgeon the Irish People into submission.”

He denounced “Maynooth Rule” in Ireland and declared that

“The Pope is the enemy of Irish republicanism and Irish Independence … England rules Ireland with the help of the Pope!”[47] “[Catholics] are not bound to follow the political leadership of the Pope and any Catholic who slavish did so was unworthy of Irish citizenship of the citizenship of any country save the Vatican State.[48]

O’Flanagan continually espoused Irish Republicanism and throughout the 1930’s he remained in conflict with the Catholic hierarchy because he condemned Blueshirt-Fascism in Ireland, Francoism in Spain and Nazism in Europe whilst his superiors in the Catholic Church gave open support and active encouragement to all of these movements.

Conclusion

Although many lay-Catholics and a handful of younger Catholic clerics contributed to the Republican struggle during the Irish War of Independence there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the Catholic priests and especially the more senior ranks of the Catholic clergy were staunchly opposed to Irish Republicanism.

Any suggestion that the church as an institution played a leading role in the fight for Irish freedom and that a modern secular society has conspired to cover up this ‘hidden history’  is farcical. Any suggestion that the centenary commemorations of the War of Independence should place emphasis on Catholicism or afford the Catholic Church a special status are absurd.

In past generations, the Catholic Church’s propagandists largely succeeded in creating the impression that Irish Republicanism was equivalent to Catholic-Nationalism.

By contrast many Irish-people remain unaware of the history of secularism, pluralism and support for the separation of church and state within Irish Republicanism. During the Centenary of the 1916 Rising the Irish Times journalist Ronan McGreevy in his analysis and critique of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic linked the leaders of the 1916 Rising with the distinctly Catholic state that emerged in southern Ireland after 1922.

McGreevy stated “Survivors of the Easter Rising dominated the governance of independent Ireland … [which] developed a distinctly Catholic ethos … [that] contributed to a sense of alienation amongst Protestants”.[49] The fact is that whilst many of the politicians who were in government in the Irish Free State in the 1920’s and 1930’s  had participated in the 1916 Rising or War of Independence they had abandoned the fundamental ideology and secular ideals of Irish Republicanism by the time that they set about building a Catholic-Nationalist state in southern Ireland.

The ideological foundations and roots of the conservative right-wing Catholic state that emerged in southern Ireland are not to be found in the ideology espoused by those who fought for a secular Republic in 1798, 1867 or between the years 1919 to 1923.

The foundations of the Catholic state that emerged in the 1920s were laid by the counter-revolutionaries on the pro-Treaty side of the Civil War who, with the support of the Catholic Church, took power in the Irish Free State in 1922. Indeed the Church was openly partisan in the Civil War, denying the sacraments to all anti-Treaty fighters and activists.

The leader of the Free State Government W.T. Cosgrave suggested that a “Theological Board” should be added as an additional the upper house of the Dáil to ensure that  the Irish government would not pass any legislation “contrary to the faith and morals [of the Catholic Church]”.[50] Likewise Kevin O’Higgins the Free State Minister for Justice proudly boasted that he and his fellow pro-Treaty politicians in the Cumann na Gaedheal Patry and the Free State Government “were the most conservative minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution.”[51]

More than a century ago the socialist historian and Irish language activist William Patrick Ryan wrote; “The most brilliant thing ever done by Irish Catholic priests was the invention of the legend that they had always been on the side of the people.”[52]

A century later there appears to be a renewed effort by an ailing Catholic Church to perpetuate this myth and rejuvenate itself through a revisionist project which is attempting to whitewash the church’s pro-British past and draft an alternative narrative which would allow them to exploit the popularity of the 1916 centenary celebrations and the commemoration of the War of Independence.  Anyone who misrepresents our history should be challenged at every opportunity regardless of whether their revisionism has a political or religious purpose.

Dr. Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc has a PhD in modern Irish history. He has written several books about the Irish Revolution of 1913 to 1923.

References

[1]               Irish Examiner, 20^th January 2019.

[2]               Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), pp. 19

[3]               The Irish Catholic, 24^th January 2019.

[4]               Irish Times, 23^rd December 2015

[5]               Maguire, W.A., Up In Arms – The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, (Belfast, 1998), p.75, Robert Emmett, Proclamation of the Irish Republic, (Dublin 1803).

[6]               Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 18

[7]               Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 19

[8]               Fenian Proclomation of the Irish Republic, 1867.

[9]               Kenna, Shane, Conspirators, (Cork, 2015) p. 18

[10]             Norman, E.R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859– 73, (Dublin, 1965),p.117.

[11]             Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 89.

[12]             Norman, E.R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859 – 73, (Dublin, 1965),p. 96.

[13]             Ryan, Meda, Tom Barry – IRA Freedom Fighter

[14]             Carroll, Denis, They Have Fooled You Again:  Michael O’Flanagan – Priest, Republican, Social Critic, (Dublin, 2016), p.157.

[15]             Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 29.

[16]             The Times, Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, 1916.

[17]             Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 30.

[18]             O’Donnell, Ruan, 16 Lives – Patrick Pearse, (Dublin 2016), p. 18.

[19]             Pearse, Patrick, ‘The Singer’ in The Best of Pearse, (Cork, 1967), p. 113.

[20]             Rafferty, Oliver J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, (Dublin, 2016), p. 40.

[21]             Augusteen, Joost, Patrick Pearse – The Making of a Revolutionary” (London, 2010),p. 233.

[22]             James  Connolly-Heron, The Words of James Connolly (Dublin 1986), p. 56.

[23]             James  Connolly-Heron, The Words of James Connolly (Dublin 1986), p. 51.

[24]             Clarke, Kathleen, Revolutionary Woman – My Fight for Ireland’s Freedom, (Dublin 1997) p. 93.

[25]             Constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – 1910 edition. Bureau of Military History, CD8/3 p.3

[26]          It is important to note that in this instance all the children of the nation is a direct reference to children but an allegorical reference to different social and religious groupings in Ireland. Likewise when French Republicans sing La Marseilles – “enfants de la Patrie” does not refer literally to children but all French citizens.

[27]             Constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – 1918 edition. Bureau Military History, CD178/3/6 p.

[28]             Ó Ruairc, Pádraig, Blood On The Banner – The Republican Struggle in Clare, (Cork, 2009).

[29]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), pp. 19 – 20.

[30]             Marnane, Denis G. The 3^rd Tipperary Brigade – A History of the Volunteers/IRA in South Tipperary 1913 -21, (Tipperary, 2018), p. 181.

[31]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), pp.44.

[32]             Marnane, Denis G. The 3^rd Tipperary Brigade – A History of the Volunteers/IRA in South Tipperary 1913 -21, (Tipperary, 2018), p. 167.

[33]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), pp. 26, 30, 47, 56, 58.

[34]             P. Murray, Oracles of God, The Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, 1922–37 (Dublin 2000), p. 409.

[35]             Andrews, C.S., Dublin Made Me, (Dublin, 2001), p. 152

[36]             NAUK, Colonial Office Papers, 904 / 168.

[37]             Hanley, Brian, The IRA 1926 – 1936, (Dublin, 2002), p. 70.

[38]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), p. 70.

[39]             Toomey, Tom, The War of Independence in Limerick, (Limerick, 2011), p. 589. It was only when the local Protestant landowner Sir Charles Barrington offered to have the two republicans buried in his own family plot in a Protestant graveyard that Father Dwane relented.

[40] Anglo Celt March 26 1921.

[41]             Record of the Rebellion in Ireland

[42]             Thomas Tuohy, BMH Statement, Irish Military Archives.

[43]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), p. 72

[44]             Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the Fifth Commandment – Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland 1919 -1921. (Manchester, 2014), p. 72.

[45] T Ryle Dwyer, Tans Terror and Troubles, Kerry’s Real Fighting Story 1912-1923, pp289, 299, 305-307

[46]             Carroll, Denis, They Have Fooled You Again:  Michael O’Flanagan – Priest, Republican, Social Critic, (Dublin, 2016), p. 187.

[47]             Carroll, Denis, They Have Fooled You Again:  Michael O’Flanagan – Priest, Republican, Social Critic, (Dublin, 2016), pp 201 -3.

[48]             Carroll, Denis, They Have Fooled You Again:  Michael O’Flanagan – Priest, Republican, Social Critic, (Dublin, 2016), pp 244 -5.

[49]             The Revolution Papers – Issue 1.

[50]             Laffan, Michael, Judging W.T. Cosgrave, (Dublin, 2014), p. 71. W.T. Cosgrave obviously passed on this subservient ideological view to his son Liam Cosgrave who as Taoiseach in 1974 voted to help defeat his own government’s bill to legalise contraception on the grounds that “I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teachings of the Catholic Church”

[51]             Terence de Vere White, “Kevin O’Higgins” (London 1948),

[52]             Ryan, W.P., The Pope’s Green Island, (London, 1912)

By John Dorney

In 1916, during the Easter insurrection in Dublin city, a young Irish Citizen Army women was one of party of 60 that took over Dublin City Hall.

She watched her commander Sean Connolly die in front of her and she was herself taken prisoner and marched off to Kilmainham Gaol.

Jane ‘Jinny’ Shanahan was born in Dublin in 1897. She was rank and file activist in the labour movement, the Citizen Army and later an unaffiliated republican.

Her story is very interesting from a number of angles. First; she was a female revolutionary in the Irish Citizen Army from 1913 to 1923, fought in the Easter Rising and afterwards – all the way through the War of Independence and Civil War.

She kept company with the most prominent republican socialist women of the era, notably her close friend and comrade Helena Molony but also Kathleen Lynn, Winnie Carney and others.

The second angle seems almost equally interesting from a personal perspective; she lived with her father until her early death at the age of just 39 in 1936. She died from kidney disease. Like her comrades Helena Molony and Kathleen Lynn, her lonely post-revolutionary life and early death may have been a symptom of the disappointment of many women republicans with the newly independent Irish state.

Joining the Citizen Army

Jane Shanahan is rumoured to have worked in Jacob’s Biscuit Factory prior to joining the Irish revolutionary movement and in her military pension her job is stated as ‘forewoman’.[1]

She was a member of the Women Worker’s Union and it is likely she met Helena Molony and others there.

By 1915 she was employed directly by the union in the sewing room of the Irish Workers Cooperative in Liberty Hall.[2] The idea of the cooperative was to give employment to the female workers in lieu of strike pay. Jinny Shanahan headed the venture, which produced children’s underclothing and workmen’s shirts.[3]

She joined the Irish Citizen Army in 1913, either during or shortly after the great Lockout of 1913, in which the Citizen Army was founded by James Larkin and James Connolly to protect workers’ pickets from the police.[4]

The Citizen Army was dedicated both to Irish independence and to a ‘Workers’ Republic’, which was a vaguely defined socialist goal. It was also committed to equality of citizenship for all men and women. Prior to 1918, only property-owning men and no women had the right to vote – or about 15% of the adult population of Ireland.

Unlike the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist militia formed around the same time as the Citizen Army, women were admitted as equal members to the Citizen Army. The Volunteers had a women’s auxiliary Cumann na mBan, but it was explicitly subservient to the male organisation, at least in its early years.

In the Citizen Army on the other hand, Helena Molony recalled, ‘it would never occur to them [the British] of course that there were women soldiers. Actually the women in the Citizen Army were not first aiders they did military work, except where it suited them to be first aiders. Even before the Russian Army had women soldiers the Citizen Army had them.’[5]

In practice though, in the Citizen Army (ICA) most women, including Jinny Shanahan, did act as medics rather than fighters, but some did also carried arms during the Rising of 1916 and used them in anger, notably Margaret Skinnider and Constance Markievizc.

Jinny Shanahan’s initial OC (Officer Commanding) in the ICA was James O’Neill of Malahide. She states that from 1913 to 1916 she ‘helped in reorganising ICA [after Lockout] and in procuring and secreting arms’.

Preparing for the Rising

Helena Molony wrote in a letter of reference for Jinny’s pension that she, ‘was active in Citizen Army in 1915-16, the officer next in command to myself’. ‘The command of the women’s section was to large extent in her hands.’ She also helped in training new recruits.

She was also close to the heart of the small closed group that planned the insurrection of Easter 1916. Helena Molony wrote that Jinny Shanahan was ‘In charge of 31 Eden Quay ‘where the Provisional Government met’.

The ‘Provisional Government’ refers to the 1916 Rising’s leaders reference to themselves as the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic proclaimed in Easter Week. Before the Rising they were referred to as the ‘military council’ a secret group including James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermot and others.

That Jinny Shanahan was responsible for the safe house where they met shows that she was a highly trusted individual.

This would mean that unlike many rank and file Volunteers or Citizen Army members, she knew that an armed uprising was imminent. Jinny herself told the military pension board in 1935, ‘I was on duty for six weeks before the Rising at 31 Eden Quay were the provisional government met. I was there all day all the time, often until 1 am. ‘.

In early 1916 the police raided the Worker’s Republic newspaper to seize the paper as a result of James Connolly’s ‘seditious articles’[6]. According to Helena Molony;

‘Jinny Shanahan and I were there. I always carried a revolver. [James] Connolly was in a little office between the shop and the printing place. Jinny went to him while I held up the police with the revolver and said “you can’t seize the paper.” Then Connolly came out and drew his revolver. The officer said ‘we have come to seize the newspaper’. Connolly said, “you can’t” “But I have my orders” the policeman said. “You drop it or I’ll drop you” Connolly said.’ The Police backed down.[7]

Just prior to the Rising, she and Helena Molony decamped to the trade union headquarters at Liberty Hall where James Connolly planned to assemble the Citizen Army.

Helena Molony recalled, that at Liberty Hall ‘For the last fortnight before the Rising, myself and

Jinny Shanahan were actually sleeping at night under a pile of men’s coats.’[8] Jinny herself however, told the military pension that she was in Liberty Hall only from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

For a nerve racking day, it appeared as if the Rising was not going ahead after all, as the Volunteers’ leader Eoin MacNeill (who had never been in on the plan and was only told about it on Good Friday) attempted at the last minute to call it off.

However by Easter Monday, Connolly and the other conspirators managed to get word to units loyal to them that the rebellion was going ahead that day. The ICA assembled at Liberty Hall and marched out to seize different spots around the city. Jinny Shanahan was sent with Helena Molony and Kathleen Lynn, along with roughly 50 other ICA men and 10 women to attack Dublin Castle, the seat of British government in Ireland.

The Rising: Dublin Castle and City Hall

Dublin Castle was, unknown to the insurgents, in fact lightly defended by 25 British troops, but after shooting a policeman who tried to stop them entering, Sean Connolly and his Citizen Army unit, when they came under fire from the small British garrison there, decided instead to occupy the adjacent City Hall, the centre of Dublin’s municipal government.

Jinny told the military pension board in 1935 that she ‘Went with Sean Connolly to Dublin Castle. Kathleen Lynn arrived later by car at City Hall with First Aid equipment.’ But the ‘Castle Gate was closed. I arrived at 12 noon but we had City Hall occupied by one o’clock’. She was second in command of the women’s section after Kathleen Lynn, who ‘brought me up on the roof’ of City Hall.

According to Jinny, British troops were not their only problem, scuffles broke out in the street with a ‘hostile crowd’ composed of the ‘women of soldiers’ i.e. the wives of local men serving in the British Army. Sean Connolly was wounded in the hand, which Jinny had to bandage.

City Hall was soon one of the first sites of intense combat that week. First, about 200 British troops from the Royal Barracks, many of them Irishmen from the Dublin Fusiliers, arrived at the Ship Street barracks of the Castle and opened a steady fire on the rebels in City Hall.

According to Jinny, ‘At about six o’clock [Monday April 24] there was a big attack by British troops on City Hall’. By the evening of Monday April 24th another 200 British troops had arrived and launched a determined assault on the building. Fierce fighting ensued in which many of the British troops were killed or injured. According to Neil Richardson, 100 men from the Reserve Cavalry Division took part in the first wave of the attack on City Hall and at least 20 were killed and wounded in the first attack and more thereafter. [9]

Helena Molony, who was beside Jinny Shanahan on the roof of City Hall, from where the Citizen Army fighters were firing recalled, ‘there was a young British soldier killed on Ship Street. I could see him lying wounded. I can remember saying to Jinny Shanahan, ‘I wonder should we do something for him?’ But [Sean] Connolly said ‘his own lads will come for him’.[10]

Shortly afterwards, Sean Connolly himself was shot and mortally wounded. Jinny told the pension board in 1935; ‘We were only about three quarters of hour in action when Sean was wounded in the lung and it proved to be fatal’. ‘He was wounded in the hand but he put his men in position around the roof and he was going around to cover all the approaches to the Castle [when] a sniper in the Clock Tower got Sean and he only lived five minutes’. Helena Molony remembered Connolly’s young brother Matt crying as he watched his brother die.

Intense firing continued and casualties on the roof began to mount. According to Jinny, ‘

A man named O’Reilly took his [Sean Connolly’s] place. We had three men slightly wounded and we managed to dress them up and put them back in position. But one of them was badly wounded and we had to get him off the roof through the skylight and put him in the care of the women below.’

Eventually, under cover of machine gun fire and grenades, the British troops broke into City Hall with bayonets fixed, according to Helena Molony shouting ‘Surrender in the name of the King’.

Molony related,

‘Apparently, according to Jinny’… troops came in and ‘it would never occur to them of course that there were women soldiers. Actually the women in the Citizen Army were not first aiders they did military work, except where it suited them to be first aiders. Even before the Russian Army had women soldiers the Citizen Army had them. The British officers thought these girls had been taken prisoner by the rebels. They asked them “did they do anything to you?” Were they kind to you?”. “how many are up there?” Jinny Shanahan answered quick enough, “No they didn’t do anything to us. There are hundreds upstairs, they have big guns and everything.”

The British were temporarily delayed from storming the roof as a result of Jinny’s deception.

But when the last twelve ICA men from the roof were finally captured and brought down from the roof one said ‘hullo Jinny are you alright?”. The officer looked at her, angry at how he had been fooled by this girl’. ‘I thought that was something Napoleon would have decorated her for,’ Molony quipped.[11]

Jinny herself testified that she was arrested and taken to Ship Street Barracks and then Kilmainham Gaol but that she was held for only a week. She stated that she was released the day ICA second in command Michael Mallin was executed, which was on 8 May 1916.

Her friend and comrade Helena Moloney was one of only five women who were imprisoned in England after the Rising.

Post Rising

In 1917, while many of the Rising’s leaders were still in prison, Jinny was involved in publicity and propaganda work for the republican movement.

She and Helena Molony (who was released in December 1916) hoisted tricolours in 1917 on military positions held in the city in Easter Week and posted the rebel Proclamation of the Republic throughout city. She also took part in the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in September 1917.

