Cromwell was Framed, Ireland 1649

By Tom Reilly

Published by Chronos Books, London, 2014

Reviewer: John Dorney

Oliver Cromwell’s name is one the most potent symbols in Irish historical memory. The mere mention of it generally prompts such epithets ‘as ‘murderer’, ‘scumbag’, ‘genocidal  maniac’ and so forth. So infamous has the memory of his campaign in Ireland from 1649 to 1650 become.

Tom Reilly contributed an engaging summary of his book to the Irish Story recently, reiterating his argument, first penned in his 1999 book, ‘Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy’ that Cromwell was in fact not guilty of the charges of the mass murder of Irish civilians of which he is accused.  In this book he defends this thesis against various historians who have criticised it, notably Michael O Siochru in ‘God’s Executioner’.

The format of ‘Cromwell was Framed’ is not as readable ‘An Honourable Enemy’, as the former consists in large part of lengthy reprinting of contemporary sources, in an effort, says Reilly, to let the reader make their mind up for themselves. This is indeed interesting in places; Cromwell’s full address to the Irish Catholic Bishops for instance is fascinating.

Take this stirring piece of invective penned by Old Ironsides;

‘remember ye hypocrites that Ireland was once united to England. Englishmen had good inheritances which many of them purchased with their money…they lived peaceably and honestly among you…You broke this union. You unprovoked put the English to the most unheard of and barbarous massacre (without respect to age or sex) that the world ever beheld. And at a time when Ireland was at perfect peace and when through the example of English industry through commerce and traffic, that which was  in the natives’ hands was better to them than if all Ireland had been in their hands and not an Englishman in it.’

Cromwell goes on to explain why he puts the fault for the war in Ireland squarely on the shoulders of the Catholic clergy who have duped their ‘poor deluded laity’ and who use the ‘fig leaf’ of support for the King to further their designs for religious domination. ‘We are come to break the power of a company of lawless rebels, who having cast off the authority of England, live as enemies to human society’.

But elsewhere the reader can flag a little at the relentless detail of the arguments over what Cromwell did and did not do, specifically at the siege of Tom Reilly’s native Drogheda in 1641.

Reilly argues that far from being a slaughterer of civilians, Cromwell respected the laws of war (such as they were at the time) during his campaign in Ireland and did his best to protect civilians. He argues that in the siege of Drogheda there is no compelling evidence to show that any large number of civilians were killed and that at Wexford the following month those civilians who died accidentally drowned while trying to escape or were killed in the crossfire between the two sides.

So for the reviewer there are two questions. One, is he convincing? And two; does it matter?

Drogheda – A Civilian massacre?

Let’s deal with the first question first – did Cromwell massacre the inhabitants of Drogheda in September 1649? As we have covered here on The Irish Story before, on September 11 of that year, Cromwell, leading the English Parliamentarian New Model Army summoned the garrison of Drogheda to surrender. Drogheda was held by a Royalist force with both English and Irish troops led by the English Catholic Arthur Aston. Aston would not surrender and the town was stormed.

Almost the entire garrison of 3,000 men, including Aston himself, was killed, many after they had tried to surrender and some after they actually did surrender. The heads of the Royalist officers were, in manner reminiscent of contemporary atrocities in Syria and Iraq, cut off and put on poles along the road back to Dublin. Whether or not one accepts, as Reilly does, that this was within the accepted boundaries of 17^th century warfare, it was still a horrific event.  Only by retrospective dehumanisation of the Royalist soldiers can this be denied.

However this is not the core of the book’s argument. Royalist and Irish Catholic writers and propagandists in the months and years afterwards maintained that Cromwell’s troops massacred the unarmed townspeople of Drogheda. Is this true? Reilly argues cogently that it is not. To a large extent it appears he is right. There are very few references to civilians being killed wholesale during the siege in contemporary accounts and only a few of accidental or what we might call ‘collateral’ killings.

The exception to this is Cromwell’s own letter to Parliament about the siege.  It listed 2,800 Royalist soldiers killed ‘and many inhabitants’. Reilly points out that the original of his letter does not survive and that some reproductions of the letter contain the line about civilians and some do not. Moreover Cromwell himself vociferously denied later that year at New Ross that he had ‘killed, massacred or banished’ anyone who was not ‘in arms’ in Ireland.

Also, as Reilly points out, Drogheda had been consistently in Parliamentarian hands from 1647 to 49. There was no automatic reason why the population should have been targeted for massacre.

In the opinion of this reviewer, we therefore cannot be sure that a massacre of civilians (as opposed to surrendering soldiers) occurred at Drogheda and we should really stop saying it did. It is certainly possible that civilians were killed in the sack, maybe even several hundred, but it seems clear there was no targeted massacre.

We can also note that at the sieges of Kilkenny and Clonmel, where his assaults were repulsed with heavy losses (in the case of the latter grievous ones), Cromwell fully respected the terms of surrender he agreed with the Irish Catholic garrisons there and the townspeople. At the very least the picture of Cromwell as indiscriminate killer must be modified.

Cromwell’s significance in Irish history

On to question two; does it matter? The thesis here seems to be, to paraphrase; ‘in 1649 English Parliamentarians killed English Royalists at Drogheda as part of a civil war throughout these islands and Irish nationalists mistakenly remember it as an example of English tyranny in Ireland’.

This is where I felt the book’s argument was much weaker. At the very least this hugely oversimplifies events in mid 17^th century Ireland. In particular the thesis that since Drogheda had been a Pale (i.e. English speaking) town in the medieval period it would not have been Irish or Catholic in 1649 is very much mistaken. Irish identity was in flux at the time, being forged on the anvil of religious war. In 1641 Gaelic Irish rebels from Ulster came to the Pale around Dublin and for the first time in history the English speaking Pale lords, in a famous ceremony at the Hill of Crofty in County Meath declared common cause with them as fellow Catholics.

Tom Reilly’s assertion here that the Pale rejected the uprising of 1641 is plain wrong.  When Drogheda was besieged for first time in 1641 elements of the town’s population attempted to open the gates for Phelim O’Neill’s insurgents. Similarly his idea that Dublin supported the Parliamentary forces on principle seems to downplay the fact that the Catholic population had actually been expelled from the city during the wars after 1641.

He sets up a distinction between the townspeople of Drogheda (English) and Wexford (Irish) that would have seemed odd at the time. Both were predominantly English-speaking Catholic towns. That Wexford was held by Irish Confederates and Drogheda by predominantly English troops (first Royalists and then Parliamentarians, then Royalists again) was simply the fortunes of war. A generation earlier both towns would have been deeply hostile to their Irish speaking Gaelic neighbours in the Nine Years War. But by the 1640s, for better or for worse, it was principally religion that determined people’s allegiances.

The idea that a new Irish identity was formed out of Catholicism and loyalty to the English King, Charles Stuart against the English Parliament is not one that many Irish people would identify with today. But not to appreciate this and not to appreciate that resisting Parliamentarian conquest for Irish Catholics meant, as they saw it, resisting dispossession and religious persecution is to fail to recognise why Cromwell became a hate figure in Irish popular understanding.

The war in Ireland from 1641-52 was incredibly fractious and complex. For most of the 1640s the Catholics, organised in the Confederate Catholic Association, based in Kilkenny, fought with Parliament- backed Protestant forces and negotiated with Royalist ones for a possible settlement. It was only in 1648 that they joined a pan Royalist alliance aimed at defending Ireland from Parliamentarian invasion (and not without factional fighting in their own ranks over this alliance).

Losing Drogheda, therefore an important port for resupply, to the most anti-Catholic faction of the Civil Wars – the New Model Army – would indeed have been a devastating blow to politically aware Irish Catholics. It was not an irrelevant squabble between English factions.

What was more, Cromwell’s campaign of 1649-50, seizing most of the walled towns in eastern Ireland paved the way for the subsequent incredibly brutal guerrilla war, in which large parts of the country were devastated by Parliamentarian forces.

We might conclude, as Reilly does with some reason, that Cromwell himself did not massacre civilians in Ireland, but we cannot say the same of his successor commanders, Henry Ireton, Charles Fleetwood and Edmund Ludlow. The death toll from their scorched earth tactics in the subsequent years certainly reached into the hundreds of thousands. Furthermore under the Commonwealth regime, the ownership of the land of Ireland passed almost in its entirety to Protestant settlers, a fact that determined perhaps the next two hundred years of Irish history.

If Cromwell became a demon figure in Irish folklore it was not necessarily a result of what he did or did not do at Drogheda but because he personally stood in for an immensely traumatic period in popular memory.

And yet as Tom Reilly would no doubt point out, none of this changes the fact that there is very little conclusive evidence of a civilian massacre at Drogheda. In this limited sense, Cromwell was indeed perhaps ‘framed’.

By Liam Hogan

The negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born, nay, he may have been   purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began his existence.

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)

  Advert: Negro Dogs – The undersigned [William Gambrel], having bought the entire      pack of negro dogs (of the Hays and Allen stock), he now proposes to catch runaway negroes. His charges will be three dollars per day for hunting, and fifteen   dollars for catching a runway. He resides three and half miles north of Livingston, near the lower Jones Bluff Road.

- Appeared in an Alabama newspaper, 6th November 1845[1]

He was originally named Frederick Bailey. He was born into slavery in the state of Maryland in 1818. His mother was a slave and this meant that, by law, all the children that she bore were the property of her owner. He never knew who his father was; although a young Frederick heard rumours that it was in fact his own master. This was a known practice among slave owners. As the Atlantic slave trade was now illegal, the forced breeding and rape of slaves by their owners made the “gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable.”[2]

As it was a slave breeding practice in Maryland “to part [slave] children from their mothers at a very early age” Frederick was taken from his mother’s arms soon after he was born.[3]He only met his mother four or fives times in his life and he did not recollect ever seeing her “by the light of day.” He was not informed when she became ill and was not allowed to be with her as she died, nor attend her burial. She died a stranger to him.

He was never told his birthday. He was not a human being in the eyes of the state but property. A pencil, a notebook, a negro. Slaves had no rights nor representation, their past, present & future – mind, body & soul  – were consigned to a form of servile oblivion. He was moved around like chattel between multiple owners and he witnessed his own siblings being sold away to different plantations.

 The Spark

At the age of twelve he was taught the alphabet by Sophia Auld, the wife of his Master, Hugh Auld. When Hugh Auld found out he was furious; he castigated Sophia that it was against the law to educate slaves and he rationalised it thus;

If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell.  A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger [pointing at Douglass] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…[..] it would make    him discontented and unhappy.[4]

This was a revelation for Douglass. Auld had articulated the system used by slaveowners to maintain their plantations (by controlling their slaves) as well as the racist ideology that was slavery’s foundation. From then on Douglass was determined to learn how to read and he succeeded by asking local white children to help him as well as observing how the people around him wrote. Around this time he obtained a copy of The Columbian Orator which included a famous speech by Curran on the “genius of universal emancipation” and another speech which called for Catholic emancipation.

These works refined Douglass’s views on slavery, human rights and social justice. The more he read the more he despised his owners who he now judged as “a band of successful robbers” who had “stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.”[5] By 1833 Douglass was teaching other slaves on the plantation to read. When caught, he was rented out to a “slave breaker” who frequently beat him and whipped him.

Douglass, who could take no more, decided to fight back and succeeded in getting the upper hand in a physical struggle. The “slave breaker”, protecting his pride and reputation, did not tell anyone what happened nor did he attempt to punish Douglass. In 1838 Douglass eventually escaped his enslavement (using the identification papers of a free black sailor) and fled to New York.

There he stayed with abolitionists, and married Anna Murray, a free black, who was working as a housekeeper. They moved to New Bedford and were helped by Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Johnson who covered their traveling expenses. It was Nathan Johnson who suggested that Frederick change his surname to “Douglas” after a character in Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady in the Lake.” Due to the Fugitive slave laws, Douglass was at risk of being abducted at any point and returned to his owner.

Changing one’s name was just one way of trying to avoid capture. For the next three years Douglass worked at the docks, and it was there that he experienced organised racism when a group of dock workers refused to work with him on account of the colour of his skin. This was a chilling precursor for what was to come post-emancipation.

After encouragement, he subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator. Reading this anti-slavery newspaper inspired and enthralled Douglass, he felt that his “soul was set all on fire.” On the 11th August 1841 he attended an anti-slavery gathering at Nantucket and delivered a speech about his experiences as a slave. There was no turning back from this point on. Garrison, impressed by Douglass’s performance, hired him as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and for the next three years he toured the country, railing against the institution of slavery. These lecture tours were far from safe, on one occasion in Indiana he was attacked by a mob and his hand was broken.

In 1845 he published his memoir, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The book was immensely popular, but due to his now elevated public profile, the risk of Douglass being renditioned had increased. It was felt that the most prudent decision was for Douglass to go on an anti-slavery tour in Ireland and Britain. This would keep him safe for an interim period as well as increasing anti-slavery sentiment in the British Isles.

Douglass was also weary from the constant struggle and he wrote to Garrison after landing in Ireland that “one of my objects in coming [to Europe] was to get a little repose, that I might return home refreshed and strengthened, ready to be able to join you vigorously in the prosecution of our holy cause.”[6]

Douglass and Ireland

Frederick Douglass encountered Irishmen (or their words) at various points in his life and some of these encounters were especially influential. He recounted how the transatlantic publication of Daniel O’Connell’s anti-slavery speeches “made American slavery shake to its centre” and how he once heard his master curse him “and therefore I loved him.”[7]

When walking on the Wharf at Baltimore he saw two Irishmen “unloading a scow of stone” and he helped them complete the job. Afterwards one of the men asked if Douglass was a slave for life. When Douglass confirmed this the man was “deeply affected” and turned to his friend and said “that it was pity that so fine a fellow as [Douglass] should be a slave for life..it was a shame to hold [him].” They both urged Douglass to escape North, to be free. Douglass retrospectively revealed that this conversation gave him further impetus to escape.

He arrived in Dublin in the Autumn of 1845 and was hosted by members the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, namely James Haughton, Richard Allen and Richard D. Webb. Webb, a publisher, was chosen by Douglass to print copies of the Narrative and also to organise a series of anti-slavery lectures across Ireland. All 2000 copies of the first run of the Dublin edition of the Narrative had sold out by the close of 1845.[8]

Douglass lectured to acclaim in Dublin and Cork, befriending both his hero Daniel O’Connell and Father Mathew in the process, before visiting Limerick in November 1845. Douglass stayed in Limerick for two weeks, lodging with the Fisher family in Lifford House. The Fisher’s, who were related to Richard Webb, were founding members of the Limerick Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass struck up a lifelong friendship with Rebecca and Susanna Fisher, both of whom were most active in Limerick in the cause of abolitionism.

Despite being hosted by a Quaker family, Douglass was not booked to speak at the Quaker Meeting House in Limerick. This may have been a preemptive action by Webb in response to the controversy in Dublin where the Quakers withdrew permission for Douglass to lecture in their hall after he spoke of his previous owner, who was a Methodist. They put the possibility of offending local Methodists ahead of the truth of Frederick Douglass’s life. This was a reminder of how anti-slavery advocacy was not a singular object even within the Quaker community.

Instead the Independent Chapel on Bedford Row was the venue for both of Frederick Douglass’s lectures in Limerick City. The Congregational Minister in charge of the Independent Chapel in 1845 was Rev. John De Kewer Williams. De Kewer Williams, who was the same age as Douglass, hailed from the parish of Hackney in Middlesex and was a graduate of the reputable dissenting academy at Highbury College in London. This college had a long anti-slavery tradition. De Kewer Williams had accepted an invitation from the Irish Evangelical Society to visit Ireland and he began his mission in Limerick in 1844.[9]

Douglass lectures in Limerick

At eight o’clock on Monday the 10th November 1845, Frederick Douglass delivered a graphic address about the treatment of slaves in the United States to a rapt Limerick audience in the Independent Chapel. In the chair was Benjamin Fisher and he introduced Douglass to the large crowd which represented “all classes and parties” with the Limerick Reporter noting that “there was a large number of females present.”

Douglass began his lecture with a call for decorum. He had received enthusiastic applause as he took the podium and in response said  “that he had no desire for any demonstrations of applause, and, considering the sacred character of the building in which they were assembled, he would prefer being allowed to proceed without them, as he was anxious not to give offense.”

His speech this night pulled no punches. He immediately tackled the assertion he oft heard in Ireland, that the Irish were “slaves” under the Act of Union or “slaves” because they had been dispossessed of land, evicted or discriminated against. He said

 If slavery existed in Ireland, it ought to put down, and the generous in the land ought  to rise and scatter its fragments to the winds (loud cheers).  But there was nothing like American slavery on the soil on which I now stand. Negro slavery consisted  not in taking away a man’s property, but in making property of him..[10]

Explaining how slave owners controlled the life of the slave in it’s entirety – from the food it ate, clothes it wore, whether it could speak, how much work it should do, how and by how much it should be punished, who it should marry or breed with – he asked the crowd

 could the most inferior person in this country be so treated by the highest? If any      man exists in Ireland who would so treat another, may the combined execrations of humanity fall upon him.

Douglass then turned his attention to foreign apologists for slavery, singling out the British geologist, Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell published a book in 1845 about his travels through North America wherein he wrote that the slaves he saw were happy in their station. Lyell had been hosted by plantation owners, coming to the dubious conclusion that slaves were in a good position in society as they had a “monopoly of the labour market; the planters being bound to clothe and feed them.”

He also refuted the common claim that slaves were “better fed than a large part of the labouring class of Europe” which unwittingly confirmed  that slaves were treated the same as livestock.[11] Douglass dismissed Lyell’s naivety with some humour, asking the Limerick audience “was it not to be presumed that the wolf would say that the lamb loved to be eaten up by him?…thus even geologists were led astray.”

Douglass next read out a list of slave laws that existed in the slave holding states, explaining that these laws were protected under the constitution and thus “there was no one spot in all America upon which I can stand free.” The core of his speech attacked the hypocrisy of the U.S. to vaunt noble ideas such as liberty or freedom while a “bastard republicanism enslaved one-sixth of the population.”

From the national to the local, Douglass turned his ire towards a Blackface actor named Bateman, exclaiming that he was “sorry to find one of these apes of the negro had been recently encouraged in Limerick.”

Minstrel shows from the U.S. were popular in Ireland at this time yet it is not quantifiable what impression this left in the minds of those who witnessed such performances. Academics disagree over this impact; Riach argues that the failure of Irish abolitionists to condemn the minstrel shows was a factor as Irish immigrants carried these racial prejudices across the Atlantic.[12] Sweeney questions how many Irish attended these shows to be of any significance, while also pointing to the Limerick Reporter’s defence of Bateman, who argue that his portrayal of the “debased slave” is one that would invoke sympathy in the audience rather than contempt.[13]

There were unique aspects to this speech. He revealed that an Irishman named Gough saved his life on board the Cambria. A group of slaveholders on the ship had threatened to throw Douglass overboard but Gough defended Douglass telling the belligerents that “two might play at that game.” When the audience heard this detail they cheered loudly, and Douglass riding this wave of enthusiasm, then called for “three cheers for Old Ireland!”

As he neared the end of his speech he engaging in a form of grotesque theatre by brandishing a selection of implements that were previously used to torture slaves. Douglass rarely resorted to such methods, so perhaps this was a calculated response to Bateman’s blackface antics. This “performance” contrasted with his initial call for respect to be shown for the venue, yet fits in with the Christian reverence to sacrifice in the iconography of the crucified and lanced Christ.

The first item, he explained to the (now gasping) audience, was an iron collar which was “taken from the neck of a young woman who had escaped from Mobile..It had worn into her neck that her blood and flesh were found on it.” This caused a sensation in the crowd.

He then produced a set of leg irons which were used to chain feet of a slave together, followed by a pair of hand-cuffs taken from a fugitive slave. Douglass said that “he knew this man well” and that he had broken his wrist trying to break free of his chains, finally finding refuge in Canada where “he enjoyed that liberty under a monarchial government which he looked for in vain in his own land under a boasted democracy.”

Douglass, a gifted orator, then turned the audience’s attention from the zenith of their engagement back to their own responsibilities and identity by reciting a fragment of a famous speech by one his Irish heroes, John Philpott Curran. In 1793 Curran defended the United Irishman, Archibald Hamilton Rowan (accused of seditious libel) and during the proceedings coined the phrase “universal emancipation.”[14] The symbolism of a former slave quoting these same words on Irish soil, during O’Connell’s Repeal of the Union campaign, was surely acknowledged by those present.

As applause followed he pulled their minds back again to the gruesome reality of chattel slavery, displaying a “horrid whip which was made of cow hide, and whose lashes were as hard as horn.” He told how the blood was clotted with blood when he first got it. In a rare reference to the torture of his disabled cousin Hester, Douglass described in gory detail how his master, Thomas Auld

[tied] up a young woman eighteen years of age, and beat her with that identical whip until the blood ran down her back.—And the wretch accompanied the whipping with a quotation from Scripture, “He that knew his master’s will, and did it not, shall receive many strips”

There were cries of “horrible!!” from the shocked audience. The lecture had lasted over ninety minutes and Douglass promised the crowd that he would continue his “exposure of slavery” at the same venue in two days.  The Limerick Reporter observed that the crowd left the Independent Chapel that night “incensed against the infernal traffic in human blood and flesh.”

Douglass’s Second Lecture in Limerick

Frederick Douglass lectured for a second time at the Independent Chapel on the 12th November. No record of this lecture remains but we know that the theme was the role religion played in sustaining slavery in the United States. Douglass claimed that without the support of the churches slavery “would have been long since abolished by the people.”[15]

He produced a selection of newspapers which showed how the “churches, in their corporate capacity, were slaveholders, and so were the Bishops and clergymen.” The Reporter claims that Douglass made particular reference to Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians as being “guilty of the crime.” He said that while Catholics were as guilty individually, they were less guilty corporately, as “they alone of all other religions put the slave and master on the same level at the communion table and in the house of worship.”

Anti-Slavery Soiree at the Philosophical Rooms

The final public appearance of Frederick Douglass in Limerick was at an Anti-Slavery soiree held at the Philosophical Rooms on Glentworth Street on the 21st November.[16]

A large crowd of over 400 people were present, including the Mayor of Limerick, Francis P. Russell. Both the Limerick Reporter and a friend of Jane Jennings (Rebecca or Susanna Fisher) record that is was attended by the ”most respectable” people of Limerick.[17] The crowd mingled, enjoying the refreshments on offer, while St. John’s Temperance Band played “several beautiful airs.”

The Mayor announced that he was proud to preside at such a soiree which did “honour to a man that came amongst them from America and who was once a slave, but is now a free man.” He offered a toast to the health of the Queen and a toast to the health of their guest “Mr. Frederick Douglass.” Douglass rose from his seat to loud cheering and addressed the crowd.

He said that he was in the habit of meeting with such an assembly but that he “was never more delighted than at the present moment.” He then referred to the role Ireland’s representatives played, as part of the Union Kingdom, in freeing the 800,000 slaves in the British West Indies in 1833, that “the people of this country had done something for them.” Indeed there were Irishmen in the Royal Navy struggling to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in 1845.

The “Chattel Becomes a Man”

As Douglass continued his speech, he reminded the audience that if he were on American soil, he would be his master’s property, liable to be sold at any time as a piece of merchandise, but “thank God, it was not so in this land.” Interestingly, he then remarked that he was “happy to see that not only the humble classes of Limerick recognised him, but its wealth and respectability.” This suggests that the working class of the city had attended his lectures. Then Douglass revealed that he now felt transformed from a slave into a man.

 Oh what a transition it was to be changed from the state of a slave to that of a free man! Really when [I think] of my former condition and [my] present I am puzzled to    know whether Frederick Douglass then, was the same Frederick Douglass now. [I] can hardly believe how my proud spirit could ever be bound in chains.

He also expressed his appreciation to the people of Limerick for their hospitality.

 [I] found freedom and a welcome to speak against slavery in Dublin, Wexford,   Waterford, and Cork, and though last, not least, in Limerick. Whether at home or   abroad, [I will] never forget the very kind manner [I] was received in Limerick.

The Mayor thanked Douglass, adding “this, the country of my birth, was always for freedom and I know of no country so opposed to slavery as Ireland.” Rev. John Brahan, (P.P. of St. Mary’s) said that he was grateful to hear Douglass for the first time and as he looked around the hall he noticed that there were many different denominations, “and also some of my own creed [Roman Catholic], all engaged in denouncing slavery.” In reference to Catholic Emancipation he said “[We] have been slaves ourselves, we are no longer slaves but [we] sympathise with the enslaved of every creed, and clime, and hue.” Before the soiree ended a relaxed Frederick Douglass “sang a beautiful sentimental air.”

 A Man of One Idea?

Frederick Douglass was acutely aware of the lamentable state of the poor in Ireland at this time. During his visit to Limerick there was an outbreak of typhus fever which claimed many lives. While most of the deaths were inevitably from the poorer parts of the city, it also claimed the life of the physician (and former Mayor of Limerick) Sir Richard Franklin.[22] There were 1,168 paupers in the Limerick Workhouse, and this number was growing each week.[23] This poverty that he witnessed shocked him so much that it stayed with him all of his life. But a question needs to be asked, did he speak out against this while touring Ireland?

Douglass had admitted that his primary mission in Ireland was to increase support for the anti-slavery cause. He wrote to Webb from Limerick, stating that he did not wish to tour alongside the social reformer Henry C. Wright as he believed it would harm his campaign by distracting from the anti-slavery theme. At this juncture he saw himself as a “man of one idea.”[24] He was careful not to offend his audiences in Ireland.

He aligned himself with popular sentiment, supported Repeal, Temperance and downplayed the role of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. in sustaining slavery. Yet in private he mocked the hypocrisy of those in positions of influence and power who oversaw such rampant destitution. Three months after his visit to Limerick, Douglass wrote a letter to Garrison from Scotland which targeted those in Ireland who argue about the minutiae of religious doctrine while their fellow beings starve in the streets,

 Where is your religion that takes care for the poor?—for the widow and      fatherless—where are its votaries?—what are they doing? The answer to this would be, if properly given, wasting their energies in useless debate on hollow creeds and points of doctrine, which, when settled, neither make    one hair white nor black. In conversation with some who were such rigid adherents         to their faith that they would scarce be seen in company with those who differed        from them in any point of their creed, I have heard them quote the text in palliation             of their neglect, “The poor shall not cease out of the land”![25]

Influenced by the universalism of O’Connell and jolted by the poverty all around, Douglass confided to Garrison that he saw “much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.”[26]

But he did not express these thoughts publicly during his time in Ireland. Some historians have judged him for this but others are more sympathetic. McFeely argues that Douglass’s feelings were genuine, but if “he had pity, he had no cure.”[27] Soskis concurs adding that Douglass’s “reluctance to embrace working-class reform does not imply a narrow-minded callousness, but an understanding of the power, and the limits, of his own celebrity.”[28]

Douglass was compelled to respond to the frequent comparison that was made between chattel slavery and the desperate lot of the Irish peasantry. This forced him to explain the meaning of chattel slavery to audiences, which naturally emphasised the differences between the two, rather than any commonalities.

