Historian Padraig Lenihan talks about his new book The Last Cavalier, Richard Talbot (1631-1691). See the Irish Story review here.

Questions by John Dorney

Richard Talbot was the political leader of Catholic Ireland for nearly 30 years. As a young man he was thrown into the turmoil of the Eleven Years War (1641-52). This was a war that pitted Irish Catholics of both Old English and Gaelic Irish origin against more recent English and Scottish Protestant settlers. It also overlapped with civil war in England that saw conflict break out between the King and Parliament. Talbot inherited from his brothers a brand of Irish Catholic Royalism, which he maintained throughout his life.

Wounded twice and captured three times in the war, after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland he was exiled with other defeated Catholics and Royalists to the Royalist court in exile. During the Interregnum he was sent on one occasion to try to assassinate Oliver Cromwell.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 he lobbied for Catholics to be restored lands that were confiscated in the Cromwellian period and to granted full rights as subjects.

During this period Catholics suffered from periodic bouts of persecution such as the ‘Popish Plot’ in 1678-81 in which Talbot was arrested and his brother, a Catholic Archbishop, died in prison.

His major opportunity arrived when James Stuart a Catholic ascended to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, England Ireland and Scotland in  1685. Talbot, or Earl Tyrconnell as he now became, was made first head of the army in Ireland and then Lord Deputy – effectively governor of the country.

For a brief time he put Catholics back in a dominant position in the army, judiciary and parliament. But James was overthrown in England by William of Orange in the the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688. In Ireland Talbot organised the Kingdom as a ‘Jacobite’ (pro James II) stronghold – a proto independent Irish state with French backing. However he was unable to defeat all Irish Protestant resistance, particularly at Derry and the Jacobite army was ultimately beaten by the main Williamite army in a war from 1689-91. Protestant dominance in Ireland was copper fastened after the Wiliamite victory.

Talbot died shortly before the end, his life’s work undone.

See also Padraig Lenihan’s interviews about the Battle of the Boyne (1690) here.

and the The Battle of Aughrim (1691) here.

An episode of the Irish War of Independence. Thirteen people die in Dublin. By John Dorney

Dublin awoke on the morning to March 14^th, 1921, to the news that six IRA Volunteers, captured in an ambush at Drumcondra two months before, had been hanged.

The gates of Mountjoy Gaol were opened at 8:25 am and news of the executions was read out to the distraught relatives of the dead. As many as 40,000 people had gathered outside and many mournfully said the rosary for the executed men.[1]

The Labour movement called a half-day general strike in the city in protest at the hangings. The clandestine Republican government declared a day on national mourning. All public transport came to a halt and IRA and republican activists made sure the strike was observed. Frank Henderson recalled;

I assisted Patrick Sweeney, Vice Commandant of the 2nd Battalion, and other members of the Battalion in parading the Battalion area during the hours of public mourning to ensure that shops were closed. With the exception of one or two public houses which had to be cleared, the order to cease work was loyally obeyed by the citizens.[2]

By the evening, the streets cleared rapidly as the British-imposed curfew came into effect at 9pm each night. The city must have been a fearful place, patrolled by regular British troops and the much-feared paramilitary police, or Auxiliaries, as people scurried home and awaited IRA retaliation for the hangings.  This was not long in coming.

Pearse Street, or Great Brunswick Street as it then was, nestles just south of the river Liffey, running from Ringsend, an old fishing port, to the city centre. Number 144 housed the company headquarters of the Dublin IRA’s 3rd Battalion at St Andrews Catholic Hall. It had been used for this purpose since before insurrection of 1916.[3]

On the evening of March 14, their captain Peadar O’Meara sent them out to attack police or military targets. As many as 34 IRA men prowled the area, armed with the standard urban guerrilla arms of easily- hidden handguns and grenades. One young Volunteer, Sean Dolan threw a grenade at a police station on nearby Merrion Square, which bounced back before it could explode, blowing off his own leg.[4]

It was about 8 o’clock. The curfew was approaching. A company of Auxiliaries, based in Dublin Castle was sent to the area to investigate the explosion. It consisted of one Rolls Royce armoured car and two tenders (trucks) holding about 16 men.[5] Apparently the Auxiliaries had some inside information as they made straight for the local IRA headquarters at 144 Pearse Street. One later testified in court that – “I had been notified there were a certain number of gunmen there”.[6]

But the IRA were also waiting. As soon as the Auxiliaries approached the building, fire was opened on them from three sides.

The ambush

What the newspapers described as ‘hail of fire’ tore into the Auxiliaries vehicles.  Five of the eight Auxiliaries in the first tender were hit in the opening fusillade. Two of them were fatally injured, including the driver (an Irishman named O’Farrell) and an Auxiliary named L. Beard.[7]

But the IRA fighters were seriously outgunned. The Rolls Royce armoured car was impervious to small arms fire (except its tyres, which were shot out) but mounted a Vickers heavy machine gun, which sprayed the surrounding houses with bullets. The unwounded Auxiliaries also clambered out of their tenders and returned fire at the gun flashes from street corners and rooftops.

Civilian passersby flung themselves to the ground to avoid the bullets but four were hit, by which side it was impossible to tell. The British military court of inquiry into the incident found that the civilians had been killed by persons unknown, if by the IRA then they were ‘murdered’, if hit by Auxiliaries the shootings were ‘accidental’; which, aside from demonstrating the court’s bias, shows us that no one was sure who had killed them.[8]

Firing lasted for just five minutes but in that time seven people (including the two Auxiliaries) were killed or fatally wounded and at least six more wounded. A young man, Bernard O’Hanlon aged just 18, originally from Dundalk, lay sprawled, dead, outside number 145, his ‘bull-dog’ revolver under him which had five chambers, two of which contained expended rounds and three live rounds – indicating he had got off just two shots before being cut down.[9]

Another IRA Volunteer, Leo Fitzgerald was also killed outright. Two more guerrillas were wounded, one in the hip and one in the back. They, along with Sean Dolan who had been wounded by his own grenade were spirited away by sympathetic fire brigade members and members of Cumann na mBan and treated in nearby Mercer’s hospital.[10]

Three civilians lay dead on the street. One, Thomas Asquith was a 68 year old caretaker, another,  David Kelly was a prominent Sinn Fein member and head of the Sinn Fein bank. His brother, Thomas Kelly was a veteran Sinn politician and since 1918 a Member of Parliament. The third, Stephen Clarke, aged 22, was an ex-soldier and may have been the one who had tipped off the Auxiliaries about the whereabouts of the IRA meeting house. An internal IRA report noted that he was ‘under observation… as he was a tout [informer] for the enemy’.[11]

Two IRA men were captured as they fled the scene, one, Thomas Traynor a 40 year old veteran of the Easter Rising, was carrying an automatic pistol, but claimed to have had no part in the ambush itself. He had, he maintained, simply been asked to bring in the weapon to 144 Great Brunswick Street. The other was Joseph Donnelly a youth of just 17. [12]

As most of the IRA fighters got away through houses, over walls and into backstreets, the Auxiliaries ransacked St Andrew’s Catholic Hall at number 144, but found little of value. Regular British Army troops quickly arrived from nearby Beggars Bush barracks and cordoned off the area, but no further arrests were made. Desultory sniping carried on in the city for several hours into the night.

Epilogue

March 14th, 1921 was bloody day in Dublin. Thirteen people had died violently in the city by its close – six IRA Volunteers executed that morning, two more killed in action at Pearse Street, two Auxiliaries killed in action and three civilians in the crossfire.  It was the worst day of political violence in the city since Bloody Sunday on November 21^st 1920 – when 31 had been killed.

The intensity of the guerrilla war in the city had picked up since late December 1920 with the formation of dedicated ‘Active Service Units’ in each of IRA’s four battalions in Dublin in order to harass British forces there. Normal ‘Company’ units were also encouraged to mount aggressive patrols – of which the fire fight on Pearse Street was one result.

The IRA’s reverse there was not serious. They had plenty more young Volunteers to take the place of those killed and few arms or papers had been lost.

Attacks continued: the following day a British soldier was shot and killed at Rialto Bridge.[13] Three days later on Dorset Street north of the river, there was another ambush of British troop convoy.[14] The day after that, three British soldiers were killed and five wounded in a grenade attack on Wexford Street.[15]

The clandestine conflict rumbled on until the Truce of July 11, with a steady escalation of shootings and bombings – culminating the IRA raid on the Customs House in May. Some 300 people had died violently in Dublin by July 11 and hundreds more had been wounded.[16]

To the Pearse Street incident there was a particularly grim epilogue. Thomas Traynor, a 40 year old married man with ten children, originally from Tullow county Carlow, was put on trial for the murder of Constable O’Farrell in the gun battle. Traynor stuck to his story that he was no longer an active Volunteer and had merely been delivering the automatic pistol when he was arrested and had fired no shots. He was nevertheless convicted by a military court martial and hanged in Mountjoy on April 25^th.[17]  Joseph Donnelly who was also captured that day was spared either because he was only 17 or because the truce intervened.

One more death can also be attributed to the fallout of the Pearse Street affair. In County Tipperary the IRA had captured an RIC Inspector, Gilbert Potter, and offered to exchange him for Traynor.  When Traynor was hanged, Potter was duly shot in revenge and buried in a remote spot in the Comeragh mountains.[18]

Finally many years later there was a somewhat incongruous sequel. In October 2001, The body of Traynor, executed for his part in the Pearse Street ambush, along with the six Volunteers executed on the morning of the ambush (and three others executed in 1920 and 1921) were formally  taken from Mountjoy and reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery, in a ceremony involving full military honours and several thousand spectators. The more cynical viewed it as an election stunt, in the lead up to a general election, by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

Crowds gently applauded the carriages as they wound their way through Dublin to the northside cemetery on a gentle autumnal day; a far cry from the fear-filled streets of Dublin, the executions, protests and sudden eruptions of violence of March 1921.[19]

References

[1] The executed Volunteers were Bernard Ryan (of Royal Canal Bank, Dublin), Thomas Whelan (Galway), Patrick Moran (Boyle Roscommon), Thomas Bryan (Sean McDermott St Dublin), Patrick Doyle (Mary’s Place Dublin) ,Frank Flood (Summerhill Parade Dublin) The Last Post p 118. For details of the executions see Padraig Yeates, A city in Turmoil, Dublin 1919-1921, p234-236

[2] Frank Henderson BMH WS 821

[3] Sean O’Keefe,Dublin 3^rd Batt WS188

[4] WH Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, The Irish Rebellion 1919-1921, p205

[5] Michael Noyk, solicitor, legal advisor to Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins BMH WS 707

[6] Noyk BMH

[7] See here for details of the Auxiliaries’ casualties http://theauxiliaries.com/INCIDENTS/brunswick-raid/brunswick-st.html

[8]. Irish Times, April 25 1921

[9] Noyk

[10] Kautt p 207-208, see also Aine Herron BMH WS 293

[11] For casualties’ names etc Irish Times March 15 1921, for IRA report, Kautt p208

[12] Noyk.

[13] He was Signalman Frederick De Orfe, see here http://www.cairogang.com/soldiers-killed/de-orfe/de-orfe.html

[14] Kautt, p209

[15] James Durney, ‘How Aungier/ Camden Street became known as the Dardanelles’, The Irish Sword, Summer 2010 No. 108 Vol. XXVII They were Lance Corporal Jarvis and Private G. Thomas and Private Whiting, died from his wounds two days later.

[16] The figure is from Eunan O’Halpin’s ‘Counting Terror’ in Fitzpatrick Ed. ‘Terror in Ireland’ is 309 killed in Dublin. Though this may overestimate violence in Dublin a little as it includes those wounded elsewhere who died in hospital in the city. The death toll included at least 58 IRA members (per the Last Post), 25 British Army soldiers killed in action ( Per their report re-published in Wiliam Sheehan, Fighting for Dublin, p130 though more died there due to accidents, illness or suicide) and about 40 police, which would indicate well over 150 civilian fatalities in the city.

[17] Noyk BMH

[18] Kautt p206

[19] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/oct/15/northernireland.ireland

Judging W.T. Cosgrave

by Michael Laffan

Published by Royal Irish Academy Press, Dublin 2014

Reviewer: Daniel Murray

Judging W.T. Cosgrave is the third in the Judging X series and the first to be on a non-Fianna Fáil figure, the previous two being about Éamon de Valera and Seán Lemass. The book launch was notable in the presence of Taoiseach Enda Kenny; likewise, the one for Judging Dev in 2007 was attended by Bertie Ahern: statements in themselves about how Civil War politics continues to define the contemporary sort in Ireland.

It is hard, after all, to imagine either of the two party leaders ‘crossing the floor’ by attending the other book launch. Cosgrave, de Valera and Lemass may be long dead, but the ghosts of their wars continue to be felt today.

History has judged Cosgrave to be something of a ghost himself. After all, this book had to have Cosgrave’s full name in the title, as opposed to de Valera needing only Dev for his. Why this would be the case, Laffan seems reluctant to explore. He is, after all, more focused on praising his subject than reminding his readers why such praise had been lacking before.

Perhaps it was due to being sandwiched between the overwhelming presences of Michael Collins and de Valera, or people equating his calm, judicious manner with a lack of charisma. A mocking cartoon from 1927 that features in Laffan’s book as a double-spread is of a sleepy-looking Cosgrave painting a portrait of himself striking a ridiculously heroic pose before a slain dragon and a damsel in distress.

Such mild appearances were deceiving. Upon the sudden deaths of Arthur Griffith and Collins in 1922, the newly-chosen chairman of the Free State cabinet found himself with the unenviable task of heading a government under siege. His enemies were initially contemptuous: de Valera dismissed him as a “ninny”, while Rory O’Connor courted hubris in believing that Cosgrave could be “easily scared to clear out.”

But they had badly underestimated Cosgrave’s spine which, when stiffened, could be a fearsome thing. The executions of Anti-Treatyite prisoners, including that of the cocksure O’Connor, shook the Civil War opposition enough for its previous policy of targeting Dáil deputies to be abandoned.

Cosgrave was bothered by the official use of the term ‘reprisal’ and its connotations with the Black-and-Tans, but otherwise he complained at how the state executions had been limited to a few counties, leading to the mistaken impression that the rest of Ireland was peaceful.

Any failure to implement such strategic executions, in his opinion, was the equivalent of losing a battle. The Civil War was a life-or-death struggle for the newborn Free State, and Cosgrave was not going to allow the “dregs of society”, as he came to call the other side, to get in the way of running a country.

As this is a biography and not a general history (for that, readers may be interested in Ciara Meehan’s The Cosgrave Party), Laffan skims over a lot of weighty issues concerning the decisions of the Cumann na nGaedheal government, with only a reference to what his subject thought about particular ones. Nonetheless, what is striking is the extent that state policies reflected Cosgrave’s personal inclinations.

With the Irish language, he was game, and his government took steps to make it compulsory. But his own was never more than patchy and went no further than signing the minutes of Cumann na nGaedheal meetings in Irish. Even this token gesture was dropped after the party lost power in 1932 and he switched to signing them in English. He may have liked to talk about the Gaelicization of Ireland, but lacked the commitment to enforce anything substantial, much like the country in general.

In any case, Cosgrave was more interested in balancing the books. He told Cumann na nGaedheal members that their priorities were to ensure “an ordered society, hard work, constant endeavour”, among others, and these Spartan tastes were reflected in the fiscal conservatism of the government.

Similarly, the Free State’s policy of integration towards ex-Unionists was as much a reflection of Cosgrave’s moderate instincts as it was a need to build a working Ireland with as much support as it could get.

The choices of state symbolism are the most fun to read, probably as much as they were for the cabinet to discuss: the artist designing the pig that was to feature on the half-penny coin was requested to reduce the fullness of its jowls. Why this should be important is not stated. One is minded of a trainspotters’ convention or the debates of Tolkien enthusiasts on whether the Balrog had wings.

Other choices on symbols are all too illuminating: the official seal of state would be a harp but not one, God forbid, with a female figure included. Catholic morality was the order of the day. Cosgrave saw to it that the new coinage would feature only ‘profane’ images, as opposed to religious ones, given the worldly ways money could be used. This was still too much for one priest who ruminated against the coins as “the thin edge of the wedge of Freemasonry sunk into the very life of our Catholicity.” Quite.