Her pension statement says she did ‘detective duty’ afterwards, but this, it turns out in interview with the pension board, only amounted to hiding documents for the movement. She remained a Citizen Army member, her OC throughout this period being Richard McCormick.

In 1920 she helped to enforce the Belfast Boycott, by which in response to attacks on Catholics in the north, firms were forbidden for doing business with Belfast. Jinny stated that she used her union contacts for the Republican labour department, to get tobacco manufacturers to boycott Belfast.

In contrast to the Rising, Jinny’s role in the War of Independence (1919-21) was much more of an auxiliary than an active fighter. She stated before the pensions board that during the ‘Black and Tan time’, ‘I often cared for wounded men’ in Dublin after ambushes, but ‘I did not throw any bombs’.

‘Guns were sometimes hidden in my garden, but I never carried guns or explosives myself. She taught first aid to the mainstream women’s republican group Cumann na mBan but was never a member. She remained in the ICA throughout.

Lily Brennan states that Jinny ‘was in Kilmainham jail with me after the Rising’ and after was a ‘Willing worker for the Republican cause’. ‘Her home was used to shelter IRA men and used for dispatches’, which ‘at height of Black and Tan terror was no small thing’.

During this time, Jinny stated her ‘house was raided and broken up’ by British forces looking for suspects, arms or papers.

Civil War period June 28 1922-May 1923

Like most of the radical republican women, including Helena Molony and Kathleen Lynn and like most of what remained of the Citizen Army, Jinny Shanahan took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War of 1922 1923.

The war began when pro-Treaty or Free State forces opened fire on the anti-Treaty IRA stronghold in the Four Courts in central Dublin on June 28 1922.

Jinny told the pension board in 1935 that she was mobilised by Lily Brennan (who had also been in City Hall in 1916 and Kilmainham Gaol thereafter) the day fighting broke out at the Four Courts. They went to the Sinn Fein office in Suffolk Street where she was in charge of medical supplies and ‘did a few dispatches’.

The Four Courts fell in two days and within a week Free State forces had driven the anti-Treaty IRA (and some Citizen Army fighters) from central Dublin.

After fighting ceased Jinny and Lilly Brennan opened a field hospital secretly in Cullenswood House, Ranelagh under Dr Kathleen Lynn and moved wounded anti-Treaty fighters there who were wanted by the authorities. Jinny stated that ‘if they were caught they would have been executed. I was in charge of the hospital and got them removed from the city hospitals.’ They secretly treated fourteen men at Cullenswood, where the improvised hospital lasted for two months.

Afterwards, Jinny came under suspicion from the Free State authorities and her house was raided in a so called ‘sit down raid’ This was where CID detectives would take over a house for a day and arrest anyone who called. Jinny stated;

‘The Free Staters raided me about three weeks after hospital closed down. It was a sit down raid. [The board asked] ‘Anybody who knocked got arrested?’ [Jinny answered] Yes but they got nobody, my father removed the signs [which told republican activists on the run that the house was safe]. I was not at home.’

Like many Irish Civil War stories, Jinny’s was tinged with a sense of personal animosity and betrayal. She knew the detective who was hunting her. She told the pension board, ‘I heard Mark Byrne was looking for me and cleared off. He came twice again and I just missed him’.

She did some intelligence work afterwards with an IRA officer named Sean Noonan, but unlike many female activists during the Civil War, she was never arrested. Her house was on one occasion used as a meeting place for the anti-Treaty IRA Army Council in 1923.

Later life and death

Jinny Shanahan had fought for a fully independent Ireland, for equality for women and for a better life for workers. Instead by 1924, she found herself on the losing side of a Civil War between rival Irish nationalists, in a conservative Catholic state that was deeply suspicious of the radical republican women who had helped to bring it into existence.

Jinny seems to have spent the post-revolutionary years caring for her elderly father, who was in poor health. She never married and lived with her father and brother at 51 Larkfield Grove in the Dublin suburb of Kimmage. Her friend and comrade Helena Molony lived just a few doors away at 71 Larkfield Grove.

In 1934, after Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fail came to power, anti-Treaty veterans of the Civil War period were entitled to apply for military pensions. It was also the de Valera government that opened the military pension to female activists. It seems that Helena tried to secure one for Jinny, who by this time was in poor health. Her claim seems to have been forgotten until late in 1935 when she wrote again to the pension board asking if her claim had been overlooked.

In November 1935 she was brought before the board to give a sworn statement on her activities during the revolutionary years.

The interview was sometimes testy, one board member asking why her interview contradicted some details in her application: Question ‘did you fill out this form yourself?’ In fact it is likely that Helena Molony filled out much of it for her.

Two months later, at the age of just 39 Jinny was dead. Helena Molony wrote to the military pensions board in January 1936, stating that she lodged a claim ‘and her friends do not know at present quite where her claim stands. ‘She died quite suddenly and unexpectedly last week, although in failing health for some years and she left an aged father who was almost wholly dependent on her’.

‘I am making this request as her officer, deeming it as I do my duty to help wind up her affairs in a way most advantageous to this faithful soldier of the Republic.’

Jinny died from ‘chronic neuritis and ueramia’ [disease of kidneys].

She was posthumously granted a pension of £27 per annum 1934-1937 in November 1936. Two years pension was back-dated and paid to her 82 year old father. It was a sad and unworthy end.

Like many female activists of that era she might have been forgotten completely had she not been the great aunt of singer and song writer Damian Dempsey. He told the Irish Independent in 2016, ‘I was searching online to see if any of my ancestors had been involved in the Rising, when my father said, ‘Look for your great grandfather’s sister, Jennie Shanahan. She was active in 1916’ and when he found Helena Molony’s account of Jinny Shanahan in City Hall, ‘as I read about her, the hairs on the back of my head stood up’. He dedicated a song ‘Aunt Jennie’ to her on his album ‘Rising’. [12]

A recent television programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ on the Irish national broadcaster RTE, featured Damian Dempsey exploring his family history. Dempsey expressed the opinion that Jinny was a casualty of ‘de Valera’s Ireland’; conservative and patriarchal. Perhaps. Some radical women did feel betrayed by the conservative reality of the Irish state.

But enlisting Civil War divisions to serve a modern agenda does not really advance our understanding of the times of the revolutionaries themselves. Most women republicans, including Jinny Shanahan took the anti-Treaty side in 1922 and its was only de Valera’s government Fianna Fail that opened military pensions to them as combat veterans.

Only by seeing activists as the complicated people they were, possessed of the often tortuous loyalties of a long and complex struggle will we begin to understand their significance.

References

[1] Jane Shanahan Military Pension File 34Ref10154

[2] Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/suffragettes-at-war-1.2427219

[3] Ruan O’Donnell, The Impact of the 1916 upon the nations, p.27

[4] Jane Shanahan Military Pension File 34Ref10154, all subsequent references are from her pension file unless otherwise stated.

[5] Helena Molony BMH WS

[6] Connolly’s articles called for armed insurrection for Irish independence and against the British war effort, which he described as a ‘capitalist, imperialist’ war. Under the Defence of the Realm Act or DORA, his previous newspaper the Irish Worker had been suppressed and its presses seized.

[7] Helena Molony BMH statement.

[8] Molony BMH

[9] See Neil Richardson, According to Their Lights, Stories of Irishmen in the British Army, Easter 1916, p93-98..

[10] Molony BMH

[11] Molony BMH

[12] https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/rising-memories/aunt-jennie-deserves-a-song-damien-dempsey-on-1916-heroine-34338610.html

By John Dorney

 In 1562, Shane O’Neill, lord of the powerful O’Neill dynasty in Ulster, arrived at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I in London. He was, one writer tells us, ‘attended everywhere by his guard of gallowglass [gal oglaigh, Scottish Gaelic mercenary soldiers] armed with axes, bare headed, with curled hair hanging down… whom the English people gazed on with no less admiration than they do nowadays them of China or America’.[1]

According to one exasperated English Lord Deputy, ‘I believe that Lucifer was never puffed up with pride more than O’Neill is’.[2]

Shane was to his admirers, a defiant Irish lord, who treated the English as equals, to his enemies, both Irish and English, a vainglorious tyrannical ruler, ‘Shane the Proud’ whose ambition in the end caused his own ruin.

Ciaran Brady begins his recent biography of Shane O’Neill by recounting the hostile legends built up around Shane; that he would ‘swallow up vast quantities of usquebeatha’ (uisce beatha or whiskey)’ and subsequently bury himself up to the neck in hot ash to cure his hangover; that he raped the wife of the O’Donnell chieftain while her husband Calvagh was chained in front of them, that he was cruel but cowardly in battle.

But as Brady points out, all of these stories were spread by O’Neill’s enemies, both Irish and English, after his death. Even his popular nickname, ‘Shane the Proud’or Sean an Diomais, was an invention of his Irish foes. Burying oneself in ash was a common folk medicine at the time – a cure for arthritis – and Cathleen O’Donnell appears to have willing eloped with Shane and stayed with him until the end. [3]

But outside of those who wanted to praise or damn him, Shane O’Neill was a man of historical significance. He was certainly a cruel man and in modern terms, a ruthless warlord. But more broadly, Shane O’Neill demonstrated to the Tudor English that they would not be able to take control of Ireland and to anglicise it without violence and coercion. The Gaelic political system that spawned Shane O’Neill would not fit into the grooves constructed by the Tudor state in Ireland.

The O’Neills of Tir Eoin

The O’Neill dynasty dominated all of central Ulster in the early 16^th century. Their lordship was Tir Eoin – or Tyrone in English – but it reached far beyond the modern county of that name, in fact incorporating all of modern counties Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry, and much of modern Armagh as well.

The O’Neills had been the foremost power in the north of Ireland since the 12^th century and their castles and tower houses dotted the landscape from Clandeboye in the east to the Foyle river the west.

To the east of the O’Neills’ for most of their history was the Anglo-Norman Earldom of Ulster, held by the de Burgh family but this gradually fell apart in the late 15^th century and in their stead, the eastern coast of Ulster had begun to be colonised by the Gaelic Scottish clan, the MacDonnells. To the west, in modern Donegal, the O’Neills were bordered by their perennial enemies and rivals for supremacy in the west Ulster, the O’Donnells. Only force subordinated a host of smaller lordships in Ulster, such as the O’Cahans and O’Reillys to the O’Neills.

Their chieftain was known simply as The O’Neill – like all other Gaelic Irish lord, the ‘head of his name’ – but in reality they were esentially kings of a small independent country in Ulster.

Like all Gaelic lordships, the O’Neill lordship was internally unstable. According to Gaelic custom and law the lordship was not automatically inherited by the eldest son (‘primogeniture’ in contemporary English terms), but rather was the subject of fierce competition between a wide pool of cousins and nephews – the derbh fhine or true kin. In theory the successor was elected but in fact many successions were ultimately settled with violence between the rival cliamants and their personal following.  What was more, the losers in such civil wars, disaffected minor chieftains, would often break off from the main clan and set up their own independent lordship, as did the O’Neills of the Fews (modern South Armagh) and Clandeboye.

The O’Neill chieftains had traditionally dealt carefully with the English presence in Ireland,  from whom they were independent, at times fighting with the English authorities in Dublin, but just as often negotiating with them. In any case, its authority, by the 16^th century restricted to the Pale around Dublin, only touched the borders of the O’Neill lands in modern County Louth.

However, by the time Shane O’Neill was born in 1530, youngest son of the chieftain Conn Bacach O’Neill, all of this was changing. Under the Tudor monarchs, who were concerned that Ireland could be a source of foreign invasion to England itself, the English embarked on a project to bring all of Ireland under their control.

When, in 1541, King Henry VIII of England declared himself King of Ireland (rather than ‘Lord of Ireland’ as previous English monarchs had) he offered the Irish lords a settlement known as ‘surrender and regrant’. Previously English theory had been that the Gaelic lordships were ‘his majesty’s Irish enemies’ and that a constant state of war existed until they were conquered. But now under ‘surrender and regrant’, Irish Lords such as Conn Bacach O’Neill would swear fealty to the King, recognizing his authority and in return by ‘regranted’ their lands under and English title – in Conn Bacach O’Neill’s case the ‘Earl of Tyrone’.

Civil War in Ulster

Shane O’Neill was the fifth and least favoured son of Conn O’Neill, some even claimed, erroneously, that he was the illegitimate son of a Dundalk blacksmith. But he made his name as a formidable warrior in the 1540s and 50s. When Conn O’Neill was placed under arrest in Dublin in 1551, for raiding the English Pale, Shane took up position as the chief ‘captain’ of the O’Neills, holding the lordship together in the absence of its leader.

Shane had, for a military force, the backing of his foster family the O’Donnellys and successfully hired Scottish mercenaries from among the MacDonnells. However his bitterest enemies were his own kin, and in the 1550s the O’Neill lands descended into a bitter civil war between Shane and his brothers and half brothers. At first, Shane claimed to be acting on behalf of Conn, the Earl, against his rebellious sons who wanted to either split up the lordship of take the title of O’Neill for themselves.

Acting with great ruthlessness, Shane stripped the succession to the Lordship from the English-backed Feardaragh (Fear Dorcha – dark man, also called Matthew) O’Neill whom the English had granted the title of Baron of Dungannon. Shane was the youngest son but he was the strongest war leader. He launched a bloody campaign against his half-brothers and their territory, which he burned and spoiled.

By the time of the bloodletting was over, Shane had emerged victorious. By 1554 he had seen Feardaragh, the English successor killed. Not content with this, he also exiled Conn from the O’Neill lands and on the death of the latter in 1559 in the Pale, Shane had himself made The O’Neill.[4]

This type of internal conflict was not at all uncommon in Gaelic Ireland. Shane was, to Gaelic eyes, the legitimate successor, merely the winner of a bloody and messy succession dispute.  The problem was that the English recognition of one claimant forced them to choose sides.

Enter Sussex

Anthony St Leger, the Lord Deputy entrusted with implementing the advance of the new Kingdom of Ireland, throughout most of the 1540s and 1550s, preferred making allies by conciliation rather than enemies by confrontation. He was also not above giving and taking bribes from local interests to grease the wheels of diplomacy. The Lord Deputy did have run-ins with the O’Neills. In response to their raiding of the Pale, he raided back into Ulster via an aggressive garrison of English troops under Nicholas Bagnal, who were established at Newry in east Ulster.

At one point had Con O’Neill, the chieftain arrested when he visited Dublin, by Croft, an interim Lord Deputy. However for St Leger, such conflicts were always temporary and could usually be resolved by compromise.

St Leger stayed in place, on and off, until 1556 before finally being sacked for his pervasive corruption and replaced by the Earl of Sussex.[5]

Sussex was a major English aristocrat  and was, unlike his predecessor, a man with a fixed agenda. He diagnosed that Ireland’s violence was not simply a result of militarised independent lordships, but a result of “faction” – the series of alliances that kept Irish lords constantly in arms against each other – so for instance the alliance between the O’Neills and the Earls of Kildare would have to severed and the O’Neills and O’Donnells forced to make peace, under English backed rulers.

In the case of the O’Neills, he insisted, against the better judgement of some others in the Dublin administration, that Shane, the usurper, in his eyes, should be forcibly removed and replaced by the English backed candidate; Hugh, the surviving son of Feardaragh O’Neill. He also planned to expel the Scottish MacDonnell clan from Ireland altogether. [6]

By all this, Sussex proclaimed he would finally establish the rule of common law throughout Ireland. From the start, Sussex’s theoretical programme proved inadequate when faced with awkward Irish realities.

Shane had built up a large military force of about 4000, partly through mercenaries, but also through pressing his peasant dependants into military service. He raided the Pale incestantly, burning the town of Carlingford and blockading Dundalk. He also took the opportunity to raid the O’Donnell’s territory to punish them for allying with Sussex and it was at this point that he captured their chieftain, Calvagh and took his wife as his own. [7]

Sussex’s campaigns

Sussex led several expeditions into central Ulster to depose Shane and re-introduce what he considered the rightful heir of the O’Neill dynasty (or the Earldom of Tyrone as he saw it). His forces marched from Armagh into O’Neill lands in 1559 and in 1560-61, rounding up cattle and crops but unable to destroy Shane’s powerbase.

Wisely perhaps, Shane did not attempt to confront Sussex in battle, but reverted to the time- honoured Gaelic tactics when faced with a superior force. He denied the enemy the chance to live off the land by removing cattle and crops from their line of march and withdrew to the woods, hills and bogs, from where he harried the flanks and rear of the English columns. As a result, Sussex spent the better part of his expeditions to Ulster marching around searching for an invisible enemy until his supplies or the weather gave out. At this point he would have to return to Dublin, leaving Shane firmly in possession of Tir Eoin and proud as ever.

‘For so long as one son a Saxon remains in my territory against my will, he wrote to Sussex, there will be no peace’.[8]

Sussex’s grand programme for pacification thus turned out to be an abject and costly failure. The burden for paying for it fell mainly on the Palesmen, who, disgruntled at the Lord Deputy’s adventures, refused to approve extra taxation in the Dublin parliament. And were instead coerced into paying “Cess” – an extra-parliamentary tax originally intended to pay for the quartering of the Lord Deputy and his bodyguard, but which was reinterpreted to mean paying for the quartering of all Crown troops in Ireland. In the Pale, this imposition was viewed as arbritrary and illegal military government and a boycott was organised throughout the 1560s and ‘70s.[9]

Humiliatingly, for Sussex, while his military strategy was failing, The Earl of Kildare and Sir Thomas Cusack managed to get Shane O’Neill pardoned and invited to Elizabeth I’s Court, where Shane histrionically prostrated himself before the Queen, but then read out a series of demands. At Court, Shane argued that he should be recognised as the legitimate Earl of Tyrone, since Feardaragh had been a bastard son of Con Bacach, and besides, as The O’Neill, Shane was already “the head of his people” by Irish custom. [10]

This was a significant claim on Shane’s part – claiming primacy for the position of The O’Neill, over the inherited title of Earl which the English recognised. Although Elizabeth did not accept O’Neill’s argument, the incompatibility of English and Gaelic social organisations was a worrying omen for the future. Shane returned to Ulster without a settlement, but still in control of Tir Eoin. Unable to curb his further aggression, the English signed a treaty with him at Drumcree in 1563, recognising him as ‘The Lord O’Neill’.[11]

Exasperated and ruined, Sussex was replaced in 1564. His successor, Henry Sidney, inherited his problems.