It’s also understandable that many in Ireland would be comfortable with describing their situation as “slavery”; it was a favoured piece of hyperbole used by Irish patriots since the first plantations. Daniel O’Connell also made such allusions (e.g. “I am a slave”) and his younger, less progressive self went further in 1809 when he attacked the British establishment for ignoring the oppression of Irish Catholics while “they moistened with their tears the sable savages of Africa.”[29] O’Connell’s observation that “the petitions of Negroes were countenanced, and their objects promoted..but [our] cause was vilified” previewed the future rage of John Mitchel.

Postscript: With friends like these..

A further criticism of Douglass it is that he did not empathise with Father Theobald Mathew’s similarly difficult position when he visited the U.S. in 1849. Fr. Mathew, the “Apostle of Temperance” who has a bridge named in his honour in Limerick City, was also a self-described “man of one idea” and despite signing the famous anti-slavery Address in 1841, refused to denounce slavery during his American tour, believing, like Douglass, that it would harm his primary mission.

This decision shocked abolitionists in Ireland and the U.S., including Douglass, who took personally the pledge from Fr. Mathew in Cork. He was scathing in his criticism. He wrote that he felt “grieved, humbled and mortified” by Fr. Mathew’s decision to ignore slavery and “wondered how being a Catholic priest should inhibit him from denouncing the sin of slavery as much as the sin of intemperance.” Douglass felt it was his duty to “denounce and expose the conduct of Father Mathew.”[30]

Douglass, who had declared in Limerick that his “mission was purely an anti-slavery one” was unwilling to afford the same latitude to Fr. Mathew.[31] Fr. Mathew, knowing that he would be attacked, further distanced himself from his former abolitionist friends by invoking Scripture to defend his neutral position. In Ireland, Richard Webb was livid.

Webb, a great admirer of Fr. Mathew’s temperance campaign, had now lost respect for him but his wife Hannah Webb was uncomfortable with the attacks on the famous priest and wondered what good could come of it. She acknowledged that Garrison was right in principle to condemn Father Mathew in the press, yet because of Mathew’s poor health and advanced age, she wished “to see the man handled more gently.”[32] The remarkable abolitionist Asenath Nicholson, (who had travelled around Ireland – alone – feeding the masses during the Famine) was a close friend of the Webb’s. She also sympathised with Father Mathew’s predicament. The historian Maureen Murphy explains that

 both had to compromise in order to do their work in a cultural setting other than their      own. Nicholson had to put her suspicion of Catholics aside to aid the poor; Father  Mathew had to set the cause of abolitionism aside to pursue the cause of      temperance.[33]

Yet, Douglass raised a salient point. His mission was to highlight the complete lack of freedom and dehumanisation that existed under slavery, whereas Father Mathew wished to address the abuse or misuse of this freedom. The only way for a slave to be free was to flee, an act which broke the law and risked life and limb.

Whereas a person that took Father Mathew’s temperance pledge was exercising a free choice, determining, as is their birthright, their future behaviour. While there can be an equivocation of Douglass’s and Mathew’s motivations, there can be no equivocation of their causes. At risk of sounding Garrisonian, little honour can be found in pointing towards a movement like temperance as a justification for being an apologist for chattel slavery.

 References

[1]          Livingston County (Alabama), Whig, 16th November 1845

[2]          Douglass, Frederick (1851), Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Written by himself. (6 ed.). London: H.G. Collins. p. 11

[3]          ibid. pg. 10

[4]          ibid. pg. 35

[5]          ibid. pg. 41

[6]          Frederick Douglass in Ireland: the Dublin Edition of his Narrative, Patricia J. Ferreira, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 5 (1), Spring 2001, pp. 53

[7]          Frederick Douglass, “I Am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery: An address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on 14 October 1845,” The Frederick Douglass Speeches, 1841-1846.

[8]          Ferreira, p.58

[9]          John De Kewer Williams, Charlotte C. Williams, The minister’s wife and my own, a memorial of Mrs. J. De K. Williams (London, 1856), p. 58 – Limerick City was his first post as a minister, and he held a deep affection for the city long after he left. He often wrote to his wife about how kindly he was treated by the locals during his three years preaching in Limerick.

[10]         Limerick Reporter, 11th November 1845

[11]         Sir Charles Lyell, Travels in North America; with geological observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia (London 1845), p. 169

[12]         Douglas C. Riach, ‘Blacks and Blackface on the Irish Stage 1830-60’, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 231

[13]         Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool 2010), p. 109

[14]         John Philpott Curran, Speeches of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran …: On the Late Very Interesting Trials (London 1815), pp. 169-171

[15]         Limerick Reporter, 14th November 1845

[16]         Limerick Reporter, 25th November 1845

[17]         Letter from Jane Jennings to Maria West Chapman, Boston Public Library, 26th November 1845

[18]         Index of 19th Century Naval Vessels, Cygnet, 1840, URL: http://www.pbenyon.plus.com/18-1900/C/01243.html (Accessed 10th January 2014)

[19]         Mary Wills, The Royal Navy and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. c. 1807-1867: anti-slavery, empire and identity, Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hull. (June 2012)

[20]         Freeman’s Journal, 10th October 1845

[21]         Private Donations to Ireland during An Gorta Mór, Christine Kinealy, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, Vol. 17 (2), 1998, pg. 118

[22]         Limerick Chronicle, 11th October 1845

[23]         Ciarán Ó Murchadha, ‘Limerick Union Workhouse during the Great Famine’, Old Limerick Journal, Vol. 32 Famine Edition (1995), p. 39

[24]         Frederick Douglass to Richard D. Webb, 10th November 1845

[25]         Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, 26th February 1846

[26]         ibid.

[27]         William S. Feely, Frederick Douglass (New York 1990), p. 126

[28]         Benjamin Soskis, Heroic Exile: The Transatlantic Development of Frederick Douglass 1845-1847 (Yale 1998), http://www.yale.edu/glc/soskis/fr-1.htm

[29]           Freeman’s Journal, 27^th May 1809

[30]         Colm Kerrigan, ‘Irish Temperance and US Anti-Slavery: Father Mathew and the Abolitionists’, History Workshop Journal pp. 105-119.

[31]         Richard Bradbury, ‘Douglass and the Chartists’, Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform (Atlanta 1999), ed (s), Alan J. Rice, Martin Crawford,  p. 173

[32]         Hannah Webb to Anne Warren Weston, BPL, 4th November 1849

[33]         Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland (Dublin 1998) Maureen Murphy (ed.), p. 229

John Dorney reports on the launch of a new initiative to document the graffiti left by political prisoners at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.

During the Irish revolutionary period from 1916 to 1923, as many as 20,000 people were imprisoned at one time or another.

Hundreds of these, including (briefly) the executed leaders of the insurrection of Easter 1916 passed through Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin – the latter on their way to the firing squad in the stone-breakers’ yard. During the War of Independence hundreds more men and women ended up there, along with 22 British Army military prisoners. During the Civil War of 1922-23, it is thought that about 600 prisoners passed through here, the majority of whom were women.

The Gaol which closed in 1924, now stands as public monument both to their experiences and to the history of imprisonment in Ireland. On September 24^th 2014, inside the bowels of Kilmainham, a new website was launched, which aims to catalogue the material reminders left by republican prisoners in Kilmainham, in the form of graffiti in the cells, autograph books and other etchings.

You can see the results here http://kilmainhamgaolgraffiti.com/

Etched on the walls of cells in Kilmaniham Gaol are thousands of messages from former prisoners, visible despite as many as 17 layers of whitewash which tried to obscure them.

More than 584 names (393 rendered in English and 154 in Irish) have been recovered from the walls, along with messages ranging from calls for Irish freedom, to celebrations of the IRA or Cumman na mBan fighters on the outside, to feminist demands to simple demands for better food.

Some messages are religious; such as depiction of the Sacred Heart, but others are critical of the Catholic Church’s failure to support the republicans, especially in the civil war. Other etchings are remarkably carefully drawn portraits of other prisoners. One poem expresses the hope that God will ‘cut the throats of the Free Staters’. One simply says; ‘Up us!’

Pat Cooke of the University College Dublin School of Art History, speaking at the launch of the website, noted that graffiti was almost always written on the wall of the cell door, so that warders could not see it – a subtle attempt to regain some personal autonomy by the prisoners.

Laura McAtackney, a contemporary archaeologist who works at University College Dublin, has conducted a close and systematic survey of the graffiti in Kilmainham. Fresh from a similar project to document the material remains of the Maze/Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland, where paramilitary prisoners were held during the Northern conflict (1968-1998), she has spent the last six years working on the Kilmainham project. (Check out her blog here).

While there are autographs and graffiti left by such famous figures as Patrick Pearse, Eamon de Valera and Constance Markievicz, her focus, she says, has not been on the ‘big names’ but on the experiences of ‘ordinary prisoners’.

Kilmainham fell into some disrepair after its closure in 1924 but was restored with the aid of volunteers in the 1960s as a monument to the struggle for Irish independence. In latter years the museum and guided tour has also focused on the hundred year history of the Gaol as a punishment for ‘ordinary’ criminals.

Laura McAtackney made the argument that the civil war in particular, in a manner similar to the social history of the Gaol, ran the risk of being forgotten in popular memory. The project to document the Gaol’s graffiti is an admirable way to correct this.

 The Howth Gun-Running and the Kilcoole Gun-Running: Recollections and Documents

Edited by F.X Martin,

(Dublin, Merrion Press, 2014). E17.95.

Reviewer: Gerard Madden

September 2014 was dominated by the increasingly vibrant debate on Scotland’s future within the United Kingdom, with Scots ultimately opting to remain within the Union. The irony of Tory MP’s hurriedly demanding ‘Home Rule’ for England in the referendum’s wake, almost exactly a century after they supported the threats of the Ulster Volunteers to resist a Home Rule Ireland by force, was not lost on many.

Appropriately, September marked the 100^th anniversary of the passing of the 1914 Home Rule Bill; another important aspect of the Union’s history, albeit one whose significance has been overshadowed by the events of the years which followed. The debates in Ireland then and Scotland now are as interesting in their differences as much as in their similarities, notably the lack of a physical force element to the debate in Scotland.

The introduction of Home Rule to the statute books in 1912 saw the introduction of the gun into Irish politics on a mass scale, with the formation of the unionist Ulster Volunteers in 1913 in reaction to the Act’s introduction itself prompting the formation of the Irish Volunteers, after the publication of Eoin MacNeill’s famous essay, ‘The North began’.

Now a selection of annotated primary sources documenting the event that armed the Irish Volunteers, The Howth Gun-Running and the Kilcoole Gun-Running: Recollections and Documents, has been republished by Merrion Press on the 50^th anniversary of its original publication in 1964.

The book is critically edited by F.X. Martin, the Augustinian Friar from Co. Kerry noted for his valuable contribution to research on the years prior to and including the Easter Rising despite having a background in medieval and early modern History, notably the Jesuit order. Best known for his contribution to the nine-volume series, The Course of Irish History, the ‘decade of centenaries’ has seen Martin’s work receive increased appraisal; Merrion Press have released another of Martin’s books on the period, The Irish Volunteers 1913-1915: Recollections and Documents, and the two books complement each other well.

Originally forwarded by Éamon de Valera, himself active in the Volunteer movement at the time of the landings at Howth, the book contains new forewords from de Valera’s grandson, the Fianna Fáil TD Éamon Ó Cuív, and Ruán O’Donnell and Mícheál Ó hAodha, both Professors at the University of Limerick. Ó hAodha introduces the reader of F.X Martin’s life and academic accomplishments, while O’Donnell’s contribution focuses on contextualizing the Howth landings for readers unfamiliar with the events discussed by the book.

He notes the disconnect between the fates of those involved in the gunrunning, with some of those involved becoming household names in the decades that followed while others would be cut down in their prime during the turbulence of 1916-1923. In the most notable example of the latter, de Valera became a fixture of the politics of the independent Irish state while others like Roger Casement and Liam Mellows fell to an early death in the events of the years that followed.

Martin’s own introduction to the original edition is also included in the text; he notes that the gunrunning at Howth was motivated in large part by Anglo-Irish and English liberals such as Erskine Childers, still a supporter of Home Rule, and the more forgotten Alice Stopford Green, as opposed to figures noted for their involvement in organising the 1916 rising, a direct product of the gunrunnings.

James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army were not involved in the operation, receiving only a few guns abandoned by the Volunteers after the landings, while a letter from Pádraig Pearse late in the book reveals he was unaware of the landings until the last minute.  As O’Donnell notes ‘Trans-atlantic’ Fenianism had strong links to the landings, however, in the shape of figures like Bulmer Hobson.

The book is sub-divided into sections, each of which deals with a separate aspect of the landings: an initial section covering the formation and early period of the Volunteers, the planning of the gunrunning, the smuggling of the Hamburg-bought guns aboard the Asgard ship, the landings at Howth and the aftermath of the landings, with the British Army massacre of civilians at Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin, an atrocity which has been largely forgotten by popular memory. The first section contextualizing the Volunteers mostly draws on unsigned primary sources, such as from the Irish Volunteers newspaper and the government proclamations prohibiting the importation of guns into Ireland.

As the book goes on to discuss other aspects of the landings, it begins to draw on more personal primary sources, from well known figures like Pearse and Arthur Griffith to relatively more obscure ones like Mary Spring Rice and the literary figure Darrell Figgis. Figgis’ account reveals the difficulties those buying the guns faced, as the German government had banned the importation of guns to Ireland following the Larne gunrunning to the Ulster Volunteers.

The arms importers had to use the scarcely believable excuse that they were Mexicans to circumvent the ban, their use of Irish among themselves mistaken for ‘Mexican’ at one stage! The diary of Spring Rice from her trip aboard the Asgard is a particularly valuable source, giving us a day by day account of the ship’s voyage, and it casts light on the contributions of other forgotten participants in the landings, such as two fishermen from Gola Island, Co. Donegal, Patrick McGinley and Charles Duggan, who helped navigate the Asgard.

Martin casts an attentive and investigative eye over the contributions to the book, using footnotes to annotate the contributions and noting when recollections and accounts of the gunrunning clash with one another. Figgis, in particular, is identified by Martin as repeatedly making factual errors and exaggerating his own role in the landings.

Overall, the book is a useful overview of primary sources associated with an event which is comparatively ignored, given its significance; without the success of the Howth gun running, it is doubtful 1916 would have happened. It gets the balance right between contextualizing the events discussed by the primary sources and leaving them unfettered for the reader to analyse for themselves.

The re-release of the book will hopefully help give those centrally involved in the gunrunning the more visible place in Irish history they deserve. Along with projects such as the 1911 census and the publication of Ernie O’Malley’s numerous interviews with War of Independence veterans on a county-by-county basis by Mercier Press, it illustrates the rediscovery of primary sources associated with the ‘decade of centenaries’, which has parallels to how the 50^th anniversary of the landings helped prompt the book’s publication in the first place.

In particular, the role of women like Alice Stopford Green and Mary Spring Rice in the landings, at a time when women were seeking to push forward their place in the public sphere, is something which merits a greater public awareness, and the book’s rerelease will hopefully promote both a greater academic and popular interest in their lives.

John Dorney tries to fit Ireland’s experience of war and nationalist revolution into a wider European context.

The First World War is conventionally said to run from August 1914 until November 1918. The narrative dominant in western Europe is one where peace was shattered by the fallout from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, culminating in the German invasion of Belgium in August of that year but restored when war ended with the surrender of Germany in November 1918.

The western European powers were damaged by the war and incurred millions of casualties. Debates raged over whose fault the war had been and how it was fought, but there was at least consensus that the war was over and that it had been won. Certainly in Britain, the centenary of 1918 will be commemorated as a national triumph and the return of peace.

Ireland’s experience looks anomalous in this regard. There the end of the war saw, not triumphant national unity but state disintegration, as separatists first won an election in 1918 and proceeded to wage guerrilla warfare against British rule. By 1922 Ireland was partitioned and most of it substantially independent. Political violence did not peter out until after the end of the Irish Civil War in mid 1923. There has been, as a result, no consensus in Ireland over what Irish participation in the Great War should mean in hindsight and some bemoan Ireland’s ‘amnesia’ about its participation in the war.

But is Ireland’s case really so unusual? Across a great swathe of Europe warfare did not end in November 1918. The war caused the destruction of no less than four empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg), Russian and Ottoman-  and civil wars raged across their former territories in the years after the Great War over how these lands should be divided  and who would rule them.

Greece and the new Turkish Republic fought a bitter war which ended in the mass expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities from both countries. Civil and class war raged in Russia, where the Bolsheviks took power over the ruins of the Tsarist Empire in 1917 and in Hungary, where a ‘Soviet Republic’ was proclaimed but toppled by the right wing military in 1918-19. Finland likewise saw a fratricidal struggle between socialist ‘reds’ and conservative ‘whites’. Germany was also convulsed by intermittent warfare between the extremes of right and left until 1923.

So in most of Europe, the end of the Great War saw not peace but what some historians have called ‘the greater war’.  The closest parallels to the Irish experience can be found in those nations that participated in the World War as parts of larger empires only to gain independence in its wake. There too the end of the Great War was followed by several years of violent conflict between rival nationalist projects. And there too the memory of the Great War was obscured by the subsequent fight for national independence.

The closest parallels to the Irish case are Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We could also cite Ukraine, where the fight for national independence constituted one strand of violence during the maelstrom of the Russian Civil war, or Croatia, which fought in the Austrian Habsburg empire but ended up in 1918 in the new state of Yugoslavia. But in both of those cases no  independent state emerged after the First World War.

How close are the parallels between Ireland’s experience of war and revolution in 1914-22 and those in eastern and central Europe?

Ireland and other stateless nations’ experience of war; 1914-18

Ireland participated in the First World War as part of the United Kingdom.  Unlike most other European powers, Britain did not have mandatory military service before 1914, so it entered the war with a relatively small volunteer professional army. As a result, facing the mass conscript armies of continental Europe, it had to rapidly expand its land force once it entered the European war in August 1914, which it initially tried to do by voluntary recruitment.

Although Ireland had seemed to be on the brink of civil war in 1914 over whether Home Rule or autonomy would be granted to it, three temporary Irish Divisions (10^th 16^th and 36^th) were raised in this way during the war, with the support of Irish nationalist as well as unionist political parties.

Recruitment in Ireland as a whole was somewhat lower than in the rest of the UK – 6% of the male population in Ireland joined up voluntarily against roughly 20-25% in England Scotland and Wales [1]. Nevertheless it still represented the largest military mobilisation in Irish history. Ireland provided some 210,000 soldiers and sailors for the British war effort (some 58,000 regulars and reservists and about 140,000 volunteers) [2].

Devastating battlefield losses forced Britain to introduce conscription by early 1916 but Ireland was, for a time exempted from mandatory military service. John Redmond, Irish constitutional nationalist leader and supporter of the war effort, told the British cabinet that enforcing it in Ireland, in the face of the rising challenge of radical nationalist would be ‘impractical, unworkable and impossible’[3].

Redmond proved to be right. There was little appetite for total war in nationalist Ireland and even less after the suppression of the separatist insurrection in Dublin at Easter 1916. Efforts to actually apply conscription to Ireland in the spring of 1918 proved a disaster for British rule in Ireland.

When the British were staring possible defeat in the face with the German Spring offensive of 1918 on the western front, conscription in Ireland was passed into law in March 1918. But the prospect of mandatory military service in an increasingly unpopular war gave birth to a widespread campaign of popular resistance. This included a one day general strike called by the Irish Trade Union Congress and was led politically by the separatist party Sinn Fein. Their victory in defeating conscription paved the way for the party’s victory in the 1918 general election, after which they unilaterally declared Irish independence.

So while Irish republicans remember the armed insurrection in Dublin at Easter 1916 as being the watershed for the ‘awakening’ of the Irish nation, in a real sense it was resistance to the demands of the British war effort that converted the hitherto passive majority to support for Irish independence.

The war divided Irish people. The families of serving soldiers repeatedly rioted in the streets with republican activists and indeed the armistice of November 1918 saw vicious street brawling in Dublin and elsewhere that left a number of people dead (see here). However by 1918 the full-bodied support of Irish nationalists for the war, promised by John Redmond in 1914 was dead. By 1918 the state’s legitimacy was compromised by its repression of separatist activists and weakened by its failure to impose conscription.

How does Ireland’s experience compare to other stateless nations during the Great War? Like Ireland, nationalist political movements had been rising in east and central Europe in the years before the war.

Poland had been partitioned multiple times since the late 18^th century by the rival powers of Prussia (since 1871 Germany), Austria-Hungary and Russia. In 1914 it was partitioned in three.  In German-ruled Poland, laws were passed against education in the Polish language and efforts made to restrict Polish land-ownership in favour of German settlers.  Similar condition prevailed in Russian-occupied Poland, where the Russian was the only approved language for education and where political dissidents were often exiled and sometimes killed –particularly in the repression of the 1905 revolution.[4]

The case of the small Baltic nationalities of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia was similar, as they were also subject to Tsarist ‘Russification’ policies.

Habsburg administered Poland, widely referred to as Galicia, was by general consensus the most mildly occupied zone.

The Czech and Slovak lands, which after 1918 would become Czechoslovakia, also part of the Habsburg empire, were similarly relatively well-treated, with the Czech language for instance being placed on an equal footing with German in the Empire in 1882. However, here too desire for self-determination preceded the war with, as in Ireland, a ‘cultural revival’ movement rejuvenating nationalist movements.

Like Ireland, all of these territories had advanced nationalist movements before 1914. Interestingly also, in the years when Irish nationalist and unionists were forming rival Volunteer militias either to resist or support Home Rule, nationalists in eastern Europe were doing likewise. In Poland for instance, Joseph Pilsudski, a nationalist revolutionary fleeing from the repression of the 1905 revolution in the Russian Empire founded ‘Polish Legions’ in Austrian-ruled Galicia.[5] The Austrians also, incidentally supported ‘Ukrainian Riflemen’ paramilitary group also a proxy against Russian, in 1914. The romanticisation of militarism and patriotism was mainstream not only in Ireland but in all of European culture at the time.

A comparison of Ireland’s war with other stateless nations experience in Europe reveals a much harsher experience of war in eastern Europe than in Ireland.

While Ireland was ultimately spared conscription this was not true for any of the other ‘small nations’ who participated in the war. Poles were conscripted into all three occupying armies – German, Austrian and Russian, as were Czechs and Slovaks into the Habsburg armies and Balts into the Russian ones. As a result, the participation of adult males in the war was much higher than in Ireland. For instance; in Poland alone between 2 and 4 million men were drafted into rival imperial armies and there were similarly huge mobilisations in other stateless nations.

On top of that Poland in particular and also the Baltic territories also became battle grounds, a fate that Ireland (the brief conflagration of Easter 1916 excepted) was spared. For all of these reasons, the toll of war fell much more heavily on these countries than it did on Ireland.

While accurate figures are hard to pin down, a minimum of 27,000 Irish soldiers (listed as born in Ireland in British records) and a maximum of perhaps 60,000 (according to some emerging local studies) were killed in the war.

By contrast in Poland some 450,000 soldiers died and just under a million were wounded.[6]  While in what became Czechoslovakia the death toll included at least 180,000 soldiers[7]. In the tiny new Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia the numbers who had died in the war were absolutely smaller but relatively greater than Ireland. Some 64,000 men were drafted in Lithuania and 100,000 in Estonia with respectively 11 and 10,000 killed in action, with another 130,000 drafted in Latvia.[8]

There was also a much higher toll on civilians in the eastern and central European countries. Poland and the Baltic countries were traversed by contesting armies repeatedly who often took supplies by force and in several cases (principally Russian troops) targeted ethnic minorities such as Jews for massacre[9].

The Irish civilian death toll from the Great War is perhaps larger than is sometimes appreciated; apart from around about 250 civilians killed in the Easter Rising, several hundred Irish civilians died aboard the Lusitania a passenger ship sunk by German u-boats off the southern Irish coast in 1915 and another 580 aboard the RMS Leinster off Dublin in October 1918[10]. If we were to count as war related deaths the victims of the ‘Spanish Flu’ in 1918-19 (almost certainly brought back to Ireland by returning troops) then we can add another 20,000 victims at least. But again these figures are dwarfed by events elsewhere in Europe. At least 200,000 civilians lost their lives in Polish territories during the war and some 30,000 starved to death in the Czech lands.[11]

As in Ireland, the Great War compromised the legitimacy of the Empires of eastern and central Europe.  Why, nationalists asked, should their people go hungry and their young men die in hundreds of thousands to prop up foreign domination of their country?

Resistance to participation in British war effort in Ireland was largely confined to the home front, but among the stateless countries of eastern Europe it was very largely a feature of military prisoners of war.  This was an unintended result, perhaps, of the conscription of so many minority nationalists into Imperial armies in those countries. In Poland a nationalist ‘Blue Army’ was recruited by France from Polish prisoners of war from the German forces. It served in French service on the western front with the aim of returning to liberate Poland. In Poland itself the Germans attempted to use Pilsudski’s exiled ‘Polish legion’ against the Russians, but were in the end unable to ensure their acquiescence and had Pilsudski himself arrested. Another Polish Legion was recruited by the Russians.[12]

Similarly the Russians recruited the ‘Czechoslovak Legion’ from Czechs and Slovaks captured while fighting in the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian armies. The Legion would go on to represent patriotic resistance and heroism in independent Czechoslovakia.

One peculiarity of the Irish experience in this context is the complete failure of the Germans’ ‘Irish Brigade’ organised by Roger Casement, to attract more than a handful of Irish prisoners of war to join up – they got in fact only 56 recruits out of thousands of Irish prisoners of war[13].

 The wars after the War

Did the industrial mass killing set off in 1914 lead to the outbreak of mass paramilitary violence in its aftermath, in Ireland and elsewhere?

Defeat in war shattered the existing states from the Rhine to Siberia in 1918. Into this vacuum of authority rushed a host of competing political movements, most of them nationalist (some extreme nationalist or fascist) some communist or socialist. Everywhere war veterans were prominent in such movements, though historians have also noted that young men who ‘missed’ the Great War often wanted to compensate by increased paramilitary zeal in its aftermath.