This priest was not to be the only clergyman vocal on how the state should be run. An eager-to-please, almost servile consideration to what the Church hierarchy thought was to be a regular feature of Cumann na nGaedheal. Particularly disturbing for this reviewer to learn was Cosgrave’s proposal in February 1921 of a ‘Theological Board’ as an additional house of the Dáil, whose role would be to debate whether any proposed legislation would be “contrary to Faith and Morals.”

By Faith, this, of course, meant the Catholic one. Mercifully, his fellow cabinet members thought this was a step too far, but if Ireland had avoided the route to theocracy it would still become one in all but name under Cumann na nGaedheal and its successor governments.

Laffan reminds his readers that no government then could have defied the Church and survived, and indeed none did until very recently. Even so, whether it was proposing to Dublin Corporation as early as 1915 that it work with the Dublin Vigilance Committee on the subject of objectionable films or the Archbishop of Dublin being sent on request an advance copy of the 1922 draft constitution, Cosgrave was only too happy to oblige.

In fairness to the man, he did his best to resist the worst examples of fanaticism, such as the case of Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, the Mayo librarian refused a position due to her Protestantism. Even if Cosgrave ultimately had to resort to the strategic retreat of transferring Dunbar-Harrison out of Mayo and into the Department of Defence, his attitude that “we Catholics ought not to fear Protestants”, however plaintive, was in favourable contrast to de Valera’s opportunistic support for the Mayo sectarianism.

Dunbar-Harrison, for all that, only held her new post in the Department of Defence briefly, as she soon married and was thus obliged to resign, another sign of the times that makes us lucky to be in the present one.

Laffan skims over the more well-known parts of Cosgrave’s career, such as the Army Mutiny of 1924, relationships with other Cumann na nGaedheal stalwarts such as Kevin O’Higgins and Richard Mulcahy, his later role in opposition after Fianna Fáil took over power in 1932 and the subsequent merger with the Blueshirts.

Laffan has little original to say about the Blueshirts, one of the most controversial and hotly debated elements in modern Irish history, and is content to quote other historians’ conclusions that they were less of a Fascist movement and more of an anti- Fianna Fáil one. Cosgrave’s interest in them was limited to their strategic, not ideological value, a “prospect of achieving unity against de Valera”, and certainly it is hard to imagine a man who was content with a democratic transition of power at his expense having much sympathy with totalitarianism.

Unlike some of his Fine Gael colleagues, he disdained wearing the Blueshirt uniform in the Dáil, and kept a cautious distance from Eoin O’Duffy even while obliged to publicly praise his party leader on occasion.

As opposition leader, the same calm, unpretentious traits that had served him well as a nation-builder came to be seen as liabilities in an increasingly stagnate and directionless party. Laffan makes no excuses for Cosgrave’s later failures as Fine Gael leader, leaving the reader to watch as the hero fades away into a not-so-golden sunset of political irrelevance.

His death in 1956 was met with indifference by the Fianna Fáil government who did not even bother to send a representative to the funeral. A notable exceptional was Seán Lemass, who praised in the Dáil the “privations and sacrifices which he endured so that national freedom might be ours.”

In many ways, as Laffan notes, the two men were kindred spirits to the point, it was claimed, of Lemass modelling his style of debate on that of Cosgrave. Both were quick to praise the practical qualities in the other – practicality being amongst the highest of virtues for both – and both their respective governments sought to be meritocracies rather than the usual clientelism of parish-pump politics.

Yet Lemass has been highly regarded to this day while Cosgrave is remembered, when he is at all, with not much more than polite respect. Perhaps Cosgrave had been in the wrong party after all, and would have belonged more in Fianna Fáil where his talents could have been better realised? Or is that a ‘step across the room’ too far to contemplate?

In the latest in our series of overviews, a summary of ‘The Troubles’, by John Dorney

The Northern Ireland conflict was a thirty year bout of political violence, low intensity armed conflict and political deadlock within the six north-eastern counties of Ireland that formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

It was a complex conflict with multiple armed and political actors. It included an armed insurgency against the state, principally waged by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), though it also included other republican factions, with the aim of creating a united independent Ireland.

Arrayed against the IRA were range of state forces –the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the regular British Army and a locally recruited Army unit, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).

Another angle of the conflict was sectarian or communal violence between the majority unionist or loyalist Protestant population and the minority Catholic or nationalist one. This was manifested in inter-communal rioting, house burning and expulsion of minorities from rival areas as well as lethal violence including shooting and bombing.

Arising from the loyalist community were a number of paramilitary groups, notably the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Loyalist violence’s stated aim was to halt republican violence against the state but in practice their main target was Catholic civilians. Though not the principle focus of their campaign, republicans also killed significant numbers of Protestant civilians.

The IRA called a ceasefire in 1994, followed shortly afterwards by the loyalist groups, leading to multi-party talks about the future of Northern Ireland. The conflict was formally ended with the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Definition

The conflict in Northern Ireland was generally referred to in Ireland during its course as ‘The Troubles’ – a euphemistic folk name that had also been applied to earlier bouts of political violence.

This name had the advantage that it did not attach blame to any of the participants and thus could be used neutrally. Republicans, particularly supporters of the Provisional IRA referred to the conflict as ‘the war’, and portrayed it as a guerrilla war of national liberation.

Unionists and the British government referred to the long running political violence as a law and order problem of ‘terrorism’. The London government portrayed the role of state forces as being primarily of peace-keeping between the ‘two communities’.

The violence never reached the most common currently agreed threshold of a ‘war’ – over 1,000 deaths in a year. Nevertheless its impact on society in Northern Ireland – an enclave with a population of about 1.5 million – was considerable, with over 3,500 killed and up to 50,000 injured over a thirty year period.

Origins

Northern Ireland was created in 1920 under the Government of Ireland Act, due to Ulster unionist lobbying to be excluded from Home Rule for Ireland. Northern Ireland comprised six north eastern counties of Ireland in the province of Ulster. It left out three Ulster counties with large Catholic and nationalist majorities (Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan) but included two counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone with slight nationalist majorities. Some areas along the new border such as Derry City and South Armagh/South Down also had substantial Catholic and nationalist majorities.

Northern Ireland’s existence was confirmed under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. In 1925, a boundary commission that had been expected to cede large parts of Northern Ireland to the Irish Free State proposed no major changes. Even its limited modifications were never implemented and the border stayed as it was.

From 1922 until 1972, Northern Ireland functioned as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. The Unionist Party formed the government, located at Stormont, outside Belfast, for all of these years. Its power was buttressed by a close association with the Protestant fraternal organisations such as the Orange Order.

Catholic voting strength was diluted by ‘gerrymandering’ –where Catholics were grouped in one constituency so they would elect a smaller number of representatives in proportion to their numbers. Additionally, in local government, only rate payers, who were more often Protestants than Catholics, had a vote.

Catholics also complained of discrimination in employment and the allocation of social housing, and also protested that their community was the main target of the Special Powers Act which allowed for detention without trial. The armed police forces, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and especially the Ulster Special Constabulary or ‘B Specials’, were almost wholly Protestant and unionist in ethos.

There was also a lack of official recognition of Irish nationality in Northern Ireland. The Irish language and Irish history were not taught in state schools. The tricolour flag of the Irish Republic was illegal, as was the Irish Republican party, Sinn Fein (from 1956 until 1974), though it organised in Northern Ireland under the names ‘Republican’ or ‘Republican Clubs’. However most nationalists in the North traditionally voted for the moderate Nationalist Party.

There was an ineffective, mostly southern-based IRA guerrilla campaign against Northern Ireland from 1956 to 1962, but with little nationalist support within the North and faced with internment on both sides of the border, it achieved little.

There were signs of a thaw in relations between north and south and between nationalists and unionists in the 1960s with reciprocal visits by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and Irish Taoiseach Sean Lemass, the first since 1922. O’Neill also proposed reforms within Northern Ireland. However O’Neill came under fierce criticism from unionist hardliners such as charismatic Presbyterian preacher Ian Paisley.

Civil Rights to armed conflict

In 1967 elements of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, radical left groups and the Republican Clubs founded the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Their aim was to end the discrimination against Catholics within Northern Ireland.

However violence regularly broke out at their marches, notably at a People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry which was attacked by loyalists. This led to increasingly bitter rioting between the Catholic population, especially in Derry, and the RUC. The unrest culminated in a series of severe riots across Northern Ireland in August 12-17, 1969 in which 8 people were killed, hundreds of homes destroyed and 1,800 people displaced.

The rioting began over a loyal order march in Derry, after which rioting between police and Catholics – known as the ‘Battle of the Bogside’ – engulfed Catholic neighbourhoods. In Belfast, the rioting developed into street fighting between Catholics and Protestants during which an entire Catholic street – Bombay Street – was burned out. The RUC also fired heavy machine gun rounds at the mainly Catholic Divis Towers flat complex killing a young boy. The British Army was deployed to restore order and was initially welcomed by Catholics.

The riots marked a watershed. The IRA split into two factions, with the more militant, the Provisionals, claiming the existing organisation had failed to defend Catholics during the rioting. They were determined to launch a new armed campaign against Northern Ireland.

The other faction, known as the Officials favoured building a left wing political party and fostering unity among the Catholic and Protestant working class before attempting to achieve a united Ireland. However it was the Provisionals who would go on to dominate.

The British Army’s relationship with the nationalist population quickly soured as a result of its efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries – notably the Falls Curfew of July 1970 in which it cordoned off the Lower Falls area of Belfast, engaging in several hours of gun battles with the Official IRA, killing four civilians and clouding the area in tear gas.

By 1971 both IRA factions were targeting the British Army. In response the Northern Ireland government introduced internment without trial – imprisoning 2,000 people between 1971 and 1975, over 90% of whom were republicans and less than 10% loyalists. In the initial sweep no loyalists at all were detained. Even those opposed to violence, such as the SDLP, walked out of the Stormont Parliament and led their supporters in a rent and rates strike. As a result, many republicans would depict the armed campaign of the following 25 years and defensive and retaliatory.

However it was also true that the Provisionals especially were determined from the outset to wage ‘armed struggle’ which they viewed as being the continuation of the Irish War of Independence. Unlike previous IRA campaigns internment was not introduced in the Republic of Ireland, leading unionists to allege that the southern state sympathised with republican paramilitaries.

The London government tried to defuse nationalist militancy with a series of reforms of Northern Ireland. The B Specials were disbanded, electoral boundaries were withdrawn to reflect Catholic numbers and housing and employment executives were set up to deal with discrimination. More moderate nationalists coalesced in 1970 as the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) which was opposed to violence.

Republicans and state forces were not the only source of violence. Loyalist groups also proliferated in the early 1970s with many Protestant neighbourhoods setting up paramilitary and vigilante groups. The largest of these was the Ulster Defence Association (or UDA, also referred to as Ulster Freedom Fighters or UFF) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (or UVF) founded in 1966. By 1972 both of these groups and others were killing significant numbers of Catholic civilians. Despite this, far fewer loyalist than republican militants were imprisoned.

The Insurgency phase

By far the worst year of the ‘Troubles’ was 1972, when 480 people lost their lives. The year opened with ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry in which 14 marchers against internment were shot dead by the British Army on January 30. This massacre gave massive impetus to militant republicans.

The Provisional IRA especially upped their campaign to its greatest intensity, killing over 100 British soldiers in that year and devastating the centre of Belfast and Derry with car bomb attacks – notably on ‘Bloody Friday’ on 21 July when 9 people were killed and 130 injured by 26 near-simultaneous car bombs.

The British Army characterised this period as the ‘insurgency phase’ of the conflict [1]. In addition to Bloody Sunday, its treatment of the nationalist population was often very violent – killing 170 people, many of them civilians, from 1971 to 1974. There were other incidents of large scale shooting of civilians such as the Ballymurphy shootings (11 dead in 1971) and the Springhill shootings (5 deaths in 1972). It has recently emerged also that an undercover unit, the MRF, was carrying out assassinations and random shootings in Catholic areas and was responsible for at least 10 deaths, so some deaths attributed to paramilitary violence may actually have been undercover soldiers.

The Provisionals believed they were on the verge of victory by the summer of 1972, or at any rate British withdrawal, when the British government opened direct talks with the IRA leadership. In response the IRA called a brief ceasefire. However no political agreement was reached – the IRA proposed no terms other than a united Ireland – and, after a standoff with the British Army and loyalists in the Lenadoon area of Belfast flared up into violence, the ceasefire was called off.

Concurrently loyalist killings also spiralled. Their actions included pub bombings such as the McGurk pub bombing in 1971 in which 15 were killed and the abduction and shooting of random Catholics.

Yet another source of violence was spasmodic feuding between the rival republican factions. However the Official IRA called a ceasefire in May 1972, leaving the title of the IRA mainly to the Provisionals. Militant Official IRA members split off to form the Irish National Liberation Army, INLA, in 1974.

In the midst of this descent into violence the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reintroduced ‘Direct Rule’ from London in March 1972.

The mid 1970s violence

By 1973 the many-sided conflict showed no signs of ending. Although the death toll fell from 1972 to 1973 (480 to 255) it remained high throughout the 1970s, with over 2,000 having died by the end of the decade.

The IRA began to back away from large scale armed encounters with British forces after their ‘no go’ zones of Belfast and Derry were taken by the British Army in a large operation known as Operation Motorman in July 1972. The British military later characterised the ongoing IRA campaign as a move from ‘insurgency’ to ‘terrorism’, meaning that their actions henceforth were typically smaller scale and clandestine. They also took to bombing British cities.

The loyalist paramilitaries also became increasingly indiscriminate in the period 1974-1976 in which they killed over 370 Catholic civilians. Republican groups killed 88 Protestants civilians in the same period. Loyalists also began bombing towns and cities south of the border, notably in the Dublin and Monaghan bombs of May 1974, in which 33 people were killed.

There have been persistent allegations of ‘collusion’ of state forces in the loyalist campaign – RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment personnel certainly passed arms and information to loyalists and allegations exist that British Army intelligence was also involved in planning loyalist attacks. The Stevens Enquiry report of 2003 stated that it had found evidence of high level collusion between state forces including police, army and intelligence and loyalist groups.

The sectarian dimension of the conflict was brought under some control in 1976 with an agreement between republican and loyalist paramilitaries to cease using car bombs and targeting ‘enemy’ civilians (as reported by Eamon Mallie, Patrick Bishop, The Provisional IRA p 340).

From January 1975 to January 1976 the IRA was persuaded by the British government to call another ceasefire. However no political progress ensued and this had little appreciable effect on the level of political violence as republicans still killed 125 people and simply meant that IRA attacks were usually claimed with adopted names.

Sunningdale and the Ulster Workers Council strike

In 1973 a

major effort was made by the British government to find a political solution to the conflict. In November of that year an agreement was signed between the major political parties (SDLP and UUP) in Northern Ireland, known as the Sunningdale Agreement.

It contained provision for power sharing between nationalists and unionist in a new regional assembly as well as a ‘Council of Ireland’ with the aim of developing all-Ireland cooperation.

The Agreement was brought down by massive grassroots unionist opposition. After the Unionist Party voted to ratify power sharing with nationalists in May 1974, mass protest rallies were organised Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and Vanguard led by William Craig. It was also during the period of the Sunningdale Agreement that loyalist paramilitary violence peaked.

Most significantly, the Ulster Workers’ Council – a body involving Protestant trade unionists as well as loyalist paramilitaries – organised a general strike in including in power stations. The two week strike caused the Unionist Party to pull out of the Agreement, making it null and void. There would be no further internal political agreements until 1998.

Nationalists were enraged that the British Army was not deployed to break the strike.

Ulsterisation, the Prison struggle and the Hunger Strikes

In the late 1970s, the British government, despairing of a political settlement, tried to find a security solution to reduce political violence to ‘an acceptable level’ in the words of one Northern Secretary.

Their strategy was to try to undermine the IRA’s claim that they were fighting a war of national liberation by two means. The first was so-called ‘, Ulsterisation’ – reducing the primacy of the British Army and returning it to the RUC police force.