Shane’s years of triumph and disaster

While the English had made a treaty with Shane O’Neill in 1563, they had no real intention of keeping to it; Shane was becoming too powerful. In 1565 he crushed the MacDonnells at a pitched battle at Glentasie in Antrim, after they had attempted to invade Clandeboye in County Down. Over 600 Scots were killed. He also enforced his authority over the Irish lords in Breifne (modern Cavan) and in Connacht and expelled the English garrisons from Newry and Dundrum. Rumours had also reached the English that Shane was intriguing with Mary Queen of Scots and with the King of France.[12]

In 1566 Elizabeth formally sanctioned breaking the treaty made with Shane in 1563 and the Lord Deputy Henry Sidney again led his forces to war with Shane. As with Sussex’s expeditions, at first this did not go at all well for the English. Shane besieged the town of Drogheda for a time and an English garrison established at Derry was forced to evacuate.

The downfall of Shane the Proud did not in fact come at English hands at all, but in an amazing stroke of fortune for Henry Sidney and the Dublin administration, at the hands of the O’Neill’s hereditary enemies, the O’Donnells.

Shane marched his army into their territory in 1567 in order to impose his authority on O’Donnell allies, O’Cahan and O’Hanlon, who had ceased paying O’Neill tribute. In a fierce battle at Farsetmore, near the modern town of Letterkenny, Shane was routed. Out of 2,000 men he brought to the battle, over 1,500 were lost, some in the fighting, many drowned in the River Swilly as they tried to get away.

Having lost the bulk of his fighters, Shane turned to the MacDonnells of Antrim, the allies of his youth, for refuge and reinforcements. The MacDonnells though, keeping in mind Shane’s recent ravaging of their own territory, killed him instead and an English officer William Piers, sent Shane’s pickled head to the Lord Deputy in Dublin, who displayed it on the walls of Dublin Castle. [13]

Aftermath

Sussex, the Lord Deputy who was brought down by his inability to topple Shane, once wrote, ‘if Shane be overthrown all is settled, if Shane settle all is overthrown’. But in fact Shane O’Neill’s death settled nothing at all in Ulster or in Ireland generally.

The MacDonnell’s in the short term received thanks and promises for killing Shane, but in the 1570sthe English under the Earl of Essex, made a concerted , but failed, attempt to remove them from Ireland, in the process carrying out an atrocious massacre of MacDonnell clans-people in 1575 at Rathlin Island. Nevertheless, the MacDonnells held their lands and the campaign was called off on the orders of the Queen. [14]

Turlough Lineach O’Neill, a cousin of Shane’s took over as The O’Neill and unlike his belligerent predecessor, quietly built up alliances with the O’Donnells and MacDonnells, which served to shore up all of their position against the English. His successor in turn, Hugh O’Neill, the English protégé, would eventually return to Ulster and wreak a terrible vengeance on the sons of Shane, who had killed his father. But Hugh was no English stooge, in fact he would fight largest Gaelic war of resistance against them – the Nine Years War – in 1594-1603.

Shane O’Neill was, or course, no nationalist hero. He, like all of his contemporaries, lived in a different world, where such categories did not yet apply. He was a self-interested Gaelic lord, who fought his clan rivals and indeed rival O’Neills more than anyone else. But his career does tell us something about sixteenth century Ireland. The English project of ‘reforming’ Ireland could not happen peacefully. Gaelic and English modes of law and government were too different, too incompatible to be fused peacefully. Only after a great deal mode blood had been shed would English rule advance over all of Ulster and all of Ireland.

References

[1] Thomas Wright, History of Ireland from the earliest times. The quote is from the English historian William Camden, who wrote in the early 17^th century.

[2] Eleanor Hull, A History of Ireland, https://www.libraryireland.com/HullHistory/Shane1.php

[3] Ciaran Brady, Shane O’Neill, UCD, 2015, p1-5

[4] Sean Connolly, Contested Ireland, Oxford 2007, p.139-141

[5] Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland, the Incomplete Conquest, p174-175

[6] Ibid. p179

[7] Lennon, p268-269

[8] Brady, p143

[9] Lennon p181-182

[10] Ciaran Brady, Shane O’Neill, p38-47

[11] Brady, p.66

[12] Brady, p74-75

[13] Lennon p274

[14] Lennon p274-280

John Dorney interviews Richard Grayson on his recent book Dublin’s Great Wars, which examines Ireland’s capital city’s experience both of the First World War and nationalist revolution from 1914-1923.

We talk about:

 The very varied motivations and social backgrounds of Dublin recruits.

Their experiences at the battle fronts.

How the war came to define rival and mutually hostile brands of Irish nationalist and republicanism.

How the War veterans fared on their return to Ireland, challenging assumptions about their presumed political allegiances and treatment by republicans.

How commemoration of the war is a far more complex story and than simply wilful ‘forgetting’.

His book is reviewed by John Dorney here.

Dublin’s Great Wars, The First World War, The Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution

By Richard Grayson

Published By Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Reviewer: John Dorney

Ireland’s experience of the First World War has recently been the subject of much reflection and comment. Since the 1990s, there has been something of a project to ‘recover’ Ireland’s lost or ‘forgotten’ part in the Great War. According to some interpretations, Ireland’s military contribution to the British war effort – about 200,000 men served in the war and at least 35,000 were killed – was part of a ‘shared history’ that had been obliterated by an intolerant Irish republican narrative post-Irish Independence.

Whatever we may think of such a narrative; and I would argue that both popular support for the war effort and Republican antipathy towards war veterans has been greatly exaggerated; it should be acknowledged both that the war affected Ireland deeply and that the demands of total war created the context for armed insurrection in Ireland and ultimately for the end of British rule as it had existed prior to 1914.

Dublin’s place in the story of Ireland’s part in the Great War (and opposition to it) is particularly interesting. Dublin was both over-represented in recruitment to the British armed forces and was also the cradle of armed nationalist revolution in the Rising of 1916.

Padraig Yeates in A City in Wartime (2011) wrote in detail of the Home Front in Dublin. Here Richard Grayson of Goldsmiths University London writes a comprehensive military history of combatants from Dublin, both at home and abroad, in the period of the First World War and the Irish Revolution.

Grayson does not make many grand overarching arguments about how the World War and the Irish revolution interacted. He does not really explore, for instance, the idea that the terrible violence of the Great War made violence at home a more palatable prospect for political actors; an idea which is central to current thinking about the plethora of civil wars that plagued post-war Europe , for instance in Robert Gerwarth’s recent The Vanquished.

But this is probably deliberate and, on balance, a good thing. Ireland’s trajectory is much more messy than the equation: Great War = destabilisation + tolerance for political violence, would suggest.

In 1914, before the outbreak of the war in Europe, Ireland was already on the verge of civil war over the Home Rule crisis. Both unionists, in the Ulster Volunteers and nationalists in the Irish Volunteers had already raised and partially armed militias and the British officer corps demonstrated, in the Curragh incident of 1914, that it could not be relied on to remain neutral in the event of conflict.

The temporary agreement of both sides to put aside their differences for the war’s duration actually defused the crisis. That the, albeit indirect, experience of total war, notably the threat of conscription, played its part in radicalising Irish nationalist opinion after the Rising of 1916 we need not doubt, but Irish experience of the war was highly complex and defies easy arguments.

So Grayson instead offers us a highly detailed and well researched account of how Dubliners joined the British forces but also the Republican fighting organisations and how they fared on the various battle fronts. Some of these stories are fairly familiar – Redmondite martyrs Thomas Kettle and Willie Redmond for instance, Home Rule Party MPs who followed John Redmond’s call to join the British Army fight for the freedom of small nations and died at the front. Or Emmet Dalton, who was with Kettle when he was killed in British uniform but later joined the IRA in Dublin and became one of Michael Collins’ right hand men.

Another interesting, story is that of the Dublin unionist company – part of pre-war paramilitary group named the Loyal Dublin Volunteers – who went north to join the Inniskilling Regiment to serve alongside fellow unionists.

But other stories demonstrate the mind bending complexity of some men’s decisions. Of these, probably the most remarkable is Michael McCabe, who served in the Easter Rising as a young boy in the Fianna, but subsequently, joined his previously avowed enemy in the British Army, in which he stayed until 1921. On discharge in 1922, he again joined intransigent Republicans in the anti-Treaty IRA in the Civil War of 1922-23, for which he was interned. But in the late 1930s Grayson finds him serving in a locally raised British regiment in West Africa in modern Ghana. Such stories, though in the minority, show how individual experiences of the war often defy easy categorisation.

Many Dubliners of course, joined the British military for economic motives. Grayson demonstrates that while there were many middle class volunteers, most recruits in Dublin were small in stature, on the verge of being malnourished and from the unskilled working class.

For all that, most served doggedly though the war, in which at least 6,000 Dubliners were killed. Those Irish units in Dublin in Easter 1916 fought without complaint against the Volunteer insurgents.

Unlike for example, Polish or Czech conscripts in the Russian or German armies, who changed sides in large numbers when captured, there was next to no take up among Irish prisoners of war for Roger Casement’s attempt to recruit a pro-German Irish Brigade.

Grayson puts this down to recruits’ fear that they would be breaking a solemn oath by changing sides and also to the widespread perception that, as Redmond had maintained, they were in a sense fighting for Ireland.

Grayson takes us in detail through the many and bloody campaigns in which Dublin troops served – from the prewar regulars in the campaigns of 1914, through the slaughter at the Gallipoli landings in 1915, where many of the Dublin Fusiliers were killed, through the battle of the Somme and the campaigns of 1917 and 1918. Their losses were somewhat higher than the British average, 19% as opposed to a mean of 12% fatalities, which Grayson puts down to more widespread service in the infantry among Dubliners than was the norm.

It is no exaggeration to say that Dublin men (and some women, principally as nurses), served all over the world. On the oceans with the Royal Navy, including the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and from the jungles of East Africa to the deserts of the middle east, as well as the familiar trenches of northern France and Belgium. Amid all the tragedy of war, it is somewhat amusing to read of the culture shock of Dubliners arriving in exotic climes such as Salonika or Cairo, where everything from language to religion to weather to clothing was strange to the Irishmen and their British comrades.

On the vexed question of the fate of war veterans in Ireland post 1918, Grayson has some interesting and measured points to make. Irish veterans were somewhat more likely to be unemployed in the postwar period than their British counterparts, but this was probably a feature of the class profile of Irish recruits more than anything else.

British Army veterans in the IRA in the War of Independence were numerically very rare, Grayson identifies only 16 such men out of around 3,000 enrolled in the Dublin IRA. But that said, some, notably Emmet Dalton, rose to senior positions in it.

Widening the scope outside of Dublin one could also point to locally important IRA figures such as Tom Barry and Ignatius O’Neill who were also British war veterans. British Army veterans were not sought out by the IRA, but where they did prove their loyalty, their military training was highly valued.

In the Civil War, it well known that the Free State’s National Army recruited heavily from among Irish British Army veterans, but so too, on occasion did the anti-Treaty IRA. Grayson disavows the idea that there was a general IRA vendetta against British Army veterans in Dublin or elsewhere. While some were killed by the IRA, there were 120 such cases, this is a small number out of at least 84,000 returned veterans. (One unanswered question here, by the by, is why so many who survived the war did not return to Ireland). In general, we might conclude, the relationship between Republican fighters and British Army veterans was estrangement rather than either friendship oroutright enmity.

Regarding commemoration of the war, again, Grayson takes us on a nuanced and complex journey. Some veterans felt alienated from the British establishment by the end of the war and refused to take part in the victory parade in Dublin 1919. Home Rule, after all had not transpired and due to the Rising and the anti-conscription campaign, Ireland laboured under a kind of martial law by 1918.

But there were large Armistice Day parades in Dublin throughout the 1920s, despite the opposition to them of some militant Republicans. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised Free State President W.T. Cosgrave’s ‘chivalrous and thoughtful’ response to an invitation to the 1926 Armistice Day in London. Cosgrave politely declined the invitation and sent minister Kevin O’Higgins instead because he was afraid that his record of fighting against British forces in Ireland would cause unnecessary pain and distress to the relatives of fallen British soldiers.

Even Eamon de Valera, the representative of the majority of anti-Treaty Republican opinion, was far more conciliatory to Great War commemorations than some popular accounts of today would have one believe. Grayson notes that the War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge were constructed under the watch of his Fianna Fail government between 1937 and 1940 and was part paid for by his government.

It was only during the later Northern Ireland conflict that the Gardens were shut in 1971 and remained so until 1988. If Dublin and Ireland’s role in the First World War was indeed willfully forgotten, this did not happen until many decades after the war itself.

This is an extremely well researched and informative book, a worthy follow-up to Grayon’s previous ‘Belfast Boys’ on the service of Belfast men in the Great War. If it generally eschews grand arguments about Ireland and the Great War, it more than makes up for this with level headed and readable narrative.

See also our interview with Richard Grayson here.

By Dan Harvey

Published by Merrion Press (2018)

Reviewer: Evan Comerford

Day to day life for ordinary citizens in the Republic of Ireland, bar perhaps those in border communities, was generally not impacted to the same extent by the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. But over the course of three decades the conflict did become a constant consideration and forced the various governments of the day to toe a fine line.

A tough approach to republican paramilitary activity in the south was needed to ensure domestic security without appearing to be too cooperative with the British Army in the North. The front-line responders, An Garda Siochana and the Irish Defence Forces, faced real and immediate threats during this period and were forced to combat extremist operations that were becoming increasingly sophisticated.

In ‘Soldiering Against Subversion’, Dan Harvey delves into how the role of the Defence Forces, during the years 1969 to 1998, developed in the face of a challenging and unique domestic security environment.

Harvey devotes considerable time in the beginning to setting the broader context of Northern Ireland in the late sixties, which ultimately provides the reader with a clearer rationale for how the Defence Forces responded. The Troubles produced a series of unique security threats in the Republic, some of which were one-offs that required firm and immediate action, while others were long term challenges that needed constant intelligence and upskilling.

As a former Lieutenant Colonel, Harvey goes about explaining the intricacies of both types of challenges using his insight and knowledge of the army’s inner workings. He comfortably manoeuvres between explanations of detailed military exercises like the transportation of IRA prisoners between prison and court-cases, to high-level analysis of how the Defence Forces interacted with government and responded strategically, which in turn showcases the wide range of work and duties the Defence Forces performed.

The Republican Threat

One thing that becomes apparent in ‘Soldiering Against Subversion’ is the potential for the over-spill of the Northern conflict in the 26 counties to cause utter anarchy in the south.

In chapter eight Harvey describes the high-profile prison break of three Provisional IRA members in 1973, which involved the hijacking of a commercial helicopter which was flown directly into the yard at Mountjoy prison.

Such daring exercises seem otherworldly now, but they fuelled massive propaganda victories for the IRA and manage to sum-up the chaotic tone of the time.

The re-telling of the precarious scenarios that soldiers and Gardaí encountered together is a strength throughout this book, such as the kidnapping of Dentist John O’Grady in 1987 by INLA member Dessie ‘The Border Fox’ O’Hare. Though O’Grady was later freed, most of the kidnapping party, including O’Hare, went on the run.

The Gardaí, with a Defence Forces protection party in tow, learned that O’Hare was headed for Urlingford in Kilkenny, where they promptly set up a checkpoint. O’Hare attempted to ram the checkpoint with his car while shooting one-handed out the driver-side window, which forced soldiers to open fire on the car’s tyres and on the car’s passengers. It was only in these extreme circumstances, where a very clear threat to the public or their own safety occurred, that the Defence Forces could engage in open fire like this. 

Strength of First-Hand Accounts

Harvey’s eye for military detail is complemented by a series of first-hand accounts offered by ex-servicemen that are dotted throughout. Theses insights offer another layer of detail into the specifics of Army life and operations and help explain in real terms the role they were required to carry out.

Some of the ex-soldier interviewees are named while others remain anonymous, but all show an incredible ability to re-account their exact movements, orders and thoughts during those key moments, which is a testament to the discipline and detail upon which Armies operate.

One Commanding Officer’s account shows how the public seemed unaware of the Army’s preparedness to act as the last line of defence when called upon. He was centrally involved when the Defence Forces supported the Gardaí in 1981 during a protest march on the British Embassy in Ballsbridge and recalled,

‘A deputation from the demonstrators were allowed behind the Garda line to confer with the main Garda officer…..I remember the look of astonishment on their faces when they caught sight of our presence drawn in orderly ranks’

Another officer’s account epitomized the on-edge relationship between the Defence Forces and the IRA during the Troubles. He re-called the reaction of a fellow Defence Force member in a Dundalk pub when an altercation with a well-known PIRA member ended with him telling them that someday they would be shot at the crossroads,

‘He (IRA man) was totally startled when he was suddenly grabbed a hold of by the collar of his shirt by one of us and was firmly told “We won’t be shooting ye on the crossroads, we’ll be shooting ye in yer beds” ‘.

Objectivity

The narrative does lose focus at times by getting side-tracked into providing too much detail on the IRA and their own history and actions. On occasions Harvey’s role as an ex-serviceman dilutes his ability to accurately provide impartial analysis.

For example, the working relationship between soldiers and Gardaí appears to have generally worked well according to Harvey, but the fact that Gardaí received more favourable working conditions (such as regular shift hours and overtime payments) which was not given to the Defence Forces does seem to be a bone of contention that, while perhaps valid, comes across as the venting of a grievance felt internally in the Defence Forces as opposed to something that actually impacted on the effectiveness of providing security to the State.

It raises a wider question, which is: how objective can someone be when discussing something which they were linked so closely to?

The characteristics of detailed historical research are not at the core of this book. This book is a re-telling, indeed perhaps the most significant one thus far, of a worthy and unappreciated story told through expert military insights from the author and fascinating first-hand accounts from those who experienced life in Irish Army uniform.

It shows how perhaps their greatest strength was not the growing intelligence in dealing with the terrorist threat, but their discretion and often what they didn’t do during times when the possibility of widespread violence was very real. It provides a convincing account of the nuanced and challenging role the Defence Forces played and how that contribution has been somewhat forgotten.

By Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Although there had been some skirmishes between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British forces in Ireland in the two years following the 1916 Rising the IRA’s ambush of two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Constables at Soloheadbeg, Tipperary on the 21^st January 1919 is generally accepted as the military event which began the Irish War of Independence.[1]

Whilst the names [2] of the first two members of the British forces who were killed in War of Independence, and the circumstances of their shooting at Soloheadbeg are relatively well known throughout Ireland, few Irish people, including the most ardent of Irish Republicans, can identify the first member of the IRA to be shot dead subsequent to the Soloheadbeg attack.

That first Republican killed in those circumstances was a Dublin-born member of the 2^nd Battalion of the IRA’s  Mid-Limerick Brigade named Robert “Bobby” Byrne and his death triggered “The General Strike against British Militarism” more commonly dubbed “The Limerick Soviet”.

Bobby Byrne

Robert Byrne was one of nine children born to Robert Byrne and Annie Hurley. The family were originally from Dublin but had moved to Town Wall Cottage, near St John’s Hospital in Limerick shortly after Roberts birth in 1889.