Throw in also the proliferation of weapons and trained military personnel and civil and inter-state violence became almost a certainty as rival groups fought for sovereignty. Without the state destruction and collapse caused by the Great War there would not have been a series of civil wars across eastern and central Europe in 1918-23.

Ireland fits in a little awkwardly here.  The British state may have been discredited but it had not collapsed in Ireland in 1918, far from it, it was in fact present in the form of a larger military garrison and more repressive legislation (the Defence of the Realm Act or DORA) than ever before.  But in Ireland too the war introduced mass killing into the lives of tens of millions of Europeans and made the prospect of civil bloodshed seem less unthinkable than it may have been before the war.

So thought James Stephens, a writer who observed the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and wrote;

In the last two years of world war our ideas on death have undergone a change. It is now not a furtive thing that crawled into your bed and which you fought with pill-boxes and medicine bottles. It has become again a rider of the wind with whom you may go coursing through the fields and open places. All morbidity is gone, and the sickness and what remains to Death is now health and excitement. So Dublin laughed at the noise of its own bombardment and made no moan about its dead.[14]

When soldiers did come home to situations of political violence, they took with them the skills and often the weapons they had taken from the fronts. In Ireland the most famous example is the British deployment of war veterans in the paramilitary police forces the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and local unionist veterans in the Ulster Special Constabulary.  By and large the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was suspicious of Irish ex- soldiers who had served in the British forces.

But ex-soldiers could also be found in republican units. While some accounts have depicted Irish ex-servicemen only as IRA victims (about 80 were killed as alleged British informers), a total of 16 ex soldiers died in the ranks of the IRA during the War of Independence (out of a total of some 500 IRA fatalities) [15]. War veterans such as Tom Barry and Emmet Dalton made it into the highest ranks of the organisation based on their military training. In the Civil War period the role of ex-soldiers was even more prominent, especially on the Free State side, with perhaps half of the National Army of 1922-23 made up of ex-soldiers.

Everywhere war veterans, now fighting as paramilitaries, helped to re-shape Europe. Poland emerged from ruins of three empires in 1918 and declared a new Polish Republic in 1918. It was very largely the return of Polish veterans from the various armies of Europe (Russian, German, Austrian and French) that helped to make the reborn Poland a reality. While in theory they were re-constituted as a national army in October 1918, up to March 1920 the reality was of a conglomerate of paramilitary Polish volunteer units.[16]

However the borders of Poland, suppressed for over 100 years, were far from clear. Should they, as some nationalists such as Pilsudski’s socialists wanted, extend over the territory of the old Commonwealth of Poland (dissolved in 1795) and take in millions of ethnic Ukrainians and Jews? Or should it, as other, more right wing elements such as the National Democrats preferred, be concentrated on a compact ethnically Polish core? Questions of partition along ethnic or communal lines, as occurred in Ireland in 1920-22, was therefore by no means confined to this country in post-war Europe.

Both to fight off attempts to strangle its newfound independence but also to expand it borders at the expense of its new neighbours, Poland fought no less than nine separate wars between 1918 and 1922. A ‘Greater Poland Uprising’ in 1918-19 expelled the remaining German troops and paramilitaries from central Poland  and three more ‘national insurrections’ in Upper Silesia led eventually to the partition of that province between Germany and Poland. An attempt by Bolshevik Russia to annex Poland was fought off in 1920 after a desperate last stand near Warsaw.

Some of these wars such as the struggle with Germany and with the nascent Soviet Union have gone down in Polish legend as icons of national resistance but others were less edifying. Wars were also fought to seize territory off Lithuania and Czechoslovakia and as a result of land taken after the defeat of the Red Army, much of eastern Poland was populated by ethnic Ukrainians. [17]

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania meanwhile, although they had been part of the Tsarist Empire, found themselves in 1918 still occupied by German troops. While the Imperial German Army dissolved in late 1918, right wing German paramilitaries such as the Landeswehr and the  Freikorps fought against the Baltic nationalists (and also at time Bolshevik forces) in an attempt to annex these territories (then with a significant German minority) to Germany. Some 200,000 returning Baltic war veterans organised in nationalist paramilitary units eventually forced German forces out of the Baltics in late 1919. The Lithuanians also fought and lost a border war with the Poles. [18]

The Czech Legion in Russia meanwhile, played a confusing but important role in the Russian Civil War and helped to ensure the Allied Powers recognition of the independence of Czechoslovakia. Even in relatively peaceful Czechoslovakia however there were border conflicts Poland and Hungary.

The ‘greater war’ in Ireland : As bloody as the others?

Like the conventional war of 1914-1918, Ireland’s experience of internal irregular was in 1918-23 was, on the whole less extreme than elsewhere. In Ireland roughly 4-5,000 people died, whereas elsewhere the death toll was fearfully higher (over 100,000 died in the Polish-Soviet War alone for instance). Moreover, violence elsewhere tended to be much more indiscriminate than in Ireland. While  the IRA’s shooting of some 200 civilian informers continues to cause regret in Ireland today, and British forces killing of perhaps 4-500 Irish civilians still causes great anger, the figures pale into insignificance compared to the fearful atrocities committed against civilians elsewhere in Europe in the wake of the Great War.

The German Freikorps particularly, composed of right wing former soldiers in the main, committed mass slaughter against both left wing class enemies at home and rival nationalists in eastern Europe. In crushing a general strike and left-wing insurrection in Berlin and Munich in 1919 for instance, they killed some 2,000 unarmed or disarmed people, many of them prisoners. While in Latvia in the same month, Freikorps units were accused of massacring as many as 3,000 civilians after their seizure of Riga. [19] Were we to venture further east, the Bolsheviks’ ‘Red Terror claimed tens of thousands of unarmed victims during that civil war.

Moreover at least one historian has made the point that violence in eastern Europe compared to Ireland was often far more brutal in character as well as in body count. T.K Wilson in a comparative survey of ‘ethnic’ or communal violence in Ulster and Upper Silesia (disputed territory between Poland and Germany) found that ‘transgressive violence’ – extreme violence such as rape, torture and mutilation was far more common in Silesia than in the north of Ireland. [20]

Wilson argues that in Ulster the role played by religion in communal barriers controlled violence , as barriers between communities were more rigid than linguistic ones in Silesia. This meant that retaliation in kind was certain for atrocities, which discouraged them.

Whether or not we accept this argument, in a wider sense, it is probably true to say that the fact that state breakdown did not occur in Ireland at any point, that armed forces were for the most part curtailed in their excesses by civilian government ameliorated violence. At no point in Ireland did guerrilla war become a war of extermination between rival ethnic or ideological groups as it did elsewhere.

Memory

In many ways Ireland’s experience of the First World War and its aftermath has more in common with eastern Europe than with the rest of western Europe. Like Poland and Czechoslovakia, the three Baltic states and elsewhere, Ireland participated in the Great War as part of a bigger empire and got its independence directly after the conflict, after a great deal of internal upheaval and death.

Like those countries, post-independence politics were dominated by nationalism in Ireland. A large part of this was the result of a rejection of the formerly existing empire and their part in the First World War. Ireland’s ‘forgetting’ of the First World War has often recently been painted as an extreme ‘air-brushing of history’.

However, looked at in the light of eastern and central Europe Ireland’s experience is not extreme at all. In Ireland there was no ban on commemorations of the war, in fact the Free State devoted a large grant to constructing the memorial gardens at Islandbridge in Dublin. Remembrance Day demonstrations were sometimes harassed but republicans but never by state security forces.

By contrast in Poland, where over 450,000 men died in the war in the armies of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, there has never been a single memorial to their memory, only to the Polish nationalist soldiers who deserted to fight in Allied ‘Legions’ or who fought Poland’s various enemies for independence after the war. The same is largely true in the Baltic countries.

In Russia itself, where over 2 million soldiers died in the First World War, because of the Bolshevik revolution, which disavowed the ‘imperialist war’, the Soviet Union did not erect a single memorial to the 1914-18 war either. Plenty however were erected to Red Army fighters in the subsequent civil war. (Vladimir Putin, as part of his drive to rejuvenate Russian nationalism has made some noises recently about changing this).

The closest experience to Ireland’s seems to have been Czechoslovakia, where there are memorials to those who died in the Habsburg armies, but Czechs preferred to remember the Czech Legion, who emerged from Czech prisoners of war to fight for independence. A recent television programme argued, “whilst members of the Czech Legion enjoyed fame and glory in the first days of Czechoslovakia, men loyal to the Habsburg monarchy fell silent”.

The rejection of the war was not at all unusual in the new states of interwar Europe. And people in all countries choose to remember most the history which is most useful to their sense of national identity.

References

[1] Keith Jeffrey, An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, p98

[2] David Fitzpatrick, Militarism in Ireland 1900-1922, in Thomas Bartlet, Keith Jeffrey, ed. A Military History of Ireland, p386

[3] Joseph P Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, 1912-1918, p110

[4] See Adam Zayoski, Poland a History, pp270-275

[5] Zayoski, p288-289

[6] Zayoski p289

[7] Clodfelter, Michael (2002). Warfare and Armed Conflicts- A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500–2000 2nd Ed.. ISBN 978-0-7864-1204-4. Page 479

[8] Tomas Balkelis, Baltic Paramilitary Movements after the Great War in Robert Gerwatrh, John Horne eds. War in Peace, paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, p129

[9] Niall Ferguson The War of the Worlds, p 136-138

[10] Padraig Yeates, A City in Wartime, Dublin 1914-1918, p254

[11] Clodfelter, Michael (2002). Warfare and Armed Conflicts- A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500–2000 2nd Ed.. ISBN 978-0-7864-1204-4. Page 479

[12] Zayoski p290-91

[13] A list is here http://www.irishbrigade.eu/recruits-irish-brigade.html

[14] James Stephens The Insurrection in Dublin, p37

[15] Eunan O’Halpn, Counting Terror, in David Fitzpatrick ed. Terror in Ireland, p154

[16] Julia Eichenberg, Poland and Ireland after the First World War, in War in Peace, p188

[17] Zayoski p290-296

[18] Balkelis Baltic Paramilitary Movements, War in Peace p129

[19] Annanarie Samartino, The Impossible Border, Germany and the East 1914-1920

[20] TK Wilson Frontiers of Violence,Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922, pp212-217

by Leo Keohane

Published by Merrion Press, 2014.

Reviewer: Daniel Murray

When An Post issued a commemorative stamp of Jack White, first commandant of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) on January 2014, historians were quick to point out that whoever the man on the stamp was, it was not White. That White could not even be assured of getting at least a stamp to himself makes Leo Keohane’s biography an overdue one.

Perhaps White had too diverse a career – first in the British army, then the Irish Citizen Army, followed by the Irish Volunteers, and then back in British military service as an ambulance driver – for Irish history to conveniently sum up. Better, then, to pass him over entirely. There was something of a ‘Peter Pan’ quality to him, the boy who never quite grew up and settled down with one label like the rest of his contemporaries. It was a trait White himself was aware of, as the aptly chosen title of his memoir, Misfit, indicates. Whatever else may be said about the man, he was not devoid of self-awareness.

The subtitle of Keohane’s biography sets White firmly in the context of the ICA, which is what he has been remembered for even though his time in it was a brief one. The son of a celebrated field marshal, White made for an unlikely revolutionary but from his time in the British army and onwards, he was a man determined not to make his time in any sort of system an easy one.

As a case in point, White refused to execute a teenage prisoner during the Boer War, threatening instead to shoot his commanding officer. Such insubordination did not stop him from later receiving the Distinguished Service Order for bravery, just as the award and a promising military career did not stop him from resigning his commission and striking out on his own.

White had by then immersed himself in the writings of Tolstoy and for the next few years sought to immerse himself in Tolsyoyan principles. Although White never did articulate quite what these principles were, this search for some sort of higher truth would drive him for much of his life. He was someone who was “desperately seeking some personal form of fulfilment,” as Keohane puts it, “with an awareness of himself that insists he must have a role to play in the grand scheme of things.”

Such a role was found upon his return to Ireland in 1912. Ireland was by then thick with tension: between Ireland and the rest of the Empire, between Nationalists and Unionists, between workers and their employers. The last conflict came to a boil in the Lockout of 1913, and it was its brutal suppression by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, coupled with the plight of the Dublin poor, that drove White to the twin causes of social justice and the ICA.

It is unclear as to who initiated the idea of the ICA. Keohane cites a number of sources that attribute this to either White or James Connolly. Both were certainly involved in the ICA from its earliest stage, and Keohane skilfully draws character portraits of what attracted either man to such a body. For White, the ICA was a chance to apply his military experience to a worthy cause without compromising his pacifism, given the self-defence role he envisioned for the ICA.

Connolly, in contrast, was prepared to use the ICA more assertively such as when he dispatched a squad with rifles and bayonets to a striking picket line. White, Keohane believes, “would have been aghast at the time if he had foreseen some of the uses that Connolly had in mind for the Citizen Army,” and it is certainly hard to imagine White leading the ICA into open rebellion against the state as it would do on the Easter Week of 1916.

But White’s leadership in the ICA did not last long. Frustrated by the increasingly low turnout of ICA members for events, White defected to the Irish Volunteers “with the suggestion of the tone of an ambitious young man, leaving a small and backward family firm for a large and exciting national company,” as Keohane observes.

White organised and commanded a brigade of 5,000 men in County Derry. Despite many of them being former soldiers like himself, he did not find their discipline to be much better than that of his former ICA charges. In addition, he found his authority increasingly undermined by the sectarian suspicions of those in the Derry Volunteers who doubted that a Protestant like White would ever lead them into a fight against Orangemen. As of before, White found that the reality of the organisation he was responsible for did not match the ideals he nurtured.

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 gave White the chance, or so thought, to solve the problem of discipline for the Irish Volunteers. A circular letter he wrote to various leading figures proposed the formation of a sort of Irish auxiliary force for the British war effort: the Irish Volunteers would be paid and equipped by the British state but with their leadership remaining within themselves. White went as far as to write to Lord Kitchener with his idea, although to no avail. Intriguingly, another leading figure in the British military, General Ian Hamilton, was sufficiently taken with the notion to take it up to Prime Minister Asquith but likewise received short shrift there.

The idea had not been a million miles away from John Redmond’s call for Irishmen to enlist. White’s version, however, was unlikely to entice many in the British government who would have been providing the resources to an armed body that they would have had little control over. On the other end of the political spectrum, it would have had little attraction to Nationalists who wanted Ireland to have nothing to do with the war. While doomed to ignominious failure, the idea did show White’s willingness to attempt an inclusive solution to a problem rather than remain fixed to a party line.

In keeping with his nature as an eternal renegade, White left the Irish Volunteers shortly after the War began in order to do his part on the Continent. Marrying his pacifist principles with his personal courage, he took up ambulance duties at the battle front. His distance from Ireland meant he was to have no input in the Easter Rising. That did not stop him from attempting to rouse the miners of South Wales into a strike in a futile effort to save James Connolly from execution. The reaction of the miners to this demagogue in their midst was not recorded.

After all that, the rest of White’s life seems almost like an anticlimax. He assisted with the Sinn Féin election campaign in 1918 while finding the time to publish a pamphlet that attempted to explain the Sinn Féin phenomenon and the future of Ireland in socialist terms. That set the tone for the rest of his life: the man who had tried moulding the fate of Ireland through the ICA and then the Irish Volunteers was content for the most part to sit on the sidelines and provide only commentary.

Exceptions to this passivity included his arrest in Belfast in 1931 while on a ‘hunger march’ with a group dedicated to the unemployed. Seemingly singled out from the crowd by the Orange police, White received a beating and a month in prison. Three years later, he was attacked by IRA men while leading a branch of the left-leaning Republican Congress, to Bodenstown for the Wolfe Tone commemoration. Almost as if not to leave anyone out, he was assaulted again at Bodenstown two years later, in 1936, and badly bludgeoned, this time by Blueshirts.

White went to Spain shortly after its Civil War began in 1936, though his actions there are uncertain, and Keohane finds a second-hand account of him as a Spanish Republican training officer “doubtful”. His death in 1946 received scant attention outside his friends and family.

Keohane tells the tale of a complex man who lived in complicated times, and tells it well. It is first and foremost a biography. The great events in Irish history at that time pass on by like so many road signs, leaving readers with only Jack White as he made his way through life as their only companion. Many other people of prominence appear through the pages, from James Larkin and Roger Casement to Lord Kitchener and Edward VII, but this is Jack White’s story, not theirs, and they are dropped from the narrative as soon as they part ways with our hero.

How much readers will remain invested in this book will depend on whether they want to continue reading about Jack White. He was not one of the most important people for his era but he was one of the more interesting, one of the more cerebral, and perhaps one of the most frustrating for he never achieved a fraction of what he perhaps could have had. For all that, he deserves to be better known, and if anything will grant him this, it is this book. And who knows? Maybe Jack White will have the right stamp for himself, after all.

John Dorney on a disastrous operation by the IRA in Dublin during the Irish Civil War.

On the early morning of August 5^th 1922, some 200 or more young men were mobilised around Dublin city. Some were armed with handguns and grenades, some had explosives and detonating equipment , others carried merely spades and picks.

Working in groups of between 5 and 40, they began digging trenches in roads leading into the city, dismantling stone bridges that forded Dublin’s rivers and canals, and laying explosives in road and railways bridges, while the armed men scanned the horizon for signs of hostile soldiers. Parties were sighted in the hills to the south of the city at from Kilakee as far south as Roundwood and across a swathe of villages north of the city from Raheny as far west as Blanchardstown.

They were volunteers of the anti-Treaty IRA, dedicated to defending, as they saw it, the Irish Republic declared in 1919 and bringing down the Irish Free State, the self governing Irish dominion set up under the Anglo Irish Treaty.

Dublin 1922, a city at war with itself

Dublin in the late summer of 1922 was a city at war with itself.

In late June of that year, rival factions of the Irish Republican movement – supporters of the Provisional Government set up under the Anglo-Irish Treaty and their anti-Treaty or republican opponents, had come to blows. The latter had ensconced themselves in the Four Courts, centre of the Irish legal system and various other strongholds around the city. Pro-Treaty troops, under the command of Michael Collins, blasted them out of their positions with borrow British artillery.

The pro-Treaty forces had come under intense British pressure to face down the anti-Treaty IRA, but also saw themselves as the legitimate Irish government, legitimised in an election in June of that year, giving them the right to defend the Irish Free State established by the Treaty. Some 65 people had died in the fighting in Dublin before the republicans, or as their foes called the ‘irregulars’, surrendered and some 400 republicans were taken prisoner.

The Irish Civil War, a fratricidal conflict between Irishmen, and very largely between former comrades, had begun. The anti-Treaty forces held most of the south of the country and in August a determined assault, mostly by way of seaborne landings, was made by the Provisional Government on their self styled ‘Munster Republic’.

But even in Dublin, the war was not over. The anti-Treaty IRA there had taken a severe blow in the July fighting but it was not eradicated from the city. It was the last week in July before the guerrillas managed to reconstitute themselves in the city, but when they did they launched a flurry of attacks on Free State troops in the streets.

In that week alone (July 21^st to 31^st 1922) there were 8 people killed in the city. Admittedly four of them were killed accidentally (two Free State soldiers, a British soldier and a civilian were shot dead while cleaning or handling weapons) but the republicans also mounted almost daily attacks. A sniping attack on Wellington Barracks on July 21^st killed an unfortunate civilian passerby for instance, while gun attacks on National Army posts across the city seriously injured another on the same night. [1] On the 25^th a grenade attack on troops at York Street missed the troop lorry it was intended to hit but wounded six civilians.[2]

The pro-Treaty or National Army, many of whom, about a year earlier, had been IRA guerrillas launching identical attacks against British troops  pondered how to enforce security in the capital, one writing on July 26^th , ‘Would it be worthwhile to put a small post on the ‘Dardanelles’ [Aungier Street]. You remember how we often used it for ambushing cars in former times?’[3] .

The Free State’s Intelligence services in the Criminal Investigation Department – a shadowy plain clothes unit manned mainly by former IRA assassins from Michael Collins’ Squad and Intelligence Department based out of Oriel House – and National Army Intelligence, uniformed and based out of Wellington Barracks but otherwise much the same, raided houses across the city to arrest anti-Treaty militants.

Ernie O’Malley, commander of the IRA’s Eastern Division reported;

‘The arrest of senior officers has generally played havoc with this command. Harry Boland who is acting QM [Quartermaster], and the D/I [Director of Intelligence] have been arrested last night. Harry was shot through the spine and stomach….Michael Carolan Adjutant of 3^rd Northern Division [Belfast]…was wounded on Grafton Street. They seem to be concentrating on officers. The result will be that the Brigade here will be without officers.’[4]

Boland and Carolan died of their wounds; the first of what would be at least 25 targeted killings of anti-Treaty fighters in Dublin. [5]

O’Malley had control over the IRA in Dublin only in the vaguest sense. He lived a clandestine life in an upper middle class neighbourhood and communicated to his guerrilla commanders through typed reports delivered mostly by female activists to men on the run either in the city or the nearby hills. In turn O’Malley reported back to IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch. But most operational matters were, of necessity, left to local initiative. With the constant arrests of IRA officers, O’Malley was not optimistic of getting a high intensity campaign up and running in Dublin but nevertheless moved in cash and weapons from elsewhere in the country in to Dublin to try to do so.

 Isolating Dublin

The IRA in Dublin were realistic enough to know that militarily they could not oust the pro-Treaty forces, or indeed the remaining garrison of 6,000 British troops, from the Irish capital, but with a Free State expedition due to attack Cork city from the sea, the Republicans planned to cut communications to and from the Irish capital.

What became known as the ‘Bridges job’ in IRA circles appears to have been an attempt by the anti-Treaty force to isolate Dublin – the centre both of the Provisional government and its National Army. According to the Irish Times, ‘The Irregulars [republicans] had made elaborate preparations to cut the railway lines and block the roads by blowing up bridges on Saturday night. Men fully equipped were sent to the city from the south and from Liverpool’.[6]

Had the plan come off it may or may not have tilted the military balance of the war in the anti-Treatyites’ favour, realistically more depended on how fighting went in Cork, where Free State troops had landed by sea and assaulted the republican ‘capital’. But had it been successful the ‘bridges job’ would certainly have put the Provisional Government in a more vulnerable position – unable to send reinforcements or communications to its units around the country.

Contrary to what the Irish Times thought, the bridges job was a Dublin affair, not an elaborate plan involving Munster IRA units shipped in via Liverpool.  According to Sean Prendergast of the anti-Treaty IRA 2^nd Dublin battalion (in the north of the city)

‘The main object of the plan was to blow up and destroy ail the canal and railway bridges surrounding Dublin in order to interfere with and interrupt road and railway communications between Dublin and other parts of the country; in other words to hit a fatal blow at the Free State forces in their conduct of military operations against the I.R.A. It appears that on the night appointed for carrying out of the operation, several hundred men of the I.R.A. had been mobilised.’[7]

The risks of mobilising so many poorly armed guerrillas in large numbers at the same time were obvious. The previous year, while fighting the British, the IRA had burned the Customs House in the centre of Dublin, but in the process lost nearly a hundred men (5 killed and 80 plus captured), nearly crippling the organisation in the city.

According to another republican fighter, Liam Nugent of the Third Battalion (south side);

‘a meeting of staff officers was held … to make arrangements for the destruction of bridges in the outlying districts around South Dublin. I strongly opposed this proposal, but the decision was taken and the operation had to be carried out. It fell to the Q.M. [Quartermaster] Dept. to get the explosives and other material to safe places on the south side of the canal. This ended our part in the operation. The whole Battalion, armed and unarmed, were mobilised’. [8]

The Government however, already knew about the ‘bridges job’ due to the capture of Liam Clarke, an IRA Intelligence officer the day before. According to Nugent;

‘The operation was to take place at a given time on a Saturday evening but on Friday evening Liam Clarke, a Headquarters officer, was captured in Rathfarnham with a map showing the bridges to be destroyed, and on Friday the Stanley Street workshop of the Dublin Corporation was raided and picks taken away. Also, the Free State Army authorities had had information that the operation was about to take place’. [9]

There were at this time roughly 4,000 National Army troops in Dublin and another 6,000 British troops who were due to stay in the city until December to ensure the implementation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In addition there were about 100 CID plain clothed, armed detectives. Though it did not publicise the fact, the pro-Treaty government mobilised both British and Irish troops in large numbers to avail of the opportunity afforded to decapitate the IRA in Dublin.

The Bridges job

Roughly speaking there were two separate IRA operations on the night of August 5-6^th. One was in the Dublin Mountains south of the city, where perhaps 100 Volunteers turned out to dismantle the roads and bridges that connected the city with the guerrillas’ hideouts in the hills. Another 146 anti-Treaty fighters[10] were mobilised in what were then rural villages north of Dublin to destroy the road and rail infrastructure there.

A puzzling aspect of the whole affair though is that the main roads and railway bridges connecting Dublin with the rest of the country lay to the west of the city, notably the road and railway lines through Maynooth and Naas in County Kildare. If the plan was to isolate Dublin these would have been far more significant targets than either the northside or southside operations, but they do not seem to have been included in IRA plans.

In any case, no sooner had the IRA parties begun their work of destruction than they were pounced on pro-government troops. Sean Prendergast remembered with chagrin that at Cabra bridge on the northside,

‘To their (the I.R.A. men’s) utter surprise and dismay the Free Staters had complete control of the scene; an armoured car patrolling the area, opening fire right, left and centre at point blank range. Bob Oman like a number of other men of the “First” [battalion] was caught while moving along to the scheduled spot. Thus many men were trapped; the men in the fields being pinned down to the point of utter frustration, the men who were making their way thither chased or captured, some quite easily and others after a grim fight, many of them like Oman quite invaluable officers and men.[11]

Across the north Dublin countryside, British and Free State troops rounded up the lightly armed ‘irregulars’ with ease and minimal casualties. Twenty five were captured at Cabra and another ten near Santry with 15 more at Donneycarney and 8 more elsewhere after only minimal resistance.[12]

On the south side it was a similar story. Pro-Treaty troops drove out to the village of Enniskerry, about 20km south of the city and, like hunters ‘beating’ their prey towards a trap, worked their way back over the hills towards Dublin, capturing parties of anti-Treaty fighters in the act of destroying roads and bridges.

Thirty one ‘Irregulars’ were captured in Glencullen, including their officer Noel Lemass, and 15 more taken on the roads back to the city, with another ten picked up further south near Roundwood.[13]

According to Liam Nugent, the IRA officers,

‘in charge of the proposed destruction of the bridges were warned’ that they operation had been compromised, ‘but they insisted on carrying on and, when the various companies arrived at the scenes of action, the Free State soldiers were waiting for them. Some succeeded in escaping but they were nearly all captured. The Republican section of the 3rd Battalion were almost wiped out. [14]

National Army troops also conducted house to house searches in the nearby seaside town of Bray, arresting another 30 men.