The second strand was ending internment without trial – viewed to have been a public relations disaster – in 1976, and phasing in non-jury trials for paramilitaries. The aim was to have no ‘political’ prisoners but only prisoners convicted of criminal offences. They were to be housed, not in the Prisoner-of War type camp at Long Kesh but a purpose built prison – the Maze – situated next door. Moreover they were to be afforded no special treatment compared to ordinary criminals.

This led to sustained protest by republican (and initially, some loyalist) prisoners for political status. They refused to wash or slop out their cells (the ‘dirty protest’) or to wear prison uniform (‘the blanket protest’). The protest culminated in the Hunger Strikes of 1981 in which 10 republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, starved themselves to death for political status.

The Hunger Strikes ended up reviving the IRA’s flagging support in the nationalist community and across Ireland. The prisoner Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament in a by-election during the strike, as, when Sands died, was Sinn Fein member Owen Carron. Two more hunger strikers were voted into the Irish Dail. There was widespread rioting in nationalist areas upon the deaths of the hunger strikers.

The ‘Long War’

Throughout the 1980s the conflict sputtered on. The IRA had a change of leadership in the late 1970s as southern leaders such as Ruari O Bradaigh were replaced by younger northerners such as Gerry Adams.

Adams and his colleagues devised a strategy known as the Long War, in which the IRA would be reorganised into small cells, more difficult to penetrate with informers and continue their armed campaign indefinitely until British withdrawal.

Parallel, they would win political support through their party, Sinn Fein. The election of hunger strikers was a major fillip to this strategy. In 1986 they decided to enter the Dail if elected. Their strategy was popularly known as the ‘Ballot Box and Armalite’ strategy after speech by Danny Morrison.

Political violence in Northern Ireland throughout the 1980s remained at a lower level however than in the 1970s. In only three years (1981,1982 and 1988) was the death toll over 100 and in 1985 there were only 57 deaths due to the conflict (see here).

The IRA in Belfast and Derry never regained the momentum they had had in the previous decade and were heavily infiltrated by informers. The organisation’s rural units in places such as South Armagh and Tyrone took on a greater importance through their continued ability to attack British forces with weapons such as mortars, improvised mines and heavy machine guns.

However many targets particularly of the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment were also killed while off-duty and unarmed. Bombings of civilian targets, particularly the Enniskillen bomb of 1987 in which 12 Protestants attending a war memorial service were killed, also damaged their popular support. Throughout the conflict Catholics voted in greater numbers for the SDLP over Sinn Fein.

The IRA also continued to attack targets in Britain and further afield, attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984 for example and blowing up 11 British soldiers on parade in London as well as Harrods department store. Three Provisional IRA members were killed while preparing a bomb in Gibraltor in 1988.

Despite importing significant quantities of heavy weapons from Libya in the mid-1980s, the IRA was able only to modestly increase the intensity of their campaign by the end of the decade. The exception to this was their bombing campaign in England. Importing large amounts of semtex explosive enabled them to detonate massively destructive bombs in commercial districts of London in the 1990s. Although these caused relatively few casualties due to warnings being given, the destruction of property in the financial centre of The City was enormous.

Crown forces in the 1980s generally became much more careful to avoid killing civilians than in the preceding decade. There were however many allegations of targeted killings of IRA fighters – a so called ‘shoot to kill’ policy. For instance at the Loughall ambush in 1987 an IRA ‘active service unit’ of 8 men was wiped out. There were also serious problems with the use of rubber and plastic bullets to control riots, the deployment of which was responsible for 16 deaths, mostly Catholics, and many more injuries.

Loyalist violence lulled in the early 1980s but picked up again after the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, in which the British government agreed to give the Irish government a consultative role in Northern Ireland. Loyalists, including a group linked to the Democratic Unionist party named Ulster Resistance, imported weapons from South Africa in response to a feared ‘sell out’. In some cases aided by British Army and RUC intelligence, loyalists began targeting republican militants and politicians for assassination. However, as in the 1970s most of their victims were unarmed Catholics.

By the 1990s loyalists were killing significant numbers of Catholics as well as republican activists. The IRA and other republican groups like the INLA and its off-shoots retaliated with attacks on loyalists, sometimes shading into attacks on Protestants such as the Shankill bomb of 1993 which killed ten people.

The Peace Process

By the late 1980s there were signs that republicans were looking for an end to the conflict. There were talks between Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and SDLP leader John Hume and privately between republicans and the British and Irish governments.

In 1994 the Provisional IRA declared a unilateral ceasefire. This was followed six weeks later by a ceasefire from the main loyalist groups. The IRA broke its ceasefire in 1996 with a bomb in London, as a result of Sinn Fein not being allowed into negotiations before the IRA gave up its weapons.

In 1997 the IRA resumed its ceasefire and Sinn Fein was readmitted to talks. These also involved the nationalist SDLP and the Irish government as well at the Ulster Unionist Party, the Alliance Party the Progressive Unionist Party and Ulster Democratic Party (representing loyalist paramilitaries) and the Women’s Coalition. The Democratic Unionist Party refused to participate. These negotiations culminated in the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement of 1998.

This deal returned self-government to Northern Ireland but stipulated that government must be formed by equal numbers of nationalist and unionist ministers in proportion to their vote. Cross border bodies were established but the Republic gave up its territorial claim to Northern Ireland. The RUC police force was disbanded and replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland which had had quotas for the proportion of Catholic officers.

The Agreement was passed by referendum in Northern Ireland and a concurrent referendum in the Republic accepted the deletion of the claim to Northern Ireland from the constitution.

This was not however immediately the end of violence or of political deadlock. ‘Dissident’ republicans who split off to form the ‘Real IRA’ detonated a bomb in Omagh in 1998 killing 30 people. Various ‘dissident’ groups have attempted to mount armed campaigns to the present day.

There was also widespread rioting each summer for several years around Orange Order parades resulting in several deaths, notably around the Drumcree standoff (1996-2000). Loyalist groups also engaged in a number of internecine feuds, resulting in about 40 deaths up the mid 2000s.

The first Northern Ireland Executive (regional government) did not get up and running until 1999 and again collapsed in February 2000 as Unionist leader David Trimble refused to operate it while IRA weapons had not been decommissioned. It was re-established in May of that year but remained fragile and collapsed again in 2002.

Trimble’s position deteriorated as his Party lost electoral support to the DUP. At the same time Sinn Fein overtook the SDLP as the nationalist party with the largest vote.

The IRA did not destroy most of its weapons until 2005, when a large quantity of guns, explosives and ammunition were destroyed under international supervision. It also announced the definitive end of its armed campaign. In response the British Army began dismantling its fortified bases across Northern Ireland and withdrawing from active deployment there.

There followed more talks between Sinn Fein and the DUP which finally produced a deal whereby those two parties would form a new Northern Ireland Executive in 2007 with a DUP First Minister, Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister, IRA veteran Martin McGuinness.

By early 2010 all the paramilitary groups had undertaken some decommissioning. Currently Sinn Fein and the DUP share power in a restored Northern Ireland Authority.

Costs

The violence of the ‘Troubles’ is still open to partisan interpretation. Republican paramilitaries killed significantly more people than any other actor (some 2,000 of the 3,500 deaths). State forces were responsible for 368 deaths (including 6 by Irish state forces) and loyalists for over 1,000. (See here) Even if, as many republicans argue, state forces and loyalists had a high degree of cooperation, republican groups still killed more.

This leads unionists to argue that the conflict consisted in the main of republican terrorism combated by a state constrained by the rule of law. They point out that by 1998 there were nearly equal numbers of loyalists as republicans imprisoned – 194 to 241. Statistics are hard to come by but estimates of the total number of republicans imprisoned over the conflict amounts to 15,000 and estimates of loyalists imprisoned range from 5 to 12,000.

However, Catholic civilians were significantly more likely to be killed than Protestant civilians, leading republicans to argue that their violence was legitimate warfare (as the majority of victims were state forces) whereas the loyalist campaign was simply sectarian murder.

Compared to the earlier conflict in 20^th century Ireland (1916-1923) the violence was somewhat less intense. In the earlier period roughly 4-5,000 died over an 8 year period and almost all but the 500 who died in Easter week 1916, died between 1920 and 1923, Moreover in the earlier period British state forces killed significantly more civilians than non-state forces, a pattern that was reversed in the Northern Ireland conflict.[2] However compared to comparable low intensity conflicts in Western Europe in the late twentieth century, such as the Basque Conflict, the Northern Ireland conflict was much bloodier.[3]

Legacy

It is widely considered that nationalists gained more from the peace process than unionists, as the unionist character of Northern Ireland was undermined, strict majority rule abolished and discrimination against Catholics reversed by quotas. However it is also true that republicans ended up putting aside their demand for united Ireland and working within a ‘partitionist’ settlement.

The conflict caused a deepening of sectarianism, especially in working class urban areas where fortified ‘peace walls’ still separate Catholic and Protestant areas.

Paramilitary prisoners (about 450 people) who were affiliated to political parties which had signed up the Good Friday Agreement were all released in 1998. However a small number of ‘dissident’ republican prisoners (about 70) are still held under anti-terrorism legislation for acts committed since then. Moreover, as evidenced by the 2014 arrest of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for the murder of Jean McConville in 1972, there has been no amnesty for acts committed prior to the agreement.

Northern Ireland’s future remains ambiguous. Catholics now form an almost equal proportion of the population to Protestants. This has led many to predict a nationalist majority in the future with a consequent end to partition.

However the latest polls indicate that support for a united Ireland is not unanimous among Catholics, with 20% preferring to stay in the United Kingdom, 35% in favour of unity in 20 years and only 7% in favour of unification now. Support for Irish unity among Protestants is very low – at about 4%.

While these preferences may change, Northern Ireland remains closely tied to the United Kingdom economically. The conflict period damaged its economy greatly and also coincided with de-industrialisation in Western Europe which decimated its ship-building and linen industries. Over 30% of the workforce is directly employed in the public sector, compared with under 20% in Britain or the Republic. The Northern regional government is also heavily subsidised from London – raising £14 billion in taxes in 2011-12, for example but spending £23 billion.

Until the Republic (now heavily indebted) is able to make up this shortfall unification of Ireland would be extremely difficult. Thus the status quo is likely to remain for the forseeable future.

  Notes

[1] In which ‘Both the Official and Provisional wings of the Irish Republican Army (OIRA and PIRA) fought the security forces in more-or-less formed bodies. Both had a structure of companies, battalions and brigades, with a recognisable structure and headquarters staff. Protracted firefights were common. ‘

[2] In 1919-21 the IRA was responsible for 281 of the 898 civilian fatalities, with British forces being responsible for 381. A further 236 deaths could not be confidently attributed to any party (the IRA, loyalist, rioters, undercover Crown forces). [See Terror in Ireland, p153-154]

[3] The Basque conflict caused the deaths of about 1,000 people from 1968 to 2010, roughly 800 killed by the separatist organisation ETA and roughly 2-300 by Spanish state forces with a comparable population to Northern Ireland

Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life: Essays on the FitzGeralds and Carton House

Edited by Terence Dooley, Patrick Cosgrove and Karol Mullaney-Dignam

Published by UCD Press, Dublin 2014,

Reviewer: Danial Murray

History, when you get down to it, is a study of the elite. Partly because they are important in a way that the rest of us are not, partly because the historical sources tend to focus on them, and partly because of the innate human fascination in those who seem to live in a higher plane of existence, whether due to fame, money or titles.

Social historians have heroically attempted to counter this bias by moving their studies away from the ‘great men’ towards recreating the lives of ordinary people. Judging, however, by the recent glut of popular history shows – The White Queen, The Borgias, The Tudors, among others – and their cast of blue-blooded characters, this interest is unlikely to wane or be replaced any time soon.

This collection of essays – nineteen in all – covers the Fitzgeralds, the pre-eminent noble family in Ireland and the Earls of Kildare. Maynooth and Carton House, as centres of the family power in different ways, also feature prominently, with chapters on the development and the early college of Maynooth and on the landscape, servants and material life of Carton.

The strengths and weaknesses of this book stem from the same root: the number of contributors and their varying specialisations means that reading the book cover-to-cover can either be enjoyed as a kaleidoscope of personalities, politics and home comforts or a disjointed mismatch.

Alternatively, readers could skip to the chapters that promise the most interest. This reviewer’s interests include the Middle Ages, biography and early 20^th century history, and so the first chapters read were the ones on the Middle Ages, Lord Edward Fitzgerald (he of the United Irishmen fame), and Lord Frederick FitzGerald and his role in Kildare politics until his death in 1924.

The three essays by Mary Ann Lyons, Carol O’Connor and Colm Lennon cover the family from its peak as chief magnates of Ireland in the 15^th-16^th centuries, securing the country on behalf of the English Crown, though that did not mean they were above staging ‘revolts’ whenever threatened with supplanting by some upstart appointee from England to ‘prove’ that only they could control the unruly island.

This trick was tried too often with Henry VIII who almost exterminated the family in response and cast them out in the political wilderness. It took the shrewd diplomacy and alliance-building by Mabel Browne, who married into the family, to restore the Fitzgeralds to royal good fortune.

The Fitzgerald legacy would then be the battleground of politically motivated historians who depicted the clan as either the natural rulers of Ireland or despicable traitors. The three essays that encompass all of this do an excellent job of narrating the family’s rise and fall and hard-won rise again, providing a coherent picture that overlap on certain points without clashing.

Liam Chamber’s ‘Family Politics and Revolutionary Convictions,’ on Lord Edward FitzGerald, has more of the latter than the former, his family largely absent. The essay is straightjacketed by its short length of eight pages, and while that is not unusual compared to the other essays, it means that the end result falls short of its ambition.

Chambers draws attention to how the historiography on Edward had been shaped by early writers like Thomas Moore, Charles William FitzGerald and Gerald Campbell, who were able to make use of the family private papers. The historians who followed them lacked such access and so were limited to quoting the papers from the earlier works.

Since the 1990s, the National Library of Ireland acquired thousands of manuscripts relating to Edward and his kin, allowing modern historians to finally see these materials for themselves. Other than that, Chambers has little to say, and the essay’s length limits him to ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ as a writer.

Thomas Nelson’s look at Lord Frederick Fitzgerald (1837-1924) is hampered by how very little is known about the man. He left few papers and none of a personal nature, so Newton resorts to other sources such as local newspapers and government papers to present a view of the Fitzgerald estates in Kildare during Frederick’s ownership. After five years serving in the British army in India, Afghanistan and South Africa, Frederick came into his Kildare estates at an awkward time.

The Land War was under way, though Nelson argues against the usual depiction of the landlord-tenant relationship breaking down in light of he local enthusiasm received by Frederick upon his return from abroad and at the marriage of his sister. Frederick was able to negotiate with his tenants in a satisfactory manner so that Kildare avoided the worst virulence of the Land War.

This ability to maintain local support continued when he was elected to the country council in 1899 at a time when landlords were increasingly depicted as colonial oppressors.

Frederick remained on the council for the next twenty-one years, winning each election that came his way until 1920, when he stepped down from any further role in politics. As a sign of the times, his replacement was Daniel Buckley, a Maynooth shopkeeper who went by Domhnall Ua Buachalla and represented Sinn Féin.

While short on personal detail about Frederick FitzGerald – other than an excessive fondness for his female servants leading to a high staff turnover rate – Nelson handles what is usually a dry topic in a clear, detailed and engaging way.

To have the book for only a few select chapters may seem a waste, however, particularly at its less-than-commercially-friendly price (an eye-watering 45 euro on the publisher’s website at this time of writing). The ideal readership are probably students who can access their university libraries.

A Portrait of West-County Down Past and Present: An Exploration of Landscape, Population, Worship and Diversity.

By Dr Francis Xavier McCorry

 Reviewer: Barry Sheppard

Francis Xavier McCorry is something of an enigma among Irish historians.  A physics teacher by trade in a previous life, he has forty years of local history publications under his belt.  Perhaps not as well-known as he should be outside of his native Ulster, he counts a number of well-respected historians such as Cormac O’Grada as admirers.  This, his latest (but not last) book, published at the age of seventy-five, sees McCorry, rather than slowing down, undertaking perhaps his most ambitious project to date.