Following the widespread political and social upheaval in the wake of the 1913 Lockout and the 1916 Rising Byrne became a very ardent Trade Unionist and this soon brought him to the notice of the Post Office authorities.

About the same time he also joined the IRA and this in turn brought him to the attention of the RIC. In late 1918 Byrne was called before his senior management at the Post Office where a number of charges were laid against him. Byrne mounted a very stout defense of his actions but nonetheless he was dismissed from his job for political activity and sedition.[3]

On the same date that the Irish War of Independence began with the Soloheadbeg Ambush and the historic inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann, Byrne was a prisoner of the British Army facing court-martial in the New Barracks, Limerick. Byrne was charged with possession of a revolver, ammunition and a pair of binoculars were said to have been discovered by the RIC at his family home.

He refused to recognize the right of British Army officers to try Irish citizens in Ireland and as a protest against the court-martial, he refused to enter a plea or take part in the proceedings. Unsurprisingly the three British Army officers who made up the court found Byrne guilty and he was sentenced to 12 months in jail with hard labour. Immediately afterwards Byrne was transferred to Limerick Prison to serve his sentence.

Shortly afterwards Byrne and sixteen other republican political prisoners, who were held in the jail, began a campaign demanding political status. When this was refused Byrne helped to lead a prison protest which saw the prisoners barricading themselves in their cells, destroying prison furniture and singing republican songs.

They sang so loudly that a crowd of onlookers and supporters began to gather outside the prison. In reprisal the Prison Authorities called in the RIC to ‘restore order’ by batoning the prisoners into submission. Byrne and his fellow prisoners had their footwear confiscated and were punished with solitary confinement. In February 1919 the prisoners feeling that they had no option left went on hunger strike.[4]

The condition of the prisoners, especially Robert Byrne, was giving the British Government serious cause for concern and Byrne was transferred under armed guard to the Union Workhouse hospital on the evening of Wednesday 12^th March 1919. Byrne’s round-the-clock six  strong guard consisted of one prison officer; Warder Pat O’Mahony, in addition to four RIC Constables; Constable Martin O’Brien, Constable James Tierney, Constable James Spillane and Constable John Fitzpatrick all of whom were under the command of RIC Sergeant Henry Goulden.

The transfer of Byrne, to the Union Hospital had presented an opportunity to the IRA to rescue their comrade.

A fatal rescue attempt

One factor that the prison authorities had overlooked and that was to be crucial to a rescue attempt was the fact that Byrne was actually held under guard in a public ward in full view of visitors to the hospital. The IRA plan was that the volunteers would enter the ward posing as visitors to the various patients and at a given signal, they would hold up and overpower the police guard.

Byrne would then be taken by a waiting car to Benson’s Nursing Home at The Crescent, Limerick where he would receive medical care before going into hiding at an IRA safe house in the city.

Twenty IRA Volunteers took part in the rescue operation and these were divided into two sections – the was first under the command of Jack Gallagher of Bishop Street, Limerick and the second was under the command of a railway engineer by the name of Michael ‘Batty’ Stack. These two section leaders were the only armed IRA participants in the attack. Only the section leaders were to be armed.[5]

The rescue attempt began when Stack visited Byrne in the ward and let him know what was planned. When Byrne was appraised of what was afoot Stack left the ward by a side door and instructed the men under his command to enter the ward posing as visitors to the various inmates. When all the volunteers were in place Stack blew his whistle and on this signal, the unarmed IRA Volunteers posing as visitors in the ward immediately sprang into action and raced towards Byrne’s bed to overpower and disarm his RIC guard.[6]

All was going to plan until Constable James Spillane the RIC Constable realised what was happening and threw himself on top of the Byrne who was lying in bed. Rather than let Byrne escape Constable Spillane   drew his .45 Webley & Scott revolver, pointed it at Byrne and fired it into his chest from just a few inches away.

When Stack saw Constable Spillane’s attack on Byrne, he drew his revolver and shot the policeman in the back wounding him.

Members of the rescue party lifted Byrne from the bed and assisted him out of the ward. At this stage all the RIC Constables and the prison Warder had been overpowered, disarmed, bound and gagged except for Constable Martin O’Brien, who managed to free himself and was about to open fire on the rescue party when Stack again opened fire, shooting O’Brien dead. The shooting caused a major panic as patients, staff and visitors alike, rushed in all directions seeking shelter.

When Byrne and his rescuers reached the front of the hospital there was no sign of the ‘get away’ car they had organised to spirit Byrne to safety. The original car driver had been called away to another IRA operation and the replacement driver had not been fully briefed on the details of the plan and had driven the car to the rear entrance of the hospital rather than the main entrance where Byrne and his rescuers were waiting.

When the IRA Volunteers realized that the car to take Byrne from the scene was not where they had expected they had to abandon plans for his removal to a Nursing Home in Limerick. Instead they fled on foot it was only at this stage those assisting Byrne to escape noticed that he had been badly wounded and was bleeding heavily.[7]

They stopped the first pony and trap that they met at Hasset’s Cross. The occupants of the trap were John Ryan of Knockalisheen and his wife Margaret. Byrne was placed in the trap and taken to Ryan’s house at Knockalisheen just outside the city in the parish of Meelick, County Clare. The distance from the Workhouse to Ryan’s farm house in Clare was a mile and three quarters away. When the party reached Ryan’s, Byrne was immediately put to bed and medical and clerical aid was sent for.

Upon examination it was found that Byrne had a large bullet wound on the left side of his body and the bullet had perforated his lung and the abdomen. Unfortunately Robert Byrne was beyond human help and he succumbed to his wounds at 8.30 o’clock that evening despite the best efforts of Doctor John Holmes.

‘A Special Military Area’

After the rescue most of the rescuers had scattered back to the city and only just in time as the police and military launched a huge search as news of the rescue became known.

When eventually the remains of the twenty-eight year old, former postal clerk, were discovered all those in attendance were immediately arrested and a number of houses in the immediate area were raided. Mrs Annie Byrne, the mother of Robert, was also among the people arrested and taken in for questioning.

In total five men, Sean Hurley, Thomas Crowe, Michael Doherty, Arthur Johnson and Martin Bray were imprisoned on a charge of being accessories in the murder of Constable O’Brien.

None of the five men had either hand act or part in the attempted rescue or the shooting of the policeman. Their real crime was to have been in Ryan’s house when it was raided or to have been related to Robert Byrne[8]. A measure of the temper of Limerick City on that Monday Evening was that when the prisoners were being taken into William Street Barracks a large crowd had gathered who cheered the prisoners and jeered the police. The newspaper accounts state that the police baton charged the crowd and a number of people were injured.

On the Monday after Byrne’s death a proclamation had been issued in Dublin Castle as follows,

‘In consequence of the attack by armed men on police constables and the brutal murder of one of them at Limerick yesterday, the government has decided to proclaim the district as a special military area’. 

Whilst the decision to proclaim the city had been taken on Monday April 7^th it was felt that it would be better to hold off the implementation until the funeral of Robert Byrne was over.

Inquest

On Tuesday morning the Coroner for East Clare[9], Michael Brady, opened an inquest into the death of Robert Byrne. The inquest was held at Ryan’s house in Knockalisheen. Hemorrhage, peritonitis and shock were listed as the causes of death.

Dr Humphreys in his evidence stated that the bullet that caused Byrne’s death had entered the body just below the left nipple. Dr Humphreys, was also of the opinion that the bullet was fired in a downward direction and because of the scorch marks on the nightshirt it was fired from exceptionally close range.

When the line of evidence was beginning to point strongly in the direction of one of the police guard as having fired the fatal shot, the RIC District Inspector objected  to Dr Humphreys giving evidence as it was ‘going beyond the lines of expert knowledge’ and at that point the RIC successfully applied for the inquiry to be adjourned.[10]

How Byrne came to receive the wound has often been a source of some controversy. The view of the rescuers was that Constable Spillane had deliberately shot the prisoner when he threw himself on top of him in the hospital ward. This was also the version of events that Byrne himself related to Doctor John Holmes shortly before he died.

At the inquest into Byrne death Mr Thomas Gaffney, the Crown Solicitor, stated that the bullet that killed Byrne did not come from a police revolver. It would appear that this statement was a deliberate muddying of the waters by the authorities especially in light of the fact that Dr Humphreys assisted by Dr. Brennan, who carried out the post mortem on Byrne, stated in cross-examination at the inquest, that he did not find the bullet.

Further evidence at the inquest established that the night shirt worn by Robert Byrne had scorch or black marks near the bullet hole which indicated that the bullet was fired from almost point blank range. However some credence was lent to the possibility of Byrne having been accidentally wounded by Batty Stack when Stack admitted in an interview, in later years, to the Limerick TD and history enthusiast Jim Kemmy that it was possible that he wounded Byrne.[11]

However what is very clear is that Byrne, who knew that he was dying when he made his statement to John Holmes, had nothing to gain by blaming Spillane if Spillane was not the culprit.

This statement is corroborated by the evidence tendered at the inquest, by Dr Humphreys and the statement of Gaffney does not stand up. The most damning evidence surely was the black powder marks on the night shirt. These could only be caused by a bullet fired at virtually point blank range. While it may well be that Batty Stack fired wildly the shooting of Byrne was in accordance with RIC policy that prisoners were to be shot rather than allow them escape.

Funerals

In death Robert Byrne suffered one last indignity from the authorities as his IRA uniform had been removed and despite protests by mourners it was not returned. On the evening of Tuesday April 8^th the remains of Robert Byrne, Trade Union activist and Irish Volunteer, were removed from Ryan’s to St John’s Cathedral.

Huge crowds lined the five-mile route from Knockalisheen as the hearse with the coffin draped in the tri-colour passed on its way. Throughout Wednesday April 9^th Byrne’s remains lay in state in front of the high altar in St John’s Cathedral. Thousands of people from Limerick City and beyond came to pay their respects.

By contrast the removal and burial of Constable Martin O’Brien was a much more muted affair. His remains were removed from Limerick on Monday evening to the parish church at Birr in County Offaly. He was buried on Tuesday following Requiem Mass. The Limerick Chronicle only makes mention of one brother and one plainclothes RIC Constable travelling with the remains from Limerick to Birr.

The funeral of Robert Byrne was held from St John’s Cathedral on Thursday April 10^th to Mount St Lawrence’s Cemetery. By any measure the cortege was reckoned to be the largest that passed through Limerick for many years. The interment took place amidst huge crowds of sympathisers and police. The route of the funeral had effectively taken the cortege through the centre of the city and all business premises, along the route, were closed as a mark of respect. As Byrne’s coffin was passing up William Street a group of four British Army soldiers in uniform were captured on film standing to attention and saluting.

The ‘Limerick Soviet’

Even as the funerals of Byrne and O’Brien were taking place the British Military had begun to enact their plan for the city. On Wednesday April 10^th Brigadier General C J Griffin the O/C of the Limerick area formally declared Limerick City to be ‘a special military area’.  This meant that all civilians had to apply for and carry a special military permit to travel.

In response the Trades Union Council, of which Byrne had been a leading member, called a ‘General Strike against British Militarism’ which lasted for a fortnight. That strike was dubbed “The Limerick Soviet” by several foreign press correspondents who coincidentally were in Limerick at the time to report on the adventures of an unfortunate British pilot and adventurer named Woods, who ultimately never managed to reach Limerick let alone America![12]

The General Strike lasted from the 14^th to the 27^th April 1919 when it was called off by the Strike Committee after the local Catholic Bishop Denis Hallinan and the Mayor of Limerick Alphonsus O’Mara brokered a resolution to the dispute whereby workers would apply to their employers for a permit to enter the special military area rather than applying directly to the British Army for their permits – thus ending the dispute.

Whilst the so-called “Limerick Soviet” is still relatively well known in academic historical circles and has an enduring popularity amongst political activists on the left-wing of Irish politics; Robert Byrne’s the man whose death sparked the strike is largely forgotten.

On Easter Sunday 2015 the Meelick-Parteen and Cratloe War of Independence Commemoration Committee erected a monument at the site in Knockalisheen, Meelick, County Clare where Robert Byrne died, and to mark the centenary of Byrne’s death the Committee has organised a commemoration at the Robert Byrne Monument at 2pm on Saturday 6^th April 2019 – all are welcome to attend.

References

[1]          It is arguable that the IRA raid on Eyries RIC Barracks, Cork on St. Patrick’s Day 1918 or the killing of IRA Volunteers Richard Laide and John Browne during a failed attack on Gortatlea Barracks, Kerry a month later on 13^th of April 1918 could also be considered strong contenders for the beginning of the war – but the fact that the IRA shot dead two RIC Constables at Soloheadbeg on the same date as the inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann makes the 21^st of January 1921 the most convenient date for both political and scholarly purposes to date the beginning of the conflict.

[2]          James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell

[3]                      Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011).

[4]                        Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011).

[5]                      Among those rostered to take part in the operation were Denis Maher (Maher was later burned and seriously disfigured at the burning of Kilmurry RIC Barracks, near Castletroy, in April 1920), Tadhg Kelly (Tadhg or Thady Kelly, later joined An Garda Siochana and was posted to County Louth. He was grandfather to the Irish soccer international Gary Kelly and great grandfather to Ian Harte), Patrick Dawson, Michael Danford, Timothy Buckley, ‘Lefty’ Egan, Corky Ryan, Michael Clancy, Terry Enright, Billy Wallace, Mick Walters, William Hayes, Joseph O’Brien, Daniel Gallagher, Michael Hogan, Edward Doran, John Clancy and Joe Saunders Limerick’s Fighting Story & 2^nd Batt Roll  Mid Limerick Brigade Per Patrick Power.

[6]                      Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011).

[7]                      Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011).

[8]                      Sean (John) Hurley who was one of the founders of the Volunteers in Limerick was a cousin to Robert Byrnes. Byrne’s mother was Hurley, whose family originally came from Carrigmartin, near Ballyneety. Arthur Johnson was one of a family with a strong tradition of involvement in the Volunteers and the IRA.

[9]                      Although the rescue and shooting of Robert Byrnes occurred in Limerick City, the fact that he died in County Clare meant that the inquest was held in that county.

[10]                    Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011).

[11]            Forgotten Revolution  by Liam Cahill (O’Brien Press 1990).

[12]                    Tom Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick 1912 -1921 (Limerick 2011). Woods was attempting to become the first man to fly the Atlantic from east to west, but Wood’s plane actually went down in the Irish Sea even before it got to Ireland

A sketch of Dublin city on the eve of Irish independence. By John Dorney

Dublin city, bounded by its two canals, had a population of about 320,000 in 1922. Add in the suburbs, which had been inching outwards along the new railway lines since the mid 19^th century and the urban area was home to over half a million people.

Industry

Dublin had never had an industrial revolution like most British cities, or even Belfast, but still according to the census of 1911 employed 73,000 manual workers. The docks were crowded with ships exporting and importing. The Anglo-American Oil Company had built large storage tanks on the docks in 1897 and the Great Southern and Western railway built its lines into the docks in 1873. [1]

The railways had first arrived in the 1840s and by the 1870s had transformed much of the city, rapidly speeding up the transport of goods around the country, which had previously been confined to the pace of a tow horse along the city’s two canals. They also made possible the creation of new suburbs far beyond the old city centre.

Dublin’s lighting and power was gradually becoming electrified and its water was piped in from the Vartry reservoir, constructed in the 1860s.

Tram lines criss-crossed the city, part of the burgeoning business empire of the Murphy family – Dublin’s first Catholic multi-millionaires, in a business sector still dominated by Protestants.

Its patriarch William Martin Murphy, locked horns with labour leader Jim Larkin during the great strike and lockout of 1913, when 20,000 workers had struck for the right to organise.

Guinness famously brewed beer and Jameson whiskey along the Liffey, and there were several small breweries and distilleries nearby. Further up-river was the Irish Bottling Plant at Charlotte Quay.[2] Since the 1860s the city centre had also been graced by large department stores, the most famous of which were Arnotts, Brown Thomas and Switzers.

New working class suburbs had sprung up outside the old city centre in areas such as Inchicore around the railway lines and more middle class ones around Drumcondra on the northside and the South Circular Road south of the Liffey. On the southside the patrician Georgian areas, Fitzwilliam Square, Merrion Square, Baggot Street, had been kept more or less intact and was still home to a prosperous, largely Protestant upper middle class.

City Politics

In the eighteenth century Dublin had been a Protestant city, but due to rural migration Catholics had become the majority by the early 19^th century. Catholic nationalists, first O’Connellite ‘Repealers’ and later Parnellite ‘Home Rulers’ had taken over control of the city’s Corporation as far back as the 1840s when the voting system was reformed to include all property holders regardless of religion.

The Liberal Under Secretary for Ireland Thomas Drummond, reformed Dublin Corporation in 1840 so that it was elected on the basis of property ownership (of over £10 per year) rather than religion, Catholic voters immediately outnumbered Protestants by over two to one. Daniel O’Connell became Lord Mayor of the city in 1841, the first Catholic to hold the position since 1689.[3] Thereafter, until the 1860s, in order to avoid sectarian animosity, the office of Lord Mayor was alternated every term between Catholic and Protestant. After the 1880s, however, the city government became solidly nationalist.

In 1898, the British extended the powers of local government in Ireland, effectively devolving local power to nationalist and Catholic representatives where they were a majority, meaning that Dublin Corporation in particular became a stronghold of constitutional nationalists, who viewed it as an Irish parliament-in-waiting.[4]

Nevertheless, up until 1922, including in the general election of 1918, Dublin continued to elect Unionist Members of Parliament alongside nationalists.

Dublin’s monuments spoke of the city’s contested politics. The name of the main street was in the process of being changed from Sackville Street to O’Connell Street and adjoining Great Britain Street was being re-named Parnell Street. On O’Connell Street itself, statues of nationalist leaders O’Connell and Parnell were overlooked by a pillar in honour of Admiral Nelson.

When King George V visited in 1911, Dublin was draped in Union flags, and crowds of ‘every class and creed’, as the Irish Times  reported, did indeed cheer the king. But Dublin Corporation, dominated by nationalists of the Home Rule Party of John Redmond, boycotted the official reception. [5]

Democratic control over the city was not complete under British rule. The British administration in Dublin Castle still controlled, up to 1922, the main levers of power directly, including the police. Dublin was policed up until revolutionary times by the Dublin Metropolitan Police a –mostly unarmed corps about 1,100 men strong. While there had long been high rates of petty crime, Dublin was not, before the First World War, a violent city. In the early 1900s about 80% of the 3,000 or so offences recorded every year were comprised of non-violent theft and most of the rest were connected with drunkenness and assault, with usually only about two to three murders a year [6].