The pro-government Irish Times reported, “The thoroughness of the intelligence, observation and military organisation on the part of the [National] Army is shown by the fact not only was the destruction prevented so that not even one bridge was destroyed, but the greater bulk of those who were to take part in the irregular operation were made prisoners without any casualties among the troops.’[15]

In fact there were 2 anti-Treaty fighters wounded in exchange of fire but there was no disguising the fact that IRA fighters had shown little stomach for a fight and more than enough willingness to surrender. True, they were outgunned. They were armed at best only with hand guns and homemade grenades (the Dublin Brigade’s rifles and submachine guns seem to have been hoarded for other ‘jobs’) and the enemy had machine guns rifles and armoured vehicles. Frank Henderson, commander of 2^nd Battalion reported to Erne O’Malley that,

‘[We were] attacked on both flanks by British and F.S. [Free State] troops who were cooperating. Our troops engaged them but the others having the advantage of machine guns and superior numbers of rifles, forced them to retreat… The enemy was very strong in armoured cars, armour plated cars and lorries which patrolled the whole area over which the battalion was ordered to operate. This meant it was practically impossible for our men to proceed with their work. The machine gun fire was particularly heavy’.[16]

However, even taking into consideration the disparity in arms, the combat performance of the anti-Treaty units was crushingly weak. There were no last stands in the ‘bridges job’, no sacrificial rearguard actions, in most cases the republicans simply put up their hands and surrendered – indicating that perhaps even at this early stage, their hearts were not in the civil war.

In the early hours of the morning there were a flurry of retaliatory IRA attacks in the city ; Firing broke out at military posts, where  ‘heavy fire was returned’, including at Mountjoy Prison , Phibsborough, Finglas, Drumcondra and Harcourt St (where a bomb was also thrown). The morning saw six civilians admitted to hospitals in Dublin with bullet wounds along with two anti-Treaty fighters and one National Army soldier, but the attacks had been no more than a futile gesture on the IRA’s part after the disaster of earlier in the night.[17]

Aftermath

The ‘bridges job’ was a disaster for the anti-Treaty IRA in Dublin and it coincided with the fall of Cork city and the main towns in County Kerry, a few days later, to pro-Treaty troops.

In Dublin National Army reports filled up with the names of prisoners taken in abortive attempt to isolate Dublin; 187 names in all were logged between August 5th and 13^th. One entire Active Service Unit of Fianna boys (the IRA youth wing) was captured, two of whom were released, no doubt due to their age, but 17 more were imprisoned. Another 6 of the prisoners were from Belfast, presumably having fled south in May to avoid internment in Northern Ireland. Of the rest the vast majority were from Dublin or neighbouring County Wicklow. By the end of August the ‘bag’ of captured republicans in Dublin city was up to 310.[18]

The prisoners were first taken to Wellington (shortly to be renamed Griffith) Barracks to be processed and questioned and then sent in batches to prisons at Mountjoy and Kilmainham in Dublin, Maryborough (now Portlaoise) or the internment camp at Newbridge County Kildare.[19]

One of the IRA officers to be captured, Noel Lemass later escaped from imprisonment and fled to England, when he returned to Dublin in mid 1923 he was assassinated, it is thought by pro-Treaty forces. His brother Sean went on to be a long serving Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland.

This was by no means the end of the Irish Civil War, in Dublin or elsewhere. It would grind on in increasingly bitter low level violence for many months. But the failure of ‘bridges job’, was in many ways a portent of the republicans’ inevitable defeat. Poorly armed, with a faulty intelligence system and facing an enemy in their former comrades who knew them well, the odds were stacked against them from the moment the first shot was fired in the civil war.

Above all though, as the supine surrender of so many men in Dublin on the night August 5-6 shows, they lacked the will and motivation to fight an effective guerrilla campaign. It was this above guaranteed their eventual defeat.

References

[1] Irish Times July 22 1922

[2] Irish Times July 26 1922

[3] National Army Civil War reports, Dublin Command, Military Archive Cathal Brugha Barracks cw/ops01//03/02

[4] Ernie O’Malley to Liam Lynch, 31 July 1922, (in Dolan, O’Malley , ed.s ,No Surrender Here! Ernie O’Malley’s Civil War papers,  P80

[5] The last Post (1985)

[6] Irish Times Sat, August 12 1922

[7] Sean Prendergast Bureau of Military History (BMH) WS 802

[8] Liam Nugent BMH WS 907

[9] Liam Nugent BMH WS 907

[10] The figure is Frank Henderson’s commander of the IRA 2^nd Dublin Battalion, in his report to Ernie O’Malley, 30 August 1922, (in Dolan, O’Malley , ed.s ,No Surrender Here! Ernie O’Malley’s Civil War papers, p132)

[11] Sean Prendergast BMH

[12] Frank Henderson to Ernie O’Malley, 30 August 1922, (in Dolan, O’Malley , ed.s ,No Surrender Here! Ernie O’Malley’s Civil War papers, p132)

[13] Irish Times August 12 1922

[14] Liam Nugent BMH

[15] Irish Times August 12, 1922

[16] Frank Henderson to Ernie O’Malley, 30 August 1922, (in Dolan, O’Malley , ed.s ,No Surrender Here! Ernie O’Malley’s Civil War papers, p132)

[17] Irish Times August 12, 1922

[18] National Army list of Prisoners taken in Dublin, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, cw/p/3/5

[19] Ibid.

Frank Aiken’s War, The Irish Revolution 1916-1923

By Matthew Lewis

Published by UCD Press, Dublin 2014.

Reviewer: John Dorney

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that at the age of just 24, Frank Aiken held the future of Ireland in his hands. After succeeding Liam Lynch as Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA in April 1923, he first called a unilateral ceasefire and then about a month later, issued an order to ‘dump arms’, ending the Irish Civil War. This books is about how he, the son of a ‘respectable’ strong farmer and constitutional nationalist in South Armagh got to this position.

Aiken joined the Volunteers at the time of the Ulster crisis of 1913-14 and said he was ready to fight in the insurrection at Easter 1916, but in fact none broke out in his district. He rose to prominence through political activism in 1917-18 as Sinn Fein fought a number of by-elections in the region and then a general election. As a result of his commitment to the separatist cause Aiken himself was elected as chairman of the local Sinn Fein county organisation.

However it was as fighter that Aiken really became influential in the republican movement. Matthew Lewis makes the point that during guerrilla war in Ireland in 1919-21 it was the presence of tough and competent IRA leaders, combined with a small number of dedicated guerrillas that made the difference between an active area and an inactive one.  Such was the case with Frank Aiken, who worked his way first to the top of the Newry Brigade and following IRA reorganisation, to commander of the Fourth Northern Division.

Grandiose titles aside, what this meant was that Aiken led a relatively small band of guerrillas, based both in Newry town and the South Armagh/South Down countryside in attacks on state forces – primarily the police (Royal Ulster Constabulary and later Ulster Special Constabulary) and more rarely the British military as well as in shootings of civilian enemies and collaborators.

Numbers expanded after the truce, and for a period Aiken’s command more resembled a regular military, with up to 300 men, relatively well armed and based in the military barracks in Dundalk after the British evacuated it.

From there they waged an intensified campaign on the new unionist and British forces across the new border in Northern Ireland – the area being formally partitioned in late 1921. The civil war however shattered this force, Aiken tried to stay neutral in the conflict but was arrested by pro-Treaty troops.

Although he famously retook Dundalk barracks and the town from pro-Treaty forces in a raid in August 1922, Aiken was shortly afterwards reduced again to small scale guerrilla warfare, but this time against Irish Free State troops. A gradual process of attrition, arrests and lack of political support and military means led eventually to Aiken’s ‘dump arms’ order in May 1923, effectively closing the curtain on the Irish revolution.

Aiken was brave; he led attacks on RIC police barracks personally and after an ambush on Crown Forces went wrong, he covered the retreat of the IRA party with the only working rifle left in the squad. He also had a ruthless streak, we learn, threatening to shoot IRA Volunteers who tried to run away in their first experience of combat and actually shooting, or having shot, a number of rival nationalists from the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1921 and, notoriously, six Protestant civilians in a reprisal in June 1922.

Beyond that we do not learn a great deal more in this book about Frank Aiken as a young man and guerrilla commander. One problem is that Aiken himself was famously reluctant to talk about the revolutionary years in later life.

Perhaps this is not terribly surprising. As Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and representative at the United Nations in New York, Aiken hardly wanted to publicise the fact that he had once been in the business of ordering the deaths of suspected informers the abduction of prominent unionists (in retaliation for the arrest of republicans) and the burning of their homes.

But a wider problem with this book I felt was that it is really not a biography of the young Frank Aiken at all. Aiken, as Lewis writes, grew up in a strongly Catholic and nationalist enclave of south Ulster with a strong tradition of social banditry and at times sectarian violence with the Protestant majority to the north. Inevitably the conflict of 1919-22 involved basically inter-communal violence as well as war on the British state.

While this is discussed in detail, Aiken’s attitudes to Irish freedom, the idea of the Republic and his thoughts about unionists and partition are not. Nor do we hear anything about his personal life or other motivations in this period.

So if I have a criticism it is that this book is rather narrowly focussed, being only a discussion of what the IRA did in the narrow zone from Newry to Dundalk and from the sea to Crossmaglen. There was scope here for a more intimate portrayal not only of Aiken himself but also of the effect of so much political violence on a small and mostly rural society along the new border. (According to very useful Appendix contained in the rear of the book, over 100 people died violently in this small area from 1919-1923 with another 150 wounded).

There is a useful social portrait of the local IRA (more egalitarian than the constitutional nationalist but dominated in leadership positions by the rural middle class like Aiken himself) but discussion of what local republicans believed they were fighting for is also undeveloped.

That said, there is no faulting the thoroughness of the research here. It set this reviewer right on a number of points; for instance Aiken’s attack on a British troop train in 1921 (in which 4 soldiers and dozens of horses were killed) involved derailing the training not blowing it up with a mine as I had believed and Aiken did not as has been alleged, take a Protestant Church congregation hostage in order to lure the Ulster Special Constabulary(USC)  into an ambush, he held both Catholic and Protestant Church goers in a pub so they would not be caught in the crossfire during the planned ambush.

Lewis has a measured take on the various historical controversies that surround Aiken’s career as guerrilla leader. He argues that in the Fourth Northern Division area during the War of Independence, the IRA was nowhere near beaten at the time of the truce, but that violence was of a persistently low level and was therefore  in essence symbolic of the refusal to accept British rule rather than militarily formidable.

While killings and reprisal by the IRA and the USC ratcheted up in 1921 and especially in early 1922, he argues that at no point was the IRA campaign explicitly sectarian.  Even in the notorious revenge killings Aiken ordered at Altnaveigh in June 1922, in which six local Protestant were murdered in revenge for USC killings and sexual assault of local Catholics, Lewis argued that the motivation was primarily political rather than religious.

The IRA took revenge on what it believed to be an ‘Orange area’ which had heavy recruitment into the USC, at a time when republicans believed that, due to the pervasiveness of the Specials, there were in the words of one no longer any unionist civilians. Lewis argues that south of border, Aiken ordered the protection of local Protestants and tried to halt harassment of them.

While Aiken’s sanctioning of the killings at Alnaveigh was out of character, and while he was sorely provoked by the killing of unarmed nationalists and sexual assault of women he knew the night before, I feel this judgement lets him off a little lightly. If all Protestants in Northern Ireland were to be considered ‘legitimate targets’ (and Catholics likewise) on the grounds of their presumed political allegiance, this would have been the first stop towards all out communal war. Fortunately both sides ultimately held back from the brink of this logic.

Apart from Altnaveigh, Aiken’s most controversial action in the revolutionary period was his non-participation in the ‘Northern Offensive’ planned by the IRA on Northern Ireland in May 1922. Aiken was supposed to have led his Fourth Northern Division over the border into Newry but in fact did nothing. Lewis makes the point that this is not really as inexplicable as it looks.

For one thing the Offensive was probably too ambitious, envisaging holding large areas of Northern Ireland despite a heavy British military presence. Aiken was concerned that his division was not well-enough armed and he was not the only one.

Three other Divisions also got cold feet amid prevarication and dissension between pro and anti-Treaty IRA elements over the supply of arms from Dublin. For another thing, according to some sources Aiken actually received an order from Michael Collins calling off the offensive for now. There are a myriad of murky possibilities and Lewis sensibly concludes that the truth behind Aiken’s inaction is probably one or both of these factors.

In ending the Civil War in May 1923, Lewis makes the point that Aiken was not giving up on his goal of a united, independent Ireland but rather helping to promote a compromise between Irish nationalists, which he had in fact also been trying to achieve at the start of the internecine conflict.

To conclude this is a useful book, full of well grounded research. Arguments are carefully considered and clearly put. It works well as a companion to the biographical collection on Aiken published earlier this year. However for an intimate portrait of the man and his region, the reader will have to look elsewhere.

John Dorney on a famous, bloody  action in West Cork during the Irish War of Independence

On the 21^st of November 1920, Tom Barry a rising star in the Third Cork Brigade of the IRA, sent word through West Cork that he was mobilising  a guerrilla column for a major attack. Jack Hennessy received notice at his home at Coolmountain and set off to the IRA camp at Ahilane[1].

Timothy Keohane considered himself lucky to have been chosen, the only member of his Timoleague IRA Company selected for the Brigade flying column (he drew lots with two other volunteers for the honour of joining).[2]

Those that were mobilised into Barry’s flying column numbered 36 and were armed with an assortment of weapons; Lee Enfield rifles surreptitiously bought or stolen from British troops, Canadian Ross rifles taken from the coast guard, an assortment of revolvers, shotguns and some grenades. They had about 35 rounds per man. Most IRA Volunteers turned up in civilian clothes, but some like Barry himself wore an Irish Volunteer tunic while others like Hennessy wore British Army steel helmet. By IRA standards of late 1920, a time when their guerrilla tactics were still taking shape, this was a large, well armed unit.[3]

Their prey was a company of Auxiliary Division police – known to the IRA and local population as ‘Auxies’. They were tough veterans of the First World War, drafted in to Ireland in order to try to put down the spreading republican insurrection. ‘C Company’ of 18 men was based at Macroom Castle. Since their insertion into rural West Cork in October (replacing two platoons of the Manchester Regiment) they had cowed much of the previous guerrilla activity with aggressive raiding and arrests of local men. They had also shot and killed at least one local civilian as he fled from one of their sweeps. [4]

They were clearly in the sights of the IRA Cork Brigades. The First Cork Brigade (north Cork) also planned to attack them but had to call off a planned attack on Macroom Castle so as not to compromise Barry and the Third Brigade’s ambush.[5]

For Tom Barry, an ex British soldier, at first distrusted by local IRA organisers, there could be no better way to make his name than launching the first successful ambush of an ‘Auxie’ patrol. The Auxiliaries had become somewhat careless and had taken to using the same road back to Macroom – passing through a townland named Kilmichael, every day. Barry later wrote that he envisaged a fight to the death with the Auxiliaries,’ the positions that they were about to occupy allowed of no retreat… the alternative was now to kill or be killed; see to it that these terrorists die and are broken’[6].

One of his men, Jack Hennessy, remembered the import if not the rhetoric of Barry’s speech; ‘The place selected for the ambush was on the road running through marshy land. There were no fences but back a little off the road there were fairly large clumps of rock. There was no line of retreat’.[7]

This was not to be a hit and run attack. The IRA ambush parties, poorly armed and barely trained, would surprise the Auxiliaries’ lorries (Barry envisaged three and in the event there were two) and sweep them with fire at the closest range possible. Since there was no getaway route – most unlike virtually every other IRA operation – it was kill or be killed.

The ambush

The IRA contingent marched in pouring rain through the night to the ambush point Barry had selected, at the bend of a narrow road at Kilmichael, overlooked by a large rock and low hills on either side.

Barry’s force was divided into six squads. Four together comprised two ‘L shaped ambushes’ – that is one squad facing the enemy force as they approached a bend and the other pouring in fire from the flanks. They were concealed in the rocky hills very close to the side of the road. Another squad of six riflemen was kept in reserve, at a point from which they could fire on both ambush sites.  Three unarmed scouts nervously kept watch at the approaches to the site.

The column, whose clothes had been drenched the night before, had a long and uncomfortable wait. Barry described the cold as ‘biting’. They had had no food since the day before apart from a ‘bucket of tea’ sent down by a local household. They lay in wait all day and must have been chilled to the bone by the late afternoon. As the gloom of the winter’s night began to draw in at about half past four, two Auxiliary lorries were spotted by the scouts. [8]

For what happened next we must rely almost solely on IRA accounts, as there was to be only one British survivor and he was badly injured. Fortunately since the recent opening of the IRA veterans’ statements in the Bureau of Military History, there are now many more of these than there once were.

Nevertheless, two things at least are certain about the Kilmichael ambush. First, it was a remarkably well executed guerrilla action on the part of Tom Barry. Yes the Auxiliaries, commanded by Francis Crake, who had served as a Lieutenant in the First World War, should have known better than to let their movements become predictable and to fall into an ambush.

But once they did, they fell into a very carefully prepared trap. Second, Kilmichael was a brutal close-quarters fight, as fierce in intensity, if not in scale, to anything in a conventional war.

When the first lorry reached the bend in the road, Barry himself threw a grenade into the cab, killing the driver. Simultaneously, it was blasted at point blank range by the hidden riflemen. The surprised Auxiliaries in the first lorry stood no chance at all. Jack Hennessy who was with the first ambush party described the fight in the most graphic of terms;

I was engaging the Auxies on the road. I was wearing a tin hat [helmet]. I had fired about ten rounds and had got five bullets through the hat when the sixth bullet wounded me in the scalp. Vice Comdt. McCarthy had got a bullet through the head and lay dead. I continued to load and fire but the blood dripping from my forehead fouled the breech of my rifle. I dropped my rifle and took McCarthy’s. Many of the Auxies lay on the road dead or dying.

In close range fire and then grisly hand to hand combat, all nine of the Auxiliaries in the first lorry were killed.

Some, Hennessey remembered, were finished off at close quarters;

Our orders were to fix bayonets and charge on to the road when we heard three blasts of the O/C’s whistle. I heard the three blasts and got up from my position, shouting “hands up”. At the same time one of the Auxies about five yards from me drew his revolver. He had thrown down his rifle. I pulled on him and shot him dead. I got back to cover, where I remained for a few minutes firing at living and dead Auxies on the road. [9]

At the same time the second lorry had been engaged by the other ambush party and was taking heavy fire at close range. The IRA men in this position had let the first lorry past and opened up on the second. The ‘Auxies’ who survived the initial fusillade had flung themselves to the side of the road and were desperately trying to fire back. According to Tim Keohane, some tried to surrender only to open fire again when the IRA fighters emerged from cover to take them prisoner.

Tom Barry then called on the enemy to surrender and some of them put up their hands; but when our party were moving on to the road the Auxiliaries again opened fire. Two of our men (John Lordan and Jack Hennessy, I think) were wounded by his fire. Pat Deasy had been wounded, while .Tim Sullivan and Mick McCarthy … had been killed prior to this happening.[10]

Tom Barry in his memoir makes this ‘false surrender trick’ the kernel of his narrative of the fight. According to him, this was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Auxiliaries and two Volunteers were killed as a result of it. He later wrote that at this point, ‘ I gave the order “rapid fire and do not stop until I tell you” ‘. Several more Auxiliaries were killed, two while trying to flee the scene, before others shouted ‘we surrender’.  But for Barry, ‘Having seen more than enough of their surrender tactics, I shouted the order, “keep firing on them”. ‘ According to Barry the IRA, all squads now having been brought to bear on the British survivors, kept firing until none were left alive.[11]

This is not , as has sometimes been maintained a fabrication. As we have seen, other IRA veterans also recalled false surrenders. But undoubtedly Barry’s account simplifies and gives order to what was an unbelievably chaotic and terrifying situation. This was combat at such close quarters that men could stab each other with bayonets and club their enemies with rifle butts. The Auxiliaries were under fire from several directions at point blank range. The idea that, facing imminent death they could have got together and devised a ‘false surrender’ ploy stretches credibility.

Much more likely is that in the confusion of battle some Auxiliaries tried to surrender and others kept on firing. Barry apparently believed this was deliberate ploy, ‘as old as war itself’ he later mused. Certainly some IRA men were shot as a result but we cannot be sure if they were killed or, as Tim Keohane remembered, injured. Regardless, those Auxiliaries who were still alive at this point were in the most dangerous position possible – trying to surrender to an enemy who was no longer prepared to accept it.

Jack Hennessey recalled that after coming upon the scene of the second lorry;

a wounded Auxie moved his hand towards his revolver. I put my bayonet through him under the ribs. Another Auxie tried to pull on John Lordan, who was too near to use his bayonet and he struck the Auxie with the butt of his rifle. The butt broke on the Auxie’s skull.[12]

Any Auxiliary taken prisoner after the first abortive attempt to surrender was killed. Jack O’Sullivan, another IRA veteran later told local historian Meda Ryan that he disarmed an Auxiliary and took him prisoner but another IRA fighter walked up and shot the man [13].

Autopsy reports found that a number of the dead had been shot in the armpits, meaning that they had their hands in the air when they were shot[14]. One man, James Guthrie, got away but was seized by a local IRA company and killed. Another, HF Forde ,was left for dead, having shot twice and been clubbed in the head, but survived, though permanently brain damaged. Seventeen of his comrades and three IRA Volunteers lay dead on the roadside.[15]

The ferocious close quarter combat left many of the IRA fighters traumatised. Some were physically sick after the action. Barry had them reform and drill among the dead to regain discipline before making their getaway across country. Left behind were two burnt out lorries and 17 smashed and broken bodies (the IRA took their casualties with them). And to add to the horror of the scene, according to one account a farmer drove his cattle over the site, further disfiguring the corpses.[16]

The reaction of British troops and Auxiliaries coming on the scene can only be imagined. By way of revenge they burned all the houses in the surrounding area[17].

Aftermath

The Kilmichael ambush came just a week after Bloody Sunday, in which the IRA in Dublin had shot dead 14 British Army officers in one night and the British forces had retaliated by opening fire on a football crowd, killing 14 civilians. In those two incidents alone the British forces had lost 21 dead and, at least three more RIC constables had been killed in separate attacks during the week. It marked a profound escalation of the conflict we now call the Irish War of Independence.

Kilmichael has sparked a war of words ever since. To the British it was a ‘brutal massacre’. ‘The ambushers came out and forcibly disarmed the survivors…The policy of the murder gang being apparently to allow no survivor to disclose their methods. The dead and wounded were hacked about the head with axes, shot guns were fired into their bodies and they were savagely mutilated’.[18]

For Irish nationalist opinion it was a famous victory. Many popular ballads, stories and laterally films have been devoted to it. ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’ ballad, still sung annually at the site goes’

So here’s to the boys of Kilmichael 
Those brave lads so gallant and true
Who fought ‘neath the green flag of Erin
And conquered the red, white and blue.’.

Kilmichael was a brutal affair, but it was also rather unusual. The body count was exceptionally high for the guerrilla war in Ireland. In only one other action of the 1919-21 period did the IRA inflict more than ten fatal casualties in a single encounter. This was the Dromkeen ambush in Limerick in February 1921 in which 11 RIC policemen were killed. There are also credible accusations in this incident that three RIC men were killed after they had surrendered and interestingly, the alleged executioner in this case also was an ex British soldier turned IRA guerrilla named Maurice Meade.[19]

Barry’s tactics at Kilmichael – the close-in ambush that ensured either total defeat or total victory – were highly risky and the IRA could not afford to gamble in this way with the lives of its relatively few experienced fighters. It was much more common for ambushes to take place at distance with good escape routes into rugged country. And the ruthlessness shown at Kilmichael was also rare. Though there were other cases of the IRA shooting prisoners, it was far more common for them to disarm captured British troops or police and let them go. [20]

Nor should we suppose that wiping out enemy detachments was something that only the IRA did. At Clonmult in February 1921, an IRA column of 20 men was annihilated after being surrounded in farm house. Twelve were killed (at least seven after surrendering) and the other 8 only survived because a British Army officer stopped the Auxiliaries from shooting the rest of the prisoners.[21]  Similarly at in Leitrim in March 1921, an IRA camp was surprised on a hilltop. Six Volunteers were killed. According to IRA leader and writer Ernie O’Malley, two of the dead were beaten to death with rifle butts while wounded.[22]

The controversy over whether or not there was a ‘false surrender’ at Kilmichael or whether Barry massacred the surrendering Auxiliaries is therefore in some ways beside the point.  In any war the act of surrendering is fraught with danger. This was a brutal guerrilla war in which neither side recognise the other as legitimate combatants. Kilmichael was also a confused close-range fight in which a moment’s hesitation meant death.  It is entirely possible that one participant’s perception of it would not be shared by anyone else who was there.

We will never know exactly what happened there. But because of its symbolic importance and because it can be used to show that the IRA were brave and skilful soldiers, or according to taste, cowardly and bloody terrorists, we may expect it will be argued about for many years to come.

References

[1] Jack Hennessey BMH WS 1,234

[2] Timothy Keohane BMH WS 1,294

[3] Tom Barry’s Memoir, Guerilla Days in Ireland (p38) gives the strength as 36, Jack Hennesssey’s Witness Statement puts it at ’36 or 37’

[4]Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies p27-29, tells us that the Auxiliaries had not mistreated the local population in their nearly two months in the area, an opinion not shared by other sources.  The dead civilian was James Lehane, shot in the back as he was running away, http://homepage.eircom.net/~corkcounty/Timeline/Third%20Brigade.htm

[5] Cornelius Kelleher WS 1,654

[6] Barry, Guerilla Days, p40

[7] Hennessey BMH

[8] Barry Guerilla Days p 42

[9] Both quotes Hennessey BMH

[10] Timothy Keohane BMH WS 1,294

[11] Barry, Guerilla Days p44

[12] Hennessey BMH

[13] Meda Ryan, Tom Barry IRA Freedom Fighter, p43

[14] Eve Morrison, Kilmichael Re-Visited, in David Fitzpatrick (Ed.) Terror in Ireland p 171

[15] The IRA dead were: Pat Deasy, Michael McCarthy and Jim Sullivan. The dead Auxiliaries were, William Barnes, Cyril Bayley, Leonard Bradshaw, James, Gleave, Philip Graham, William Jones, Frederick Hugo, Albert Jones, Ernest Lucas, William Pallister Henry Pearson, Frank Taylor, Christopher Wainwright, Benjamin Webster, Frederick Poole and James Guthrie who escaped but was killed two days later.  See here for Auxiliary casulaties.