The subject of McCorry’s latest study, a history of West County Down, is indeed niche in terms of its geographical and historical scope.  It is certainly not the most fashionable of areas for research, and often is overlooked by the more romantic south of the county, ‘where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea’.  That said, there are many parts of West County Down which have a rich history dating back a millennia and are more than worthy of note.

Painting a picture from its earliest modern settlements, pre 12^th century to the mechanisation of farming practices in the mid 20^th century, it is an ambitious and all encompassing project.  One fascinating theme from the opening chapter are the maps of early ecclesiastical sites, which are significant given the associations the area has with St. Patrick.  This chapter not only gives a detailed account of the early Christian settlements, it provides a great commentary on the evolution of cartography, from early tools for invading armies, and the territories of local Gaelic Chieftains to later natural history surveys.

Subsequent chapters deal with the physical geography of the land, the farmers it attracted and the political and cultural allegiances they had.  It combines beautifully to give a sense of what, and who gave the region its diversity, in terms of land use, and religious worship.

Some points drift into the territory of memoir, not so much of the personal, but of the place, and this may a problem for the purist, nevertheless it is clear that McCorry has a long-standing affinity with the area.  This however, does not detract from the obvious historical scholarship which informs the author’s appraisal of the locations examined within.  Much is added to the overall picture by the author’s interest in the evolution from Irish to English of the various place names.  This is complimented by the other historical and geographical sources which are utilised throughout.

A later chapter examines the plethora of stone religious crosses and artefacts which adorn the area from Celtic to modern.  Outdoor stone crosses have become almost something of a cliché when identified with Ireland.  The author steers clear of such crudities.  Without overstating their ‘Irishness’ nor venturing into the territory of the current buzzwords ‘a shared past’, in vogue with so much history with a modern political reconciliation tinge, it reveals a countryside still physically, and spiritually connected to its early common ancestry in terms of Christian roots.

Chapter Five sees the Author revisit some of his best historical themes, the condition of the pre-famine poor of Ireland.  This chapter focuses upon aspects relating to the 1833 Royal Commission on the Poorer Classes in Ireland and the 1843 Devon Commission: (‘Commission on Occupation of Land (Ireland)’).  The importance of the background to the two commissions is explained, and bolstered with a list of those who provided oral testimony to the commissions from the Baronies of Upper and Lower Iveagh on the causes of low wages, rates of labourers.

It reflects the harsh realities of life in what was supposedly a more prosperous region of the country.  While the area had a more diverse industry and farming culture than many areas, it was still not entirely spared the ravages which befell the country.  This work, alongside McCorry’s previous work on the Famine, as well as the likes of Gerard MacAtasney on the Famine in Lurgan and Portadown, provide invaluable insights into a region which has been overlooked somewhat in Famine historiography.

Subsequent chapters take the reader on a tour of the area known as Lagan Valley and Upper Bann Valley from the Medieval to the modern period.  Throughout the various townlands one gets a sense of a forgotten earlier history.  These areas had since the time of the Famine until the 1911 census provided much in the way of emigrants for various locations.

What McCorry shows here is an important and again overlooked aspect of Northern local history.  The emigrant has long been portrayed as a Southern or Western in popular history, and it is therefore unsurprising that it has been forgotten that large amounts of emigration took place within a prosperous region of Ireland.  However, it wasn’t all desolation and emigration in the area.  The Industrial revolution and the linen industry helped to shape many aspects of the area which are still visible to this day.

McCorry’s depth of knowledge of Irish history from the Medieval to the modern is impressive.  His knowledge of local history is just as impressive as that of his national history.  This has the effect of placing this book neatly within the wider context of the country’s story, regardless of which period covered within.  The depth of historical scholarship is undoubted.  What is also clear is the author’s affinity with the area.  This may not appeal to the purists, nevertheless it plays a significant part of the study.   This book provides a welcome change in a region which has for too long been oversaturated with conflict studies on the more recent past.

The book is available via the author:

Francis McCorry

10 Parkview Street, Lurgan, Co. Armagh BT66 8QL.

By John Dorney

Travellers to Dublin in and around the year 1577 would have found not an Irish but an English city. It was in theory the capital of the Kingdom of Ireland but reality it was the centre only of the English enclave known as the Pale.

The Pale was not, as is often imagined, an immediate product of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the 12^th century. Certainly the Anglo-Norman conquistadores did seize these lands –some of the most fertile in Ireland – and settled much of Ireland’s east coast with English peasants and labourers.

These people certainly held themselves apart from the Gaelic or Irish speaking population but there was in the early medieval period, no need to barricade themselves into a fortified enclave. The Pale itself was a defensive reaction to the decay and retreat of the English presence in Ireland in the 15^th century. The inhabitants of the Pale developed an identity familiar from other settler-colonists, that of a beleaguered enclave of  civilisation surrounded by barbarous natives.

Around Dublin were the ‘marches’ the borderlands, mostly possessed by the Gaelicised Anglo Norman dynasties such as the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, and to the south butting right onto the city’s hinterland were the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, still in the hands of Gaelic Irish clans.

A siege mentality

The siege mentality of medieval Dubliners is best illustrated by their annual pilgrimage to Cullen’s field in Ranelagh, where in 1209, 500 recent settlers from Bristol had been massacred by the O’Toole clan during a fair. Every year on “Black Monday”, the Dublin citizens would march out of the city to the spot where the atrocity had happened and raise a black banner with a raven emblem in the direction of the mountains to challenge the Irish to battle in a gesture of symbolic defiance;  “the sight of which daunteth the Irish beyond measure” – so wrote one Palesman.

This was however, still sufficiently dangerous throughout the 16^th century, that the participants had to be guarded by the city militia and a stockade against, “the mountain enemy”. [1]

Dublin city was a tightly knit place of around 5,000 people, intimate enough for every newly married citizen to be escorted by the mayor to the city bullring to kiss the enclosure for good luck. It was also very small in area, an enclave hugging the south side of the Liffey of no more than two square kilometres.

Outside the city walls were suburbs such as the Liberties, on the lands of the Archbishop of Dublin, and Irishtown, where Gaelic Irish were supposed to live, having been expelled from the city proper by a 15^th century law. Kilkenny had a native suburb of the same name, as did several other towns.[2]

The Dubliners and Palesmen had a highly conservative attachment to English laws and to the pre-reformation Catholic religion, and repeatedly requested that these be extended to all of Ireland. The Irish Parliament passed laws, most notably the Statute of Kilkenny in 1366, forbidding the English from marrying the Irish, speaking Irish, or dressing in the Irish manner. But even the Pale was becoming Gaelicised, since many Irish-speaking peasants migrated into this fertile area.

The Black Plague of the 14^th and 15^th centuries had hit the Pale communities hard, creating a labour shortage that was filled by native migrants.[3] Only in the barony of Fingal (north county Dublin) was English the sole language of the common people. In the rest of the Pale, Irish was becoming the lingua franca. One Palesman complained, “we must embrace their language while they detest ours…we must gauge our laws in gibbering Irish”.

It became common to use Irish slang in conversation, especially insults such as bodach, foagh and poghue.[4]   In 1515, a deputation from the Pale, led by William D‘Arcy, appealed to the English Privy Council for a new initiative to stop the ‘decay’ of the English colony before it was too late and the whole country was lost to assimilation with the Irish.[5]

Law and order

Dublin was governed by an oligarchy of merchant families such as the Stanihursts, the Fyannes, the Sedgraves, the Fitzsimons, the Cusacks the Redlows and the Fagans from whose ranks the mayor was usually selected. All citizens of Dublin – a coveted status available only to members of guilds, their families and descendants, elected aldermen, who in turn elected the Lord Mayor. Dublin had 24 aldermen,  48 sheriffs and 96 guildsmen, who were all elected to the common council in the borough of Dublin.

Law and order was kept by a citizen’s militia which mustered  for parade four times a year – Black Monday, Mayday, John the Baptist Day the eve of Peter’s day.  They could also be summoned when needed by the Mayor, Sheriffs or by their commander, the ‘captain of bachelors and unwed youth’ who was elected by the citizens.

Among their duties were punishing those who ‘frequent brothels and other unchaste places’.  A smaller number of gate-keepers, constables and clock keepers kept watch the rest of the time.[6]

Proud Dubliners

Then as now Dubliners saw little reason to leave their city and visit the rest of Ireland. A proud Dubliner, Richard Stanihurst wrote in 1577 of his native city,

‘It is pleasant comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills they are not far off. If champion ground [open country]it lieth off all parts; if you be delighted by freshwater, the famous river called the Liffey runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand’.[7]

He acknowledged that the streets were roamed by many ‘extraordinary beggars’ but contended they were fed by the ‘charitable citizens’.

The port, he conceded was in bad shape, much of it blocked by a sand bar which no one had the resources to clear. Nevertheless, the markets of Dublin, he boasted, which were held on Wednesdays and Fridays were, ‘so well stocked with meat and corn as not only in Ireland but also in other countries you shall not see any market better furnished than this one’.[8]

But all was not well in Dublin. Many citizens resented the new Protestant religion imported into Ireland by the English Tudor monarchs. In 1537 50 Catholic shrines in Dublin and Meath had been closed down by the state. Just three years after Stanihurst’s glowing account of his native city, 45 Catholic ‘outlaws’ were hanged in Dublin  for their part in the rebellion of the Catholic Pale lords, James Eustace of Baltinglass. In 1613 they lost control of the Parliament of Ireland when boundaries were redrawn to make Protestant settlers a majority.

Richard Stanihurst himself left for Spain where he informed king Phillip II, arch enemy of Elizabeth I of England, about the interests of Catholics in England and Ireland in 1602 he became a priest.

The 16th century Dubliners imagined that they were the bedrock of the English presence in Ireland but the religious wars that wracked Ireland for the next hundred years would sweep their eclectic Catholic English in Ireland identity away forever.

Notes

[1] Richard Stanihurst, Hollinshed’s Irish Chronicle 1577, p42-44

[2] Ibid. p44, 58

[3] Colm Lennon Sixteenth Century Ireland p46

[4] Stanihurst, p15-18

[5] Lennon p79-82

[6] Lennon p23 Stanihurst p43

[7] Hollinshed’s Irish Chronicle pp39-52

[8] Hollinshed’s Irish Chronicle p41

Daniel Murray on the murky, unsolved killing of IRA intelligence officer James Dalton in May 1920 during the Irish War of Independence.

The Murder

On the 15^th of May 1920, James Dalton was making his way back to his house at 5 Clare Street, Limerick, at the end of another unremarkable day. He had left home earlier at around noon for his work as a clerk in the Electric Power Station on Frederick Street, and afterwards had joined his father-in-law in a pub sometime after 6 pm. Half an hour later, the two men had left the premise and went their separate ways. If Dalton was in any way troubled or concerned for his safety, he gave no sign of it.

Within a couple of hundred yards from his residence and within sight of his thirteen-year old daughter, Kitty, James Dalton was accosted. The initial report numbered the assailants as from four to six, though Kitty saw three, one in front of her father and the other two on either side. Testifying afterwards, Kitty could not identify any of them, only that they were young and one was tall.

Their quarry surrounded, the men opened fire point-blank with revolvers and continued doing so even after Dalton had collapsed face-first onto the street, one man lingering while the others made their escape long enough to put two more rounds into the back of his prone target. Caught in the line of fire was six-year old Elly Lowe, struck by a stray shot that left a jagged hole in her calf.

Both victims were rushed to hospital. While Elly Lowe’s wound was ruled not to be a serious one, Dalton was pronounced “life extinct”. Six bullets were found in him: three in his front, one embedded over his heart, one lower in the same region, with the other passing far enough to lacerate his liver, two more in his back, and the last in his hand, close to the thumb. Four of the injuries by themselves would have been enough to be fatal. The close proximity of his assassins and their cold thoroughness had ensured that Dalton’s chances of survival had been almost non-existent.

The 48-year-old deceased had left behind a widow and eleven children.[1]

The Mystery

Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) arrived at the scene of the crime. That some of them felt the need to be armed while on duty was an indicator in itself that Limerick was not a city at peace with itself. Though the police stayed for some time, no arrests were made. No arrests would ever be made.

As the murder had been committed in an isolated district of the city, it took until sometime after 7 pm, over half an hour later, for the news to be widespread. There was shock at the slaying of a man who had played leading roles in a number of sporting, political and military spheres, a fact laid bare by his brother as Joseph Dalton took the stand at the resulting Crown court of inquiry in Limerick.

A skilled and versatile athlete, James Dalton had boxed as a middle-weight champion, and had been a trainer for the All-Ireland Limerick hurling team. He had been heavily involved in the rise of the now ascendant Sinn Féin party, having campaigned for its East Clare and North Roscommon Parliamentary election victories, as well in the unsuccessful by-election for South Armagh where he had impressed an acquaintance as “physically a fine figure of a man.”[2]

As a patriot he could not be faulted, having assembled with the rest of local Irish Volunteers on Easter Week four years ago for what would be for them an aborted Rising. It was true, Joseph added, that his brother had not had the same interest in the Volunteers once the movement really took off after the Rising although he had remained with them. In any case, he had already proven his willingness to lay down his life for his country.

As Joseph recounted in the Crown courthouse his brother’s multiple careers, it would have seemed baffling that anybody would want to kill such a prominent and well-connected individual. But as Joseph continued on, it became clear that things had been amiss for some time.[3]

The Suspicion

Not included by Joseph in his testimony was how Dalton had also been shot at two months before and wounded with the loss of a finger, probably from throwing up his hand in a defensive gesture. Graffiti on the streets had announced that the matter was far from over: “A bullet is waiting for Dalton the spy.” Undaunted, he had continued on with his life as normal. Perhaps he had attempted to take matters into his own hands and believed the matter resolved.[4]

What this matter may have been was strongly hinted at by Joseph as he continued on with his testimony: in December 1919, Dalton had been seen entering the house of a RIC officer and leaving it sometime later. This had given rise to what Joseph called a “scandalous report” and though he did not spell it out, it was obvious that the scandal lay in the implication that Dalton was acting as a spy for the police.

No charges were made against Dalton, either from Sinn Féin or his fellow Volunteers. It was all rumour, but rumours were enough to kill or be killed over as Ireland became increasingly mired in insurgency and counter-insurgency.

Eager to silence these suspicions before they claimed any more from him, Dalton had met with a representative of the recently formed Dáil Éireann on St Stephen’s Day of 1919, demanding a full examination to clear himself in the eyes of his peers. This request had been duly forwarded on. Some time later, Dalton had gotten the inquest he had sought, the documented results of which were presented by Joseph to the Crown courtroom:

Dáil Éireann Official Verdict in case of Mr James Dalton. The main point was not in dispute that the plaintiff (Mr Dalton) had entered certain premises at 1am and remained there til morning, the fact which had brought suspicion upon him.

 Having heard the evidence I was of opinion that the plaintiff had been guilty of a grave indiscretion and error of judgement in acting as he had done, and that his conduct very naturally gave rise to much suspicion.

 As against this I was certain of opinion that there had been no guilty or dishonest notice on his part, and that the suspicions in this respect had been unfounded. [5]

Plainly, however, not everyone had agreed with that verdict.

This was the first time this exoneration had been made public, although, according to Joseph, these Dáil findings had been common knowledge on the streets of Limerick a week before the shooting, further underlining for his audience the senselessness of the murder, and that an innocent man had died for nothing.

A Question of Courts

It was a peculiar scene: Joseph Dalton using the Crown court to vindicate his brother by airing the ruling of another court that was regarded as an illegal entity by the one he was standing in. Of those in attendance, only the Crown representative, District Inspector (DI) Marrinan, seemed to recognise the contradiction and rose to question the witness on the stand.

When Marrinan asked Joseph if he had been present at the Dáil inquiry in question, J.J. Dundon, the solicitor for the Dalton family, objected, accusing the DI of trying to trick the witness into incriminating himself. Upon Marrinan promising as a man of honour not to take such an advantage, Joseph confirmed that he had indeed been present at the Dáil inquiry.

 Marrinan continued his line of questioning, only to be met by a wall of repetition:

DI Marrinan: Was the verdict given in open court?

Joseph Dalton: It was forwarded to the proper authorities.

DI Marrinan: What I want to know – was it promulgated in open court at the time your brother was tried?