While nationalists had long held municipal political power in Dublin, by 1922, only about one in ten of its population had the right to vote. The Corporation had an electorate of 38,000, including some women.[7]

Protestants and Catholics

In response to nationalists political advances, many Protestant and unionists had moved out of the city proper and set up their own autonomous townships at places like Rathmines and Pembroke. Later their children moved further out of the city again to the ‘railway townships’ of Kingstown, Blackrock, Dalkey and Killiney. [8]

Dublin Corporation only managed to recover the near townships and their much needed tax base in 1901, and then by threatening to exclude the townships from the city’s water supply if they did not come back into its tax fold.[9]

By 1922, roughly 20% of the population of Dublin was Protestant – a percentage that would drop sharply after Irish independence. Sectarianism was ever present in early 20^th century Dublin, but its tended to be of the casual rather than the virulent kind. In the early 1900s it was sharpened by the rivalry between the Catholic and Protestant Churches over who would have custody, and therefore spiritual authority, over orphans.

Todd Andrews a scion of the Dublin Catholic lower middle class, thought that, ‘from childhood I was aware that there were two separate and imiscible [impossible to mix] kinds of citizens: the Catholics, of whom I was one and the Protestants, who were as remote and different from us as if they had been blacks and we whites’.

‘We were not acquainted with the Protestant community, but we knew they were there, a hostile element in the community, vaguely menacing us with such horrors as Mrs Smyth’s homes for orphans where children might be brought and turned into Protestants’. That said, when his father caught him spitting at a Protestant Church, he recalled receiving a long lecture he did not fully understand, but leaving him in no doubt not to do it again.[10]

Andrews further differentiated between his class and ‘Castle Catholics’ – the upper middle class – so-called because of their integration with the British administration located at Dublin Castle – whose ‘accents were indistinguishable from those of Dublin Protestants’ who played golf, cricket and rugby and who ‘lived cheek by jowl with the Protestants on Mountjoy Square, Fitzwilliam Square or in Foxrock, Dalkey or Kingstown’.

The city also had a small Jewish enclave along the South Circular Road, inhabited by Jews who had left the Russian Empire since the 1880s, mostly from modern Lithuania. It was about 4-5,000 strong in 1922.

The middle class, Catholic and Protestant and other, amounted to about 20% of the city’s workforce – the 1911 census listed 18,000 in the ‘professional class’ with another 23,000 in the ‘commercial class’ and they employed some 18,000 domestic servants, counted as the ‘domestic class’.

Andrews own social milieu, the Catholic lower middle class, were more nationalist, played soccer as opposed to rugby, and hoped only for a secure job, preferably in the civil service. The Gaelic revival and its attendant sports tended to be minority tastes in Dublin. While the Catholic lower middle class were religiously observant, they were not generally devout, keeping neither ‘too close nor too distant from the clergy’ in Andrews’ recollection.

One of the major factors separating the two major religions was education, which was, since the mid 19th century, in the hands of the two main Churches – Catholic and Church of Ireland. Additionally at third level, Protestants generally attended Trinity College, while only the ‘Castle Catholics’ were confident enough to defy the Catholic Church’s ban on Catholics studying there. Most Catholic third level students attended the Catholic ‘National University’ (forerunner of today’s University College Dublin) at Earlsfort Terrace.

Slums

‘At the bottom of the heap’, Todd Andrews thought, were the inhabitants of the slums who were ‘seldom above the poverty line and many of them far below it’.

According to Andrews, they ‘supplied the rank and file of the [British regiment] Dublin Fusiliers’ and found their only entertainment in the pubs or on the terraces of the city’s football (soccer) grounds Dalymount or Shelbourne Park. They were religious in a superstitious way, ‘there was always a statue of the Blessed Virgin, the Sacred Heart and  perhaps the Infant of Prague on the mantelpiece’. ‘They accepted their misery as the will of God’.[11]

Dublin’s real segregation was not between Catholic and Protestant, but between rich and poor. Whereas most of the middle classes lived in the new suburbs and took the trains or trams or cycled, or by the 1920s, drove, into the city centre, the population of the heart of the city was increasingly impoverished.

Dublin’s old Georgian core, particularly on the northside was notoriously riven with slums. What had once been the homes of grandees and merchants had over the course of the 19^th century become dilapidated tenements, inhabited by the poorest, unskilled section of the Dublin working population, whose men were generally employed in casual labour, particularly on the docks, meaning that at the best of times their wages were low and many were often unemployed.

Many memories of the Dublin tenements, which were largely cleared in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, remember fondly their sense of community, since lost in anonymous suburbs. However the reality of the tenements was stark.

In 1911, 33% of Dublin’s families lived in one room tenements.[12] Some 50,000 people were thought to be in need of re-housing by 1918. By the 1920s the situation had actually got worse.[13] The slums were notoriously unhealthy. Poverty, bad diet and poor housing meant that Dublin had an unenviable mortality rate of 23.1 % in 1914 compared to 18% in Belfast and 14% in London [14]

Poverty and the large British Army garrison combined to produce the ‘Monto’ around Montgomery Street – reputed to be Europe’s largest concentration of street prostitution – in the north inner city. The Dublin Metropolitan Police estimated in 1901 that while female prostitution was decreasing there were still over 1,500 women earning a living as prostitutes on the streets of the capital. There were 1,067 arrests for prostitution in 1912.[15]

James Larkin the messianic labour leader, who had organised the city’s lumpen proletariat into trade unions for the first time, commented on the prevalence of street prostitution and in In 1907 he wondered, ‘If Dublin men were so proud of their city’, why they did not put a stop ‘to the disgraceful scenes in O’Connell Street, when fellows from the slums of London, in red [British Army] uniform, were coming along with Irish girls on their arms, whom they would ruin in body and soul’. [16]

The census of 1911 listed a further 170,000 ‘Indefinite and non-productive class’ meaning children, women in the home and, about half, the unemployed.[17]

Dublin was known for its irreverent wit, which Todd Andrews at least remarked, was much overrated, ‘in fact the wit practiced in Dublin was and is essentially no better than jeering and has its basis in envy and a desire to denigrate’.[18]

Destruction and hope

In 1922, for the first time since the Act of Union in 1801, Dublin was again on the brink of becoming a capital city.

Its last period as the political centre of Ireland had seen the construction of most of its grandest buildings – the Four Courts, the Custom House, the Parliament building (now the Bank of Ireland) and City Hall with their distinctive Georgian domes and columns, and shortly afterwards, the General Post Office which was finished in 1818.

But it was also, in 1922 a city that had passed through 6 years of violent nationalist revolution. By January 1922 many of these sites of symbolic power lay in ruins. The GPO and much of O’Connell Street was destroyed in the Rising of 1916, the Custom House left a burnt out shell after an IRA raid of May 1921.

In the Civil War of 1922-23, there was yet more destruction; the Four Courts pulverised and gutted by artillery bombardment and huge detonation of explosives, the eastern side of O’Connell Street that had been spared the fighting in Easter week 1916 was bombed and burnt out in the fighting between pro and anti-Treaty factions in July 1922. Nor was the damage all physical. About 5,000 Dubliners had died in the First World War and roughly another thousand died in political violence at home in the city between 1916 and 1923.

Dublin’s local government was also a casualty of the Civil War. Due to the Corporation’s neutral stance during the conflict and its criticism of some government actions, local elections due to take place in January 1923 were postponed by the Government.[19] In 1923 Dublin Corporation was restructured and a city accountant appointed. Then, following an inquiry that uncovered corruption in a municipal housing scheme, the Corporation was abolished altogether and its function taken over by three commissioners. It was not restored until 1930 and then with much reduced powers.[20]

And yet there were already springs of a new order in 1922. It had originally been thought that an Irish parliament would resume in the old parliament building, now occupied by the Bank of Ireland. The Bank was reluctant to move, however and its facilities were in any case outmoded for the new independent Irish parliament. In the autumn of 1922 the Provisional Irish Government acquired, from the Royal Dublin Society, Leinster House and adjoining Merrion Street buildings, all once the stately residence of the Duke of Leinster, to house the Dial and the Senate and government buildings. There they have remained ever since.

Irish independence did not solve Dublin’s social problems overnight, or indeed for many decades, but when the last British garrison marched out of the city and took ship for Britain in December 1922, it was, at least, a new start.

References

[1] Joseph Brady, Dublin at the Turn of the Century in Dublin Through Space and Time, P256

[2] Brady p 303-312

[3] Hill, Jacqueline. The Protestant Response to Repeal, the case of the Dublin working class in Ireland Under the Union (Lyons and Hawkins eds), Clarendon 1980. pp.45-46

[4] See Lee, Joseph, The Modernisation of Irish Society.

[5] Irish Times Thursday, July 13, 1911

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

[7] Peter Murray, Electoral Politics and the Dublin Working Class before the First World War,  Saothar, Irish Labour History Society, Journal Vol. 6, 1980

[8] Brady p265

[9] Seamus O Maitiu Dublin’s Suburban towns 1834-1930,  Four Courts Press Dublin, 2003, P142

[10] CS Andrews, Dublin Made Me, Lilliput Press 2009 pp.4, 31.

[11] Andrews p.6-7

[12] Louis Cullen, Health and Housing in Dublin, 1850-1921, in Dublin, City and County, From Prehistory to Present,  ed Kevin Whelan,  F.H.A Aalen, Geography Publications, Dublin 1992. p282

[13] Cullen p 282

[14] All above figures from Padraig Yeates, Dublin 1914-1918,  A City in Wartime, p7-11

[15] History Ireland, August 2013, https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/prostitution/

[16] History Ireland, August 2013, https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/prostitution/

[17] Brady p 263-264

[18] Andrews, Dublin Made Me p22

[19] O Maitiu Dublin’s Suburban Towns, p204

[20] David McEllin, The Legendary Mayor Alfie Byrne in Leaders of the City, Lisa Marie Griffith, Ruth McManus, eds, Four Courts Press, Dublin 2013 p154

Buck Whaley: Ireland’s Greatest Adventurer by David Ryan

Published by Merrion Press, Newbridge, 2019

ISBN: 9781785372292

Reviewer: Gordon O’Sullivan

“Buck Whaley lacking much in cash

And being used to cut a dash

He wagered full ten thousand pound

He’d visit soon the Holy Ground” 

 

Can you admire an 18th century serial spendthrift who managed to burn his way through the modern equivalent of €100 million? David Ryan in his assured new biography, Buck Whaley: Ireland’s Greatest Adventurer, certainly makes a compelling case for Whaley being one of the great characters of a character-packed era.

Drawing on some unpublished and hitherto unused sources as well as Whaley’s celebrated memoirs, Ryan plots the crazy-paving course of a life full of incident and adventure. A life of incredible profligacy, reckless bravery and daring foreign travel in an age where travelling abroad was neither simple nor safe.

Buck Whaley enjoyed fame in his own time due to an astonishing bet made in 1788 with the Duke of Leinster and his cronies. As Ryan underlines, gambling was “one of the great obsessions of the eighteenth century” and Whaley was even more addicted than most of his class. Whaley wagered that he could travel to Jerusalem, secure proof of his stay and return to Dublin, all within two years.

The potential winnings were incredible – £15,000, about €5 million in today’s money. To the modern ear, that sounds like a straightforward exercise but for most Europeans in that time, the journey was fraught with dangers and no-one believed Whaley could achieve his goal. In typically flamboyant style, Whaley sailed away on a yacht, serenaded by singers and accompanied both by servants and barrels of Madeira wine.

Whaley started his life in a much more sedate fashion however. A Dubliner born into the wealthiest surroundings imaginable. He would inherit large estates, fine houses and an annual income of £7,000 from his infamously anti-Catholic father, Richard Chapell Whaley.

‘Ill-considered escapades’

Unfortunately for Whaley, but not for his biographer, his father died when he was but two years old. The absence of the father and the doting, forgiving nature of his mother would prove to be a ruinous combination when the sixteen-year-old Whaley went on his first wild adventure, the Grand Tour requisite for 18^th century gentlemen.

In this engaging, pacy and persuasive biography Ryan has used many archival sources to keep up with Whaley’s “tendency to set off on ill-considered escapades”, his “obsession with achieving what few or none had accomplished before”, and his “cavalier attitude towards danger.”

Those characteristics make him a fascinating subject for a biographer but made Whaley an inveterate gambler in every element of his life from the gaming tables to the bedroom, “In an age notorious for its gamblers, he was one of the worst”. Living in Paris with a completely outmatched chaperone, Whaley quickly settled into the picaresque pattern that dominated his life and lifestyle.

He would gamble outrageously; he would be taken advantage of by card sharpers and cheats; he would finally be bailed out by his family or friends. His Parisian adventures soon encompassed losing £14,000 in one night, fathering an illegitimate child, contracting venereal disease from repeated visits to a courtesan and ending up mixed up in a lunatic scheme to abduct an heiress. Whaley was finally forced to leave Paris when his bankers refused to honour his colossal debts.

Rescued by his stepfather and returned to Dublin “distressed and disarrayed”, Whaley was “’treated like the prodigal son” and seemed to be “transforming into a responsible and charitable member of society”. For an all too brief moment, it appeared that the now eighteen-year-old Whaley was maturing. He was elected to the Irish House of Commons and lived quietly in rural Ireland. It was, however, a short interlude before he made his famous bet and set out on his Jerusalem adventure.

Voyage to Jerusalem

In one of many rash relationship decisions, Whaley elected to voyage with Captain James Wilson, an undependable and corrupt former Marine.

Wilson was eventually left behind and replaced with a much more “committed member of the expedition” in fellow Irishman Captain Hugh Moore whose unpublished journal on the Jerusalem expedition is used judiciously by the author.

Despite nearly killing himself in St. Michael’s Cave in Gibraltar due to his determination to descend “at least, as far as any other person had ever been”, Whaley and Moore made their way to Smyrna, escaping pirates along the way, and from there journeyed overland to Constantinople.

There Whaley became gravely ill and for a while it “seemed that he and his great adventure would expire on a sickbed in Constantinople”, disease being the one thing that seemed to genuinely scare him. When he recovered though he put his formidable charm to work. His personal charisma must have been extraordinary as he managed to charm men and women of all nations and all religions.

His relationship with the British Consul “allowed the Irishmen to mingle freely” among “Constantinople’s European elite” while the Ottoman Vizier Hasan Pasha provided Whaley with the required permits to visit Jerusalem. Even the infamous Ahmed al-Jazzar, ‘The Butcher’, facilitated his onward journey from Acre to the prized destination, Jerusalem. Even on the last leg of his long trip, Whaley was able to negotiate his way through hostile desert before finally arriving in the Holy City.

His charm had, of course, already prepared the way with a letter from the Spanish ambassador in Constantinople providing safe and sanitary accommodation in the Convent of the Terra Sancta. Jerusalem did seem to work its magic on Buck, he was charmed and inspired by the city, visiting all the pilgrimage sites and remaining respectful of the pilgrims. Staying for a month he got the proof he needed to win the bet before his relatively uneventful return journey to Dublin.

Ten months after his bet, Whaley, soon to be known as Jerusalem Whaley or Buck, arrived back in Dublin triumphant. As Ryan underlines, “magazines and newspapers in Britain and Ireland had maintained a keen interest in his affairs” while he was away, and bonfires were lit as he sailed into Dublin. When he had calculated his profits from his Jerusalem adventure, he had £7000 in his pocket, “the only instance in all my life before, in which any of my projects turned out to my advantage”.

 Second Act

Only 23 years of age, Whaley now set out to enjoy the benefits of fame and “any sense of piety or perspective he had acquired on his travels was soon discarded” as he “embraced a life of expense and excess.”

The second half of Whaley’s life takes up far less space in Buck Whaley: Ireland’s Greatest Adventurer yet, is, in itself, the stuff of novels. His gambling problems worsened and his debts piled up, reinforcing a natural restlessness eventually leading him back to Paris in the midst of the French Revolution. In typically madcap style he “attired himself ‘like a true Sans culotte’” and tried to rescue Louis XVI from execution.

He set up a faro bank in Paris, one of his infrequent financial successes, before fleeing from the revolutionaries to Switzerland and thence to a debtor’s prison in London. Incredibly this was the one and only time he ended up in jail for his jaw-dropping debts. Even then he his release was secured by his brother-in-law. By now Whaley had no more estates to sell to clear debts, he had “dissipated a fortune of near £400,000” without enjoying “one hour’s true happiness”.

Whaley moved to relatively quiet exile in the Isle of Man where “perhaps to his surprise, he had found peace of a kind”. On the foot of some successful gambling, he bought a parliamentary seat in Enniscorthy whereupon he used his position to solicit bribes to support the Act of Union, then to oppose the Act, and finally to support it.

His end, when it came at thirty-three, was surprisingly free of drama, dying in Knutsford in Cheshire from rheumatic fever. Naturally rumours sprang up at once that he had been murdered.

This quite remarkable character, said to be the inspiration for both the characters of Barry Lyndon and Phileas Fogg has been very well served by his biographer, David Ryan. The author’s fluent writing style render his research skills easily accessible. The pace of this biography is novelistic and almost unrelenting as the reader is continually astonished by the scale of Whaley’s expenditure, the audacity of his personal conduct and the bravura with which he took on the world.

In Ryan’s view, Whaley “transcended the world of rakes, gamblers, and adventurers. His legacy is greater and more significant than that.” But is it?

Ryan is least convincing on the lasting significance of Buck Whaley. The reader hears Whaley’s own words but remains curiously unsympathetic to someone who had so much and spent even more.

Whaley was admirably brave but had a psychological need to push physical boundaries, compulsively reckless with his own money and with others’, self-destructive but also capable of wreaking pain, debt and in one case, death on those closest to him. A litany of sins offset Ryan argues by his realisation that “his lavish life of privilege was a mere accident of birth” and travelling “did bring him closer to his essential humanity”.

The author is more convincing when he states that despite struggling with his “deep human frailties”, he “hurled himself into one of the greatest adventures of the age”. And it is as one of the great adventurers of his age and a gambler emblematic of the great passion and vice of the 18th century that Whaley deserves to be remembered. In David Ryan’s Buck Whaley: Ireland’s Greatest Adventurer, Whaley has got the biographer he merits.

By Constance Markievicz (edited by Lindie Naughton)

Published by Irish Academic Press (Newbridge, 2018)

Reviewer: Daniel Murray

“It is awfully funny being ‘on the run’!” wrote Countess Markievicz to her sister Eva, in January 1920. “I don’t know what I resemble most: the timid hare, the wily fox, or a fierce wild animal of the jungle.” For three months, she had been a free woman, since leaving Cork Jail, on the 18^th October 1919, in time for a police constable to be shot dead in Dublin later that evening.