[16] The claim was made by a priest Thomas Canon Duggan, BHM Ws 551

[17] Ryan Tom Barry, p95-97

[18] Cited in Hart, IRA and its Enemies, p23

[19] Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p121

[20] DM Leeson in his book The Black and Tans, British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, p148 concludes, the IRA, ‘could disarmed their opponents and let them go, or they could take them prisoners or they could kill them. In most cases it seems the Volunteers chose the first option’.

[21] Hart, IRA and its Enemies p97-98

[22] Ernie O’Malley, Raids and Rallies, p101

Irish Voices From the Great War

By Myles Dungan

Published by Irish Academic Press 2014

Reviewer: Barry Sheppard

One thing is almost always certain in the run up to any historical anniversary, public commemorations and that is the release (or re-release) of books about that particular anniversary.

It is therefore no coincidence that this book Irish Voices from The Great War has been re-released at this particular time to tap into the interest which the hundredth anniversary of that war inevitably brings. The original (They shall not Grow Old, Irish Soldiers and the Great War) was released in 1997. The gap between the original and current release dates can be seen as milestones in evolving Anglo-Irish relations; the original release in the mid 1990s arrived at a time when the Northern Ireland Peace Process was in it’s infancy, to the current point where official Ireland and Britain are commemorating such anniversaries on a joint basis to demonstrate a shared past, and a present of mutual respect.

There can be no doubt that Dungan contributes to this idea of a shared past. His earlier edition shed much light on what had been a forgotten aspect of Irish history, the involvement of Irish men of all backgrounds in ‘The Great War’, during a period when it simply wasn’t a popular notion in some circles.

Today there is much more acceptance of this idea. The concept of promoting a shared past in relation to the Great War has, in many eyes superseded the realities of that war, to the point that (to borrow a phrase from an unnamed historian) a fetishism for commemoration takes over, blurring or ignoring the reasons why many signed up in the first place, or the circumstances in which they died.

Of course a simplistic approach to history is to be accepted in public commemoration. The loss is remembered, whereas the reasons for the loss are sometimes relegated to the background. What we expect from the copious volumes of works on those events, is a much deeper analysis than the pomp and pageantry of officialdom. Dungan provides this with his analysis of the battles and campaigns, through which he weaves the narratives of many of the young men from throughout Ireland who took part in these bloody battles, in what was four disastrous years for humanity.

Before the graphic retelling of the battles at Gallipoli, Sulva Bay and the Somme commence, Dungan attempts to familiarise the reader with the lay of the land, in terms of the approach taken by the various battalions. His description of troop manoeuvres show the distances which had to be travelled on foot to strategic points, bringing in everything from the unfamiliarity of the terrain to weather conditions, to the point you begin to feel what the strain on the body must have been like for these inexperienced soldiers.

In describing the battles themselves, a lot is of course added by eyewitness accounts of the horror of war, nevertheless there is rapidity to Dungan’s style which goes someway to illustrating the pace and confusion in the midst of battle. To the uninitiated the different platoons and battalion names may confuse.

There is no way around this, and while it may cause the reader to pause to take stock, it doesn’t detract from an engaging and at times graphic retelling of the significant battles. Beyond the battle-front, the book doesn’t hold back on its criticisms of those who ultimately planned the battles which ended in mass slaughter. Of Gallipoli, Dungan calls the almost farcical planning ‘that morass of incompetence’. (p.47) In relation to the Somme, the lack of planning and industry by British Generals in comparison to the Germans is stark. (p. 147)

Perhaps, not unexpectedly, given the number of Irish casualties and its continued significance to commemorations in Northern Ireland, the Somme is afforded special attention. However, the lesser explored Irish involvement in the Somme with The Sixteenth (Irish) Division is also brought in alongside the Ulster Division. The Sixteenth and The Thirty Sixth (Ulster) Division are afforded a chapter each. Although in some respects their experiences were different, there were many similarities, and assigning a chapter to each is a good juxtaposition, showing the different traditions and different reasons for joining, with pretty much the same outcome.

Again, the carnage and confusion of the events are graphically and expertly retold. The sense of awe and foreboding among the soldiers is clearly evident. “The slopes of Thiepval run red with the blood of Ulstermen – dead in heaps, dying in hundreds. God above us this is glorious war! Huddled together, surrounded, the end is near”. (p.137) However, shining through this chaos and despair are the important stories of the individual acts of heroism from the ordinary soldiery.

As the title suggests, this work is about exploring the Irish voices of the war, which up until a point had been forgotten. This book presents a large number of Irish voices for consideration. However, they are more often than not, from certain sections of Irish society, mainly coming from the middle-class to the upper echelons. Educated and well connected Officers are well represented with their testimony.

Those further down the social scale are also represented, in many instances by correspondence to their families back home. Such resources are utilised to full effect by Dungan, showing the despondency felt by frightened young men as they waited for their inevitable demise. The language contained within letters is noticeably different to that of the composed Sergeant writing in his journal after the fact. However, on occasion, they contained the same sentiments of fear and desperation.

It may, however, be said that there seems to be a feeling that the ‘voices’ used frequently are pro-union voices. This is evident from the beginning, and is most apparent with a chapter dedicated to the dairies of ‘convinced Unionist’ Captain N.E. Drury of the Dublin Fusiliers.

This is not a criticism of the author as such, nor would it be true to say that there are no ‘nationalist’ voices contained within, it perhaps highlights how deep nationalist Ireland’s involvement in the war was buried by subsequent generations, that much of the testimony from nationalist combatants went unrecorded.

Indeed, the author highlights such problems in the ‘Nationalist’ Somme chapter: “despite the fact that many of the men who lie in that cemetery do not come from Northern Ireland, but from the Republic of Ireland, you would have searched the book in vain – as the author did on his first visit – for Southern names and addresses. Now, in the 21^st century, more pilgrims from the 26 Counties are likely to have made that journey to pay their respects to their slain relatives”. (p. 175)

It is the theme of respect that the reader will find permeating through this book. There are examples of respect shown by soldiers to their fellow countrymen of different ideologies, as well as the respect shown by the author to all of his subjects. However, justified criticism of the senior ranks is obvious, and while there isn’t blanket criticism of the leaders (the author contends that sometimes the Generals ‘got it right’), there is a strong sense of empathy with the men who risked all over those giving the orders.

Public commemorations of war are fleeting, symbolic, all-encompassing to include those giving the orders and those obeying, and paying with their lives. It doesn’t of course make for ‘good history’. What Dungan has achieved with Irish Voices from The Great War, is more of a monument to those forgotten men who died in a dubious war than any public commemoration, no matter how well intentioned, could ever achieve.

Daniel Murray on Seumas Robinson’s re-telling of his War of Independence. See also Seumus Robinson’s War of Independence.

A Man for all the Seasons

Among the surviving voices from the War of Independence, Séumas Robinson was an unusually loquacious one. While most Statements submitted to the Bureau of Military History (BMH) were content to begin with an overview of pedestrian facts – e.g. family history, early life and influences, any notable relatives – Robinson’s Statement started his with a playfully philosophical burst:

 Somewhere deep in the camera (or is it the anti-camera?) of my cerebrum (or is it my cerebellum?), whose loci, by the way, are the frontal lobes of the cranium of this and every other specimen of homo-sapiens – there lurks furtively and nebulously, nevertheless positively, a thing, a something, a conception (deception?), a perception, an inception, that the following agglomeration of reminisces will be “my Last Will and Testament.[1]

As this quirky, almost singsong, opening sentence would suggest, Robinson was more than just another IRA veteran recalling his war stories for posterity and a pension. For one, he was a full-time staff member of the BMH, which would explain his confidence in beginning his Statement on his own terms instead of following the lead of his interviewer and answering from the list of pre-arranged questions.

Robinson had no time for that, what with the amount he had to say, pent-up as it was from the previous thirty years of silence. That the aforementioned agglomeration of reminiscences of his be known and recorded was a matter of utmost importance to him, despite his concern that he was not in a position to do them justice.

The stated reasons for his worry were many: he was no historian. He had been too close to the events to give them a proper overview like an historian should. History had to be full of facts, and facts were half-lies anyway, so what was the use of history in the first place? If Robinson had been present when Henry Ford had declared that history was more or less bunk, he would undoubtedly have nodded in appreciation (however shocked he would have been at the car tycoon’s atheism, given his devout Catholicism).

Robinson’s soliloquy as the prologue to his Statement is a rambling masterpiece of charming self-doubt, gentle self-deprecation and cheerful cynicism at the follies of man in thinking he can know his own past: “Only an angel can record the truth-absolute”.[2]

It is also a complete façade and one that did not take very long to drop. Robinson was to display throughout the rest of his Statement a very definite certainty in the idea of a truth-absolute, in this world as much as the one of angels, as well as a hot-blooded readiness to spring into attack should his place in history be threatened by unscrupulous and uncouth hoaxers.

And why not? His status was not inconsiderable. He had fought in the Easter Rising and helped change the course of Irish history. During the War of Independence, he had been commander of the Third Tipperary Brigade and then second-in-command to the Second Southern Division and played an important role in the Civil War on the republican side. In the theatre of politics he had been elected TD for Waterford-Tipperary East in 1920, had argued vigorously in the Dáil debates over the Treaty, against which he would take up arms against in the name of the Republic, and in the years of peace afterwards he was a Fianna Fáil Senator to the Seanad Éireann.

Patriot, guerrilla leader, elected representative, war hero, a historian for all his protests, and finally a statesman – Séumas Robinson had been a man of success in many a field. And yet he was to be constantly tormented, enraged and provoked into writing streams of vehement counter-attacks by the burning conviction that his colleague and brother-in-arms, Dan Breen, the arch-hoaxer, had, with the connivance of the cold-hearted and ungrateful people of Tipperary, screwed him over.

Kathleen Kincaid

Robinson’s contention was that Breen had falsely made several claims about his role in the War of Independence through his 1924 memoir ‘My Fight for Irish Freedom’. It was a case he would make repeatedly, in his Statement and in the numerous letters he wrote to various newspapers or individuals and later collected in the appendix of his Statement.

Not all the letters were written by himself, for he had adopted an ally in his war of words: his sister-in-law, Kathleen Kincaid. While too young to contribute anything herself during the War of Independence, Kincaid was steeped in the struggle by virtue of her family home of 71 Heytesbury Street, Dublin.

This had been used as a safe-house and meeting-place for those on the run, including many famous names such as Ernie O’Malley, Sean McBride and Liam Lynch, among others, and she claimed to have “met or saw and heard nearly everyone of the real fighting men” through this.[3]

Kincaid wore her address as a medal of honour; when the luckless editor of the Sunday Press refused to print an earlier letter on the grounds of excessive length, Kincaid began her response by unsheathing the sharp edge of her research skills:

 Dear Mr Feehan,

 As you see, I have learned your name. I have also learned you are a South   Tipperary man from Clonmel.

 (The Dear Mr Feehan having omitted his name and address in his preceding rejection of her earlier letter, to no avail)

 …and then by challenging him on his suspicious absence from the 71 Heytesbury Street Hall-of-Fame:

 I met many men and some women from Clonmel in the old days of “71”; but I never heard of you. You must have been as young as myself – too young to do anything…What do you say?[4]

 Feehan very sensibly did not venture an answer to that one.

 Given her zeal for her brother-in-law’s cause, Ambrose decided that “Robinson clearly looked over Mrs Kincaid’s shoulder as she wrote” as if she was merely a convenient pen for Robinson. But when comparing her letters with his, their writing styles were very different: his with a tendency towards long-windedness and waffling around the issue, while she wasted little time in getting to the point – and going for the jugular.[5] Whatever else one may think of the woman and her letters, she was a believer.

 Making Claims

 While not included in every letter of theirs, Robinson’s and Kincaid’s main points of contention were that Breen had been:

1. Never elected Brigade O/C and had never obtained rank above that of Quartermaster.

2. Not present in the attacks on the RIC barracks at Drangan or Hollyford, or indeed in charge of any fight.

3. Wounded ‘only’ two times – once below the collar-bone, and the other through the calf – and not twenty-two times as claimed.[6]

The first two points will be addressed further in the article. The third one is hard to prove either way without access to Breen’s medical history, but as two bullet-wounds are still two more than what most people have had in their lives, it was perhaps unduly petty on Robinson’s part to make an issue out of it.

Nonetheless, it was an attack point Robinson pressed upon in a private letter to a friend. Writing in 1952, Robinson tarred Breen with the worst brush that a Fianna Fáil member and former Anti-Treatyite could tar another with: association with the ‘Staters’:

 The Staters gave Dan Breen a house and a farm, gave him 200% of disability          pension (he had only two bullet wounds in the whole of his I.R.A career in Ireland –     wounds that healed up immediately and, why did these same Staters, when they got back to power as a coalition, in the first 24 hours, almost, of their existence rush   through a bill through the Dáil granting him (not by name!) £3,000 for Doctors’ bills  “contracted in the U.S.A.” [7]

The coalition mentioned had been the Fine Gael government of John A. Costello/ Twenty-eight years after the end of the Civil War and the opposition party was still ‘the Staters’. For Robinson, as with others, the past war had never really ended.

Robinson’s picking at this scab was perhaps aggravated by his own wrangles with medical pensions. In 1940, he applied for expenses for the damaging effects on his health caused by the irregular meals, damp conditions and the like from being on the run during his IRA days. This claim lingered in bureaucratic limbo until 1943, when a medical examination was arranged for Robinson in order to assess the validity of his claim. Robinson did not attend the appointment and when contacted further by the Army Pensions Board, dropped his claim altogether.[8]

Et Tu, Tipperary?

Breen’s enablers in what Robinson dubbed with entertaining bombast ‘the Great Tipperary Hoax’ were none the less than the people of Tipperary. Or so Robinson claimed in an unusual theory as to why his side of the story was not common knowledge already.

A native of Belfast, Robinson believed that the Tipperary people preferred to embrace one of their own, the Tipperary native Breen, as the hero in the War of Independence in their county. “Truth in a noose when it comes to trying to get any Tipperary man to expose the ‘Great Tipperary Hoax,” Robinson was supposed to have muttered to Kathleen Kincaid upon hearing of how another of her letters had been rejected.[9]

Plaintively, Robinson professed to hold out hope that someday there would appear “some generous-minded Tipperary man to undo at least some of the ungenerous treatment I have received.”[10] As of yet, no such generous-minded native of Tipperary has emerged.

 Who’s in Charge?

Robinson had been O/C of the Third Tipperary Brigade when it was formed in October 1918, with Seán Treacy as Vice Commandant, and Breen as Quartermaster. But Robinson was to frequently complain that Breen had falsely passed himself off as the O/C in Robinson’s place. The famous wanted poster of Breen, identifying him as the one who ‘calls himself Commandant of the Third Tipperary Brigade’ was a particular source of frustration for Robinson, especially as it continued to be reprinted in books afterwards.[11]

As Robinson’s claim to fame was in large part his command of one of the most renowned fighting units in the War of Independence, it is understandable that such a hierarchical intrusion would infuriate him.

Breen did say in his memoir that he had been O/C but before Robinson, in the spring of 1918, prior to the official forming of the Brigade.[12] The wanted poster was printed after this time, when Breen was wanted for murder, so it can be explained by the authorities’ information being out of date.

Robinson insisted that Breen had never had a position higher than that of Quartermaster. But a contemporary, Patrick O’Dwyer, remembered Breen as the O/C around the time of October 1918, suggesting that Breen had held the post up to Robinson’s election.[13] Robinson was either wrong or refused to consider any Brigade position before that of October 1918 as legitimate.

The Man Not Present?

Perhaps the most serious claim of Robinson’s is that Breen lied in his memoir about being present at the assaults by the Third Tipperary Brigade on the Hollyford and Drangan Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Barracks, the former on the May 1920 and the latter on June 1920.

A possible tie-breaker here is Ernie O’Malley, who helped lead the attacks on Hollyford and Drangan Barracks with Robinson. O’Malley wrote accounts of his own, first as in his War of Independence memoir, On Another Man’s Wound, published in 1936, and later a series of articles in the mid-1950s that were published under Raids and Rallies.[14]

In O’Malley’s accounts of the Hollyford-Drangan attacks, Breen does not appear in either, though he does in the assault on the Rearcross barracks, which Robinson did not deny.

Had he been present at either Hollyford or Drangan, it would have been strange for Breen to have not made a mention of it, given how well know Breen would have been to O’Malley’s readers. Thus we may tentatively conclude that Breen did lie about having been present at the Hollyford-Drangan attacks, and that Robinson was entirely correct in this.

Father Colmcille

The letters collected in the Statement’s appendix pertain to a number of subjects from this period. Of those letters centring the ‘Danbreenofile’ distortion view of history – as Robinson, with his flair for phrase-making, put it – four were written by Robinson.[15] One was to the Irish Press, and had been refused publication. The other three were part of the same convoluted mission and require an explanation onto themselves.

While a casual reader browsing through the appendix may think at first that these three letters were unrelated except in subject material, they were written together in response to a planned book about the Third Tipperary Brigade by a Father An tAthair Colmcille.

Samples of the text had been published in the Irish Press, and Robinson had had the chance to read a typescript of the book, given to him by Seán Fitzpatrick, his former Brigade adjutant, who had been asked to check it for inaccuracies by Father Colmcille. Robinson had his own opinion on its accuracy: “On the whole I prefer Buck Rodgers.”[16]

Robinson could have written to Colmcille directly but, for reasons known only to himself, did not. Perhaps he found the prospect too distasteful. Instead of this obvious route, Robinson instead had all three letters mailed together to Abbot Benignus Hickey of Mellifont Abbey in County Louth.

The first letter was addressed to Abbot Hickey, asking him to pass on the second letter to Seán Fitzpatrick, then a resident of the Abbey, it would seem. It was an impressively long letter, and Fitzpatrick was treated to no less than two postscripts. The third letter was ostensibly addressed to W. F. O’Connell, secretary of the Soloheadbeg Memorial, with the intent of turning down a recent invitation but which was, at Robinson’s request to Hickey, to be passed on to Colmcille, who was either another resident of the Abbey or who was in contact with its abbot.

As told to Abbot Hickey, the two letters to Fitzpatrick and O’Connell were intended to address the points in Colmcille’s upcoming publication. A good Catholic, Robinson made sure to stress that his rebuttals were intended for “Father Colmcille, the Tiperaryman-Historian – not the priest, God bless him,” and ending the letter to Hickey with a request that the Abbot pray for him.[17]

A Victory of Sorts

That Colmcille was being singled out as an historian and not for anything else about him must have been scant comfort when reading remarks like: “I cannot make up my mind whether Father C. is simple (the virtue); or is a simpleton (within strict limits,” or threats of “a locker-room of deadly shots that I will discharge at his book.”[18] One can only speculate as to whether such remarks were intended to browbeat Colmcille into submission or if Robinson could not resist the chance to vent.

This triple-pack of letters prompted a mollifying response from Colmcille, who wrote with the wariness of a man moving slowly around a strange dog. Colmcille began by stressing that the typescript Robinson had read via Fitzpatrick had been a rough draft and not intended in any way to be publishable, a fact that Fitzpatrick was amiss for not making clear to Robinson. One could assume that this would be the last time Colmcille would ask Fitzpatrick for any editing favours.

The second defence was to deny any contact with Breen as a source, and minimise his use of Breen’s book for his own beyond a few quotes.  Colmcille ended his letter with an invitation to forward his typescript to Robinson for any amendments he would want to make. If Robinson sent a reply, he did not include it in his BMH Statement, so we do not know what he made of Colmcille’s olive-branch.

At the end of all that, Colmcille never did publish his book. If Robinson had hoped Colmcille would tell his side of the story, he had failed, though not for want of trying. If he had wanted Colmcille to drop the book completely, then he had succeeded, and there had been a method to his seeming madness. But for a man with a lot to say, Robinson remained stubbornly opaque as to what he hoped to achieve. All a historian can do is shrug and apply a question-mark over his motives.

Motives?

Three other letters in the appendix were written by Kincaid to The Irish/Sunday Press, all refused publication. The reason given by the above Mr Feehan for refusing one of her letters was “pressures of space” and indeed the letter in question was a fairly long one, as were the letters in general.[19]

As all these letters to newspapers were rejected, it begs the question as to why either Robinson or Kincaid did not simply write shorter letters if they were so keen for Robinson’s version of events to be heard. It could be that the letters were never intended to be published.

After all, that would have brought the ill feeling to public light, which would have been awkward given how the two men were both members of the same party in Fianna Fáil – Breen as a TD, Robinson as a trusted bureaucrat. Instead, it could be that Robinson passively-aggressively sabotaged his own efforts by intentionally making the letters too long for any editor to realistically consider printing them.

As for why write them at all, Ambrose has suggested that even with the letters rejected, “the whole of Dublin would hear about their contents”, in a sort of guerrilla war by rumour. However, there is no indication that knowledge of the letters’ contents went beyond the offices of The Irish Press, let alone that that was Robinson’s intention.[20]

Equally questionable is Ambrose’s suggestion as to why Robinson added these letters to the appendix of his BMH Statement: “The result was a time bomb from another era, recently exploded, that was designed to wipe out Breen’s reputation and the credibility of his book.”[21]

As Robinson never hinted at any plan as long-term as that, or any plan at all, it is impossible to say for sure. An argument against this is how the BMH Statements were only to be made available upon the death of their last contributor, Robinson included, which was not to be until 2003, forty-two years after Robinson’s death in 1961. A plan of vengeance whose culmination the perpetrator could not be around to enjoy could hardly be a satisfying one.

Books Make the Man

On a similar note, it is a mystery as to why Robinson, if he was so aggrieved at Breen’s use of memoir-writing to inflate his role, did not respond in kind and write his own? Robinson adopted a puzzled, almost irritated reaction to that question:

 Quite a large number of people have been asking me from time to time, mostly importunately, during the last thirty odd years to write my memoirs. Why, I don’t know.[22]

He mentioned in a letter his “manuscript notes for, perhaps, a book – certainly a statement,” indicating that he was at least entertaining the idea of a memoir.[23] The way the Statement was divided into chapters, with a prologue, separate chapters, and an appendix, further suggests that it was intended to be the makings of a publishable book.

 Robinson had previously contributed an earlier Statement, in 1948, this one limited to specific themes in his revolutionary career:

• His family, early years and Volunteer activities in Glasgow up to 1916.
• A list of names of those in the ‘Kimmage Garrison’ of the Easter Rising.
• His role in the Rising as part of the ‘Kimmage Garrison.’
• A 1932 Evening Telegraph article on the Lord French Ambush, written by the then-Senator Robinson.[24]

This one was composed in 1948, nine years before Robinson wrote his main one in 1957. It is the shorter of the two, at 26 pages including newspaper clippings, while the material in the 1957 one totals 142.

Through the difference in the two Statements, one can see the writer’s progression from the short pieces in the first to a more complete narrative and arguments that make up the second. Also notable is how Breen is barely mentioned in the first, in contrast to the spleen displayed against him in the second. Presumably Robinson lacked the self-assurance to do his cause justice initially.

By the time he composed his second Statement, he had grown in confidence as a writer and in the certainty of himself as a wronged man. Robinson seemed to be building himself up to write something greater, perhaps a magnum opus of his life’s work and vindication?

 But, ultimately, Robinson went no further.  He never provided a book nor an answer as to why other than indifference on his own part, when of course Robinson was anything but indifferent. He clearly had the ability, time and passion to write a memoir of his own, and there was certainly a demand for stories from the War of Independence, which Breen among others were happy to supply, but for whatever reason Robinson never followed suit.

Conclusion

The Statement of Séumas Robinson is one of the most colourful to have emerged from the vaults of the Bureau of Military History. The reader is struck by the vitriol displayed by Robinson towards his colleague, Dan Breen, an indignation that formed around a number of claims Breen had made through his memoir: Breen had been Brigade O/C, he had been present at the assaults on a couple of RIC barracks, and he had exaggerated the extent of his injuries. Breen was enabled in his deception, or so Robinson believed, by the people of Tipperary who preferred to celebrate one of their own at the expense of the Belfast-born Robinson.

And so Robinson embarked on an underground literary career, assisted by his sister-in-law, in writing letters of complaint about Breen’s deceptiveness to an assortment of newspaper editors, historians and abbots. Why he did not pursue the same aims through more productive methods such as shorter letters or publishing his own memoirs is a mystery, as are his motives in general for his extensive, but ultimately futile, letter-writing campaign.

 Bibliography

Bureau of Military History / Witness Statements

O’Dwyer, Patrick H., WS 1432

Robinson, Séumas, WS 156

Robinson, Séumas, WS 1721

Books

Ambrose, Joe. Dan Breen and the IRA (Douglas Village, Cork: Mercier Press, 2006)

Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013)

O’Malley, Ernie. Raids and Rallies (Cork: Mercier Press, 2011)

Military Service Pensions Acts 1949

Robinson, Séumas, http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Pensions/R1/MSP34REF147SeamusRobinson/WDP11152SeamusRobinson.pdf (Accessed 29/11/2014)

[1]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), p. 3

[2]Ibid, p. 5

[3]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), p. 95

[4]Ibid, p. 100

[5]Ambrose, Joe. Dan Breen and the IRA (Douglas Village, Cork: Mercier Press, 2006), p. 178

[6]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), pp. 87-88

[7]Ibid, pp. 121-122

[8] Robinson, Séumas, Military Service Pensions Acts 1949, http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Pensions/R1/MSP34REF147SeamusRobinson/WDP11152SeamusRobinson.pdf (Accessed 29/11/2014)

[9]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), p. 100

[10]Ibid, p. 119

[11] Ibid, pp. 86, 125, 128-129

[12] Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), p. 19

[13] O’Dwyer, Patrick H. (BMH / WS 1432), p. 6

[14] Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom, pp. 107-110 (Hollyford), pp. 112-118 (Drangan)

O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound, pp.  189-195 (Hollyford), pp.200-203 (Drangan)

O’Malley, Ernie. Raids and Rallies (Cork: Mercier Press, 2011), pp. 21-41 (Hollyford), pp. 42-60 (Drangan)

[15]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), p. 118. In case one wonders what the ‘usual concomitant’ of this is, it is ‘S.R.-opobia.’

[16]Ibid, p. 127

[17]Ibid, p. 117

[18]Ibid, p. 118, 119

[19]Ibid,  p. 99

[20]Ambrose, p. 178

[21]Ibid

[22]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), p. 3

[23]Ibid, p. 101

[24]Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 156)

Book Review: The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irish Woman and Soldier

by Anne Holland

 Published by Colilns Press

Reviewer: Lucy Kinnally

When author, Anne Holland stumbled across a small item in the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards museum in Edinburgh Castle referring to ‘Mother Ross’ she was instantly intrigued.  Mother Ross, better known as Kit Cavenaugh, a seventeenth century woman who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the British Army to find her press-ganged husband, was the type of historical figure that writers dream about.