Joseph Dalton: It was forwarded to the proper authorities.

After getting Joseph to confirm that James Dalton had been present at his own trial, DI Marrinan pounced with an unpleasantly pointed question: what would have been the consequences if James Dalton had been found instead guilty by the Dáil inquiry? It did not take a legal mastermind to understand what the District Inspector was insinuating: that James Dalton had instead been found guilty by this Dáil and been executed accordingly.

Dundon objected again on the grounds that no witness could tell what anyone would do in hypothetical situations. Marrinan pressed on, wanting to know what powers this underground court had. At this, Joseph rallied enough to make a sortie from the stand: “It is the government of this country and it is recognised by the country.” However, when Marrinan repeatedly asked whether the power of this government included that to sentence a man to death, Joseph retreated back to pleas of ignorance on the matter.

Choice Words

Unable to lure his witness into saying anything beyond stock answers, Marrinan instead tried unsettling him with thinly veiled taunts:

 DI Marrinan: Were you aware that a good many evil disposed people had given your brother a lot of trouble – didn’t they shoot him?

Joseph Dalton: That was public property; I was aware he was shot.

DI Marrinan: Were you not aware also that in different parts of the town there were written notices “Dalton the Spy” and “Dalton the Informer”?

 

It was the first time in the course of the inquiry that the loaded terms ‘spy’ and ‘informer’ had been voiced. Joseph did not rise to the challenge and downplayed the aforementioned notices, dismissing them as the work of youngsters whose mothers had already apologised for them. Furthermore, he added, the Sinn Féin Club had helped to wipe out the notices, a message to his onlookers that James had had the support of the new local authorities as well as the new national one.

Lines in the Sand

Hoping to cast a wider net, DI Marrinan began to ask about the men James had contacted when seeking his Dáil Éireann inquiry. When it seemed that Joseph might actually answer, Dundon cut them both short on his potentially sensitive matter.

The solicitor then ignored the District Inspector to address to jury, reminding them of the brutality of a man shot down in front of his children, and how he did not think he had anything to add by speaking of it any further.

What Dundon did speak further on was how the lack of charges made against James Dalton by the political organisation – and by this, everyone knew he meant Sinn Féin – and the steps he had taken to clear his name of the still-unspecified accusation against him all pointed towards an innocent man. Dundon closed his speech with the maxim of how ‘nothing uncharitable be said of the dead.’ In short: case closed.

A naïve newcomer to the country might have found it peculiar that a solicitor in a murder inquiry would spend his time on the reputation of the victim and none on who might have actually done the deed. But then, Dundon probably knew that the Crown court in which he stood had little power on the matter, anyway.

The District Inspector was not so easily deterred, however, when it came to his turn. How had it come to pass, he wondered out loud, that in a Christian and civilised city, a man had been done to death in broad daylight by a shadowy court that presumed the power of life and death? Did not the jury consider this one murder to be a dangerous precedence, that to accept the situation as somehow normal would be to grant such assassination a form of legality? Marrinan implored his audience as Irishmen and Catholics:

 For God’s sake have pluck and have public opinion, and stand up against these cold-blood murders that are disgusting and ruining our country. Let them accept no record of any secret court but only the record of a court that tries a man with the light of God on it.

 I beg of you to take your courage in your hands, and I say damn these people who would shoot myself to-morrow if they could do it. Take your courage and do as I would do, and you will soon have Ireland a land that every man can be proud of.

But Marrinan was preaching to the wrong congregation. The District Inspector was yesterday’s man, as out of touch as the system he was striving to defend. When the jury returned its verdict, it gave nothing more than a repeat of the obvious – that James Dalton had died of shock and haemorrhaging from multiple wounds by persons unknown – and the standard expression of sympathy for the bereaved family. For better or for worse, the jury had accepted the new status quo in their city.

The sole whiff of comedy in the grim and often tense proceedings was provided when DI Marrinan refused to hand back the Dáil letter of James Dalton’s innocence. When the court coroner protested such ungentlemanly conduct, the District Inspector replied that it would take a better man than the coroner to take it off him. Rather than risk the spectacle of two officials brawling in court over a sheet of a paper, the coroner merely accepted a second copy from the deceased’s brother.[6]

A Question of Spies

The IRA practice of targeting spies during the War of Independence has been a contentious issue for historians, not least for how emotionally charged it can be. When reviewing such practices by the Meath Brigade, historian Oliver Coogan admitted to his readers that it “may make unpleasant reading or even upset some people’s romantic notions that nothing underhand or unsavoury was indulged in by Volunteers in the old days.”[7]

Further complicating such romantic notions are the questions to whether the victims were killed solely on the basis of their suspected espionage or if factors such as sectarianism, personal feuds, unfounded paranoia and the like were involved.

The case of James Dalton is atypical for a number of reasons. For one, very few IRA members were charged by their own with spying throughout the course of the War. This made the IRA, according to historian Eunan O’Halpin, one of the safest places for an informant to have been was within the IRA, given how only a handful of Volunteers – perhaps only half a dozen out of nearly 200 – were executed up to December 1921.[8]

As if this did not make Dalton’s death enough of an anomaly, he had already received a ‘clean bill of health’ by the Dáil authorities for all the good it did him, suggesting either a dire miscommunication between Limerick and Dublin or a breakdown in IRA discipline.

DI Marrinan had tried to muddy the waters further by arguing that it had been the underground Dáil court that had had Dalton killed, whatever its own paperwork claimed.

The recently released Witness Statements from the Bureau of Military History (BMW) have helped to shed some light on the issue. In other ways, however, the BMH Statements only complicate the picture further.

A Tragic Mistake?

Kevin O’Shiel, an acquaintance of Dalton’s from when they had campaigned together for Sinn Féin in the 1918 South Armagh by-election, described his death as “a tragic mistake, indeed, a crime.” Although not personally familiar with the details of the case, he was told by the IRA director for publicity, Pierce Beaslai – who was – that Dalton had been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and it had been other members of this secret society who had killed him.

Dalton’s habit of visiting the Limerick RIC barracks canteen for a drink (“being rather a thirsty soul,” as O’Shiel generously put it) was enough to put him under suspicion. Quite why Dalton would feel the need to go to an enemy stronghold for a drink when there were presumably enough pubs in Limerick already, O’Shiel did not speculate about.

Despite vindication by a top level inquiry, which had included Pierce Beasley, an “undisciplined group” from the IRB took it upon themselves to shoot Dalton all the same. Michael Collins, for one, was enraged, not only that an innocent man was dead, but how a decree of the IRB Supreme Executive, of which Collins was head, had been blatantly ignored.[9]

This breach in discipline was taken seriously enough by the IRA GHQ for Frank Thornton, the Deputy Assistant Director of Intelligence, and ‘Squad’ member Joe Dolan to be dispatched to Limerick for investigation. After a week of careful survey, as Thornton put it, they were able to piece together something of the local scene.

Dalton had not only been a member of the 1^st battalion of the Mid Limerick IRA, but its intelligence officer, and his killers had been from the 2^nd battalion, the 1^st and 2^nd covering Limerick City and Castleconnell respectively. Thornton noticed the tension between the two battalions dating back to the Easter Rising, although he leaves that possible reason for the shooting unsaid, and says nothing about any role by the IRB.

Instead, he identifies the motive as the result of a misunderstanding: Dalton had indeed been associating with enemy agents like he had been accused of, but they had been his double-agents and he had been meeting them for information, and “some very valuable information” at that according to Thornton, in his capacity as intelligence officer. Thornton and Dolan left Limerick confident that they had definite evidence to submit to GHQ that Dalton had been innocent like the earlier Dáil Éireann inquiry had said.[10]

Outsiders

Both O’Shiel and Thornton were too far removed from the Limerick scene to be ideal sources. O’Shiel’s worth is primarily in what he tells us the reactions in Dublin, and he corroborates Joseph Dalton’s claim that the victim had already been cleared of the charges against him.

As for Thornton and Dolan, their week in the city was unlikely to be enough to fully gauge the situation there, despite what Thornton thought, but Dalton’s membership of the 1^st battalion and the feud between the 1^st and 2^nd battalions are corroborated by more local sources.

Historians have been divided over Thornton’s statement that Dalton had been a luckless intelligence officer shot for doing his job too well. According to Thomas Toomey: “Thornton and Dolan were hard-bitten intelligence men who lived by their wits in the ruthless world of Dublin in 1920 and it would be reasonable to believe that they would have smelled a ‘cock and bull’ story from a distance” – which may have been true in Dublin, but in Limerick they were outsiders in an unfamiliar scene.[11]

John O’Callaghan, on the other hand, characterises the 1^st battalion as having been “redundant” since 1917, making Dalton’s activities as its intelligence agent unlikely. Furthermore, if Dalton had secured such information, none of it has since come to light.[12]

Of course, there is no reason to believe that any such intelligence should do so, considering the clandestine nature of espionage, especially if Dalton had declined to keep written notes. Still, it is surely significant that none of the other sympathetic sources repeated this claim.

Manhunt

A more detailed account can be found in the BMH Statements of a man who worked in the Limerick IRA as O/C of its 5^th battalion: Richard O’Connell. The murder of a man both the Dáil and the IRB Supreme Executive had already cleared was a challenge to their authority that could not go unanswered, and O’Connell was tasked with tracking down the main suspect. Given the inter-battalion rivalry, it is perhaps not surprising that this was the quartermaster of the 2^nd battalion: Martin Barry.

On the run and now wanted by both sides in the war, Barry proved himself an elusive prey until O’Connell was able to arrange a meeting with him in Limerick City, from which he was taken to Castleconnell and placed under arrest. O’Connell does not say how willingly Barry went. The quartermaster need not have worried, as there was no clear evidence against him for Dalton’s murder and the charges fizzled out after a week.[13]

Insiders

As a neutral observer to the friction between the 1^st and 2^nd battalions, O’Connell had no problem believing that the feud was as much a factor in Dalton’s murder as his poor choice of houses to visit. Another local source and part-time Volunteer, John J. Quilty, went as far as to accuse the 2^nd battalion of maligning Dalton’s character in order to smear the 1^st battalion by association. Given the vitriol involved, this is not too hard to believe.[14]

O’Connell’s account also sheds more light on the role of the IRB. He had been enrolled in the Organisation – as insiders liked to call it – by Liam Forde, one of the heads of the local IRB Circle. Forde was also Brigade Commandant of the Mid Limerick IRA, but O’Connell regarded his role in the case as an assignment on behalf of the IRB specifically.

O’Connell’s attitude towards the IRB when he came to composing his BMH Statement decades later was one of faint condensation. He remembered it as having little importance in Limerick and being largely limited to the 1^st battalion, himself being an exception. As that battalion had a poor reputation among the others, the IRB was regarded with the same low opinion accordingly.[15]

The Brotherhood

The association in O’Connell’s account of the IRB with the 1^st battalion, and the consensus in most of the sources that Dalton was killed by the 2^nd battalion, would seem to contradict Kevin O’Shiel’s opinion that Dalton’s shooting was an act by the IRB, this same IRB which supposedly had no real influence outside of one battalion. However, contemporary paperwork within the IRA would seem to argue against such a clear depiction.

Court-martial charge sheets signed on the 27^th of May 1920 by IRA Adjutant general– who would then have been Gearóid O’Sullivan – listed a series of alleged offences by six Volunteers, one of whom was Martin Barry. All six were charged with committing robberies without the sanction of the IRA GHQ and with keeping the money gained from such robberies – it is unclear which one was considered the worst.

Barry’s charge sheet is noteworthy in how it included the accusation that he:

Attempted to coerce an Officer of the Limerick City Batt. into joining another organization, by threatening him that he would not be acceptable for the position of Batt. Commandant, and that he would not be trusted by his officers unless he joined.[16]

Although this other organisation was not named, its description could only match the IRB, which had a policy of infiltrating other societies such as the IRA and encouraging the promotion of its own members to better control the secondary body.[17]

That Barry was in the IRB is supported by the recollections of Con McNamara, also of the 2^nd Battalion and a lieutenant in its A Company, of Barry acting as witness for McNamara being sworn into the Brotherhood in 1917 by their commanding officer, John Sweeney.[18]

Such evidence indicates that Richard O’Connell’s view of the IRB in the Mid Limerick Brigade as largely limited to the 1^st Battalion was an oversimplification. After all, not only were at least three 2^nd Battalion officers in the Organisation, but one was accused of threatening an officer of 1^st into joining.

Kevin O’Shiel’s belief that Dalton’s murder was a case of the IRB turning on its own now appears a more solid one. That IRB members would defy so blatantly an order from their superiors in the Executive casts the Brotherhood in a different light to its usual image as a slick, well-oiled machine under the firm control of its leadership. Here, it is a body of men as prone to infighting, vendettas and uncertain discipline as any in this period.

In light of what O’Connell had to say, it would be tempting to regard these court-martials as being for Dalton’s murder, particularly as the dates are so close together. But nowhere in the paperwork does it suggest anything of the sort, and it is hard to imagine the murder of a fellow Volunteer being considered of less importance than the misappropriation of funds. O’Connell’s belief that he had arrested Barry on the charge of Dalton’s shooting seems to have been a confusion, perhaps brought about the decades that had passed by the time he composed his BMH Statement in 1952.

The court-martial was to be held on the 5^th of June in Limerick, and letters were sent to Rory O’Connor, as IRA Director of Engineering, and Tomás Malone, Commandant of the East Limerick Brigade, to attend in their roles as senior officers. The court-martial notes depict a sullen and uncooperative Martin Barry refusing to answer questions.[19]

The final verdict has been unrecorded. Some clue, however, may be gleaned from how Barry was identified in April 1921 as still being the Brigade quartermaster. Clearly, the court-martial had done his career no harm at all.[20]

A Case without a Conclusion

A visiting reporter from the Irish Times in the days following Dalton’s murder noted how the scene of the crime on Clare Street attracted hundreds of visitors, and the many standpoints from which the circumstances were debated. The discussion continues to this day, with none of the sources able to provide a clear picture.[21]

Joseph Dalton was evasive on the stand in the Crown court inquiry. Frank Thornton described James Dalton as an intelligence officer who fell under suspicion when meeting his own spies, a claim that not even the other sympathetic sources repeat.

O’Connell provided some illuminating details, particularly on the feud between the 1^st and 2^nd Battalions that served as the backdrop to the murder. O’Connell, however, underestimated the extent of the IRB. He believed it limited to the 1^st Battalion, while there is ample proof that it was prominent throughout the 2^nd as well.

It is the source most removed from the Limerick scene, Kevin O’Shiel, who was probably the most accurate when he described the murder as resulting from conflict within the local IRB, but he could provide little more than that.

Even the original question of whether Dalton was a police spy is disputed. Both the Dáil Éireann and IRB Supreme Executive found there were sufficient grounds to declare him innocent, but this was not enough to stop those who believed otherwise from shooting him dead in the street.

There was to be no justice for James Dalton. His family continued the fight to clear his name, going so far as to write to Arthur Griffith. Dalton’s widow was granted £500 by the Dáil in recognition of the unlawfulness of his homicide. She died in July 1921, a little over a year after her husband. Their eldest daughter, who had been among those who had witnessed their father’s murder, heard the names of those responsible from her father as he had lain dying in the street. She never revealed who they were. According to her son, she never ceased to preach the virtues of forgiveness.[22]

It was the best legacy James Dalton was going to get, as a man who learnt that sometimes in war, it is not only the enemy who is trying to kill you.

 Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Times, 18/05/1920

Limerick Chronicle, 18/05/1920

Limerick Chronicle, 27/05/1920

Limerick Leader, 17/05/1920

Limerick Leader, 28/05/1920

Limerick Leader, 31/05/1920

Bureau of Military History / Witness Statements

O’Connell, Richard, WS 656

O’Shiel, Kevin, WS 1770 – Part 5

Portley, Morgan, WS 1559

Quilty, John J., WS 516

Robinson, Séumas, WS 1721

Thornton, Frank, WS 615

Books

Coogan, Oliver. Politics and War in Meath, 1923-23 (Dublin: Folens and Co. Ltd, 1983)

O’Callaghan, John. Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Campaign for Independence in Limerick, 1913-1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010)

O’Halpin, Eunan, ‘Problematic Killing during the Irish War of Independence and its Aftermath: Civilian Spies and Informers’, Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain, and Europe: Historical Perspectives (Sallins, Co Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2013)

Toomey, Thomas. The War of Independence in Limerick, 1912-1919 (Thomas Toomey, 2010)

National Library of Ireland Manuscripts

MS 11,406/2/3-5

MS 11,410/6/2-7

Military Service Pensions Collection

MA/MSPC/RO/134

 Notes  

[1] Limerick Chronicle, 18/05/1920, 27/05/1920

[2] Limerick Chronicle, 27/05/1920 ; O’Shiel, Kevin (BMH / WS 1770 – Part 5), p. 147

[3] Limerick Chronicle, 27/05/1920

[4] Limerick Leader, 17/05/1920

[5] Limerick Chronicle, 27/05/1920 ; Limerick Leader, 28/05/1920

[6] Limerick Leader, 31/05/1920. Compare the muted reaction of the jury with the coroner’s inquest into the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain which accused Llyod George, among others, of having a role.

[7] Coogan, Oliver. Politics and War in Meath, 1923-23 (Dublin: Folens and Co. Ltd, 1983), p.168

[8] O’Halpin, Eunan, ‘Problematic Killing during the Irish War of Independence and its Aftermath: Civilian Spies and Informers’, Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain, and Europe: Historical Perspectives (Sallins, Co Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2013) p. 343

[9] O’Shiel, p. 148

[10] Thornton, Frank (BMH / WS 615), p. 16-7

[11] Toomey, Thomas. The War of Independence in Limerick, 1912-1919 (Thomas Toomey, 2010), pp. 284-5

[12] O’Callaghan, John. Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Campaign for Independence in Limerick, 1913-1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), p. 176

[13] O’Connell, Richard (BMH / WS 656) pp. 37-8

[14] Quilty, John J. (BMH / WS 516), p. 19

[15] O’Connell, Richard (BMH / WS 656) pp. 37-8

[16] National Library of Ireland Manuscripts, MS 11,410/6/2

[17] One example of this was the eyewitness testimony of a distinctly unimpressed Séumas Robinson (BMH / WS 1721), p. 18

[18] Military Service Pensions Collection, MA/MSPC/RO/134, p. 11

[19] National Library of Ireland Manuscripts, MS 11,410/6/2-7 and MS 11,406/2/3-5 for the complete paperwork that has survived on the court-martial.

[20] Portley, Morgan (BMH / WS 1559) p. 29

[21] Irish Times, 18/05/1920

[22] O’Callaghan, p. 175 ; Toomey, p. 284

By Brighid O’Sullivan

The man known as Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland is shrouded in so many fantastical stories that one wonders if he was a man at all. The real Patrick was a simple human being who was kind, gentle, courageous, and confident in his beliefs. True, he was larger than life but not the way most people think.

A Roman nobleman

Maewyn Succat is the name given at birth to the man we know as Patrick of Ireland around the end of the 4th century. Most likely, he was born in Britain and the son of a Roman deacon named Calpornius who was also a tax collector. His grandfather was Potius during the reign of Constantine the Great, first Christian emperor of the Romans so it is easy to see how Patrick would be influenced in ‘the family business’ from an early age on.  As one of Roman nobility, a station of honor and privilege, Patrick would have had hereditary privileges as well.  His father would have had high hopes for his son, knowing he could one day rule over his less fortunate countrymen.

There is no clear answer to where Patrick lived although he does give us several hints through his writing. He talks about his family estate near a town called Bannaventa Berniae and although the location of this town is unknown, it is likely that wherever he lived, it must have been close to a seaport to enable his easy capture by Irish pirates.

This is why the explanation of a town called Bannaventa is less likely and thought to be a miscopied for it is seventy miles from the nearest port.  If he lived in Glannoventa, it would make more sense. Glannoventa was close to the western coastline and would have afforded the Irish a bandits a speedy escape.

At the age of sixteen, Patrick’s abduction from Roman occupied Britain by Irish raiders landed him in Ireland as a slave.

Slavery

Slavery in Ireland was much like Roman Britain except for one thing. Though probably rare, a Roman slave could change his lot in life by buying his own freedom. In pre-Christian Ireland, slaves could not buy their freedom or be set free. Irish law forbid it, believing it would upset the natural order of life. Since Ireland was a pastoral society, it was thought that to upset the natural world, would lead to crop failures or barren livestock.

So what was Patrick to do? If he yearned for a better life, he needed to escape. After six years of tending sheep, that is exactly what he did.

Neither Patrick nor Ireland was new to Christianity but Irish Christians were not the same as the rest of Western Europe. Irish Christianity had survived by blending slowly with Paganism although, no doubt Christianity appeared odd to the native Irish.

The difference was Patrick grew up under the Roman influence. For instance, he began fasting. This would have impressed a bizarre idea to those of Ireland. Under Irish Brehon law, fasting shamed a person; it was not a form of prayer. If someone committed a crime, a man received justice by ‘camping out’ on the defendant’s steps, right outside his door, neglecting to eat or drink until his oppressor paid him an ‘honor price.’

Living as a slave tending sheep near the Western Sea, Patrick must have thought of nothing but escape. Life for a slave was harsh and exhausting. Especially for a boy who grew up privileged.

After six years of this, he says that God spoke to him in a dream, telling him to go home and even where to get the boat.  These dreams must have given him great courage for not only would he be a fugitive, punishable by death if he were caught, but Ireland was a difficult terrain with  few roads, treacherous bogs, numerous hills and streams and no family to shelter him along the way.

There may have been a law about hospitality and now and again bruideans, which were like bed and breakfasts but for the most part it was dangerous to venture outside of a clan’s territory.  So where was the boat?  Ships would naturally only come into trading ports. Archaeological evidence points to areas around Dublin Bay, the Boyne Valley, or present day Belfast.  Patrick would have had to offer his services as a sailor unless he had something to bargain with.  That part we will never know.

There is something surprising  in Patrick’s letters about his encounter with the sailors who took him on board. Something so strange medieval scribes have tried to change it. Patrick writes that the sailors of the ship asked him to “suck their breasts” as a token of acceptance which he flatly refuses.  The ritual may not be as unusual as it seems, referred to by an old text between the Irish King, Fergus mac Léti and a dwarf, as well as in Algerian folk tales told in modern Africa.

Salvation

So what happened after Patrick escaped? He states that he and the crew plus a pack of dogs ‘wandered for twenty-eight days through empty country’ leading us to believe that the ship landed somewhere off course.  It is possible they were caught in a storm, landing them in Wales or Cornwall for he describes the land as deserted and Britain would have been heavily populated at the time.

After 2 weeks, the desperate captain demanded Patrick pray to his God for food because they were close to starving. Patrick responds with confidence and prays.  Soon, a large herd of pigs appears and later they find some wild honey, which Patrick refuses when he learns that the honey is a sacrifice to Pagan Gods.

Once home at last, Patrick’s father would have encouraged 22 year old Patrick in his Christian training, perhaps not realizing what Patrick’s goals were different from his own.  Following in Calpornius’ footsteps would have meant politics and tax collecting but Patrick had other ideas. He planned to go back to Ireland but first he had to complete his religious education.

The place where he trained may have been Lérins, a monastery on an island off the Tyrrhenian Sea. Some people think he trained in Gaul, others that he stayed in Britain but wherever Patrick trained his family ties and influence would have held some sway in getting him admitted as his early years of training were missing and his Latin was sketchy at best. We are not sure if Patrick was bishop or a deacon when he returned to Ireland but he was not the first Christian, perhaps not the first bishop either though certainly one of the most loved.

Converting the Irish

So how it was that Patrick was so successful in converting the Irish when others before him could not? What were his challenges? For one, he was a very simple man, compassionate and understanding of the Irish. Instead of working against them, he worked within their systems much as possible and made many friends along the way.  Still, Ireland was a very dangerous place and people were spread out, not in close proximity, as there were no towns like in other parts of Europe.

Tribal borders were strictly enforced and Patrick suffered many narrow escapes with his life, which he attributes to God’s interventions.  He soon realized that travel in this harsh land required careful planning and it was necessary to pay bribes  to tribal kings for safe passage through their territories. Often, the king’s sons became his bodyguards and kept him safe.

So who were Patrick’s converts?  A good majority of them were women.  Patrick states:  the number of virgins who have chosen this new life continues to grow so that I cannot keep track of them all. He was right. In choosing Christianity, women chose virginity.  Both slaves, widows, married and single women alike would have seen a great advantage in becoming celibate or remaining virgins.

Women would have few choices. In following Patrick’s teachings, they could have escaped constant childbirth, which had obvious risks and possibly the control of their husbands and brothers.  Slaves faced the threat of constant rape, widows being married off by male relations and parents needed their children to cemented alliances with rival tribes. Some of the women offered gifts to Patrick, often leaving jewelry on an altar but Patrick returned what they offered him.  He also explains that when asked to leave Ireland he was loath to abandon his female followers.

Not all of Patrick’s missions, no matter how carefully planned, ended in glory.

Close to Easter Sunday, a terrible thing happened. Patrick had just baptized a group of his followers on a beautiful spring day when they were attacked on their way home, still dressed in their baptismal robes with sweet oil on their heads. The men were all killed; women and children kidnapped to sell at slave markets in Britain, brutally ripped from their native land much as Patrick was as a young boy.  Patrick was both devastated and furious.  His beloved Irish, many he would have called friends were slaughtered like cattle. He knew who was responsible, a brutal warlord named Coroticus.

His letter to the Coroticus drips with anger and indignation. He calls his fellow Romans citizens of Hell and insists on the captive’s release while imploring fellow Christians in Britain to shun Coroticus and his soldiers. Do not have anything to do with them. Don’t eat, drink or accept charity from them but cry to God to free these Christian women and captives. We can hear Patrick’s desperation and sorrow in his letter. He assails Coroticus with endless scripture and describes the warlord’s actions as selling his fellow Christians to a brothel.

The church’s response to this letter? It infuriated the British church. How dare a bishop of Ireland take matters into his own hands? Patrick should have contacted the British bishop to discipline Coroticus. So why didn’t Patrick do this? Several reasons.  It was unlikely a British bishop would have chastised a man of Coroticus position when it did not involve British citizens.

In addition, to take actions against Coroticus, may have had consequences to the church. Patrick knew it would take time to go through the proper channels as well, and he was hoping to affect the release of the captives.  He simply could not wait but like all politics, including those of the church, there were consequences to Patrick’s actions.

Relations with mother Church

Patrick was not a favorite of the church.  He spoke Irish better than Latin, had less training, less discipline and cared more about the Pagan Irish than listening to his superiors. His statements of giving back gifts would have enraged a greedy church. He should have kept the gifts or sent them abroad to fund church expenses.  Patrick himself admits that he used church funds to bribe the Irish kings so that he could move freely throughout the island. The British bishop and clergy accused Patrick of hoarding Irish riches and keeping it for himself.  As his ministry grew, they saw promises of church riches, unexplored, unclaimed by the church.

They insisted he act responsibly toward the church. But what to do about Patrick? He was summoned back to Britain to face his charges.  Patrick knew that if he left Ireland, he would never come back.  He’d worked so long with his followers, had become loved and accepted and to leave would have meant the possible collapse of all he’d worked toward. He was not about to go down without a fight.

In a letter known as his Confession Patrick not only defends himself against charges of corruption, but also admits how imperfect he is and that he knows he is despised.  He talks about his lack of literary skill and that he is ashamed and awkward, apologizes while explaining his story in simple words.  The confession appears to be his will. He is asking to die in Ireland and is writing when he is an old man.

He talks about revelations from God, is forced to admit that he did something terrible as a youth. This sin in his youth was betrayed to the church by a trusted friend.  Perhaps it was the icing on the cake, their last straw with this wayward bishop.

How ironic that we now have a special day called St. Patrick’s Day, a time filled with celebrations and joy, named after a man who was compassionate and gentle, a day set aside in remembrance of Patrick’s life’s work, an appreciation he never obtained when he was alive.

Brighid O’Sullivan writes about Irish history @ Celticthoughts.com

by Jason Myers.

The relationship between Ireland and the First World War is a fascinating one. New angles and discoveries continue to emerge, and it seems that hardly a month goes by without a new article in the Irish Times that contains content on the Great War.

Naturally, the centenary of that conflict is a major reason for the re-assessment of Ireland’s role in the war, but for someone who has studied this relationship for the past decade the abundance of new information is heartening.

Of course, there are a few points of fact that remain an issue, namely the precise number of men who served and the number who died in the war. Several local historians have chipped away at the latter issue, usually on an individual county level, but as far as readily available statistics on Irish fatalities in the First World War, Patrick J. Casey’s “Irish casualties in the first world war” from the Irish Sword (1997) is still the go-to reference, at least until all the emerging research is aggregated.

I’ve used Casey’s article quite a bit over the years, but I’ve usually taken it at face value. What I hope to do here is to offer some additional analysis on the numbers that Casey bore out in his article.

It’s no secret that the memory of the First World War was used for different purposes in various corners of Ireland. It may be a bit reductive, but at its core the mythology surrounding Irish service in the British Army became a shortcut that informed who died for their country and how.

For many Northern unionists, the beating of the war drum in 1914 demonstrated unionist resolve and commitment to the United Kingdom. This mythology became a cornerstone of loyalist ideology in The Troubles, and associated imagery can still be seen in the murals of the Shankill Road in Belfast today.

In the Free State-turned-Republic, the First World War was basically an historical footnote. Something that people knew happened, but passed over it unless they were truly interested in the subject.

After dealing with issues surrounding these ideas for years I wanted to find a way to test these myths. Was it possible to determine if one section of the Irish population was really better at dying for their country in the First World War?

In a nod to T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards and their commitment to “value-free” history, I wanted to see what would happen if human logic and passion was removed from the analysis. Therefore, I opted to do a basic statistical analysis of the number of Irish fatalities, as presented in Casey’s article, in an attempt to answer this central question.

Casey presents his data in a table that cross-tabulates county of origin with regiment of service. Now Casey’s list of regiments is extensive, but the majority of Irishmen who fought in the war did so in an Irish regiment. There were nine Irish regiments:

• The Connaught Rangers
• The Irish Guards
• The Prince of Wales Leinster Regiment
• The Royal Dublin Fusiliers
• The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
• The Royal Irish Fusiliers
• The Royal Irish Regiment
• The Royal Irish Rifles
• The Royal Munster Fusiliers

 Recruitment

(Please click on the maps below to enlarge them)

The map below details the recruiting areas for each regiment as well as their respective recruiting depots. (Note that the Irish Guards was the only regiment that technically recruited from all thirty-two counties. Since it functioned as a catchall the other eight regiments are highlighted here.)

Originally, the analysis I performed focused on these nine regiments and considered whether one’s county of origin or service regiment made a difference among the war dead.

I then took this same approach that I used for all thirty-two counties and applied it to each of the four traditional Irish provinces, Ulster, Leinster, Connaught, and Munster, as well as an additional test on the six counties that would eventually comprise Northern Ireland. (I realize that using the term Northern Ireland in this period is anachronistic, but it is a useful analytical lens because of post-war myth-making.)

For brevity’s sake I’ve only present the final results. If anyone is interested in the nitty-gritty details of how this analysis was done feel free to contact me.

The central assumption throughout out this process is that most men likely joined the army in the same county cited as their county of origin. Recruiting data by county is extremely elusive, as most of those records were destroyed in the Four Courts fire in 1922. Ideally, it’d be preferable to pit enlistment rates against the total population and number of Killed in Action (KIA), but that data simply doesn’t exist.

So with this lengthy preamble for context, what were the results of this analysis?

When comparing county of origin with regiment of service for the entire island the analysis stated that regiment did not matter. The fact that most Irish volunteers served in Irish regiments likely accounts for this fact.

However, in the county analysis several stood out among the rest. Antrim was in a group all on its own at the top of the list. After Antrim, the counties of Dublin, Down, Cork, Londonderry, Armagh, Tyrone, and Tipperary constituted the next group. The third classification category included the other twenty-four counties.