The British authorities claimed a connection between that and her release; in any case, the situation was sufficiently unsettled in Ireland for a state crackdown on the burgeoning Republican movement, with house raids, arrests and, for some, deportations, hence the necessity of Markievicz staying one step ahead of the foreign foe.

Not that she appeared terribly concerned, at least in another letter to Eva: “I go about a lot, one way or another, and every house is open to me and everyone is ready to help.” When she felt like stretching her legs, she took a bicycle around Dublin, the startled expressions of policemen at the sight of a notorious rebel as she whizzed by amusing her considerably.

“There are very few women on bikes in the winter, so a hunted beast on a bike is very remarkable,” she pointed out.

But then, Markievicz was far from an ordinary individual. With a flourish, she signed the letter with the initials ‘I.C.A, T.D.’ after her name, the first set from her time in the Irish Citizen Army, which she had helped lead during the 1916 Rising, and the other due to her Dáil Éireann seat. Whatever her commitments, she took them seriously. When municipal local elections were held in January 1920, Markievicz publicly spoke on behalf of several female candidates, despite her outlaw status and the threat of capture. At one such rally, as she related:

I wildly and blindly charged through a squad of armed police, sent there to arrest me, and the crowds swallowed me up and got me away. The children did the trick for me.

But luck and pluck could only take her so far, and she was finally caught in September 1920, while driving back with Seán MacBride from a trip to the Dublin mountains. After all the close shaves, it was an absurdly minor oversight that undid her:

The police pulled us up because of the tail lamp not being there: they asked for a permit; [MacBride] had none, so they got suspicious and finally lit a match in my face and phoned for the military.

Confinement to Mountjoy did little to stem the flow of her correspondence. It was not all business; Markievicz thanked her sister for the fruit sent to her in prison. Eva was holidaying in Florence, and Markievicz was eager to hear the details. “You’ll be glad to hear that I am not on hunger strike at present,” she added near the end, almost as an afterthought.

To read her words is to be yanked back into the cut and thrust of Irish politics and war at a time when a thin line, at best, existed between the two. Despite the hardships, Markievicz thrived, and her letters show a remarkable range of interests, from cosy family chitchat to the finer points of literature. But a hunger for current affairs was never far from the surface, whether Ireland’s or elsewhere; Russia, for instance, pricked her notice. “I haven’t given up on the Bolshies yet,” she wrote. “I believe that they will greatly improve conditions for the world.”

On that particular point, the two siblings were not entirely in accord, though Markievicz sought to mollify the other somewhat: “I agree with you disliking the autocracy of any class, but surely if they have the sense to organise education, they can abolish class.” While she admitted the possibility of Communism becoming another tyranny, “it would be worth it in the long run. After all, as she blithely put it, “the French Revolution gave France new life, though all their fine ideas ended in horrors and bloodshed and wars. The world, too, gained.”

Quite what the Bolsheviks would have made of the aristocratically-born Countess is another, unasked question. But then, Markievicz wasted little time worrying about what society thought. Her life was her own, and she lived it with scant regrets. In January 1924, barely a month out of her latest spell in prison – courtesy of her fellow countrymen this time – she explained to Eva her approach to the challenges in her life, such as the hunger strike she and the other Republican prisoners had just undertaken.

“I always rather dreaded a hunger strike,” she admitted:

But when I had to do it I found that, like most things, the worst of it was looking forward to the possibility of having to do it. I did not suffer at all but just stayed in bed and dozed and tried to prepare myself to leave the world.

The good news was that the prolonged starvation had alleviated her rheumatism. “Now, old darling, I must stop. Writing on a machine always tempts one to ramble on and on.”

Judging by the rest of her letters collected here, the typewriter was hardly the one to blame. Not that the reader, whether a learned historian or neophyte seeking to know more, is likely to mind. Few voices from the era were as loquacious or engaging as Countess Markievicz’s, as this book shows.

How social strife accompanied the Irish revolution in the north midlands region. By John Dorney.

At a meeting of evicted tenants at Cavan Town Hall in 1923 a Mr MacAbhareagh (McAvery) Chairman, told his listeners, ‘We need to recover the land from which our fathers and grandfathers were thrown off without law or justice’. He called for the division of ‘ranches’ and an end to the ‘system which makes Ireland a market garden for England’. [1]

Many expected the Irish nationalist revolution to finish off the ‘land wars’ of the late 19^th century, expropriate the remaining landlords and give ‘the land to the people’. In December 1921, all across the region ‘unpurchased tenants’ went on rent strike, demanding that the new [Provisional] Irish government buy out their landlords.

Nor was land the only social issue that caused violent conflict. The following year there were bitter strikes in the area, not between landlords and tenant farmers, but between farmers and their labourers. Shots were exchanged between them until finally the Army of the new Irish Free State settle matters in the farmers’ favour.

On June 10, 1922 at a Labour meeting, Lyons, a Labour party candidate in the upcoming election declared that;  Workers, ‘should have the advantages of education and to hold his own with the sons of the capitalists.’  He ‘stands by the principles of James Connolly and Jim Larkin. (Cheers) The great are only great because we are on our knees, let us arise’.[2]

These are not isolated examples. As state authority broke down in rural Ireland in 1920-21, undermined by both the political and military campaigns of the republican movement, a raft of social conflicts, some long dormant, some appearing for the first time, took on a violent intensity.

At the same time, class conflict in all its forms was sharpened when the boom years of the First World War for Irish farmers were followed with a savage recession from early 1921 onwards. With less ground to give on all sides, violence became more and more frequently used.

In the border region in particular, the land question also had particular sectarian and communal undertones, because so much of it had been traditionally owned by Protestants, now a minority in a predominantly Catholic and nationalist region, but a majority just over the new border in Northern Ireland.

Finally the re-imposition of ‘order’ by the forces of the Irish Free State in 1922-23 in the region tells us a great deal about the society and politics of the new Irish state.

It is often written that the Irish revolution had little or nothing to do with social class. Or conversely, some socialist accounts will have it that the period was a social revolution that was aborted at its birth by the counter-revolution of the Civil War. This article will argue that neither of these positions is quite right. The overthrow of British rule was not a class movement. The republicans were not disguised social revolutionaries and the Civil War was not a class war.

But class and class conflict, in complex ways, was an integral part of the turmoil of the period as it was experienced on the ground.

Farmers and landlords

The area in question – the counties of Louth, Longford, Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim had a combined population of roughly 450,000 in 1911.[3] Though it had a number of fairly large towns, notably Dundalk – a working port – and market towns like Cavan, Monaghan and Clones, it was predominantly rural.

Most of the commerce in the towns also depended on agriculture, principally on the sale and export of foodstuffs and animals. The local authorities also depended disproportionately on farmers’ rates, giving them a powerful political voice.

As late as the 1880s, the region had been dominated socially and politically by the classic Anglo-Irish (usually Protestant) Landlords. ‘The land for the people’ was classic nationalist slogan since the 1880s. And indeed, a series of Land Acts brought in by the British government in response to land agitation or the ‘Land War’, culminating in the 1908 Wyndham Act, had greatly undermined the old landed class’s position. Many had voluntarily sold their holding to their tenants, who were subsidised by the British government to do so, with long term loans.

The old landlord class were still not a completely spent force in the region by the 1920s however. Many had refused to sell up, or had received too low an offer. Agrarian activists estimated that there were 2,500 ‘unpurchased tenants’ in County Cavan alone, in 1922 who had been ’wronged and robbed by landlords’ and estimated that there were 100,000 unpurchased tenants in prospective Irish Free State[4].

A look at rent disputes in late 1921 for instance shows that, many estates were still held by largely Protestant landlord families, often with close ties to the British military officer corps, who often elsewhere, with their estate managed by agents. For instance the Portland estate in County Monaghan was owned by a Captain Maxwell and managed by his agent McNorris Croddard. Similarly Major Purdon owned the Purdon estate in County Cavan and the Logan Ellis Estate in Bawnboy was also possessed by an old style landlord family and managed by agents Ross Todd and Co. based in Dublin.[5]

So the demand for the end of ‘landlordism’ and for tenant purchase – which was still seen by nationalists as reversal of the ‘conquest of Ireland’ was still a live issue during the independence struggle.

That said, the land struggle had meant that by the 1920s, the stronger, more prosperous farmers had mostly been freed from paying rent and tensions rose between them and small farmers and the landless.

Though it had zones of good land, the region was mostly too hilly and boggy for extensive tillage agriculture and by far the most profitable activity was raising live cattle for export. This meant that inevitably big farmers tried to consolidate their holdings into larger ‘ranches’ while smaller farmers tried to hold on to or expand their family holdings.

These tensions had already led to one period of intense agitation – the so-called ‘Ranch War’ of 1906-1909, in which small farmers or landless men had driven away the ‘ranchers’ offending cattle and re-divided holdings until evicted by the police. A great deal of untapped bitterness and personal grudges lay dormant in the region after decades of land struggles.

The collapse of British state power would bring both of these land struggles; landlord vs tenant and small farmer vs ‘rancher’ to a violent head.

Labourers

The weakness of an economy based on cattle export and small farms was two-fold. Firstly it did not supply enough jobs and secondly it often did not supply enough food, at least, not enough locally, at prices that the poor could afford.

Famine scares occurred periodically after bad harvests. It also left agricultural workers disproportionately dependent on casual labour and thus condemned to poor pay and conditions.

A peculiar feature of this in the whole of Ulster was the ‘hiring fair’ where on market days, young agricultural labourers would hire themselves out for six months to farmers.

To give a typical example, in November, 1921, there was a Hiring fair, at Ballybay, Monaghan. Applicants, who would line up in the market square to be inspected for their physical fitness, were informed that, ‘term time starts now’ and were offered six month contracts as servants or labourers, but were warned that as result of declining agricultural prices,  ‘Wages will fall substantially’ from the previous year. The following were the wages on offer for a six month deal.

Ploughman £14-16

Farm hand, £10-12

Girl, £8-13

Boy ‘half time’.[6]

These were not terribly out of line with the national average for unskilled work. By David Fitzpatrick’s estimate, unskilled workers in Ireland expect to make an average of £25 a year in 1911, but prices of food had doubled since that time.[7].

During the years of the Irish political revolution in 1918-23, the workers’ movement also emerged as force to be reckoned with – particularly in the form of the ITGWU trade union. They fought for union recognition, regular contracts and to defend wage levels. In some cases they dreamed too of a new ‘Workers’ Republic’.

The years of the First World War (1914-1918) and up to late 1920, saw a great surge in farmers’ profits as Britain imported more and more food from Ireland, with other trade routes cut off. But the years from 1921 to 1923 saw a slump as demand in Britain dried up completion resumed from other suppliers such as Canada. In this context farmers and other employers made a concerted effort to drive down wages of their workers.

By 1922 and 1923 (the years of the civil war) when combined with bad harvests and disruption caused by political upheaval and guerrilla warfare, levels of destitution across the region had reached crisis point. Independent reports warned of acute malnutrition among small farmers and labourers, reporting that they were ‘living hand to mouth’. Every drops in prices affects their daily fare’, and that their ‘Lack of nourishing diet’ had made them ‘Incapable of sustained physical effort made by people past generations’.[8] In Leitrim there were dire warnings of imminent famine.[9]

This, as well as the unions’ attempt to regularise casual labour, resulted in some of the bitterest labour disputes of the period across the region, many of which were ultimately ended by force, state or otherwise.

The political context – rival monopolies of force

None of the above conditions would probably have caused the levels of violence and disruption that they did had it not been for the concurrent nationalist revolution.

After their victory in the 1918 election Sinn Fein rapidly set about undermining the British institutions of state, setting up their own courts (the Dáil Courts) and police – usually members of the Irish Volunteers (soon known as the Irish Republican Army or IRA) to replace the existing courts and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).

Frederick Engels once wrote that the state essentially exists to prevent class warfare,

‘it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’ …. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion ….”.[10]

If the state and its instruments of coercion are supposed to ‘keep conflict within the bounds of order’, what happens when there are two or more rival ‘bodies of armed men’ trying to do this in the same place at the same time?

In fact, the rival attempts of the British and republican systems to impose their own ‘monopoly of force’ meant that law and order began to break down altogether.  A coordinated IRA action crippled the ability of the RIC to police rural areas effectively. On Easter weekend 114 rural RIC Barracks were burnt across the country by the IRA, including those at Baileboro, Standone, Crosskeys (partially) in Cavan, five more in County Longford, 9 in Meath, 2 in Leitrim and 3 in Fermanagh. Several more were later destroyed in Monaghan. Income tax records were also destroyed.

Law and Disorder

From early 1920 there were frequent complaints in the region of a rise in crime. The proliferation of lethal weapons also did not help matters. In March 1920 Cavan Assizes (courts) warned that crime was up because of the ‘impunity’ with which burglars can operate and the widespread use of revolvers in robberies.[11]

There were a series of murders in the region that may or may not have been related to the political conflict. In November 1919, for example, a father and son, Farrelly were arrested for the murder of Thomas Carroll in November 1919 at Eighter, Co. Cavan. The motive was apparently a land dispute but the deceased was also accused of being an informer. On April 17, a farmer, Francis Curran, (66) was shot dead at Carrigallen, Monaghan, the motive was again unknown.[12]

Sinn Fein and the IRA aspired to keep ‘order’ themselves and their courts and police – styled the Irish Republican Police, in effect competed with the Royal Irish Constabulary. For instance, after the murder of another farmer Mark Clinton, who was shot dead, apparently in a land dispute, in May 1920 in County Meath, 6 men were later arrested , two by the RIC and 4 by the IRA.[13]

By August the ‘Sinn Fein Courts’ were up and running.  At Cootehill, for example, one Bernard McDonald was convicted of assault and threatening language towards his neighbour in a land dispute and fined.[14]

Some locals responded to the upsurge in crime by forming vigilante groups.  Notices signed ‘Rory of the Hills’ [a traditional name used for clandestine land agitators] were posted in Ballyconnell, county Cavan threatening ‘death to burglars’ if stolen money was not returned.[15]

But the biggest obstacle to the republicans keeping order was that the British forces, both police and military, tried systematically to dismantle their efforts. One of the first IRA Volunteers to be killed in the region was James Cogan of Oldcastle County Meath who was shot dead by British soldiers while escorting prisoners whom the IRA had arrested for cattle stealing.[16]

By September the Dáil Courts were suppressed all across the country by British forces. The Courts staff were arrested and their documents seized.  At Carrigallen and Arva for example, joint British Army and RIC raids smashed in the doors with hatchets and seized their documentation.[17]

The re-assertion of British state authority did little to help the law and order situation however. With an active guerrilla insurgency underway across the region, the RIC could devote little time to fighting ‘ordinary’ crime. Indeed in many cases, state forces were perpetrators of crime.

The Auxiliary Division in particular often robbed households they were supposedly raiding for IRA suspects. The Ryan family of Leitrim, for instance were later awarded £103 for having been robbed at gunpoint by Auxiliary policemen. Michael Flynn of Annaghbradigan was beaten by Auxiliaries, who also took £96 from his home. Thomas Moran, a vintner was robbed and threatened at gunpoint and robbed of £25.[18]

And yet another source of mayhem came from the newly formed Ulster Special Constabulary – the unionist-dominated, armed, auxiliary police of Northern Ireland, formed in July 1920. In January 1921 the RIC shot dead a Special Constable, McCullough of Belfast, in Clones as he and 15 other ‘Specials’ were looting the premises of  J O’Reilly’s Off License, another was wounded and the rest arrested.[19]

After the truce of July 1921, the republicans again made a concerted attempt to re-establish their own Republican Courts. Austin Stack the Dáil Minister of Home Affairs wrote to local IRA commander and TD Paul Galligan on September 26 to impress on him the importance of re-establishing the courts[20]

The justice of the Irish Republican Police was often rough and ready  –  tying a youth to the railings of the Cathedral in Cavan town, for instance, to shame him for petty crime. And they also faced completion from the still functioning RIC even after the Truce.  There were several instances where the RIC arrested IRA or IRP personnel carrying out policing duties and some cases where both the IRP and the RIC arrested different people for the same crime.[21]  Dáil Courts at Castleblayney and Lisnaskea were also broken up and their officers arrested.[22]

New states

It was only after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that the British forces first withdrew to barracks and then in a process from February to April 1922 withdrew from the region altogether that Irish forces took their place. From early 1922 there now also existed a ‘hard border’ running through the region for the first time, with the IRA in possession of the southern side and the Ulster Special Constabulary on the other in Northern Ireland.

By this time though, the IRA had split over the Treaty into antagonistic factions. The Provisional Government set up under the Treaty actually reconstituted the old courts system (replacing the revolutionary Dáil Courts) in early 1922 in an effort to quell growing social disorder. But in the subsequent period of Civil War between pro and anti-Treaty factions there was very little effective law and order from any source.

Personal land disputes often ended in violence, sometimes with the intervention of undisciplined local IRA members.

In January 1922, for instance, a farmer Patrick Conlon, 59 years old, the owner of 20 acres in County Meath, who was described in the local press a ‘most respectable man’ was shot dead by armed raiders.[23] On February 11, 1922, at Carrickmacross, Monaghan, the farm of James Shelvin was seized by a Thomas Daly on behalf of his deceased father. Shelvin went to the newly installed IRA garrison in Carrickmacross, who arrested an IRA officer, Thomas Duffy for the illegal land seizure and imprisoned him in the barracks.[24]

The legacy of decades of land agitation had left a poisonous tangle of local disputes over land, which, in the lawless conditions of 1922-23, often exploded into violence. Sometimes, though by no means always, in the border zone, this had a sectarian tinge. In April 1922 for instance, before the onset of Civil War, 20 armed men evicted a Protestant family, the Elkins, in favour of a Catholic one, the McMahons, who had been evicted from the holding 65 years previously.[25]

There was also the added social pressure caused by Catholic refugees from the violence in Northern Ireland, who sometimes pressured the IRA into displacing Protestant farmers to accommodate the northern refugees. In May 1922, three refugees from Belfast were convicted of intimidating Protestant farmer, Robert Crawford, who they told to ‘go back to the six counties’.[26]

During the Civil War, which broke out in late June 1922, between pro and ant-Treaty factions, the problem of social disorder only got worse.