She survived numerous battles and managed to keep her sex a secret despite sustaining three injuries and continued to serve the British Army in various capacities for over fifteen years.  Hers was a story that was begging to be told.  Unfortunately, Holland’s book, The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irish Woman and Soldier, in its creative nonfiction style, manages to take what could be a compelling story of love, adventure and unbridled bravery, and turn it into a plodding narrative of conjecture and what ifs.

According to The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh, Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanaugh was born in 1667 in the outskirts of Dublin to a middle class Protestant farming family.  Despite being Protestant, Kit’s father supported King James II and served in the Jacobite Army, where he died in the Battle of Aughrim.  After his death, his lands were seized by the Williamite government and Kit and her family were left destitute.

To escape poverty and a cousin who took advantage of her, Kit moved to Dublin to help her aunt run a pub, which she eventually inherited upon her aunt’s death.  It was here, in her aunt’s pub, that Kit met her husband, Richard Welsh, who would change Kit’s life and set her onto the adventure that would make her infamous.

Kit and her husband, Richard, lived a very happy life until Richard disappeared one night, leaving Kit behind with two children.  After several months of wondering what had become of her beloved husband, Kit received a letter from him, explaining that he had been forced into the Army and shipped across the sea.  Hoping to find her husband, Kit enlisted in the British Army as Christopher Welch and began a life that saw her serving in the War of Spanish Succession, being detained as a prisoner of war in France, courting a Burgher’s daughter, fighting duels, and even being accused of fathering a child.

Eventually, beyond all odds, Kit managed to find her husband who had been living with a Dutch woman.  Unwilling to give up her life as a soldier, Kit convinced Richard that they should both remain in the army, which they did until her sex was finally discovered when a stray shell fractured her skull.  Though discharged from the army, kit decided to follow Richard’s regiment, becoming a cook and a sutler, associating with the British army for many more years.

Kit’s life as a soldier and sutler was so extraordinary that she was eventually presented to Queen Anne and granted a shilling a day as a pension for her service, but her years of adventure made ordinary life difficult for her and she had a hard time adapting to normal life.

Kit Cavenaugh’s life truly was an extraordinary one and it is one that should have made a superb book.  Holland does an excellent job of explaining the minutia of the eighteenth century life of a soldier and manages to construct a fairly complete narrative of Kit’s life from the limited sources that are available, relying heavily on, The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, Commonly Call’d Mother Ross, a book published a year after Kit’s death in 1740, purportedly written by Kit herself, to do so.

But the lack of biographical information led Holland to take the rather unusual strategy of writing in a creative nonfiction style, attempting to merge facts with dialogue and filling in space with speculation of what Kit might have been thinking, wearing, feeling or doing.  Phrases such as, “perhaps she,” “she may have” or “Kit probably . . .” crop up repeatedly, placing thoughts and experiences into Kit’s life that are complete speculation.

This not quite fact, not quite fiction, style of writing is slightly frustrating as Holland could have been successful in writing a very interesting and insightful, though shorter, biography of Kit, or a truly gripping novel.  In the end, Holland’s book ends up like Kit herself, hovering between two worlds and not really fitting into either, disguising itself in the garb of nonfiction, while harboring fictitious tendencies.  But perhaps, like we do with Kit, we should just applaud Holland for being brave enough to do so.

How was the Anglo-Irish Treaty received in the counties it made a frontier zone? By John Dorney.

If you lived in the strip of Ireland from Dundalk to Leitrim in late 1921, there was much to be worried about. It was a period of interregnum, after the cessation of the Irish War of Independence, and pending political settlement being negotiated in London. As of 1920 the British government had drawn a new border at the north of your county line, creating a new frontier between the territories it called Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Nationalists on the southern rim of the new border zone were scornful of the new Northern State. The local nationalist newspaper opined that the Northern Parliament was, ‘A discredit to a third rate creamery’. With ‘overpaid ministers’, and a ‘huge police force, one policeman for every 10 inhabitants’[1].

But as of late 1921, executive and policing powers had been devolved to Northern Ireland from London. It began to look as if Northern Ireland was there to stay. Two rival militias now patrolled either side of the new border, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrillas to the south and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC or ‘Specials’) to the north.

The IRA had been in an uneasy truce since July 1921 with British troops and Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) police. Many were fearful of a return to war. And rival police forces, the RIC and the Irish Republican Police (IRP – an adjunct to the IRA) competed to impose their own order. In November, for instance, the Republican Police arrested several youths for drunkenness at Carrickmacross fair, only for the RIC to arrest the IRP officers for false imprisonment. At a fair at Clones both RIC and IRP investigated stolen a horse.  In the event, the IRP retrieved the horse, while the RIC arrested the alleged thief.[2]

The result of this zeal for competitive law enforcement was not more security but, with no effective, impartial police, a breakdown of law and order. Crime such as burglaries, land seizures and cattle theft spiralled.

And on the land, agitation had sprung up across the region in late 1921. This was a poor rural region and though many famers had taken the opportunity afforded by British land reform to buy out their landlords since 1908, many families were still paying rent to old-style big landlords (often of the Anglo-Irish gentry class and often absentee).  A rent strike by tenants started on November 25^th in the Portland estate in County Monaghan, but rapidly spread across the whole of the north midlands by late December, demanding a 50% reduction in rent and the compulsory purchase of landlords’ estates and ownership right to be given to tenants.[3]

So in the border counties, people waited nervously for what came out of the London negotiations. Who would form the new state in two thirds of Ireland? Would that state be independent? Would the partition of Ireland be permanent? No one as yet knew.

On December 6 1922, the Irish negotiating team in London, headed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Treaty created in the southern 26 counties of Ireland a self-governing dominion under the British Crown, to be known as the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland (the north eastern 6 counties) would be given a year to decide if it would join it.

Over the following month, the Treaty was heatedly debated in the republican parliament, the Dáil, in Dublin, where Eamon de Valera, the President of the Irish Republic declared in 1919, rejected the settlement his negotiators had brought back from London. But the Treaty was also debated fiercely at local level, in county and town councils, trade and farmers unions and other assemblies right across Ireland.  Nowhere was the impact of the Treaty more obvious in the counties which it would make a frontier zone.

Reactions to the Treaty

For some republicans on the Northern side of the border there was naturally anger at what appeared to be a meek acceptance of partition. Patrick Casey, an IRA member from Newry, had been preparing, as he put it, ‘for the resumption of hostilities’ and was staying in the home of sympathetic schoolmaster, McKevitt, near Banbridge as he was visiting the local IRA units.

‘When we awoke’, he recalled, ‘the [Irish] ‘Independent’ [newspaper] had arrived and contained all details of the terms and signing of the Treaty. I remember well McKevitt, senior, saying that the terms were not a settlement and would lead to bloodshed. How true, in fact, were his words to become in the matter of a few months!’[4]

But more broadly, especially on the southern side, the initial reaction to the Treaty seems to have been one of relief. After all there would be an Irish state there, with an Irish army and police. British forces would evacuate the territory of the Free State. All 3,600 Irish republican internees would be freed.

The release of local prisoners (most of whom had been held in an internment camp at Ballykinlar, County Down) seems to have been a powerful local selling point for the Treaty. They were given heroes’ welcomes on their return to their home towns and villages in the next two weeks.

At Clones, county Monaghan, the prisoners marched through the streets accompanied by a Pipe band, the Ancient Order of Hibernians band, as well the IRA, Cumann na mBan and Sinn Fein contingents to a rally where they were addressed by a priest, Father O’Daly. At Cavan town the prisoners were feted with a torch lit parade. The local press reported, ‘Hearty handshakes’ for the 36 Cavan prisoners welcomed home, who ‘looked remarkably fit’, considering their experiences.[5]

 ‘It would be criminal not accept it’ – Support for the Treaty

In the IRA, several important local leaders in the border area, notably Sean MacEoin of north Longford, Eoin O’Duffy of Monaghan and Paul Galligan of Cavan publicly came out in favour of it.

Many, like O’Duffy expressed serious reservations in private about whether the Treaty  would solidify the new border, but loyalty to IRA GHQ in Dublin and in particular to Michael Collins ensured their assent for the Treaty.

O’Duffy was in Dublin when the Treaty was published and allegedly told IRA Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy, ‘The Army won’t stand for this Dick’. Mulcahy responded, ‘wait until you see Collins’, who apparently talked him around[6].

Frank Aiken, the commander of the IRA Fourth Northern Division in the area of north Louth, South Down and South Armagh, that now spanned both sides of the border, was against the acceptance of partition but was persuaded not to oppose the Treaty in public by Collins, who assured him that not only was partition temporary but the new Dublin government would support IRA military actions across the border.[7]

On the political front late December and early January saw a concerted campaign by pro-Treaty supporters in the area to build support for the settlement. A host of civil society organisation passed motions, overwhelmingly in favour of the Treaty. Paul Galligan, TD for West Cavan as well as IRA commander, received a host of telegrams and letters from public bodies and parish councils in Cavan in the weeks leading up to the Dáil vote on the Treaty urging him to ratify it.

The Cavan town Urban District Council for example wrote, of its, ‘high appreciation of the terms of the Treaty’ and urged all TDs, ‘for the sake of our country to bury their differences and stand with Arthur Griffith and Sean McKeon [MacEoin] for the ratification of the Treaty’. The Swanlibar Sinn Fein Club, ‘trusts that the Treaty shall lead to the establishment of a Republic at no distant date” and urged ratification, “to prevent the appalling consequences of a split’. The Belturbet District Council thought that, ‘99 per cent of the people call for Ratification’.[8]

Seamus MacDiarmada, a Cavan IRA intelligence officer remembered,

‘Every public body in Cavan urged its acceptance, members who had not attended in years turned up to support it. My proposition against it [the Treaty] caused much the same reaction as an atomic blast would today [1952] in Cavan town – voting 15 for 3 against’.[9]

At the Bawnboy Poor Law Guardians meeting a Mr McBarron declared, ‘I don’t believe there is one in my district opposed to the Treaty’. They resolved: ‘though a fraction short of Republican aspirations, it gives us the freedom that no nationalist leader ever expected… ‘Without any more bloodshed, time and proper understanding between Ireland and England will put these things right’.[10]

Pro-Treaty nationalists presented the Treaty merely as common sense, its defects only temporary. One Joe McCarthy a Louth farmer, thought, ‘It gives us everything except Ulster and wise government and gentle economic pressures will induce Ulster to come in’.

It was, moreover, in a phrase repeated constantly, ‘the will of the people’. At the Monaghan Sinn Fein meeting, the Chair, a Catholic priest, Father MacNamee argued, ‘It is possible that the majority of the representatives of the people are against the Treaty but the majority of people are in favour of ratification’. The motion proposed by another priest, Reverend Murphy, seconded by IRA leader Eoin O’Duffy resolved, ‘it would be criminal not to accept the Treaty’.[11]

And there remained a sizable minority in the border area, mostly Protestant, many of whom were successful farmers and businessmen, who were relieved that the connection with the British Empire was not going to be severed fully.

At the meeting of the Louth Farmers’ Union in Dundalk for instance,  William Russell, who said he represented the ‘large commercial community’, argued that he was ‘proud to be associated with the British Empire’ and that he opposed complete separation as a, ‘Republic would mean we would be foreigners in the Empire’. A Major Barrow (‘just back from India’) told the meeting that, ‘remaining in the Empire gave Ireland all the advantages of belonging to a big firm’. Ratification, he argued, was necessary or they would be ‘fighting a much bigger man’.[12]

‘Freedom was won by a sacrifice of lives’ – Anti-Treaty voices

Anti-Treaty Republicans were in a distinct minority in the region. Their view, articulated in the newspaper, An Phoblacht [the Republic] was that; the ‘will of the people’, could not be freely expressed under a British threat of force; ‘We shall labour to unite the Irish People temporarily disunited under duress and the temptation of an easy peace.’[13]

In their world there was no room for compromise. The Irish Republic had been declared by the Irish people, fought for and there was no good reason to throw it away for the compromises inherent in the Treaty. They would proceed, ‘upon the only basis upon which unity is possible; loyalty to the Irish Republic, established once and for all in 1919’. [14]

Some swallowed their pride. Leitrim County Council reluctantly endorsed the Treaty though it acknowledged that, ‘The Treaty is not popular and opinion is divided. ‘This is not what Sean MacDiarmada [Leitrim born IRB leader, executed in 1916] gave his life for’.

In meeting after meeting along the border however, the anti-Treaty republicans simply asserted that rejecting the Treaty was a point of principle and that no other argument was required.

In the Cavan County Council Meeting of January 1, 1922, a Mr Fitzsimons proposed a motion to endorse the Treaty, arguing that, ‘Whilst it does not realise all the hopes of the Irish nation it safeguards the best interests of the Gaelic nation. Also there is no alternative”.

The following exchange gives a good indication of the unsophisticated but quite determined outlook of the anti-Treaty Republicans. Mr Boylan responded to Fitzsimons with a counter-motion;

Mr Boylan, ‘As republicans we do not approve of the Treaty.”

Fitzsimons and several others responded with a reiteration of the pro-Treaty case.

Fitzsimons; ‘I am as convinced a republican today as at any time over the last 4 or 5 years. The Treaty is not a final settlement. I swore an oath to the Irish Republic but have no qualms about transferring that allegiance to the Irish Free State’.

Mr O’Reilly, I also took an oath and have no problem with transferring that allegiance to the Free State.

Mr Murphy ‘The opinion of the people is for the Treaty’

But Boylan was not to be moved; ‘I don’t wish to say anything. The resolution speaks for itself. We were elected as republicans. That is all’.

Some in the County Council wanted no vote to be taken in order to preserve unity. But the chairman insisted, ‘We must voice the opinion of the people’ A Pro-Treaty resolution was passed.[15]

Two obvious points of attack for anti-Treatyites in the border area were the Treaty’s acceptance of partition and its lack of any clauses dealing with further land reform. But at this early stage, the anti-Treatyites’ arguments were much simpler; men, in some cases their friends and families, had died for an Irish Republic and they were not going to settle for any less. The Republic was a kind of bond with the dead, sealed with their blood.

The debate  at Cavan Farmers’ Union on January 3^rd highlighted the point evocatively. At Cavan Town Hall, Thomas Smith, a pro-Treaty Sinn Fein member, argued about ‘freedom to achieve freedom’, quoting Michael Collins. Ireland he argued, now had control over education, industry, finance, policing and the army. He cited the support for the Treaty of Collins, Arthur Griffith and Sean MacEoin, an IRA legend in the locality, ‘whom the Irish nation honours as a hero’.

Michael Sheridan took up the anti-Treaty argument.  ‘Freedom’, he declared, ‘was won by a sacrifice of lives’. It was wrung from England’.  John Redmond, Lord rest him, could have had this in 1914 if he had utilised his own forces [Heckler: ‘then why didn’t he?’] without Easter Week, or 1920 or 1921’. ‘The Treaty’, Sheridan went on, ‘is not the freedom of Pearse or Tone [who talked about] ‘the ‘blood of Irishmen to redeem the soul of Ireland’.

Here came the crux of the debate. A heckler shouted, ‘Are you going to shed it?’

Sheridan was taken aback. ‘That’, he responded, ‘is hardly fair. My family were prepared to shed blood and did shed it, the only sacrifice of life in Cavan and I am not ashamed of it’

Chairman: ‘the man did not know’

Michael Sheridan’s brother Thomas had in fact been shot dead by the RIC in arms raid in 1920, one of only three IRA Volunteers to be killed in the County  during the conflict (another Cavan IRA man was killed just over the county border in Leitrim).[16]. His IRA OC Paul Galligan later voted for the Treaty.

In May of 1920, Galligan had sent his West Cavan unit to ambush two RIC men at a fair in Crossdowney to take their weapons, but, “strict orders were given by the battalion OC [Galligan] that no lives were to be taken in the attempt”.  In fact, when the police were challenged, they opened fire with their pistols. In a shootout, one of the Volunteers, Thomas Sheridan, Michael’s brother, was shot and mortally wounded; his brother Paul and one of the policemen were also injured. The police swore they would kill the other Sheridan brothers if the wounded sergeant died and set fire to the thatched roof of the Sheridan house that night. The roof fell in but the house itself was saved by the efforts of the neighbours.[17]

So in 1922, Michael Sheridan was in no mood for compromise. He resumed, ‘The threat of force is not a good argument for the Treaty and anyway it is mere bluff’. Though he conceded, ‘Mine is voice in the wilderness I know’. What he said next though is probably most revealing about the anti-Treaty Republicans’ stance. It was not so much an ideology, in the sense of a coherent world view as mentality and is worth quoting in full;

‘England may in the future subject Ireland to the same tyranny if a Republic is proclaimed.  I am not a doctrinaire republican, Strictly speaking I am not saying what form of government Ireland should have but I implicitly believe in complete and absolute independence from England.’

‘I will never consent to the Treaty. I have been through the mill, I saw England’s paid assassins put my father against a wall with a revolver against his breast and the abuse of my aged mother looking for my wounded brother’. I have looked down the barrel of revolvers’. We must forgive but we won’t forget’. We must break the last link with England’ [Applause].

The Chairman concluded the meeting; I agree with Mr Sheridan but I am not sure the war threat is bluff, there is no guarantee’. The majority of people in Cavan know very little about what parts of Ireland suffered while the fighting on… and that was only child’s play towards what real war would be like’. .[18]

The Treaty was endorsed at the meeting but chair praised the ‘pluck and bravery of Mr Sheridan’.[19]

That Cavan and counties like it had not pulled their weight in the war was a sensitive charge. Only ten people died in Cavan compared to nearly 500 in County Cork. But Cork had nearly 400,000 inhabitants compared to Cavan’s 90,000.  The entire border area with a combined population of roughly 450,000, from 1919-21 saw a death toll of about 140, with hundreds more injured. Casualties were still well under those for areas with comparable populations; Cork, Belfast or Dublin, but do indicate a considerable level of political violence. [20]

‘The trouble’ had certainly been bad enough for people not to want it to resume. Back in November IRA Cavan commander Paul Galligan had told a crowd of supporters that he, ‘Regretted it has been said of Cavan, inside and out that it did not take its place in the fighting movement, but … The difficulties might have been for the best’.[21]

The tragedy for the likes of Michael Sheridan was that their determination to validate their sacrifices of their comrades could only result in more violence.

 ‘We are anxious not to lose the services of President de Valera’

A few months later the Chairman or his armed representatives were very likely hunting Michael Sheridan, since in late March 1922 the IRA formally split over the Treaty into antagonistic factions and in late June the hostility boiled over into all-out Civil War. But one of the surprising things about the initial local Treaty debates is the lack of animosity between the rival sides.

Certainly pro-Treaty Republicans were dismissive at times of anti-Treaty ‘diehards’, At the Monaghan meeting one Father Murphy expressed the view that, ‘The anti-Treatyites have not got the intelligence to reason it out’. They were scared, he argued of someone asking ‘where is your republic now?’ ‘But the Treaty will get the last trace of khaki [British soldiers] out of the country in 10 years’.[22]

But there was also a clear desire to avoid disunity to patch up the quarrels caused by the Treaty. The pro-Treaty motion in Monaghan was seconded by a Father Coyle who declared, ‘Clontibret urges Mr. de Valera to bow the will of the people’.  The Free State has placed the ball in front of the goal and he can kick it in any time he wants’. De Valera in other words was still considered by pro-Treaty supporters to be the natural Irish leader. Coyle concluded; ‘I hope opponents can shake hands with other side’.

The pro-Treaty proposal was unanimously passed by Monaghan County Council. It also resolved, ‘We are anxious not to lose the services of President de Valera’.[23]

Similarly, the Anglo Celt approvingly reported of a ‘Prominent Methodist’, a ‘Cavan man returned from New York, son of clergyman’, ‘an Irish Protestant with no bigotry in his blood’, who the paper reported, said in a public speech,  ‘to refuse it [the Treaty] would be suicide’. ‘I am a consistent Home Ruler’. I stand with Griffith and Collins without any prejudice to my honest, brave friend de Valera.’ [24]

And such apparent bi-partisanship percolated even into the region’s elected representatives. After a stormy debate, the Dáil narrowly passed the Treaty on January 7 1922, by 64 votes to 57.  Paul Galligan, TD for West Cavan, voted for the Treaty as a TD in January 1922 but also voted for Eamon de Valera as President, the man who led political opposition to the Treaty.  De Valera of course was not re-elected and began what turned into bitter and eventually armed opposition to the Treaty and his former comrades.

Ahead lay seven tortuous months in the border counties. Within two months the British forces would pull out leaving the IRA, increasingly divided though it was, in control of all the territory along the southern side of the border. There would be an on-again, off-again war between them the Ulster Special Constabulary across the border.  There were also occasional clashes between pro and anti-Treaty IRA units until Civil War finally broke out on June 28 1922. Law and order would also further deteriorate in the months ahead. It was not until well into 1923 that some sort of peace was restored to the region.

As of January 8, 1922, the day after the Dail’s approving of the Treaty, no one knew this of course. It appeared as if the debate over the Treaty, fiery thought it sometimes was, had been amicably resolved. And had matters been left to locals along the border, war with Northern Ireland was probably considerably more likely than civil war over the Treaty.

But the north midlands border region could not be insulated from the rest of the new Irish Free State. The 26 counties’ descent into internecine strife would eventually drag in all parts of the country. Michael Sheridan and other idealistic and uncompromising anti-Treaty Republicans, would indeed see a further ‘blood of Irishmen shed to redeem the soul of Ireland’, though perhaps, in the end, they lived to regret it.

References

[1] Anglo Celt, December 10, 1921

[2] Anglo Celt November 17, 1921

[3] Anglo-Celt, November-December 1921

[4] BMH WS 1148 Patrick J Casey IRA Newry

[5] Anglo Celt, December 17, 1921

[6] Fearghal McGarry, Eoin O’Duffy a Self-Made Hero, p88

[7] Matthew Lewis, Frank Aiken’s War, the Irish Revolution 1916-1923, p115

[8] Galligan papers, UCD archives.

[9] Seamus MacDiarmada, Witness Statement BMH

[10] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[11] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[12] The Anglo Celt, January 7, 1922

[13] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[14] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[15] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[16] For IRA fatalities, see IRA monument, the Courthouse, Cavan town.

[17] Sean Sheridan Witness Statement BMH

[18] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[19] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[20] Counting the border area in question as including North Longford and Leitrim as well as the south of counties Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Down as well as all of counties Cavan, Monaghan and Louth. Population figures are taken from the 1911 census. Figures for those killed in the period taken from Eunan O’Halpin, Counting Terror, in David Fitzpatrick Ed., Terror in Ireland, p152, also from a survey of the Anglo Celt newspaper 1920 – 1922 and the Appendix of Lewis, Frank Aiken’s War, p224

[21] Anglo Celt November 10, 1922

[22] Anglo Celt, January 7, 1921

[23] Anglo Celt January 7, 1922

[24] Anglo Celt, January 7, 1921

Whimsical seasonal thoughts. By John Dorney

Today in Dublin, traffic crawls very slowly but somehow very frenetically along into the city centre. Bumper to bumper. Every traffic light piling up in front of it frustrated drivers. Irish drivers are far too restrained to lean on their horns as they do in other cities, but you can smell their frustration. Bikes wobble past them through too-narrow gaps between cars and pavements.

People rush in a frenzied hurry, getting in each other’s way. They emerge from shops with bags so stuffed with Christmas presents that they can barely hold them. Do they really have this many friends to buy gifts for? A cold wind whips into them. Squalls of rain spray into their faces. It’s 2014 and Dublin prepares for Christmas.

The recession, which came suddenly in 2008 along with the worldwide banking crash, is apparently over. Which means that we must again worship feverishly at the god of consumption. It is apparently our patriotic duty. Some of us miss the crash years a little bit already. Yes we had no money but at least we got a few years break from turbo capitalism and its insistent pursuit of …nothing.

Perhaps, like me you might like a stroll around some of Dublin’s quieter spots to ease your mind. Parts of the city’s history come to mind. Perhaps this is merely escapism, but it also fulfills basic human requirement; to put reality into a context – to make it make sense.

If you walk through the back gates of Dublin Castle, onto Great Ship Street. You will find yourself very briefly in what is left of medieval Dublin. The last intact section of the city wall (built in the fourteenth century) runs from here to Cooke Street. You can walk through it at St Audeon’s gate gate.

In medieval times the walled city was a small enclave that clung to the south side of the river Liffey. The river itself was mainly used a dumping ground by medieval Dubliners. (Their anti-social modern equivalents who don’t want to pay for bin collection drive to the mountains to find particularly scenic spots and dump their rubbish there). This stretch of wall survived the city’s rapid growth in the 17^th and 18^th centuries – which saw the rest of its defences demolished – because people had built their houses right up against it so that the city wall here could not be knocked down without also destroying the surrounding houses. It was only with slum clearance in the 20^th century that the city wall re-emerged into view.

Walk across the river and you’re attention will inevitably attracted by the Four Courts, it’s green dome rising over the Liffey. Up until 2011 it was the centre of Ireland’s criminal and supreme courts but since the construction of a new court complex down the river, near the Phoenix Park it has housed only civil cases. Back in the 18^th century, Dublin’s belle epoque, the famous architect James Gandon constructed it and other buildings such as the Custom House to resemble Greek or Roman public buildings – civilisation, progress, reason. But when I see the Four Courts I also think of the battle that took place there in 1922 at the start of the Irish Civil War.

Ernie O’Malley, who was there, recorded in his memoir of how snipers sheltering in the Dome picked off Free State soldiers in the surrounding street he remembered the exultation of one sharpshooter when he ‘got’ his target. I always sent a shiver down my spine.

I also picture the anti-Treatyites’ armoured car whizzing up and down the quays and the Free State field ground across the river on Parliament street pounding the courts. That and the massive mushroom cloud that rose over the complex when the anti-Treatyites’ arsenal in the Public record Office went up.

Walking down Henry Street would be a bad idea at this time of year – the festive shopping mayhem being particularly frenzied there. If one did, one would see stalls set up at either side of the street where the hawkers shout in Dublin accents so strong they may qualify as a separate dialect of English; ‘Wrapping paypah teeyoo fur fuiave’ [Wrapping paper, two for five].

But I would prefer to walk down the riverside part Bachelor’s Walk where back in 1914, British troops fired on a jeering crowd after the Howth gun running. That was in the days before mass motorised transport of course. If anyone tried marching down Bachelor’s Walk today the casualties at the hands of the juddering heavy goods vehicles that lumber through it on their way to Dublin Port would probably be considerably greater than the three who died there in 1914.