 So if you served in the First World War being from any of the counties listed could have a negative effect on your likelihood of survival, especially for those from Antrim. This finding isn’t really surprising, as counties with a higher population had more men to contribute to the war effort, and therefore potentially higher aggregate KIA numbers.

Interestingly, when getting to a more granular provincial level, Antrim was no longer an outlier in either the nine Ulster counties or the six of Northern Ireland. Dublin, however, remained an outlier in Leinster. County of origin wasn’t statistically relevant for the counties in the other two provinces.

Regiment may not have mattered at the island level, but at the provincial level it made a difference. This shouldn’t come as a major surprise, considering the recruiting areas of some regiments.

Casualties

(See the appendix below for the total Irish casualty figures per county)

In the analyses of the Ulster and Northern Ireland counties regiment came back as statistically relevant, but after running further tests it was determined that the likelihood of dying in any of the regiments was essentially the same.

Service regiment was also a relevant indictor for Munster and Connaught. For the former, predictably, the Royal Munster Fusiliers was the worst regiment to serve in in terms of KIA.

The next two worst regiments were the Royal Irish Regiment and the Irish Guards, followed by a grouping of the remaining six regiments. In Connaught, the Connaught Rangers was the worst regiment to serve in, but there was no statistical difference amongst the other eight regiments.

Not all regiments saw the same type of combat action, and when and where regiments served likely impacted the number of fatalities associated with that regiment. Unfortunately, that data is not readily available at this time (as far as I know).

 Perhaps the most telling result from all these tests is the proportion of Irish KIA to total male population aged 15-54 in Ireland. There is no statistically significant relationship between this ratio and county of origin. Across the entire island the range of the population-to-KIA ratio is only 2.33.

The average proportion for all thirty-two counties was 1.66%. Antrim (which is home to most of Belfast) and County Dublin, with its eponymous principal city, would seem safe best for having the highest ratio of KIA; both shared a similar ratio of 2.45%. The distinction of highest ratio of KIA to male population went to County Down at 3.09%.

This analysis is perhaps the most telling in my estimation. While the raw number of fatalities vary widely from one county to the next, there is far less disparity between KIA-to-population ratios. These results then beg the question: does it make sense for any group to mythologize the sacrifices made by Irishmen during the First World War?

It’s difficult to conclusively state that in light of this analysis that one section of Ireland gave drastically more for the war effort than another.

Considering that both sides of the Home Rule question used enlistments in the First World War to justify their position for or against Home Rule then dying for that cause demonstrates the ultimate commitment to it, as morbid as that sounds.

Of course, we can enter the typical caveats that not everyone who enlisted did so for political reasons, but they myth factory never concerned itself with that point. Statistically the data suggests that the differences in terms of lives lost during the war between the various areas of Ireland do not warrant the mythologizing that those men’s sacrifices generated.

In the absence of additional data that can either corroborate or disprove whatever narratives have been constructed over the course of the past century historians will have to continue to make educated guesses, like this one.

Jason Myers is the author of The Great War in Irish Memory and Culture, 1918-2010. 

 Appendix I – Irish First World War Deaths by County

 Appendix II A Note on maps and statistics

In order to help illustrate these findings I created a series of maps. A few comments on how these maps were made are in order. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and likewise more than one way to make a map. Several different analytical methods are available when symbolizing data such as these. Using ESRI ArcGIS as my mapping application, I opted for the Natural Breaks (Jenks) analysis. This option determines natural breaks in the data and groups the data accordingly. Because what we’re ultimately dealing with here is the validity of myth-making, I opted for accuracy in the map and associated legends, and not rounding to cleaner breaks.

I considered a Quintile representation, which in the thirty-two county map would break the data symbols into even categories. For example, if one opted for 4 classes in a Quintile representation, there would be four different colours used in the map and each colour would contain eight counties. Because Ireland’s population is not so evenly distributed, I opted for varied sized groupings along natural breaks in the data.

In creating all the maps in the series I used the same settings so that comparing one map to another would be as much of an apples-to-apple comparison as possible.

Regarding statistics; the thing to remember is that the variables in question are analyzed on their relevance to each other. Sometimes things are statistically relevant and sometimes they are not, but either way the results can be informative.

If an initial analysis suggests that there is statistical relevance between the variables under examination it is possible to analyze those results further using something called pairwise comparison.

Essentially, this process classifies the relevant results into groups to find out how significant the individual variables of the analysis were. In other words, the pairwise comparison ranks and groups the variables according to relevance.

The19^th Century Landlords of Greater Buncrana  (The Civil parish of Lower Fahan) by Gearoid Mac Lochlainn.

Finley Dun, who in 1879 after his travels in the USA authored the book “American Farming and Food”, was requested by the Times to inquire into ­the subjects of land tenure, estate management and the condition of tenants and labourers in Ireland.  That he undertook in the winter of 1880 setting out to travel the country and on 31st December he found himself in Buncrana where at the fair being held on that day he talked to a number of people about local conditions and afterwards wrote the following:

“A considerable number complain of repeated advances of their rents. They plead that they dare not break up the superabundant bog, stock the heather and huge boulders out of the mountain side, or otherwise make improvements without risk in a year or two of the reclaimed land being charged as cultivated land, its rent being probably increased three or four fold.  Mr. Mc Glinchey who held under lease at £14 : 10s is recorded to have made improvements variously estimated at £600 to £800.  When last year other tenants had their abatement he was passed over and told that his rent should be £42.  ‘Would any man reclaim bog or build houses after that robbery?’  warmly exclaims my informant.                                                                     

 Instances are cited of men with good coats and hats met at market by landlord or agent and told that such evidences of prosperity show that they can bear another rise.  A new coat of thatch or a fresh whitewashing of the house has often, I am assured, brought a revaluation.  Even if such cases are only occasional and exceptional they shake confidence and paralyse enterprise.  

Some of the Ennishowen landlords have been unreasonable, despotic and sometimes short-sighted.  The late Daniel Todd, before dividing and selling his estates, raised the rents to 30 and even 70 per cent over Griffith´s Valuation, small regard being given to the source from which the enhanced value accrued.   One section of this estate close to Buncrana, bought by an Englishman, with a rental of about £1500,   is understood to be 50% above Griffith’s valuation.   Under accumulated arrears from which they cannot extricate themselves, some of the poorer mountain tenantry are hopelessly dragged down. 

Captain Mc Clintock has a rental of about £1700.  Combining against enhanced rents and refusing lesser reductions tardily offered his tenants have recently settled up, receiving all round a reduction of five shillings in the pound.” [1]

Who were these landlords perceived by the people of Buncrana to stifle their every effort to improve themselves?

The Planters – the Chichester family

When Cathaoir O´Dochartaigh [Cahir O’Doherty] discovered that siding with the English in the Nine Years War did not bring the expected results he rose in a senseless doomed rebellion which provided the Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, with the opportunity to further enrich himself.

After the rebellion was crushed there was a mass seizure of native owned land in what is known as the Plantation of Ulster. Chichester was granted all the lands of Inishowen, except those held by the new, Protestant, state Church. Chichester was now the greatest land holder in Ireland and that vast wealth passed down through his collateral descendents until, at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was in the hands of George Chichester, 2^nd Marquis of Donegall.

Due to an extravagant lifestyle and heavy gambling George Chichester ran up huge debts and now the pigeons were coming home to roost.  As he did not have the wherewithal to satisfy his creditors he was interned in debtor´s prison in 1795 from which he had to be bailed out by his future father-in-law, a very shady lawyer who as a condition for paying his debts demanded that Chichester marry his illegitimate daughter and then together with his son,“a smart blackguard” in the words of a family acquaintance,[2] exploited that relationship to the utmost.[3]

But the skies were still not clear.  To the money lenders from whom he had borrowed as much as £50,000 (about €4,000,000 in today´s money) he had given bonds with his Inishowen property as security and now he put great effort into trying to outwit the hawks who were hovering overhead watching for any opportunity to recover their money.

He needed ready cash and he needed it now.  His household furniture was put up for auction and he sold 1000 year leases with only a nominal rent to anyone who could come up with that cash.   Among the leases were those of the Manor of Buncrana  and those who came forward with the money were Harveys and Isaac Todd.

The Russian Connection

Thomas Harvey was a partner in one of the biggest British merchant companies in the Empire of Russia based in St. Petersburg.  It was involved in the import-export trade sending iron, grains, tallow, hemp, flax and linen etc. to Britain, much of it to be re-exported around the world at a very handsome profit, and importing into Russia machinery and luxury goods from the British Empire.   In 1797 this company was the largest British merchant company in St. Petersburg [4] and in this same year its senior partner died.

He was Archibald Ross a native of Derry but resident in Russia.  He was a very wealthy man and in his will made in 1785 he states:-

 “I give and bequeath the whole residue and remainder of my estate and effects wheresoever situated or invested to Archibald Paris, son of my partner John Paris of London, and to my partner Thomas Harvey of St. Petersburg to be divided in equal shares between them, each one half, and in case of the death of one of them before my demise my will is that the survivor of them shall enjoy the whole of my fortune.”

In fact both of them survived Ross and Thomas who had married Archibald Paris´s sister in 1789 used some of his inherited fortune to buy up townlands in Inishowen.[5]   Perhaps he was uncertain about the future and was hedging his bets as Catherine II (the Great) was beginning to put pressure on British commercial interests in Russia, a policy followed by her successors.

Up until then Britain enjoyed favoured nation status which Catherine considered was becoming less and less advantageous to Russia. She began to increase the tariffs on British imports and ordered Russian merchants to demand higher prices for the raw materials that they were selling.

Thomas seems to have disengaged from business in Russia about 1800 because after that date his last two children were born in England whereas the first five were born in St. Petersburg.  Also in the family he became known as Thomas Harvey of Mintiaghs where he had built a hunting lodge although he spent very little time there apart from holidays.

Thomas died in 1819 and his will states:- “to son John, his heirs and assigns for ever, lands in the  Barony of Inishowen.” [6]  This John, the eldest son, who was born in St. Petersburg married his first cousin, the daughter of the above mentioned Archibald Paris.  First cousin marriages are legal in Britain and this became quite common among the moneyed classes when marriages were arranged to make sure that family wealth remained in the family.

This is the John Harvey whose name appears as the “Immediate Lessor” for a number of townlands in Griffith´s Valuation 1857 although he had died the previous year.  He was succeeded by his eldest son Edward Henry.   The year before Finley Dun visited Buncrana the following notice appeared in the newspapers:

“Sale.  Offers open up to 4^th March 1879.     Estate of Edward Henry Harvey, a Lunatic.                                                                                     .                    William Marsh Harvey and Rev. Frederick Mortimer Harvey – owners”.[7]

The American Connection.

Robert B. Harvey (a distant cousin of the former) up until 1788 went by the name of Robert Bateson.  In that year he inherited a large fortune from his maternal uncle David Harvey but on the condition that he take the extra surname “Harvey”.  David had amassed that fortune in transatlantic trade mostly in Irish linen which he exported from London to America.  Robert now used some of the money to buy up leases in Donegal and when his son, George who then owned the Inishowen estate, died in1881 just 17 days after Finley Dun visited Buncrana, the family had acquired 39 townlands in the county.

Isaac Todd brought his money from Canada.  Originally from Coleraine, where the family of Scottish descend had settled in the 1600´s, he emigrated to Canada and by 1765 was in Montreal where he set up as a fur trader.  Some eleven years later in 1776 he established the trading company, Todd & McGill, in partnership with James Mc Gill, a Scottish merchant who had also settled in Montreal and whose will in 1813 left a bequest of money and land to set up McGill College later to be instituted as McGill University in 1821.[8]

After the confiscation of Inishowen under the Ulster Plantation in 1609, the townlands of the lower Crana valley were leased to Henry Vaughan who lived in the O´Doherty castle (Keep) around which had grown up a settlement at the Bun (bottom, mouth) Cranncha (of the Crana river).

In 1718 George Vaughan built a new “castle” and moved the village out of his sight into the townland of Ardravan, to a position where the name no longer accorded with the reality, as he wanted to develop pleasure gardens where it had stood.  When the Vaughan family died out in 1763 the transplanted town of Buncrana and surrounding townlands changed hands with dizzying frequency through leases, releases, partnerships, renting, sub-renting, mortgages and bankruptcy involving people of means from Derry, Belfast and various parts of England until Isaac Todd appeared on the scene in 1801.

His association with Buncrana came through his nephew, William Thornton Todd, married to Wilhelmina Patterson the daughter of a Derry merchant, Daniel Patterson, who had been leasing townlands in the area.[9]

When the latter died in 1799 William Todd acquired a peppercorn 1000 year lease of Ardravan, including Buncrana town, Ballymacarry, Ballymagan, Tullyarvan and Tullydish along with Buncrana Castle and the salmon fishery for £10680.[10]  The money probably came from uncle Isaac because the properties were turned over to him in 1801 and he took up residence in Buncrana Castle for some years even becoming First Lieutenant 3^rd Company of Buncrana Cavalry in 1811.[11]

Isaac never married and although he had an illegitimate daughter when he died in 1819 he left his estate to the aforementioned nephew, who built the courthouse and jail in Buncrana at a cost of £1300.[12]   The latter’s son Daniel, the Grand Secretary of the Grand County Donegal Orange Lodge,[13] who lived in Buncrana Castle is the person referred to by Finley Dun.   When he died his brother, James Henry Todd of Westbrook, inherited the estate and also the estates of his second cousin Lieutenant-General William Thornton of Muff.

In consequence he had to take the surname of Thornton in addition to and after the surname Todd, authorised by royal licence dated 8^th September 1866.[14]

Mr. Todd may have thought that his family line would enjoy a 1000 year lease but if he did he failed to reckon with Sir George Augustus Chichester 2^nd Marquis of Donegall, who had spent a lifetime wrangling with creditors, money lenders and other people of little importance and who now disputed Todd´s lease backed by his army of lawyers.  The outcome may be judged from the inserted newspaper advertisement published in the months of October and November 1833.

­­  As Finley Dun states above Daniel Todd divided what was left of his estate and sold off 884 acres through the Encumbered Estates Court on the 30^th April 1850 to clear a debt of £20809 [10]  and the remaining 295 acres in the townland of Tullyarvin were inherited by the above mentioned brother in 1866.

The  English man referred to was Thomas Alexander as is clear from the following:-

“The Marquis of Landsdowne, on Friday night, laid upon the table of the House of Lords the following return:-

‘Names and residences, as far as can be ascertained, of the English and Scotch purchasers of lands sold by the Encumbered Estates Court, referred to in the report of the Commissioners to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, bearing date the 3^rd day of May 1851 and setting forth the amount of money allowed to each of such purchasers out of their purchase money, in discharge of encumbrances heretofore vested upon the lands purchased by such encumbrancers’.”[15]

The first names on the list were Daniel Todd as seller and Thomas Alexander as purchaser whose address is given as York Place, Portman Square, London.  But in fact Thomas was born and reared in Limavady, 5^th son of a family of Scotch planters who came to Ireland in 1615.  He moved to London where he established himself as a timber merchant  and became quite prosperous, so prosperous indeed that he was able to purchase Frowick estate in Essex [16]  and in the early 1830´s buy leases in the Buncrana area.

When he married in Dublin on 20^th February 1835 the event was recorded in the papers as the marriage of Thomas Alexander of Buncrana and Frowick in Essex.   However he continued to live in London, his children were born in Marylebone, Middlesex, and he died at 70 Lancaster Gate London in 1867.

But why Buncrana?  Firstly because Chichester´s continuing need for cash led to his granting “perpetual leases”,  basically the sale of townlands in his Inishowen property.   Secondly we recall that the Todds came from the same general area.  All the above mentioned families were interconnected either through marriage or descent as were those we still have to consider.

The old adage “birds of a feather flock together” can apply not only to the Irish poor who congregated in ghettos in British and American cities but also to the wealthy planter families whose search for rich pickings were mainly responsible for the plight of the former.

Ardravan, including the town of Buncrana, as advertised in the above newspaper extract, together with the townlands of Ballymagan, Cleenagh, Drumaderry and Trillick was bought by William Kerr Mc Clintock, a Derry merchant who resided at Green Haw House, later rebuilt as Hampstead Hall, in Shantallow on the Culmore Road.  Pigot & Co’s Provincial Directory of Ireland 1824 lists William Kerr Mc Clintock as owner of a “Wholesale Hardware, Jewellery, Trimming and Hosiery Warehouse” in the Diamond.