According to (pro-Treaty) National Army Intelligence, a major part of the local ‘Irregulars’ or anti-Treaty IRA, appeal lay in their taking sides with evicted or otherwise aggrieved farmers in land disputes. Citing a case in November 1922 in which ’17 armed Irregulars’ visited a farmer named Byrne in Cavan and forced him to sign over his land to one of their supporters, the Army concluded, ‘The Irregulars are taking advantage of the present state of the country to annex a farm for one of their supporters’.[27]

The Anglo Celt newspaper noted that people were trying to reclaim land ‘where their fathers were evicted’. ‘As soon as normal conditions are restored in the country it is hoped to introduce new land legislation under which genuine evicted tenants will receive special consideration’.[28]

The Civic Guard (later Garda Siochana) police were introduced into the area in September 1922 but, being unarmed, were all but helpless against republican guerrillas, armed robbers and other armed bands until well after the Civil War was over. What order there was, was mainly imposed by the Army. The Pro-Treaty National Army in mid 1923 deployed a unit known as the Special Infantry Corps which to the region at the end of the Civil War to deal with social disorder. A National Army report of the summer of 1923 stated that the Special Infantry Corps was ‘having a very bad effect on the civil population in most districts where it is stationed’.[29]

It was against this background – a four year period where no one group was capable of establishing its own law and authority in the region that class conflict took on such intensity.

‘The Land for the People’

At first, it seemed as if the ‘new land war’ that accompanied the nationalist revolution, would pass the north midlands region by.

An editorial in the Anglo Celt said that land agitation was confined for now to the west; counties Clare, Kerry, Roscommon, Westmeath and was cautious in endorsing it:

‘Many claims to land are frivolous and unjust. When the fight is won, the Dail will make every effort to see that justice is done. No citizen will have to leave these shores in search of his livelihood.’[30]

The spring and summer of 1921 saw a wave of ‘Big House burnings’ – that is destruction of landlord’s mansions, in the region. Among the mansions gutted by fire were Gola House in County Monaghan, Ravensdale House County Louch, Lanesboro House County Cavan and Shanton House at Ballybay County Monaghan. In this case, however it was the IRA that was behind the arson attacks and the motivation appears to have been to deny the Big Houses ad garrisons for British troops, rather than to settle land or rent disputes.[31]

It was only during the lapse in hostilities, after the truce of July 11, 1921, that land agitation really took off in the region.

Late 1921 saw a revolt of farmers all across the north midlands who had not purchased their land in previous Land Acts. It began on the Portland Estate of one Captain Maxwell in Monaghan in November, where tenants declared that with agricultural prices down by 50%, they were demanding an 85% reduction of rents and warned of ‘defensive action’ if their offer was rejected or there was any attempt to collect rent.

In late December, rent strikes spread to three more landed estates: in Bawnboy Cavan, on the Logan Ellis Estate – tenants demanded a reduction in rent to 10s and the same on the Montgomery Estate. On the Rothwell Estate, they demanded a reduction of 5s. On the Purdon estate (owned by Major Purdon), they demand that rent be cut by 8s.[32]

While initially these appear to have been militant tactics designed to lower rent at a time of falling incomes for farmers, after the Anglo Irish Treaty was signed on December 6, 1921, and with an independent Irish government in prospect, the strikes rapidly became a tactic to force the remaining landlords to sell up.

On the Coolamber estate in Longford for instance, owned by a Mr Stanley. Tenants declared that they had tried to buy their holdings since 1908, without success. But, they stated, ‘times and conditions have altered in Ireland…We cannot raise our offer without bringing obloquy for ourselves and being unjust to other tenants. We do not consider that you have made any sincere effort to give us the benefits of the Land Acts. We are the only tenants in Longford still paying rent to a landlord’. They resolved that no rent would be paid until purchase is agreed.[33]

While the same farmers’ unions voted motions to approve the passing of the Treaty, it was also clear that they expected Irish independence to mean the end of landlordism. They argued, ‘Each person should get an equal chance in a free Ireland to compete for a decent living at least’, and called on the Dail to, ‘make completion of land purchase the first act of the Irish parliament’. ‘In future when the country is flourishing we will also have to look into land for labourers and town tenants’. ’[34] Copies of the resolution were sent to local Sinn Fein TDs Paul Galligan, Sean Milroy and Arthur Griffith.

By late February 1922 the rent strike had spread to dozens of estates across Monaghan Longford and Cavan.[35]

The pressure on landlords, particularly if they had been outspoken unionists increased in this period in which the IRA and republicans generally were left in control of much of the countryside. The Mountray estate, in Monaghan, for example was put up for sale in February 1922 after the violent re-instating of evicted tenants. Thomas McKenna shot in arm when tried to buy land off evicted tenants.[36]

At the Farnham estate on County Cavan, the tenants resolved not to pay and back rent and stated that Lord Franham had, ‘declared war on the tenants’. At the  Ballyhoe estate, in Monaghan,  the landlord Colonel Murray refused an offer by the Tenants association one year’s rent as a purchase price. He was informed, ‘There won’t be another’.

Rent strikes in pursuit of land purchase were also declare on the Maxwell, Harman and Mongomery estates. At the latter, Tenants resolved to pay no rent until purchase was agreed, and cited the ‘collapse of cattle agricultural prices’. ‘It is humanly impossible to pay the excessive rent demanded’.[37]

On April 13, the tenants association representing all the unpurchased tenants of Cavan, representing nine estates and 2,500 families, declared, ‘This is not a case for the courts, we won’t meet the landlords there’. ‘By our resolution we will stand or fall together’.[38] In a nationwide conference held in Dublin on April 19, which claimed to represent 100,000 tenant farmers nationwise, the tenants resolved that the new Irish government must complete compulsory land purchase and that in in the meantime they would not pay any rents in arrears. The Cavan delegation declared ‘We have been wronged and robbed by landlords’.[39]

Patrick Hogan, the Provisional government Minister for Agriculture replied that he wanted to meet the farmers and that he sympathise with their grievances, but the the infant Irish state could not afford another land act; ‘Land purchase is essential for the prosperity of the agricultural industry. It is the first thing that must be done’.  But, ‘the government needs £3-4 million a year [to pay for it] and it does not have it’.[40]

Fighting the Civil War, after June 1922 distracted the Free State government from land reform and most other until well into the following year. By then, however, it was apparent, in the border region and elsewhere, that providing an orderly means of land reform was the only way of ending much of the endemic violence across the country and to reassert government control.

Free State forces were being used to collect unpaid rates, debts and even rents. From February 1923, the Special Infantry Corps was raised and deployed to areas where farms had been illegally seized by the IRA and others, particularly in the west and in County Cork, to restore them to their owners. Cattle that had been grazing on occupied land were seized by the troops and sold off in Dublin. In Roscommon the Free State troops fired over the heads of a crowd trying to prevent the impounding of animals.[41]

On February 10 1923 at Shercok Cavan, a landlord sued 55 tenants for non-payement of rent, the judge, the newly established Free State courts suggest that the tenants, due to the ‘bad times’ should pay 70% of the rent due.[42]

However, as the government knew, collecting rents for landlords was a most hazardous thing for a nationalist government to do. A meeting of unpurchased tenants in Ballybay, Monaghan – 100 delegates, representing farmers on rent strike since early 1922 – heard that the troops and police had been used to collect landlords’ rent.  One Father Maguire declared, that while shouldn’t be ‘armed resistance’, it was ‘terrible for government to lift money for absentee landlords who never spend a penny in the country’. [43]

Some such landlords caved in to popular pressure. In April 1923, for instance in County Cavan, Lord Farnham agreed to sell to his tenants. Others though waited to see what action the new Irish government would take in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Mollifying the small farming class, the bedrock of pro-Treaty support, was necessary for the survival of the pro-Treatyites, especially as they had called a general election for August of 1923.

In June the Agriculture Minister Patrick Hogan tabled a Land Bill under which 70,000 tenancies, containing about 300,000 people, with a rental value of £800,000-£1 million would be compulsorily purchased from the remaining landlords.[44]

This was not a redistribution of land as many agrarian radicals had hoped for, rather it simply meant that farmer would be freed from paying rent on his existing plot. Undoubtedly this land act however did help to shore up support for the Free State. Anti-Treaty Republicans such as Patrick Smith in Cavan criticised the Act as it had tenants pay 70% of back rents. He declared in a rally in Cavan town, ‘Tenants have to pay 70% of rent due’ A real government of the people by the people would say to the landlords, “you never owned the land of Ireland, you have no right to it. The land belongs to the people of Ireland”.[45]

Similarly the Labour candidate in that election argued that, ‘the land is not being well used… ‘Ranches should be broken up and divided among the people’[46]

However, by their own lights, the conservative pro-Treatyites had not only settled the national question but the land question as well. And most of those who owned land probably agreed with them.

The Workers against the farmers

However, not everyone saw the end of the Irish independence struggle in simply land for the farmers. In August of 1921, Huston, an organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) told a public meeting in Cavan town; ‘Workers should not vote for farmers or landlords. ‘The farmers will not pay a living wage’. We want public services controlled directly, absolutely by the people, for the people’.[47]

As early as January 1920, farmers in Cavan proposed to set up ‘Freedom Force’ following the proposal of Farmers Union branch in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, to fight strikers. By January 28 of 1922, with the Treaty signed and British state forces withdrawing from the territory of the new Free State, some farmers were warning of all-out class warfare with their labourers. Houses had been burned they reported and produce burnt by ‘disorderly labour, hooligans’.

A Monaghan Farmers’ Union report of labour trouble stated that – ‘The farmer goes to work with a revolver in one hand for the time to come’. A Priest, Fr Murphy warned that ‘Farmers may have to fight labour’ and urged the government to ‘put down a firm hand’.[48]

This was not empty rhetoric, as many strikes ended in violence. On August 5 1922 for instance, at Anny, Co. Monaghan, a Farmers Union member James McGinnity was shot dead during a labour dispute with his labourers. On September 9 1922 a farmer was stabbed by a worker with a pitchfork at Shercock, Co Cavan. And on February 3 1923, during strike at Arva quarry, 40 men paraded with farm implements for self defence.

Though this militancy was sometimes put down to the influence of radical agitators, in fact, as the local newspaper editorial argued, labour militancy was the result of acute hunger and hardship. Wages, which had been falling since 1921, were insufficient to buy bread and farmers were selling the best meat to England.  ‘No one expects farmers to be philanthropists but why can’t farmers union in each district kill a certain number of sheep, cows and bulls and sell them at the right prices? They would have ample meat at a reasonable price.’[49]

Meanwhile the local ITGWU branch in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan proposed radical land reform that went well beyond land purchase by tenant farmers. They proposed; breaking up of grazing ranch between ‘cottiers, landless men and men who fought for Ireland in the late war [IRA men]’. They also wanted ‘direct labour on the roads’ that is for labourers working on the roads to be directly employed, rather than hired by contractors.[50]

Unlike the huge strikes of agricultural labourers in Counties Kildare and Waterford in 1923, which were put down by battalions of government troops in the Special Infantry Corps, there was no spectacular end to the strike wave in the north midlands. Rather, after the deployment of Special Infantry troops to police strikes and the establishment of police barracks, the violence around strikes gradually fizzled out by mid 1923.

The workers did not always lose these disputes. In Baileboro, Cavan for instance, workers successfully resisted an attempted to cut their wages to 24 shillings a week with wages eventually being set at  33 shillings a week for labourers, Gangers 40s a week. Carters 12 s per day.[51]

Aftermath

In the election of August 1923, although the wounds of the Civil War were still extremely raw, there was also a straightforward dimension of class conflict in the positions of Labour Party and the Farmers Party in the region. The former called for ‘Employment for the unemployed. Houses for the homeless. Land for the landless’. Patrick Sheridan, the Cavan Labour candidate stated; ‘He stands for the ideals of James Connolly. He is a Cavan man. He is a worker’.

While the Farmers Party called for ‘state loans to small farmers. Oppose ‘unreasonable interference with farmers’. ‘Oppose nationalisation in all its forms’. Reduce rates’. [52]

Meanwhile the ruling pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal party did not address class issues at all in its manifesto stating its priorities were; ‘Establish National Finance and Education on a sound footing. Restore the national language. Complete the organisation of National Defence. Demobilise surplus forces. Secure Citizens against return to terrorism and violence.’

While the anti-Treaty Republicans denied they were on the side of radical labour and appealed almost solely to unfulfilled nationalist goals, betrayed in their eyes by the pro-Treatyites, ‘We are not against the farmer or the labourer we are in no way antagonistic to their claims. We stand for complete independence not of 26 but of 32 counties. No foreign constitution, no foreign king’.[53]

In truth, except for the land question, the Irish revolution settled little of a social nature. Workers had won the right to organise but much of their organisation, especially in rural areas was in disarray by 1923. Under the Free State there was to be no wholesale redistribution of land, as some had wanted. The ‘ranches’ so deplored by agrarian activist were mainstays of the Free State’s economy.

Wages for agricultural labourers remained low and the distress of the unemployed or small farmer was largely eased only by large scale emigration. For all that there was no desire for further armed revolution. The Farmers Party pleaded for ‘No more jail and bullet’ while Labour declared, ‘The spade produces, the gun does not, muzzle the guns![54]

References

[1] Anglo Celt November 23 1922

[2] Anglo Celt June 10, 1922

[3] Population figures are taken from the 1911 census, online here.

[4] Anglo Celt April 21 1922

[5]  Anglo Celt November 25, December 31, 1921

[6] Anglo Celt November 13, 1921

[7] https://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/cost-of-living-rose-in-1916-as-price-of-great-war-was-felt-by-irish-people-376678.html

[8] Based on the report of an Agricultural Commission to County Cavan, reported in Anglo Celt, March 24, 1922,

[9] Anglo Celt, April 22, 1922. One June 24 of that year, farmers in distress in Leitrim appealed to the new Irish government for ‘food and provisions’ to prevent hunger. Ibid, June 24, 1922

[10] Frederick Engels (‘The Origins of Private Property the Family and the State’, 1884)

[11] Anglo Celt march 13 1920

[12] Anglo Celt March 13 and April 17, 1920

[13] Anglo Celt May 1920

[14] Anglo Celt August 14, 1920

[15] Anglo Celt May 29 1920

[16] Anglo Celt July 27, 1920

[17] Anglo Celt September 25 1920

[18] The Anglo Celt, Report of compensation hearings at Carrickonshannon, January 21, 1922

[19] Anglo Celt January 29, 1921

[20]  Peter Paul Galligan Collection [CD 105], Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin 6.

[21] Anglo Celt November 17, 1921 for instance IRP arrested youths for drunkenness at Carrickmacross fair. The RIC arrested them Francis Keenan, Peter Corrigan. Dispute between DI Mansel and IRP officer Lonergan, IRA Liason officer called. The two Volunteers were charged with false imprisonment.

[22] Ibid and Anglo Celt November 26, 1921

[23] Anglo Celt January  27 1922

[24] Anglo Celt February 11,1922

[25] Anglo Celt April 29, 1922

[26] Anglo Celt May 12 1922

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

[28] Anglo Celt October 28, 1922

[29] National Army Dublin Command Intelligence Report Number 16 cw/ops/07/16

[30] Anglo Celt May 22, 1920

[31] Further details are in John Dorney, The Burning of Big Houses Revisited, The Irish Story.

[32] Anglo Celt December 24, 1921

[33] Anglo Celt December 31, 1921

[34] Anglo Celt, December 24 1921 and January 3 1922

[35] Anglo Celt, November 1921–March 1922

[36] Anglo Celt February 4, 1922

[37] Anglo Celt February 11, 1922

[38] Anglo Celt April 13, 1922S

[39] Anglo Celt April 19 1922

[40] Ibid.

[41] Dooley, the Land for the People, p51

[42] Anglo Celt 10 February 1923

[43] Anglo Celt March 17 1923

[44] Anglo Celt June 2, 1923

[45] Anglo Celt August 18, 1922

[46] Ibid.

[47] Anglo Celt August 13 1921

[48] Anglo Celt January 28 1922

[49] Ibid.

[50] Anglo Celt February 25 1922

[51] Anglo Celt April 14, 1922

[52] Anglo Celt August 11, 1923

[53] Ibid. In the elections itself In Cavan the Farmers Party candidate, Baxter toped the poll, followed by the Republican Patrick Smith and the former unionist JJ Cole cam third. Transfers were enough to get Cumann na nGaedheal candidate Sean Milroy over the line while Sheridan the Labour candidate, polled well but finished fourth. In Monaghan, Ernest Blythe of Cumann na nGaedhel topped the poll, followed by Dr McCarvill,e a Republican and another pro-Treatyite Pat Duffy.

[54] Anglo Celt May 12, 1923, August 18, 1923

By Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck

Publihsed by : Irish Academic Press, 2018

Reviewer: Gerard Madden

An effusive tribute by the Australian feminist Germaine Greer is perhaps not the first thing one would expect to adorn the back cover of a book on Nano Nagle, the eighteenth-century foundress of the Presentation Order of Catholic nuns.

The quote by Greer, a pupil at a Presentation convent in Victoria in the early 1950s, is suggestive of the key themes the book explores.  Greer’s praise for the caring nature of the Presentations she encountered – ‘they loved me more and they worked harder on me than my mother did’ – is indicative of their status as a leading provider of Catholic education internationally, one which dates back to the convent Nagle founded in Cork City in 1775. Their presence in Australia illustrates the manner in which Nagle’s order spread after her 1784 death, first across Ireland, and then across the world.

Now, three scholars from University College Dublin, Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, have produced this comprehensive study on Nagle’s legacy for the tercentenary of her 1718 birth.

Those approaching this book expecting to find a straightforward biography will be disappointed. Perhaps due to a paucity of archival sources – there are scanty records pertaining to much of her early life, including her education on the continent and her postulancy as a nun – only the book’s first chapter deals directly with Nagle herself. The remaining chapters discuss the growth of her Presentation Order in the two centuries after her death, with a particular emphasis on its role in Catholic education.

Nonetheless, Nagle remains a thread connecting the chapters together.  Coming from an affluent and educated family in Ballygriffin, Co. Cork – Edmund Burke was a relative – her desire to ameliorate the conditions of Cork City’s poorest from the 1750s onwards fed into the emergence of the Presentation Sisters, and were reflected by the activities of the Presentations that followed her. What emerges is a significant legacy that traverses five continents over two centuries.

The authors note that in comparison to Edmund Ignatius Rice – founder of the Christian Brothers and Presentation Brothers, two Irish religious orders who also had an international impact – Nagle’s career has been comparatively neglected by scholars. The way in which women religious have often been denied the recognition they deserve is a recurring theme of the book. The authors offer a telling anecdote, noting that while Presentation nun Sr. Catherine Condon did considerable research on Nagle for an earlier book on the Presentation foundress, Fr. T.J. Walsh, her male co-researcher, received sole credit as the publication’s author.

Throughout the book, Raftery, Delaney and Nowlan-Roebuck push against the narrative that nuns were passive agents who obeyed bishops unquestioningly. Rather, they were keen to negotiate with ecclesiastical and state authorities to advance what they felt was in the best interests of their order, and were not diffident in disagreeing or placing conditions on the requests of ecclesiastics.