On O’Connell Street you might as well stop for a second in some quiet spot and muse over the street’s history. (Not for too long though or someone might assume you’re there to buy drugs and/or try to beg from you). But ever since I was a teenager I stopped here and wondered at it.

There was the GPO the headquarters of the 1916 Rising. And there was Clery’s from where in 1913 Jim Larkin appeared and caused a riot. At one end of the street Daniel O’Connell, the ‘Liberator’. At the other end Parnell; ‘no man has the right to fix the boundaries of the forward march of a nation’.

In 1913 and 1916 the street was crisscrossed with trams (indeed they were the main focus of the Lockout in 1913 and used as barricade in 1916). And today again, after an absence of about 50 years the street is again crossed by tram service, the Luas. I always picture what would happen if the Luas drivers walked off the job like Larkin’s members did in 1913. I remember in 2006 watching an anarchic riot breaking out as loyalist ‘Love Ulster’ marchers assembled at Parnell Square to attempt to march down here.

The GPO is in a way, a kind of secular shrine in independent Ireland. The tricolour flies proudly over it. In the window a statue of Cuchullian represents the fallen heroes of 1916. And yet it is and always has been a working post office.

It is a little incongruence. I am not in favour of living in the past or of worshipping it. Probably the majority of people on O’Connell Street today are not Irish and know or care nothing about Irish history. And personally I’m fine with that. A city is an organic body, its natural state is constant change.

But ever since I was a teenager and was old enough read veteran revolutionaries like O’Malley (who by the way came upon the 1916 Rising purely by accident) I have stopped here for minute and pondered the death and heroism and veneration for modern Ireland’s founding myth and wondered if it all worth it.

 By James H. Murphy

University Dublin College Press. 2014. 400 pages.

Reviewers: Petrushka Kharchenko & Carol Kiley

This work by James H. Murphy presents a description of the chapter in the history of Anglo-Irish political relations in the late 19th century, focusing on the lord lieutenancy of Earl John Spencer, { Princess Diana’s lineage } providing a thorough picture of the Gladstonian government, and its ebb and flow with the Irish public view of that system, especially concerning the increasing momentum of Irish nationalism in British politics.

In this period, Gladstone the Prime Minister made a number of major concessions in Ireland, disestablishing the Protestant Church of Ireland, beginning a long process of land reform and attempting (without success) to implement some form of autonomy or Home Rule. However it was also a time of significant political and agrarian violence in Ireland including the Land War and Fenian factions like the Invincibles. For a time Ireland was put under a form of martial law or ‘Coercion’. Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant, in practice a kind of colonial governor of Ireland, was unfortunately for him, generally blamed for the latter while Gladstone took credit for the reforms.

The work is an important study, both, as John Spencer’s biography, and as a study of the constitutional and political culture. In that respect it shows that lord lieutenancy was used in a way that was damaging to the culture of the political and national affinity between Ireland and Britain.

It is interesting to note that although this era of British and Irish history has been thoroughly studied, the lord lieutenancy, and, in particular, the impact of John Spencer’s policies, in a biographical sense, has not been written about in such detail. The work draws on a large amount of documents, letters, and archival papers, including the Royal British Archives. The letters of personal correspondence are used to bring the reader closer to the events described.

The work draws comparisons between Spencer’s two terms of service as a lord lieutenant (1868-1874 and 1882-1885). Throughout the book one may notice the distancing of Gladstone from Spencer – Gladstone unhappy at Spencer’s use of Coercion –  particularly in the second term, while Spencer remained passionately loyal, to Gladstone’s policies. In fact he became more Gladstonian – coming in the end to favour Home Rule – a policy voted down in the House of Commons in 1886 and by Spencer’s fellow peers in the House of Lords in 1893.

In the second term (1882-1885) Spencer and Gladstone formed a ‘bifurcated’ form of government (that is split between the government in London and the Irish administration in Dublin Castle), as opposed to the unitary government of the first term. Murphy points out that the ‘bifurcated government’ was not as successful in addressing the “Irish problem”, as Gladstone referred to it, with the Lord Lieutenant increasingly being seen as kind of dictator.

The public opinion of Spencer is shown throughout the book. In his second term his policies, especially his increasing of force in dealing with political crimes, as well as the growing political power of the Irish nationalists marked a significant change, making him increasingly unpopular. His use of Coercion – he had to travel everywhere with an armed guard – made nationalist politician William O’Brien refer to him as ‘Ireland’s Czar’. This was not a compliment, the Czar of Russia being held up universally as a tyrant in late 19th century western Europe.

This book also explores the politicisation of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which became for the first time a major force in this period, and the British Liberals, which paved the way for the eventual political alliance between the Irish nationalists and the Liberals.

The work is scholarly in nature, and although it reads like a biography, it is an invaluable study of the political climate in the Anglo-Irish relations, the British government under Gladstone, and the effects of lord lieutenancy as an official position.

If you enjoy well researched, detailed history of Ireland/Britain during 1868/1886 James H. Murphy does a brilliant job of recreating little known or forgotten history to life.

Happy New Year! Last year the Irish Story was visited more than 285,000 times with an average of 780 visits per day. Here are our most popular new articles and reviews of 2014. Thanks to all our readers and contributors. See last year’s list here.

Top 10 Articles

1. The Tragedies of Ballyconnell, by John Dorney

2. Opinion: Cromwell was Framed, by Tom Reilly

3. The Easter Rising on Film, by John Dorney

4. The Eleven Years War a Brief Overview by John Dorney

5. From Limerick to Antwerp, the Irish Brigades Abroad, 1690-1815, by Stephen McGarry.

6. Today in Irish History, The Howth Gun-Running, 26 July 1914, by John Dorney

7. Transport in 19th Century Dublin, by Michael Barry.

8. Bushwhacked: The Loss of the Carlow Flying Column April 1921, by Daniel Murray

9.Robert Emmet, the 1803 Proclamation of Irish Independence and the Ghosts of 1798, by Maeve Casserly

10. Opinion: Remembrance and Reconciliation: Heroes in the Irish War of Independence, by Donald Masterson.

Honourable Mentions also go to:

A number of articles by John Dorney,

• The Bridges Job, August 5-6 1922,
• The Kilmichael Ambush,
• We Must Forgive but we won’t Forget, the Treaty debates in the Border Counties.
• Ireland and the Greater War
• What to Do About the Past?

John Jinks and the Collapse of the Fifth Dail by Cathal Brennan

‘Progress and Poverty’ -Henry George and Land Reform in Ireland by Barry Sheppard

Some good pieces by Daniel Murray,

• Never Lukewarm: Seumus Robinson’s War of Independence
• A Bitter Brotherhood, Seumas Robinson’s War of Words
• Understated Insurgency the Carlow Brigade

And two strong pieces by Liam Hogan

• Frederick Douglas;’ journey from Slavery to Limerick
• The Launch of the Limerick Volunteers 1914

 Top Ten Reviews

1. Film Review: Jimmy’s Hall, by Cathal Brennan

2. Myth and the Irish State, by John Regan, reviewed by John Dorney

3. Launched: Peace After the Final Battle, the Story of the Irish Revolution, by John Dorney

4. The Cork International Exhibition 1902-1903 – A Snapshot of Edwardian Cork, reviewed by Patricia Curtin Kelly.

5. Cromwell was Framed by Tom Reilly, reviewed by John Dorney

6. A Question of Duty, The Curragh Incident 1914, by Paul O’Brien, reviewed by John Dorney

7. The Irish Revolution Tyrone, by Fergal McCluskey, reviewed by John Dorney

8. War in the Shadows by Shane Kenna, reviewed by Maeve Casserly.

9. Ground Truths, British Army Operations in the Irish War of Independence, by W.H. Kautt, reviewed by John Dorney

10. Frank Aiken, Nationalist and Internationalist, Edited by Bryce Evans and Stephen Kelly, reviewed by John Dorney

Top Interviews, videos and podcasts

1. From Catastrophe to Baby Boom, population in early modern Ireland 1641-1741with Padraig Lenihan.

2. Dublin and Cork during the First World War, with John Borgonovo and Padraig Yeates

3. The People’s College Lecture series on the Irish Revolution

• Part 1, Patrick Pearse, Women in 1916 and the Black and Tans
• Part 2, Labour and the Irish Revolution, The Belfast Pogroms and the Truce.
• Part 3, The Irish Civil war and the Prison War.

By Padraig Lenihan

Published by UCD Press, Dublin 2014

Reviewer: John Dorney

One upon a time there would have been no need, as Padraig Lenihan does at the start of this book, to assert the reason why one would write a biography of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell.  Talbot was the last Irish Catholic to serve as Lord Deputy of Ireland, a post he held at the pleasure of the last Catholic King of England (or Ireland), James II. He died in 1691 as the forces of the Protestant king William of Orange, who had overthrown James in England itself in 1689, conquered the country.

Bar the fairly brief period when James Stuart himself was in Ireland, Talbot headed the Jacobite regime there from 1688-91 which was usually counted as one of the forlorn attempts at Irish self-rule and Catholic equality – indeed dominance prior to the 20^th century. For a brief time the Penal Laws were abolished, land confiscations halted and in some cases reversed and the Irish Parliament even voted its independence from the British one.

At one time the Jacobite-Williamite War of 1688-91 loomed large in Irish national consciousness – for Protestants the brave defence of Derry and Victory at Aughrim and the Boyne; for Catholics the treachery of James at the Boyne the heroics of Irish soldiers holding the bridge in Athlone and the walls of Limerick, the bravery of dashing cavalryman Patrick Sarsfield and the tragedy of defeat and the exile of the Wild Geese. To some extent these far off events still feature in unionist historical memory but they have largely been supplanted by more recent events in nationalist consciousness.

The 1690s saw a potential Catholic renaissance in Ireland but in practice saw the founding the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. Talbot led the Catholic cause but he was little loved in the Jacobite or later nationalist memory. For one thing he was not of Gaelic Irish but rather ‘Old English’ blood. As Lenihan comments this did not stop Patrick Sarsfield (with whom Talbot in fact did not get on at all) from becoming a type of national icon. But Talbot was also accused by Irish Jacobite writers (unfairly Lenihan argues) of cowardice and treachery. Add in the fact that Protestant or Williamite accounts accused him of everything from lying to anti-Protestant bigotry to sexual debauchery and it becomes clear that Talbot has not had the best of press over the centuries.

Pale rider

However in 17^th century terms, as Padraig Lenihan makes clear in this book, he was a pivotal figure in Irish history.  Talbot came from the powerful ‘Old English’ aristocracy (in practice ethnically a mixture of Norman, English and latterly Irish) that had settled in Ireland throughout the middle ages, principally in the Pale around Dublin. The Talbots held lands on the fringes of the Wicklow mountains in what is now the county border between Kildare and Wicklow.

Having held themselves up as bastion of English civility against Irish barbarism for at least three centuries, the Old English, who retained the Catholic faith despite the English Reformation, found themselves on the wrong side of a Protestant English state that by 1603 had for the first time real control over all over Ireland.

So just as they had a chance to fulfil their generations old ambition to govern Ireland themselves as Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, members of the Irish Parliament and above all as Lord Lieutenant and Lord Deputy, the Old English had this prize snatched away from them by their refusal to recognise the King of England as head of their Church and to attend Protestant services. Many of them along with Gaelic Irish landowners, lost land to the acquisitive ‘New English’ Protestants who were arriving in their thousands.

As a result, in 1641 the Pale lords including the Talbots, threw in their lot with Gaelic Irish insurgents as fellow Catholics. The ensuing war consumed Ireland for 11 years, pitting Catholics, who aspired to back the King Charles I, against Protestants, who in the wider conflict that broke out in England, sided with the Parliament against the King. Richard Talbot continued his studies until 1646 but in that year aged just 16 he was sent off to war for the King, country and religion against the forces of the English Parliament.

The young cavalry cornet had a remarkably unlucky military career – captured no fewer than three times; at the disastrous Catholic defeat at the battle of Dungan’s Hill in Meath in 1647, again at the siege of Drogheda in 1649 where he was one of the few Royalist officers not to be ‘knocked on the head’ after Cromwell’s sack of the town and finally as guerrilla or ‘tory’ in 1650. On each occasion he was important enough to be exchanged back to his own side and not killed and dumped into a mass grave as a common soldier probably would have been.

Exile, triumph and disaster

Like most of the major Catholic families, after the defeat of the Catholic and Royalist cause, the Talbots lost their lands at the hands of the Cromwellian regime. Richard Talbot and several of his brother chose exile in French military service, where along with his brother Peter (later Archbishop of Dublin), the young Richard ended up close to fellow Catholic  James, Duke of York, who was eventually to become James II.

A great deal of intriguing, including several plots to assassinated Oliver Cromwell himself, later, Richard Talbot emerged after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 as one of the favoured Irish Catholic Royalists. Throughout the 1660s and 1670s Talbot lobbied and cajoled in London for the land confiscation of the Cromwellian period to be reversed in Ireland discrimination against Catholics ended.

It was, to us, a strange world he moved in. The aristocracy in Europe was still essentially a military caste, intended to be well dressed, well read but above all good at applying violence. Richard Talbot fought a number of duels on points of offended honour, not Lenihan informs us, with the effete 18^th century pistol (where the duellists were quite likely to miss each other) but the much deadlier weapons of sword and dagger. Even at Royal court, open brawls were not unknown.

This should not really surprise us as the aristocracy’s main social function was enforcing local government through positions like Justice of the Peace and, in wartime, leading armies. What is more surprising is the importance they also put on having the latest fashion, including the signature wig, to dress up in as well. Another puzzle is that while religious conflict appeared to define Talbot’s political career, he was not a particularly devout man and was keener on alcohol and women than religion (as was the norm at the Restoration court).

After James Stuart came to the throne in 1685 and especially after his wife gave him a potential Catholic heir, Richard Talbot, by now Earl of Tyrconnell, finally appeared to have triumphed. First he was made head of the Army in Ireland which he quickly purged of Protestant officers and replaced them with Catholics. Then he called in private arms held by Protestants. After finally being made the Lord Deputy (the King’s representative in Ireland), Talbot seemed to be poised to break the Protestant monopoly on power in Ireland altogether.

How far this would have gone we will never know. Lenihan argues that since Talbot left a number of prominent Protestants in positions of power a Catholic Ascendancy would have been more tolerant than the Protestant one was in practice after 1691. Would the ownership of land have been reversed and the settlers sent home? From celebratory Irish language poetry (‘John [an Englishman]  no longer stands guard, calling out “who’s there?” in his place is Tadhg on Sliabh [an Irishman] who called out “Cia sud?” [‘who’s there’ in Irish]) and hostile Protestant verse such as the satirical ballad ‘Lillibulero’ (‘By my soul it is a Talbot and he will cut all the English throats’) we can see that such questions went far beyond the concerns of the Catholic landed class. They also opened the prospect of renewed ethnic and religious war between mainly Catholic natives and mainly Protestant settlers.

In the end though as Lenihan concludes, Talbot’s career ended in failure. Despite French military help, James was chased away from his three thrones of England Scotland and Ireland by William of Orange Stadtholder of the Netherlands and his multi-national (Dutch, Danish, French Huguenot as well as English and Irish Protestants) army. Talbot himself presided over a brief experiment in Irish Catholic self government before dying of a burst ulcer shortly after the disastrous Jacobite defeat at Aughrim and the surrender at Limerick. Catholic power in Ireland was smashed, as was the Old English landed interest that Talbot represented.

‘No more corrupt than we would expect’

This is a short but densely researched book. At times the unfamiliar names and intrigues within intrigues that made up 17^th century court politics can get a little confusing. However Padraig Lenihan a military historian by trade, has a briskly direct style, almost like a military report at times, sounding out Talbots political and military tactics and the great political issues of his long life.

Talbot the man also comes through in outline. Like any skilled politician he was capable of manoeuvring people into position until he finally got what he wanted from them. And if all else failed he let loose on them his infamous temper.  It is also somewhat endearing to read little details, for instance that he used spell ‘here’ as ‘hear’ in accordance with his Irish accent and hiberno-English convention of the time.

Lenihan concludes that Talbot, ‘had no genius or natural aptitude for war but what he did have was unrivalled firsthand experience’. As an administrator he was tactful but also ‘cunning’. ‘He was no greedier or more corrupt than one would expect’ and at times ‘his cool head and resourcefulness’ saved the Catholic cause.   It is hardly a eulogy for ‘the last cavalier’ but it is an indication that a man who dominated Irish life for much of his 60 years should be remembered and studied today.

An anti-Treaty column is captured and five of its members executed in December 1922. By Christopher Lee.

Heavy machine gun fire ricochets off the brick walls of the house and shatters windows. Those inside rise from cover to fire at the soldiers advancing towards them across the field but they can do nothing to slow the armoured car that rolls down the road towards them.

The gun battle can be heard for miles around and troops continue to converge on the area. Though the men inside the house have stood their ground and fought, their outposts have been pushed back and they are under attack from two sides. It is clear to them they are outgunned and outnumbered and will soon be surrounded. Rather than be pinned down inside the house, the decision is made to break out and escape across country, to take their chances in the fields of Kildare.

The Leixlip flying column may not have left its mark on the history of the Civil War but it was certainly not for the want of trying. From its creation to demise, under the command of Patrick Mullaney, the Anti-Treaty flying column was responsible for the widespread destruction of transport and communication infrastructure across Eastern Kildare and numerous ambushes of Free State forces. Mullaney was also involved in an ambitious plan, which, if carried out, would have been an outstanding propaganda and tactical coup, nothing less than the destruction of the Baldonnel military aerodrome and the aerial bombing of Leinster House.

Though it operated for only a little over three months, as a guerrilla fighting force it was certainly formidable; well-disciplined and heavily armed with automatic weapons. The men of the column would distinguish themselves in their last engagement against Free State forces, earning the respect of their opponents.

The formation of the Leixlip Column

During the War of Independence Patrick Mullaney, a school teacher from Balla, Mayo, operated with the Meath/Kildare flying columns and carried out a number of actions ranging from sabotage and destruction of railway lines and bridges to attacks on R.I.C. barracks and ambushes. With the split in the army over the acceptance of the treaty, Mullaney sided with the Anti-Treaty forces in Kildare.

The day after the Civil War broke out on 28^th June 1922 Mullaney was arrested and imprisoned in the Curragh, but by 20th August, had managed to escape and took command of the 1^st Brigade, 1^st Eastern Division. The 1^st Brigade’s area of operations was from Dunboyne to Celbridge and from Lucan to Maynooth.

Under Mullaney’s command it engaged in a campaign of ambush, destruction and raiding. The railway lines between Dublin and Maynooth were repeatedly destroyed, as was the Louisa Bridge at Leixlip and Post Offices were raided for mail bags and money. Several ambushes and attacks were carried out on National Army troops, with sniping attacks on Maynooth and Lucan.

On 27^th September 1922, the Provisional Government granted itself emergency powers to the effect that any civilian charged with taking up arms against the state or even possessing arms without permission could be tried in a military court and face the death penalty.[1] From this point, all members of the flying column risked execution by a firing squad if they were captured.

The proposed attack on Baldonnel Aerodrome

In November 1922 Mullaney was involved in his most ambitious operation yet, a plan to capture and destroy Baldonnel Aerodrome, home of the fledgling Irish Air Corps. The Air Corps had around ten aircraft based at Baldonnel which was guarded by around 300 soldiers and 30 officers.[2]

Mullaney was in touch with soldiers inside Baldonnel sympathetic to the Republican cause, one of whom, Corporal Leo Dowling, told him that if he mounted an attack he could count on the support of around thirty soldiers.

A member of the flying column, Michael O’Neill, had the contract to supply meat to Baldonnel and Mullaney made frequent trips inside the base, producing drawings of the entire layout.[3] The plan was to assemble a substantial force from Kildare, Meath and Dublin and, relying upon the inside help, capture the aerodrome before any resistance could be mounted. James Dunne, officer in charge of the Kildare Brigade, recalled:

“I reported to Celbridge, where we were joined by T. Harris with men from 4th Battalion (Prosperous) and W. Byrne…with that Battalion Column. We had about 50 men all told, and Mullaly’s (sic) men brought the total strength to 80 men. One hundred men were promised from the Dublin Brigade but only twenty men turned up.”[4]

Mullaney and his men were in Baldonnel guardhouse with the sympathetic soldiers, waiting for the signal to attack, when the operation was called off because of the low turnout from the Dublin Brigade.[5]

Todd Andrews, the Dublin Brigade officer in charge of providing men for the operation, ordered the men to disperse back to their brigade areas without any action being taken. Over the next fortnight, two more attempts were made to assemble enough men to mount the attack and on each occasion the Dublin Brigade failed to turn up in sufficient numbers, on one occasion just seven men turned up.

On the final attempt, when Todd Andrews again called off the operation, James Dunne recalls in his witness statement, Mullaney, who had invested a lot of energy into the operation, cried.[6]

After the Civil War, Mullaney would lay the blame for the failure of the Baldonnel operation on Todd Andrews and other senior officers of the Dublin I.R.A. accusing them of “…insincerity and negligence…”.[7]

Following the cancellation of the final attempt to organise the attack on Baldonnel Mullaney was asked to create a diversion to allow those of the Dublin Brigade who had shown up to disperse back into the city. Mullaney mounted an attack on the nearby Lucan barracks and though the shooting continued until dawn there were no reports of casualties on either side. [8],[9]

The most interesting aspect of the plan to capture Baldonnel was to use two planes to bomb Leinster house or Beggars Bush barracks: “… two I.R.A. officers who were ex British army airmen were to man two planes and bomb Leinster House. [10]

The plan to use the National Army’s own weapons against them was audacious and, if successful would have been a significant propaganda coup. James Dunne said “The bombing of Leinster house might have ended the war.”[11] However, Todd Andrews, selected as a bombardier for one of the planes, in his autobiography, was dismissive of the practicality of the plan and its chances of success.[12]

In his witness statement, Dunne says, regarding the first cancellation of the operation: “As only twenty men turned up from Dublin, Todd Andrews decided to call off the operation as he had not enough men to take away all the material and to attack Dublin with the help of the planes.” (emphasis added)

This would seem to indicate there was to be a coordinated ground and air attack by Republican forces on key centres in Dublin. Following the disastrous attempt to destroy Dublin’s road and rail links to the rest of the country on the ‘night of the bridges’ in August 1922, the Dublin based Anti-Treaty forces had lost considerable manpower and arms. Perhaps the coordinated ground and air attack on Leinster House and Beggars Bush barracks was to be an attempt by the Dublin Republican forces to regain the initiative.

However, though it would undoubtedly have caused alarm in the government, it is unlikely to have irrevocably swung the military or political balance in favour of the Republican side. The planes chosen for the attack would likely have been Bristol F2, which were based at Baldonnel. These WW1 biplanes were considered very good fighters and ground attack aircraft for their day.

They could stay in the air for around 2 ½ hours, were armed with two machine guns and could carry up to 200kg of bombs. However, with only two aircraft and untrained bombardiers, there would be a limit to the amount of damage they could inflict before they ran out of fuel, ammunition and bombs, and potentially causing civilian casualties with poorly aimed bombs dropped in urban areas.[13]

With Baldonnel Aerodrome presumably having been destroyed there would have been nowhere for the planes to refuel or rearm. Indeed, Todd Andrews mentions his plane was to put down on the beach at Merrion Strand near Sandymount.[14] At this point the plane would be useless to the Republicans and would probably have been destroyed. However, regardless of the effect of the air attack upon the government, the raid on Baldonnel would certainly have provided a large quantity of arms, ammunition and possibly armoured cars for the Republicans at a time when weapons were in short supply.

Though the plan to bomb Leinster House has often been attributed to Mullaney, in his interview with Ernie O’Malley, he denied any knowledge of it:

“The place would have been given over before anyone would have known of it and when the aerodrome was captured it was to have been burned. I didn’t know about the pilots. .. Dowling said they were to bomb the government buildings and Beggars Bush when the planes had been captured. But I would have been satisfied to have captured Baldonnel.”[15]

One curious aspect of the planned attack on Baldonnel is mentioned in Mullaney’s interview, the involvement of Erskine Childers. Mullaney says: “Erskine Childers was to have been brought up from the south in connection with that (the attack on Baldonnel).” Later, Mullaney again says: “Childers, I was told, came up for Baldonnel ….”

Childers had been a decorated pilot with the Royal Air Force during WW1, and perhaps Mullaney thought Childers would pilot one of the planes. On 10^th November 1922, Childers was captured while making his way to Dublin, ostensibly to meet with De Valera. Childers had in his possession a .32 semi-automatic pistol, a gift from Michael Collins from before the Civil War. He was charged with the illegal possession of arms, found guilty and executed at Beggar’s Bush Barracks on 24th November, 1922. Childers was the fifth anti-treaty fighter executed under the emergency powers act. The previous executions had been four young Dublin men sentenced for possession of firearms.

A campaign of destruction

For the next few weeks Mullaney’s column carried out an aggressive campaign of destruction, tearing up railway lines, burning signal boxes, cutting telegraph and telephone wires, wrecking exchanges as well as raiding for supplies. Railway lines and road bridges were blown up at Leixlip, Straffan, Celbridge and Maynooth. Post offices and pubs in Leixlip and Celbridge were raided for money, alcohol and cigarettes. At one stage, in the early hours of the morning, the column effectively occupied Leixlip in preparation for an ambush that didn’t eventuate.[16]

On the 28^th November, Mullaney received word the remaining soldiers in Baldonnel who were sympathetic to the Republican cause would no longer be on guard duty.[17] It was at this point Mullaney states six soldiers from Baldonnel joined his column: “They would not remain inside (Baldonnel) any longer for they had become pals with our men from meeting them so often.”[18]

By December 1922 the Republican forces in the South of Ireland had been defeated, the ‘Munster Republic’ had fallen and the civil war had degenerated to a bitter conflict consisting of skirmishes, raids, assassination and executions. By this time the Anti-Treaty forces had effectively lost the war. However, Mullaney and his men, the last significant Anti-Treaty force operating near Dublin, stayed in the field and fought on.

By now the Leixlip flying column numbered 22 men and was heavily armed. They had rifles, grenades, automatic pistols, a Thompson sub-machine gun, with the soldiers from Baldonnel adding a Lewis gun to the arsenal. By now Mullaney had welded his men into a compact, efficient and well-disciplined fighting force. [19]

On the 30^th November, the flying column raided Maynooth, taking food and clothing from Dawson’s pub, effectively occupying the town for a short time.[20] Mullaney’s force had now been operating with virtual impunity, occupying towns and carrying out sabotage seemingly at will. So far they had met with no serious challenge from government forces. This was about to change dramatically.

The Battle of Pikes Bridge

On Friday 1^st December, the Leixlip flying column occupied Grangewilliam House, the residence of Mr Cornelius Kehely, a large country house 2.5km east of Maynooth near the main Dublin – Galway road.[21]

The position was well chosen by Mullaney to mount an ambush on traffic travelling the main road. Running parallel to the road was the Royal Canal and the Midland Great Western Railway line. The column occupied positions on the southern side of the canal, using it as a defensive barrier.

Mullaney placed some of his men in a small graveyard at the ruins of Donaghmore church close to the canal and immediately overlooking the only nearby bridge over the canal, Pikes Bridge. Another group was positioned in Grangewilliam Wood, guarding the house from the Maynooth side.

The previous day, twelve National Army soldiers under the command of Commandant Joseph Ledwith had left Lucan for Maynooth in response to the flying column having occupied it the previous day. [22]

At around 9am on Friday 1^st December, a National Army lorry left Lucan barracks to deliver pay and provisions to Ledwith’s soldiers in Maynooth. The occupants of the vehicle were Vice-Commandant Lynam, the Quartermaster-Sergeant of Lucan and a driver. After passing through Leixlip the lorry developed engine trouble and came to a stop some distance west of Collinstown.

While working on the engine, the three men came under fire and took cover on the canal bank, where they were fired at by the Thompson gun and fled towards Pikes Bridge, further along the canal. The members of the flying column used a commandeered car to race to the bridge to cut off all escape. Vice-Commandant Lynam and the Quartermaster-Sergeant, were cornered and forced to surrender.[23]

Following their capture the Free State soldiers were taken to Grangwilliam House, given something to eat and placed in a room under guard. The lorry was searched and set on fire and the commandeered car used by the ambushers was abandoned nearby.

However, the driver of the lorry had managed to evade capture, a fact that had fatal consequences for the IRA column. The driver continued on foot to Maynooth and there made contact with Commandant Ledwith who sent requests for reinforcements to the barracks at Portobello Barracks, Naas, Trim and Lucan.

It is impossible to know why Mullaney did not move the column once the National Army troops had surrendered. To any other troops passing along the road the burning lorry would have been a clear signal they were operating in the area, removing any element of surprise. Also by abandoning their car the flying column removed their ability to escape quickly. Perhaps Mullaney had become accustomed to operating unchallenged, and now faced with a challenge from Ledwith’s force, was unwilling to back down. This was a serious miscalculation.

While waiting for the reinforcements to arrive, Commandant Ledwith advanced on Grangewilliam House. While inspecting trains he had encountered a group of a dozen soldiers returning to Dublin, one of whom had a Lewis gun. He placed these soldiers under his command bringing his total force to around twenty four soldiers. Leaving Maynooth at around 1.45pm, Ledwith set off towards Grangewilliam House, advancing in an extended formation and spreading out across the fields.

As they neared Grangewilliam, the soldiers came under heavy fire from the rifles and machine guns of the flying column hidden in the woods. The soldiers now crawled forward, attempting to work their way around the flanks of the flying column position, while they, on the other hand, concentrated their fire on the ends of the infantry position to prevent them spreading out.

During this time two soldiers had become separated from the main group when one of them was hit in the head, killing him instantly. Some members of the flying column came out from the wood, captured the remaining soldier and took both soldier’s rifles and ammunition. The soldier was placed with the other two National Army soldiers in the house.

The flying column and National Army soldiers exchanged fire in the fields before Grangewilliam Wood for about an hour before reinforcements began to arrive. The first troops to arrive were from Wellington Barracks, a detachment of seven officers and forty soldiers under the command of Commandant-General Hogan travelling in five Crossley Tenders accompanied by a Rolls Royce armoured car and a Lancia armoured car.

The Rolls Royce armoured car, one of only thirteen the National Army possessed, was plated with half-inch thick armour and armed with a .303 Vickers machine gun. The Lancia armoured car carried between eight to twelve soldiers firing through loopholes in its armour in addition to at least one Lewis gun. Additional reinforcements arrived near Collinstown, one group under the command of Commandant-General Hugo McNeill.[24] The size and firepower of the force converging on them is perhaps a testament to how seriously the National Army took Mullaney’s flying column.

On approaching Pikes Bridge the National Army convoy came under fire from the flying column position in Donaghmore graveyard, wounding one soldier. The National Army soldiers took cover and, with the armoured cars, returned such a heavy fire the Republicans were forced to evacuate the graveyard and retreat back towards the house.

Before advancing any further the National Army troops were divided into two forces, one under Commandant Saurin and Captain Trayers with the Rolls Royce armoured car, to advance over the fire swept Pikes Bridge, while the other, under Brigadier McDonnell, with the Lancia armoured car, was to go back along the Royal Canal and cross over the bridge at Collinstown in an attempt to outflank and encircle the flying column.

As the armoured car rolled over Pikes Bridge, covering the advance of the soldiers, the members of the flying column would have been under fire from two sides – from Ledwith’s men to the West and from the newly arrived troops to the North. Inside Grangewilliam House, as the shooting intensified, Commandant Lynam protested it was unfair for them to be held captive while under fire from their own side. One of the flying column replied that the captives would have to take the same risks as themselves. [25]

By now it would have been clear to Mullaney and his men they were heavily outnumbered and outgunned. It was decided they would attempt to break out and retreat across country to the south. It is unknown if Mullaney was aware of the second National Army force working its way towards the rear of their position via the bridge at Collinstown. Taking their prisoners, Mullaney’s men headed into the lanes and fields around Grangewilliam.

Pursued by the National Army soldiers and armoured car, the fight developed into a cross country running battle. Accounts of the battle describe the flying column moving from one defensive position to another as they retreated, maintaining a disciplined and steady fire. At some stage during the running battle the Flying Column abandoned their prisoners who managed to make their way to their own side unscathed.

Moving across country, under constant fire, the column was unable to cover ground as quickly as the National Army troops could by vehicle on the roads:

“All the reinforcements had by this time arrived and armoured cars and Crossley tender patrolled the roads. The sounds of the firing from Vickers, Lewis and Thompson guns and rifles were heard for miles around.”[26] Some idea of the intensity of the fighting can be seen in Mullaney’s interview: “An armoured car cut the top of a bank behind which we lay. We fired away until we had no rounds left to fire.”[27]

While soldiers pursued the retreating flying column across country, other forces pushed further South via the roads near Ballygoran House to Kilwoghan. By this stage Brigadier McDonnell’s troops, coming from the direction of Collinstown, had also made their way behind the flying column, completing the encirclement.

Mullaney’s men were eventually pinned down around Ballygoran, roughly 1.5km from Grangewilliam House. The end came at around 4pm, when a group of ten soldiers and an officer from Commandant Saurin and Captain Trayers group managed to get behind the flying column:

“With ten men…I pushed my way along cautiously towards where the fire came from. It was like a chapter from a red Indian novel. We crept along under cover until we suddenly saw about twenty men, three of them in uniform. We hesitated about firing, but one of them turning round caught sight of us and immediately they opened fire. We replied of course and it was all over inside ten minutes. They all surrendered with their arms and ammunition.”[28]

Even after having fought a running battle across country for two hours against superior numbers and firepower, and now attacked from the rear, the members of the flying column still held their nerve and fought on for another ten minutes before surrendering. Mullaney was of the opinion: “In another half hour we would have got away in the dark”[29]

The Irish Independent stated: “Here the whole column surrendered with their arms and ammunition and were congratulated by the troops for the fight which they had made.”[30] After the surrender Commandant-General Hugo McNeill said to Mullaney, “… you fought a damn good clean fight…”. However, Mullaney, in his interview with Ernie O’Malley said, “He (Hugo McNeill) didn’t know how near death he was that day (at Kiely’s at Grangewilliam) for we had him cornered with a rifle and tommy gun and before we could shoot something else happened.”

The National Army had suffered one fatality, Private Moran, and two wounded.[31] Moran was thirty-five years old, from Kilcock.[32] The Flying Column suffered three wounded – William Wyse, Charles O’Connor and Thomas Kealy. However, not all the wounds were sustained in the fighting: “One F/S lost his head in the surrender and fired a burst from a tommy gun at Charlie O’Connor, a shoemaker. He was in hospital for months and months in the Curragh.”[33]

The arms captured with the flying column consisted of 21 rifles, 1 Lewis machine gun, 1 Thompson submachine gun, 5 revolvers, 1 ‘Peter the Painter’ automatic pistol, 5 grenades and around 1000 rounds of ammunition.[34]

Aftermath

Following their capture, the members of the column were taken to Wellington Barracks and interrogated. Three of the column had been captured wearing National Army uniforms and very soon another two were identified as army deserters.

On 11^th December 1922, Corporal Leo Dowling (18 years old), Corporal Sylvester Heaney (19 years), Privates Terrence Brady (18 years), Laurence Sheehy (21 years), and Anthony O’Reilly (age unknown) were tried in a military court for treason.[35] They were found guilty and sentenced to death and on 8^th January 1923 they were executed by firing squad at Portobello Barracks.

This was the first time National Army troops had been executed for either treachery, desertion or any other reason.[36] It is possible the soldiers were executed to send a warning to any remaining Republican sympathisers within the ranks of the National Army.

However, one of the army deserters, Thomas McCann managed to avoid the firing squad:

“An officer came in to identify him in Kilmainham and I was in the cell with him. “Blast it all”, he said, “I had applied for my discharge.” “I looked over the file McCann,” he said “and I couldn’t find it” said the officer. “Couldn’t you find it,” I asked him, and he did find it, for McCann was a sergeant, but he wasn’t shot.”

January 1923 saw the largest number of executions of the Civil War, a total of 34 with the largest single judicial execution carried out at the Curragh on 19^th December, 1922. On the night of 13^th December, eight members of the anti-treaty Rathbride column were captured in a dug out at Mooresbridge, right on the edge of the Curragh. One of their number, Tom Behan was killed during the capture of the column, beaten to death with a rifle butt. The remaining seven were tried, sentenced to death and executed on 19^th December.

Against this backdrop of executions the members of the Leixlip flying column were put on trial for taking up arms against the state and being in possession of arms. Unsurprisingly they were found guilty and sentenced to death. However, due to a legal technicality their sentences were commuted to 10 years imprisonment. Following the end of the civil war the members of the column were released from detention in mid-1924 as part of the general amnesty.

Though the flying column operated under Mullaney’s command for only a little over three months it left and impressive trail of destruction through Kildare. Despite its short life the flying column was also probably the most effective and aggressive Anti-Treaty unit operating near Dublin. Within a short space of time Mullaney created a well disciplined and efficient fighting force that, when faced with a superior force, initially stood its ground and then conducted a well ordered, cross country, fighting retreat.

Even when outnumbered, attacked from the rear, when three of them were wounded and they had been fighting for hours, they still refused to surrender until it was clear all hope of escape had gone. They had fought hard and fought well, earning the respect of their enemies.   However, that respect was not enough to prevent five of them being executed and would have led them all to their deaths if not for chance. The men of the Leixlip flying column deserve to be remembered as brave men who didn’t back away from a fight and stood their ground to the last.

In Kilmainham Jail, in a cell in the West Wing there is a piece of graffiti, scrawled in pencil on the back wall:

By their comrades

of the column

R.I.P.

In Memoriam

Executed 8 January 1923

1. Brady

Leo Dowling

Sylvester Heaney

1. O’Reilly
2. Sheehy[37]

(See Kilmainham Gaol Graffiti website here)

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Matt McCormack and Denis Brennan. Christopher Lee, January 2015.

References

[1] Cahir Davitt, BHM.WS1751, p.32

[2] James Dunne, BMH.WS1571, p.18;

[3] Ernie O’Malley Military Notebooks U.C.D. Archives P17b/106;

[4] James Dunne, p.18;

[5] James Dunne, p.18;

[6] James Dunne, p.19

[7] Cummins, p.8

[8] O’Malley;

[9] Cummins, p.9;

[10] James Dunne, BMH.WS1571, p.18;

[11] J. Durney, The Civil War in Kildare, (Mercier Press, 2011) p.102

[12] Hopkinson, p.146

[13] Hopkinson, p.146

[14] Hopkinson, p.146

[15] O’Malley;

[16] Cummins, p.13;

[17] Cummins, p.13;

[18] O’Malley;

[19] This list of names would not have been possible without the invaluable research of Matt McCormack; The members of the column were:

Patrick Mullaney, Balla, Mayo;

Terrence Brady, Wilkinstown, Navan, Meath; *

Francis Brennan, North Road, Finglas, Dublin;

Thomas Cardwell, Celbridge, Kildare;

John Curley;

James Dempsey, Castletown Lodge, Celbridge, Kildare;

Leo Dowling, Yew Trees House, Askinran, Carna, Curragh Camp; *

John Gaynor, Leixlip, Kildare;

Bertie Hawney;

Sylvester Heaney, Dillonstown, Louth *

Thomas Kealy, Celbridge, Kildare;

Charles Kelly, Church St, Skerries, Dublin;

James Kelly, 168 Gallowgate St,         Glasgow;

Thomas McCann, Duleek St, Drogheda; *

Patrick Nolan, Leixlip, Kildare;

Thomas O’Brien, Virginia, Cavan;

Charles O’Connor, Elm Hall, Celbridge, Kildare;

Michael O’Neill, Weston Park, Leixlip, Kildare;

Anthony O’Reilly, Simonstown, Celbridge, Kildare; *

Laurence Sheehy, Braytown, Meath; *

Tim Tyrrell, Maynooth, Kildare;

William Wyse, Jamestown, Finglas, Dublin

* The soldiers who deserted the National Army at Baldonnel.

[20] Cummins, p.14;

[21] Kildare Observer, 9 December, 1922, p.4

[22] In the all too common irony of the Civil War that Ledwith and Mullaney knew one another, Ledwith having been under Mullaney’s command during an aborted raid on the Castledermot RIC barracks during the War of Independence.

[23] Many accounts of the ambush state the fire came from the direction of Grangewilliam House or from Grangewilliam Wood. However, Grangewilliam House and the wood are around 750m from the canal at its nearest point, too far away to mount an effective ambush. The Tommy gun had a maximum effective range of 100m to 150m meaning the ambush party was considerably closer to the canal than the accounts indicate. Also, if the ambush party was near Grangwilliam House and in Donaghmore graveyard then the soldiers would have been fleeing towards the flying column instead of away from them towards Collinstown.

[24] Irish Independent, 2 December 1922, p.7;

[25] Kildare Observer, 9 December, 1922, p.4

[26] Kildare Observer, 9 December, 1922, p.4

[27] O’Malley;

[28] Kildare Observer, 9 December, 1922, p.4

[29] O’Malley;

[30] Irish Independent, 9 December, 1922, p.4

[31] Irish Independent, 2 December 1922, p.7

[32] Kildare Observer, 9 December, 1922, p.3

[33] O’Malley;

[34] It is remembered within the Brennan family that Francis Brennan carried a handgun during the War of Independence and Civil War he referred to as ‘Peter’. This would indicate that the ‘Peter the Painter’ (Mauser C96) automatic pistol listed in the captured arms was the personal weapon of Francis Brennan;

[35] Ages are provided in the National Army Census of November 1922.

[36] Ulster Herald,

[37] N. O’Sullivan, Every Dark Hour. A History of Kilmainham Jail, (Liberties Press, 2007), p.224;

Easter Widows, Seven Irish Women who lived in the shadow of the 1916 Rising.

By Sinéad McCoole

Published by Doubleday Ireland, 2014.

Reviewer: Eoin O’Driscoll

“All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born”. Sinéad McCoole’s “Easter Widows” bears testament to the tragic poignancy of Yeats’ words. Her heart-rending account of the lives of the seven women whose husbands were executed in the aftermath of Easter 1916 portrays the brutal human consequences of that Easter’s immortalised events.

McCoole’s seven widows are a fairly diverse set. It is hard to identify much in common between Kathleen Clarke and Maud Gonne McBride or the Gifford sisters and Lillie Connolly or any of the other women whose lives would be changed utterly by the Easter Rising. Their one shared feature was their love of men who would give their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.

The over powering historical forces that brought such a diverse range women together in the heart of the nationalist cause is apparent in McCoole’s work. The emotions and ideas sparked by the Fenian uprisings, the Boers war and even Irish participation in British wars in India and Afghanistan that they would later view to be deeply unjust, all played a role in uniting disparate sections of Irish society in the cause of the nation.

These historical events permeated the loves of McCoole’s seven widows. So too did the influence of those foremost in the Irish cause itself. Padraig Pearse’s St Enda’s school and the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa loom large in this text as formative events in the creation of the national movement that touched the lives of so many of this book’s protagonists.

The 1916 proclamation begins by invoking “Irishmen and Irish women”. The Irishmen who led the Easter Rising have found their place amongst the pantheon of Irish heroes. Sadly, no such recognition has been given to the many women who played pivotal roles in Ireland’s struggle for independence. McCoole’s book is, therefore, an important contribution to the tale of the emergence of an independent Ireland. It seeks to recount the oft-neglected histories of some of the Irishwomen who rose to the proclamation’s call and go some small way to offset this historical imbalance.

Some of McCoole’s Easter Widows were at the forefront of the independence struggle themselves. Maud Gonne’s contribution to the Irish cause equals, if not surpasses that of her, one-time, husband John McBride. Kathleen Clarke was to become a key leader in the post-Rising Sinn Féin, chairing Cumann na mBan and smuggling funds for on-the-run Minister of Finance Michael Collins.

Like so many other Irishwomen at the time Áine Ceannt provided a crucial safe house for Collins and IRA members. Others had a lesser direct involvement but all played a necessary role in a facilitating their husband’s pursuit of an idealised vision of a free Ireland.

Without their wives’ emotional (and oftentimes financial) support, without their acceptance of financial hardship, long absences and harassment from the authorities, without their shared belief in the cause of a free Ireland, the leaders of 1916 would have been unable to lead the Rising. And after the executions were finished, it was up to these seven women to pick up the pieces and provide for their families.

This book is a vividly poignant account of figures who have played a largely forgotten role in the birth of the Irish state. There is intense emotional power in the telling of Grace’s marriage to Joseph Plunkett hours before his execution and of Muriel MacDonagh’s despairing death swimming out to plant an Irish flag a mile of the coast. Romanticism and abject tragedy are intertwined in this tale.

This work illustrates how the Irish nationalist movement lost a certain romanticism amidst the human tragedy of the 1916. As independence became close to a reality the vision of a utopian Gaelic Ireland, envisaged by many of those most devoted to the cause, was shattered. For these widows, and the many more who lost husbands, fathers, sons, no reality could ever be worthy of the loss of their loved ones. No state could ever compete with what they lost.

It is notable that even as McCoole pieces together the stories of these women, much of the source material comes from the men whose deaths overshadowed their lives. It was their husbands’ who were recorded in the annals of history and their widows lives have largely had to be sewn together from scraps found in the margins of their lost husband’s histories. It is notable that despite McCoole’s best efforts, it has been impossible to escape from the reality that much of this history of women remains told through the eyes of the men in their lives.

Coming up to the centenary of 1916, the Easter Widows is an important book. It not only highlights the role of women which has been largely marginalised in the intervening years but also poignantly illustrates the “terrible beauty” that birthed the Irish state.

Conor Patrick Heffernan on famous strongman Eugen Sansdow’s visit to Ireland in 1898.

In April 1898, reports began to emerge in Irish periodicals that the self-proclaimed, world’s strongest man, Eugen Sandow, would be touring Ireland later that year. Readers of the Freeman’s Journal were encouraged to “look out for Sandow”.[1]

When it was later reported that Sandow would indeed be coming to Ireland in May 1898 to perform at Dublin’s Empire Palace Theatre, devoted fans prepared themselves for the show of a lifetime.

In the prime of his career, Eugen Sandow was known for having ‘the perfect physique’ and for being one of the foremost proponents of physical culture. Physical culture being broadly understood as the social movement concerned with health and strength that swept across Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.[2]

A man built to a Grecian ideal of beauty and presented as the ideal of what good health should be, Sandow toured the world performing and lecturing the masses about the importance of physical and spiritual health.

Such was Sandow’s mass appeal in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, that some commentators have credited him with launching the body obsessive societies of today.[3] His influence stretched from America to Australia and many places in between. Much has been written about Sandow’s time in Great Britain and the United States, but few have examined Sandow’s time in the south of Ireland in the late 1890s.

Sandow in Ireland

On May 6^th 1898, Eugen Sandow and his tour company opened their first show in Ireland for over five years. Sandow had toured Ireland in 1893 but had only been met with moderate support from pockets of Irish fans. Indeed, the Irish press barely took notice of his visit.

When Sandow returned in 1898 he was treated like the celebrity he had become. Reports from the Irish Times suggested that the opening night of Sandow’s performance saw over 1,300 fans cram into the Empire Palace Theatre to see the “perfect embodiment of human form” in the flesh.[4]

They weren’t to be disappointed. First in the running order came a preliminary posing routine from the Prussian strongman. Stood atop a revolving platform, Sandow went through a variety of poses designed to display the splender of his physique.[5] Some lucky members of the audience were even permitted to touch Sandow’s well-sculpted muscles.

Sandow was more than a body however, as David Chapman eloquently argued in his biography of him.[6] The Prussian was part model and part showman. If one is to believe the newspaper reports of the performance, Sandow’s showmanship in Ireland was nothing short of extraordinary.

Descending from the revolving platform, Sandow began a balancing act involving two 56 pound dumbells and a willing volunteer. Hoisting up the two dumbells in one hand, Sandow then preceeded to lift a member of the audience aloft in the other. Sandow followed this trick by lifting two 96 pound dumbells aloft in one hand before pressing a 300 pound dumbell overhead. This was only the beginning of his routine.

The audience’s attention had well and truly been captured at this stage. Next Sandow

“lifted enormously heavy weights, which he raised above his head, stretching out the arm in which he held them to its full length; getting on the back of a horse, he leant back over the crupper and lifted enormous weights from the level of the stage and brought them up until he sat upright with them on horseback.”[7]

Soon after Sandow was reported to have thrown willing members of the audience around the stage like bags of flour followed by novelty tricks such as tearing through 162 playing cards with ease. Sandow was given a brief remission whilst a pianist arrived on stage to entertain the audience.

According to the Freeman’s Journal, once rested Sandow rose purposefully, disdainfully gazed at the pianist and proceeded to raise both overhead a platform supporting both a piano and a pianist. Sandow then stood calmly with the platform overhead whilst the pianist played a quick cavatina.[8]

Once the curtains drew down to rapturous applause, Sandow went backstage where his night’s work continued. Backstage Irish doctors, professors and gentlemen eagerly awaited a lecture from Sandow regarding his health regimen. Speaking in a slightly foreign accent, Sandow lectured his small audience on the virtues of physical health and well-being. Importantly, he also revealed the means to obtain them.

Once the lecture was finished, Sandow patiently waited as Irish physicians prodded and probed at his muscular physique in a quest to gain a fuller understanding of his vitality. Few were surprised when the verdict of such investigations was that Sandow was “sound as a bell.”[9] Sandow and his tour company performed for just one week at the Empire Palace Theatre but the effects of his visit were to be long lasting.

Sandow’s Lasting Influence

During and soon after Sandow’s visit, numerous articles began to emerge in Irish newspapers about the importance of health and physical culture. Clubs, similar to the modern day gymnasium, began to spring up around the Ireland within a decade of Sandow’s show.[10] In the years after his visit, Sandow’s influence remained constant in Ireland.

His book ‘Strength and How to Obtain it’ and magazine, ‘Physical Culture’ debuted just before his appearance in Dublin on Irish shelves and proved itself to be a hit. Browne and Nolan, the Irish booksellers based in Nassau Street, Dublin, even advertised Sandow’s tome ‘Strength and How to Obtain it’ alongside St. John’s Gospel.[11] Sadly no records exist as to which publication sold more.

Irish newspapers began to carry foreign editorials about Sandow’s latest health advice accompanied beside advertisements for Sandow endorsed foods and equipment. References to the Sandow Developer, a crude system of pulleys and dumbbells, turned up in newspaper reports, Irish Army Brochures, and even James Joyce’s Ulysses.[12]

A number of Sandow biographers have postulated that Joyce may have even attended Sandow’s performance in 1898.[13] Certainly the ‘Ithaca’ episode in Ulysses, which discusses the Sandow system in great detail, suggests that Joyce was highly familiar with the Sandow phenomena.

Joyce wasn’t the only famous literary figure in Ireland to become fascinated by the Prussian. In 1905, tempermental Irish laureate, W.B. Yeats wrote to a friend that he had included Sandow exercises “twice daily.”[14] Such was Sandow’s influence that famed pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington had the Sandow workout manual amongst his possessions.[15]

Sandow’s real influence came amongst the Irish masses who readily accepted his advice. In 1899 a Mr. Hornbrick from Cork was awarded a medal by Sandow for his progress whilst using the ‘Sandow system’. The suggestion from the press was that Hornbrick was one of many who used Sandow’s methods.[16] In 1906, Sandow announced in the Irish Times that henceforth he had established a consolatory office in Dawson Street for Irish strength enthusiasts hoping to get advice from the ‘modern day Hercules’, thereby continuing his presence in Ireland.[17]

The advent of physical culture in Ireland from the late 1890s onwards was no different to similar trends in the US, UK and mainland Europe. What can be learned from Sandow’s success is that Irish men and women at the turn of the 20^th century were as concerned about health, strength and well being as their counterparts elsewhere.

 References

[1] Freeman’s Journal, April 4, 1898.

[2] R., Roach, Muscle, Smoke, & Mirrors: Volume I (Bloomington, AuthorHouse, 2008), 5.

[3] Barford, Vanessa and Townsend, Lucy, ‘Eugen Sandow: The Man with the Perfect Body’, BBC News Magazine (2012). (Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19977415) [Accessed 22 December 14].

[4] Irish Times, May 7, 1898.

[5] Ibid.

[6] D., Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1994), 2.

[7] Irish Times, May 7, 1898.

[8] Freeman’s Journal, May 6, 1898.

[9] Ibid.

[10] See for example, Southern Star, July 21, 1900 and the Irish Independent, May 2, 1910.

[11] Irish Times, March 15, 1898.

[12] Plock, Vike Martina. “A Feat of Strength in” Ithaca”: Eugen Sandow and Physical Culture in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 1 (2006): 31.

[13] Barford, Vanessa and Townsend, Lucy, ‘Eugen Sandow: The Man with the Perfect Body’, BBC News Magazine (2012). (Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19977415) [Accessed 22 December 14].

[14] R. Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 160.

[15]Sheehy Skeffington Papers, National Library of Ireland.

[16] Southern Star, April 2, 1898.

[17] Irish Independent, October 30, 1906.