Following Nagle’s death, the Presentations grew rapidly in Ireland during the early nineteenth-century, amidst a broader rise in religious vocations. Raftery, Delaney and Nowlan-Roebuck highlight how they became a leading order of women religious in Ireland, funding their expansion both internally through ecclesiastical sources and nuns’ dowries and externally through donations from wealthy benefactors and charity events such as charity sermons, bazaars, and prize draws.

While based across Ireland, their convents remained predominantly clustered in south Munster and south Leinster, reflecting Nano Nagle’s Cork roots.

The authors’ emphasise that the long-term success of the Presentations should not mask the difficulties they encountered in this formative period, with many succumbing to disease while in their thirties.

The Presentations remained an important aspect of Irish education into the twentieth-century, and the order placed considerable importance on the need for sisters to acquire strong Irish language skills, acquiring a retreat in the Waterford Gaeltacht.

In discussing the Presentations’ growth internationally, the authors particularly focus on Newfoundland and England, drawing upon Presentation archives in both polities. In 1833, four Presentation Sisters from the Galway convent founded a community in Newfoundland, Canada, following an invitation by Bishop Michael Fleming, the island’s Vicar-Apostolic, to provide education for Catholic girls.

While Fleming asserted in a report to Rome that it was primarily through his own determination that the Presentations came to Newfoundland, Raftery, Delaney and Nowlan-Roebuck push back against this, instead emphasising the agency and initiative of the Galway Presentations who made the initiative a success. The Galway Convent’s Superioress, Mother Power, placed strict conditions on Fleming in agreeing to his request, stipulating that the Galway community had the power to recall the four sisters any time after six years.

The Galway nuns were warmly received when they arrived in St. John’s harbour in 1833, with ‘Protestants, Orangemen and all kinds of people’ amongst the large crowd which greeted them. But their early history in Newfoundland was far from easy, and it was almost a decade before the first four arrivals had a proper convent to call home.

Both the Presentations and the Sisters of Mercy, who attempted to establish a foundation in Newfoundland in the 1840s, lost several members of their communities to diseases such as typhus and consumption. The Presentation Sisters endured and went on to have a strong impact on Newfoundland, with fifteen Presentation Convents opening there in the nineteenth-century and thirty-four opening in the twentieth-century.

The Galway convent continued to be an important source for Newfoundland Presentation nuns, and the authors delineate the role of chain-migration in transforming the Presentations into a truly international order.

Meanwhile, in England, the Presentations first established a community in Manchester in 1836. It was an auspicious time for English Catholicism; Catholic Emancipation had occurred only a short time before, and the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales would be restored in 1850.  The considerable poverty of the Irish Catholic slums in Manchester were noted by many contemporary observers, including a young Friedrich Engels, and the Presentations worked amongst the most deprived communities in Victorian Britain.

While the English Catholic hierarchy actively encouraged congregations of teaching sisters to come to England in the period, the growth of the Presentation Order there was much slower than in Newfoundland. It was only by the very end of the nineteenth-century that the Presentations made another foundation in England.

The authors argue that the Presentations were perceived by many English clergy as a less sound financial ‘investment’ than some of the continental teaching congregations as, in contrast to the latter, they provided free education to the poor and did not exact income for their services. The Presentation Sisters were also hesitant about making new foundations if they felt it was not in the order’s best interests, again highlighting their agency.

The Presentations also faced considerable anti-Catholic prejudice when they first arrived in England, as nuns were a particular target of anti-Catholic polemicists. In a manner inverse to Catholic concerns about Souperism in Ireland, the nuns were accused of attempting to convert the Protestant poor to Catholicism through their charitable works.

Yet the Presentation Sisters’ focus on communities marred by poverty was admired by other non-Catholics, and convent annals highlight examples of friendliness and helpfulness from neighbouring Protestants. The Presentations saw significant growth in England in the twentieth-century, and by the late 1950s had seventeen branches operating there. Convent annals allow the authors to delineate how the tumult of the First and Second World Wars shaped Presentation communities, with the nuns hosting Belgian refugees during the former and children from the heavily bombed cities during the latter.

The book’s final chapter is a broad discussion of Presentation foundations elsewhere in the world, such as the United States, Australia, India and Rhodesia. The authors note the role of Catholic nuns in the British empire as an under-researched area for scholars to take up.

The book is well-presented; three maps at the beginning outline Presentation foundations in Ireland, the United States, and the world as a whole by the mid-1960s, giving us a clear grasp from the outset of the orders’ global reach.   While its thematic structure is distracting at times – something the authors acknowledge in the introduction – overall this is a strong contribution to scholarship on Irish Catholicism, Irish women’s history and Ireland in transnational context, opening up new avenues for further research.

By John Dorney

According to the Republican historian Dorothy MacArdle, in the 19^th century Ireland was governed, ‘almost continuously since the Act of Union’ by Coercion Acts, which ‘made every expression of national feeling a crime’.[1]

She quoted the Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain, ‘it is a system founded on the bayonets of thirty thousand soldiers encamped permanently, as in a hostile country’.[2]

By contrast, American journalist, William Hurlbert, visiting in 1888 thought that the Irish nationalist complaints of ‘English tyranny’ were histrionic. He characterised the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, nicknamed ‘Bloody Balfour’, as the ‘mildest mannered and most sensible despot who ever trampled the liberties of a free people’ and that ‘the rule of the [nationalist] Land League is the only coercion to which Ireland is subjected’. [3]

However, it is a fact that for much of the 19^th century, Ireland in theory now an integral part of the United Kingdom, saw basic civil liberties; the right not to be arrested without charge and the right to trial by jury. suspended for a prolonged period, in a way that they were not in England, Scotland or Wales.

The Insurrection Acts

In fact the use of emergency legislation dated back further than the Act of Union in 1800 to the Parliament of Ireland, which was dealing in the 1790s with United Irish insurrection.

The Insurrection Act of 1796, imposed the death penalty (replaced in 1807 by transportation for life) on persons administering illegal oaths – that is member of the United Irishmen or other secret societies such as the Defenders. Around 800 such prisoners were sent to the penal colonies in Australia, alongside many more ‘ordinary criminals’.

It also allowed government to proclaim specific districts as ‘disturbed’, instituting a curfew, suspending trial by jury, and giving magistrates the authority to search houses without warrants and to arrest without charge. The act was in force throughout the revolutionary period of 1796-1802, and was reintroduced, in 1807-10, 1814-18, and 1822-5.[4]

According to James S. Donnelly’s figures, about 600 men were transported to Australia under the Insurrection Act during the ‘Captain Rock’ agrarian rebellion of the early 1820s.[5]

Coercion Act 1833

The Coercion Act of 1833, formally Suppression of Disturbances Act (1833), the first under the Union, was mainly a response to the Tithe War disturbances of the 1830s – in which Catholic tenant farms resisted paying compulsory tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland. Essentially, it empowered the Lord Lieutenant to proclaim a district ‘disturbed’ and then to try suspects my military court martial, with penalties including death, whipping and transportation for life. [6]

It read;

In case the Lord-lieutenant should direct that any person charged with any offence contrary to any of the Acts aforesaid, which by law now is or may be punishable with death, shall be tried before any Court-martial appointed under this Act, such Court, in case of conviction, shall, instead of the punishment of death, sentence such convict to transportation for life, or for any period not less than seven years: and provided also, that such Courts shall in no case impose the penalty of whipping on any person convicted by or before such Courts: provided always, that it shall not be lawful for any such Court-martial to convict or try any person for any offence whatsoever committed at any time before the passing of this Act.[7]

The Coercion Act was enacted again he era of the Young Ireland rebellion in 1848-1849, and again in 1856. [8]

Under these acts, persons suspected of crime could be arrested and imprisoned without charge and sentenced to death or transportation or military courts.

The Fenian era

From 1866 to 1869, habeas corpus, that is the right not to be arrested without charge was suspended almost continuously in the face of the Fenian, or Irish Republican Brotherhood’s attempts at insurrection. The Fenians attempted to organise a nationwide military uprising in March 1867, with the aid of Irish veterans of the American Civil War.

In 1865, the British government suppressed the Fenian paper, The Irish People and arrested their leader James Stephens, and several hundred other activists (Stephens later escaped however). In 1866, habeus corpus, or normal, peacetime law, was suspended in Ireland under the Coercion Act.

According to an MP, Mr Labouchere;

It was well-known that in 1866–7 Ireland was in a state of almost open rebellion, there being then a strong ease for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. In February of that year, a Bill was brought in to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, which was to continue to the 1st of September; and on the 10th of August it was extended until the expiration of 21 days after the commencement of the next Session of Parliament.[9]

The Conservative Spectator magazine approving wrote that,

‘the suspension of the Habeas Corpus was effectual, because it frightened the American Fenians out of the country. Lord Naas (afterwards Lord Mayo) himself gave this explanation of the operation of the measure,—” Numerous arrests were made, and persons who were known to be leaders of the movement were consigned to prison.”[10]

Many local Fenian groups were involved in agrarian agitation and attacks on landlords and agents as well as strictly nationalist activity. The suspension of Habeas Corpus acts was aimed at both nationalist and agrarian crime. The Quarterly review listed 17 murders of landlords, related to ‘Fenianism’ in 1869 alone. For this reason, the movement remained a threat long after its attempts at open rebellion in1867 had failed.

Prime Minister Disraeli recorded of the last continuance act in 1868,

14 February 1868, Lord Mayo tabled Habeus Corpus Suspension (Ireland) Continuance Bill, which he proposed should remain in effect until March 1869 and which he emphasised was ‘absolutely essential to the government’s efforts to frustrate and destroy the Fenian conspiracy. [11]

The Spectator thought that no progress was made in eliminating what it called ‘agrarian crime’ until a new Coercion Act or ‘Peace Preservation Act’ was passed in 1870;

‘This suspension [of habeas corpus], though it had its effect politically, had no effect at all on agrarian outrages. The greatest number of agrarian outrages was reported when the Suspension Act had already been in operation for eighteen months. The effect of the Suspension was political, and was nil in relation to agrarian crime. In 1869, the Suspension Act was allowed to expire ; but agrarian crime increased so much towards the end of 1869, that in 1870 the Peace Preservation Act was passed, which no doubt immediately reduced the number of outrages, and had; indeed, far more effect than any previous Act of this kind.[12]

The Peace Preservation Act allowed magistrates not only to detain suspects without trial, but also to detain suspected witnesses, to force them to give evidence and to hold them in prison until they testified.

However, if British, and particularly Conservative observers, saw in the Coercion Acts merely a necessary response to crime, Irish nationalists even if they did not support the Fenians, saw it differently. An Irish MP Arthur O’Connor in 1881 recalled that in the 1860s normal civil liberties in Ireland had appeared to be suspended arbitrarily and without explanation.

The right hon. Gentleman also said that the Bill was to protect life and property in Ireland; but he forgot altogether the manner of that protection. It really was a Bill to suspend all law in Ireland. There would be no law in that country except the arbitrary will of the Lord Lieutenant. There would be no liberty of the person. Men and women at any time might be arrested on suspicion of having committed crime, or of having aroused the suspicion of the authorities at Dublin Castle and their spies. There would be no liberty of speech, for no speaker could tell what interpretation would be placed upon his words by some irresponsible person.[13]

No Fenians were executed under the Coercion Act (three were however hanged for murder in Manchester) but several thousand were imprisoned and others were transported to penal servitude in Australia. 

The Land War

Two more Coercion Acts followed in the era of the Land War (1879-82 and 1886-87). This was a period in which the Land League, led by Irish nationalists Michael Davitt and Charles Stuart Parnell, among others, attempted first to halt evictions and to lower rents at a time of world economic recession.

The main weapons of the Land League were the ‘boycott’ or social ostracism, was well as rent strikes, another methods of passive resistance. However, as in the past, agrarian strife was also punctuated by assassination of landlords and agents.

Violence peaked in 1880-1882 as landlords attempted to recover the rent arrears of the previous year and to evict those who would not or could not pay. In 1880, 2,585 outrages were reported, in 1881, 4439 and 1882, 3433. These included an average of 17 murders per year of landlords and their associates, though much more common were acts such as intimidation and cattle maiming.[14]

Evictions, which were enforced by bailiffs under the protection of the police and military, also spiralled. There were in total 11,215 evictions during the Land War. [15]

The government on 1 January 1881 introduced a Coercion Act, becoming law in March of that year. It was essentially in line with the earlier Coercion Acts , suspending habeas corpus, trial by jury and facilitating the proclamation of entire districts as ‘disturbed’. Irish nationalists were dismayed that it had been enacted by their hitherto allies, the Liberals, rather than their customary opponents the Conservatives.

Over 950 people were imprisoned under the Act, including Land League leader Michael Davitt in February 1881. Parnell and party were ejected from House of Commons Feb 1881 for protesting Davitt’s arrest.[16]

The Prime Minister Gladstone tried to pacify Ireland by introducing a Land Act that would set up arbitration boards who would determine a ‘fair rent’. In September 1881 Parnell urged his followers to ‘test’ the Land Act by trying arbitration boards, convincing Gladstone that he was trying to undermine the Land Act. He was arrested on 20 October 1881, for ‘inciting tenants not to pay rent’ and imprisoned in Kilmainham Goal, in Dublin. [17] From prison, Parnell issued a ‘no-rent manifesto’, urging no tenants to pay rents, for which the Land League as whole was declared illegal under the Coercion Act. [18]

The arrest of Parnell and his associates and the banning of the League did little to reduce disturbances however. Much of the organising was taken up the Ladies’ Land League, led by Parnell’s sister Anna, who sustained the land agitation over the following six months.

Parnell was finally released in April 1882 after a deal termed ‘the Kilmainham Treaty’ in which he agreed to revoke the no-rent manifesto.  In return Gladstone promised to wipe out arrears in rent owed by many of Parnell’s followers and to gradually drop coercion. The hard-line Chief Secretary for Ireland William Forster had resigned in protest at Parnell’s release.

This compromise was not helped by the subsequent assassination of the two highest ranking British officials in Ireland in the Phoenix Park murders of May 1882, in which Foster’s replacement, Frederick Cavendish and the under Secretary, Henry Burke were stabbed to death of a Fenian splinter group named the Invincibles.[19]

Nevertheless, the Kilmainham deal gradually defused the conflict on the land. Agrarian ‘outrages’ largely ceased by the end of 1882 and the Coercion Act was allowed to lapse[20]

However, it was revived after another burst of land agitation the ‘Plan of Campaign’ led by nationalist activists William O’Brien and Michael Davitt in 1886. This again was mainly a campaign of ‘moral force’ involving rent strikes and boycotts, but also, again, considerable violence against landlords, agents and ‘land grabbers’.

The British government, now under the Conservative Lord Salisbury, in 1887 passed another Coercion Act under which suspects could be imprisoned by a magistrate without a trial by jury and ‘dangerous’ associations, such as the National League (as the Land League was renamed in late 1882), could be prohibited. 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 Phoenix Park murders.[21]

The 1887 Coercion Act was particularly associated with the Chief Secretary Arthur Balfour, Police opened fire on a crowd of protesters at Mitchelstown County Cork in 1887 killing three, in an event known as the ‘Mitchelstown massacre’ among Irish nationalists and earning Balfour the title ‘Bloody Balfour’.[22]

Balfour had come into office promising ‘repressing as stern as Cromwell’s.’ And though, among contemporary Irish nationalists at least, he became an equivalent hate figure to the 17^th century Lord Protector, historian Joe Lee remarks that, ‘his “repression” resulted in little more than William O’Brien losing his pants in jail and three people losing their lives in Mitchelstown…a derisory haul that would have left Cromwell turning in his desecrated grave’.[23]

Though Balfour was a staunch opponent of Irish self-government, he was no wholly unsympathetic to Irish grievances. Indeed British rule in Ireland from the 1880s onwards was characterised by concession as well as repression, a policy that included extending the powers of local government, land reform and encouraging economic development, known colloquially as ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’.

Restoration of Order

And yet, in no other part of the United Kingdom was normal peacetime law so regularly suspended as it was in Ireland. The Coercion Acts were never repealed, despite regular nationalist attempts to bring up the matter in Parliament. In 1908, one such attempt made it to the Committee stage at Westminster but went no further.

When in 1920, Britain was again facing a significant challenge to its rule in Ireland it again resorted to military courts, internment without trial and official reprisals in the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act.

One senior British politician, Lord Riddell, noted after meeting the Prime Minister Lloyd George in October 1920 that, ‘I came away with the conclusion that this was an organised movement [of reprisals] to which the Government are more or less assenting parties.’ Lloyd George, apparently would have preferred if troops and police had confined themselves to shooting ‘Sinn Feiners’ rather than burning property, but felt that reprisals ‘ had, from time immemorial, been resorted to in difficult times in Ireland… where they had been effective in checking crime’.[24]

It was perhaps ultimately as one British politician Lord Morley stated, Coercion was ‘the best machine ever devised for governing a country against its will’. [25]

References

[1] Dorothy MacArdle, The Irish Republic (1968), p.46

[2] Ibid. p.49

[3] Mark Holan, 1888: An American Journalist meets Arthur Balfour and Michael Davitt. http://www.theirishstory.com/2018/09/13/1888-an-american-journalist-in-ireland-meets-michael-davitt-arthur-balfour/#.XMLy0th7nIU

[4] http://members.pcug.org.au/~ppmay/acts/insurrection_acts.htm

[5] James S Donnelly, Captain Rock, The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-24, p.323.

[6] The details of the 1833 Act are here.

[7] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1833/apr/01/suppression-of-disturbances-ireland

[8] [Mr W Holms on history of Coercion acts in Ireland].

[9] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/feb/21/protection-of-person-and-property-1#column_1421

[10] The Spectator 1880 25 December p.6

[11] Disraeli papers 4728 here

[12] The Spectator 1880 25 December p.6

[13] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/feb/21/protection-of-person-and-property-1#column_1421

[14] James H. Murphy, Ireland, A Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1791-1891 p.128

[15] Murphy p.125

[16] Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1918 p.87

[17] Lee p87-88

[18] https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/land-war-1879-1882

[19] Shane Kenna, The Phoenix Park Killings, http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/07/31/the-invincibles-and-the-phoenix-park-killings-2/#.XMMHCNh7nIV

[20] Lee p.91

[21] Mark Holan, http://www.theirishstory.com/2018/09/13/1888-an-american-journalist-in-ireland-meets-michael-davitt-arthur-balfour/#.XFyFYqDgrIV

[22] Murphy p 132

[23] Lee, p.126

[24] or Lloyd George’s view of ‘unofficial reprisals’ see Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence p. 82 and for official Reprisals, ibid. p.93

[25] MacArdle, The Irish Republic, p.49.