In 1818 he married Sarah, daughter of William Macky also a merchant in Derry and a next door neighbour.  William Kerr died in 1841 and so it is Sarah who appears in Griffith´s Valuation as immediate lessor of the said townlands comprising some 1862 acres except Trillick which was left to Ellen their oldest surviving daughter.  By the time when Finley Dun visited Buncrana Sarah also had passed away and the lands were then in the hands of her son, the Captain Mc Clintock to whom he referred.

   The middlemen

These were the main landlords but they were not the only people to join the feeding frenzy.  There was another group who wanted a piece of the action – the middlemen.   Thomas Douglas Bateson, a land agent who managed the estate of his cousins, the Bateson Harveys, in his evidence to the Devon Commission stated “the lands up to 1837 were in the occupation of middlemen.   At that time a great portion fell into the hands of the proprietor”, but not all as is evident from Griffith´s Valuation.

One such middleman was Dr. Francis Rogan, a surgeon in Derry who in 1832 resided at 13 Pump Street but by 1846 had moved to St. Columb´s Court.   A man of great energy he held one of the largest provincial practices in Ireland, was physician and surgeon in Derry goal, surgeon in the County Infirmary, physician at Derry Lunatic Asylum and medical officer of the Fever Hospital.[17]

But he was also an entrepreneur and a landlord.  He had extensive commercial interests in Castlefinn, most of which he owned and which he regularly visited by boat.  On the river bank he had a corn store and a quay built at the head of navigation on the Finn-Foyle river system from which a large quantity of grain was shipped to Strabane and Derry.[18]  Further he was involved in the cotton industry.

In 1848 the Londonderry Journal reported that “280 looms are at constant work upon Dr. Rogan´s estate at Castlefinn.”  Obviously a very prominent business man, in 1845 he was one of those who gave evidence on the merits of Derry, Armagh and Belfast as the site of the new university which in fact would become Queen´s University Belfast.[19]

And yet he could not resist Inishowen.   In the area under consideration he held one townland under the Bateson Harveys and of that the Rev. E. Mc Ginn (later Bishop Mc Ginn) spoke to the Devon Commission in these words:-  “ with respect to recent improvements , in one case the people went up to the side of the mountain in the townland of Meenamullaghan, and cultivated the land; they took that at £20.

The landlord’s son went up the hill and looked down at the improvements they had made and raised them to £42 and served them with ejectments to leave the places or come up with him to the £42.”  This was the son of a middleman and happened about 1835.  In Griffith’s Valuation the immediate leesor of Meenamullaghan is recorded as “Reps. of Dr. Rogan” who had died 2 years previously.  When Finley Dun visited Buncrana it was back in the hands of George Harvey [20].

The townland of Foffanagh was also in the hands of a middleman; in this case the Rev. Peter Benson Maxwell who also held under the Bateson Harveys.  At the confiscation of Inishowen a Peter Benson was granted the lands of Elaghmore, Dundrain and Elaghbeg straddling the present day border.[21]

A descendant, another Peter Benson whose wife, Catherine Cary, inherited land in Birdstown purchased in 1718 from a relative of Catherine´s an estate in Faughanvale for £800.   His granddaughter, Ann Benson, the only surviving descendant and heiress, married Richard Charleton  in 1775 and he changed his name to Maxwell in order to inherit his uncles estates as the following extract from the  “General Armory”[22]  demonstrates:-

Maxwell of Birdstown, Co. Donegal; exemplified to Richard Charleton, Esq., upon his assuming, by royal licence, 1790, the name of Maxwell instead of Charleton, in compliance with the testamentary injunction of his maternal uncle William Maxwell, Esq., of Birdstown.

When the now Richard Maxwell died in 1822 his son, the above mentioned Rev. Peter Benson Maxwell, who was rector of Desertegny, inherited all his lands in Inishowen, Faughanvale and Tyrone, some 8885 acres but it seems that it wasn´t enough and so we find him in Griffith´s Valuation (1857) as a middleman, immediate lessor of Foffanagh with an extra 460 acres.  However by 1880 when Finley Dun was asking questions at the fair in Buncrana it was back in the possession of George Harvey. [20]

Kinnego was also leased out by the Bateson Harveys, in this case to the Harts of Kilderry.  This family was very much involved in military affairs. They first burst onto the scene in Inishowen when Captain Henry Hart was victim of a ruse by Cathaoir O´Dochartaigh to obtain arms from Culmore Fort for his rebellion.  At first under a cloud of suspicion he managed to re-ingratiate himself through the good offices of Chichester who had benefited greatly from the rebellion.

In 1609 Henry was in possession of lands lying along the Foyle from Ballynagard to Ardmore and two year later he was granted 1000 acres as an undertaker in the Plantation of Ulster. [23]  Around 1679 his grandson, another Henry, built the house at Kilderry and it became the family residence though rebuilt, modified and added to over the years until finally sold in 1944.  In 1816 George Vaughan Hart inherited the family property.  His military career had seen him participate in the American War of Independence, afterwards in the West Indies and then on to India where he picked up booty to the value of some £4000 after one of the campaigns.  However it all ended in disgrace when he was court-martialled for embezzlement and suspended from his position.[24]

Nevertheless in 1800 he returned to Ireland a very rich man having made money in India and the disgrace did not prevent him from being appointed General  in the Northern Command and continuing in the military until he retired in 1815.  In the meantime his attention had turned to politics and he was elected MP for Donegal on an anti-Catholic ticket.  He was the vice president of the Londonderry Brunswick Club formed to deny Catholics the right to be elected to the British Parliament.[25]  The General retained his seat until he died in 1832.  He was a man who liked things and persons in their “proper” place as the following sentences taken from his will would illustrate:-

“Whereas I have reason to think that my eldest son John Richard James is engaged or actually married to a daughter of James Fisher of Duke Street, St. James´, London, tailor, and by such connection would disgrace himself and his family, I am determined to deprive him of the estate limited to him should he have so married or hereafter do so.  Therefore should he have married etc my estate is to go to the next, just as if my son John were dead, and without issue and I revoke all bequests to him and leave to him instead £3000 to be vested in and under control of my executors to be paid in same manner as to my son Edward Hart” [26]

John did not proceed to disgrace himself and the family, although he left Miss Fisher with a son, and so did inherit Kilderry and the other Hart properties but he did not long outlast his father dying in 1838. A younger brother, also called George Vaughan Hart, now inherited the family properties and it is he who appears in Griffith´s Valuation as the immediate lessor of Kinnego.   In 1876 he is listed as the proprietor  of 6599 acres in Donegal and 434 acres in Derry.

It is clear then that the finance to buy or lease these lands came from the wider world and Inishowen was seen as a good place to invest that money.  All of this, of course, was above the heads of the ordinary people of Buncrana but they also had their relationship with the wider world.

As seasonal migrant workers they left their sweat in the fields of Scotland and England trying to scrape together the money for the rent which would keep their “betters” living in the luxury to which they were accustomed while they as tenants derived very little of the comforts of life.  With the passing years more and more joined the throngs that were sailing down the Foyle on their way to the Americas in the hope of a better life.

Conclusion

For the landlords Inishowen was just an investment.  They treated with contempt the people whose ancestors had lived in the land since the end of the last ice age, some 11000 years ago.

Their attitude could best be summed up in the words of a member of another branch of the Harvey family, George of Malin Hall who died in 1773.  He claimed that he found the people ´uncivilized, ignorant and barbarous´ but that he ´tamed them and introduced order, settling more difficulties by the whiskey bottle and horsewhip than by a mittemus or the beadle´[27]  and this at a time when the Penal Laws were in their full rigor and education was legally forbidden to those same people.  That that attitude continued into the 19^th century and the people kept in a state of subordnance is clear from an article reported in the Belfast Newsletter in January 1829 which stated the following:-

“On Monday last, a most numerous meeting of the Protestants of the County of Donegall, was held in the Square of Lifford, for the purpose of petitioning Parliament against further concessions to R. Catholics.  It had been originally arranged that the meeting should be held in the Courthouse, but the vast numbers of those who attended rendered this plan utterly impracticable.  Unlike the semi-barbarian hordes that for the most part constitute the average material of “civil and religious liberty” meetings, the meeting at Lifford presented an influential assemblage of wealth and respectability and intelligence”.                                                                                   

There on the platform among other speakers were John Hart and Daniel Todd.

 Notes­­­

1     Finley Dun “Landlords and Tenants in Ireland”  Longmans Green and Co.  1881

2     Drennan-Mc Tier letters. Vol.3 edited by Jean Agnew.    Martha Mc Tier´s letter of 4^th June 1803 to her brother.

3     W. A. Maguir, Living like a Lord: the 2^nd Marquis of Donegall 1769-1844.

4     Marie-Louise Karttunen “Making a Communal World: English Merchants in Imperial St.Petersburg”  Helsinki  University Press 2004.

5     Rev. F.L. Molloy 1814 Statistical Account – Parish of Clonmany.

6     Will appears in “Visitation of England and Wales-Notes Vol.I”

7     Donegal Archives Lifford

8     Nearly 200 Years of History.  www.mcgill.ca/about/history.

9    The Registry of Deeds, Henrietta Street, Dublin

10   Incumbered Estates Commission (Ireland)  Return to House of Commons for the sales up to the 1^st January 1852

11   Belfast Newsletter 21^st June 1811

12  Samuel Lewis  A Topographical Dictionary 1830´s  Buncrana

13  House of Commons Papers Vol.XV: Report from the Select Committee on Orange Lodges 1835

14  Burke´s Landed Gentry of Ireland 1912 (page 698)

15  Belfast Newsletter 23^rd July 1851

16   1841 Census of England  and also Rev. Charles Rogers “Memorials of the Earl of Sterling and the House of Alexander” Vol. II Edinburgh 1877

17   Dublin Almanack 1847  and  Thom´s Directory of Ireland 1850

18   Lieutenant Wilkinson´s Statistical Report of the Parish of Donoughmore 1836 (Castlefin)

19   Commission to enquire into site for college in Ulster, Ireland; 1845.  Pages 10-18.

20   The Cancelled Books which were a continual updating of Griffith´s Valuation can be examined at the Valuation Office, Irish Life Centre, Lr. Abbey St., Dublin.

21   List of those holding land under Sir Arthur Chichester in 1622 as it appears in “That Audacious Traitor” by Brian Bonner.  P. 221

22  Sir Bernard Burke (Ulster King of Arms) The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.  Harrison, London.  1884

23  Henry Travers Hart.  The Family History of Hart of Donegal.  Michell, Hughes & Clarke, London. 1907

24   PRONI.  Introduction to Hart Papers D3077

25   The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820/1832.  Ed. R.D. Fisher 2009.    Member Biographies.

26  Will of G.V. Hart 1832.  (The Family History of  Hart of Donegal)..

27   The Harvey Families of Inishowen, Co. Donegal and Maen, Cornwall  by G.H. Harvey.  (Copy available at County Library, Letterkenny)

Edited by Mel Farrell, Jason Knirck and Ciara Meehan,

Published by Irish Academic Press, Dublin 2015

Reviewer: John Dorney

Politics and life in Ireland in the 1920s was dominated by the aftermath of political upheaval from 1912-1924 (now commonly referred to as the ‘Irish revolution’) that led to the partial independence and partition of Ireland.

This volume is a collection of articles on the fallout from nationalist revolution and civil war. Most essays concentrate on the Irish Free State – only one out of ten (Sarah Campbell’s ‘A Cold House for Catholics?’) deals with Northern Ireland – and, as contemporaries did at the time, wonders about how to explain and how to judge the results of Ireland’s violent break with the Union.

We might say that the shadow of historian John Regan is ever present in this book, despite him not contributing a word to it. Regan is mentioned in almost every chapter, mostly to decry his thesis that the ‘Irish revolutionary period’ was followed by a ‘counter-revolution’, in which the more conservative elements of the nationalist movement – those who had been ‘cheated’ of their prize of Home Rule by the mass mobilisation of 1918-21 – put down popular militancy in the Civil War of 1922-23.

Successive contributors to this volume explicitly deny the value of this analysis, Mel Farrel arguing that Cumann na nGaedheal (the pro-Treaty party formed in 1923) was not in fact a reformation of the Home Rule party but a genuine continuation of the Sinn Fein separatist movement. Others wheel out the time-tested argument that the pro-Treatyites saved the nascent Free State from the anti-democratic and militarist ultra-nationalists on the ‘Irregular’ or anti-Treaty side.

Terence Dooley notes that the Land Act of 1923 was an impressive piece of politics on the Free State’s part in peacefully resolving the land issue, defusing agrarian agitation, and contrasts it with the pitfalls involved in more radical land policies, citing those pursued by Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF in early 2000s Zimbabwe that beggared the farming class and caused a collapse in food production.

According to Elaine Byrne the Free State Senate of 1922-1937, which came under sustained attack during the Civil War and was abolished altogether by Fianna Fail and Eamon de Valera in 1934, was a ‘unique experiment in idealism’ in incorporating former unionists and intellectuals like W.B. Yeats.

Mckayla Sutton shows how the Free State tried to divert nationalist idealism away from political violence and towards constructive projects like the Shannon hydroelectric scheme that enabled electricity to be brought to most towns in rural Ireland.

What is the problem with any of this? After all it is true that pro-Treaty nationalists did institute a genuine Irish democracy, in spite of the Civil War of 1922-23 and did let their former armed opponents participate in it – ceding power peacefully in 1932. It is true that they saved their new state from bankruptcy (a real possibility in the early 1920s), established fairly equitable security forces and managed to calm class and agrarian violence, which looked to be getting out of control in 1923.

We should not underestimate these achievements. But they do not explain why the ‘Irregulars’ (a pejorative name which historians should not use except in quotation in my opinion) had such substantial support, even for their somewhat incoherent position during the Civil War, and formed a movement that by the end of the 1920s was well on the way to winning power by democratic means in Fianna Fail. As Timothy O’Neil points out here, they did develop a fairly coherent analysis of both the political and economic shortcomings of the Free State and a programme to remedy it.

Part of the problem here is that ‘revolution’ still has a romantic air and ‘counter-revolution’ has connotations of reaction and barrier to progress and equality. In reality of course many revolutions actually make things much worse. Their achievements are paradoxical and their disappointments crushing. The Soviet Union’s principle accomplishment, for instance, was to keep the Tsarist Empire territorially intact and militarily stronger during its life-span, while it manifestly failed create economic prosperity and equality as it had promised. It was also much more repressive that its autocratic predecessor.

‘Counter-revolution’ is therefore probably an unhelpfully judgemental term, leaving people unnecessarily defensive. It is also true that the likes of O’Duffy, O’Higgins and Mulcahy had been ardent nationalist revolutionaries prior to 1921, not closet Home Rulers.

But another problem is that, as John Regan himself pointed out in his recent ‘Myth and the Irish State’ it has been necessary for mainstream southern commentators and historians to legitimise the origins of the Irish state against armed republicans, during the Northern Ireland conflict and even in the present day, who wanted to overturn the 1922 settlement in both parts of Ireland. This certainly still seems to inform a lot of debate on the Irish revolutionary period south of the border.

This has led to a certain blindness about the shortcomings of the Free State in its early years, certainly as seen through the eyes of those, around a third of the population at least going by election results, who identified with anti-Treaty republicanism. We can separate these shortcomings into three categories; incomplete independence, state repression and economic failure and inequality.

The Free State had the British monarch as its head of state, which as Jason Knirck, in a chapter on the Farmers’ Party notes, almost no one wanted but the British insisted on in the Treaty negotiations. The Free State’s ambitions towards a united Ireland died in 1925 when the Boundary Commission proposed no real changes in the border (and indeed proposed ceding part of Donegal to Northern Ireland).

And it conspicuously cooperated with formerly ‘imperialist’ elements in putting down republican opposition in the Civil War. James Campbell, for instance Lord Gleneavy the chairman of the first Free State senate, had along with Edward Carson, participated in a proposed armed provisional government of Ulster that would have resisted Home Rule by force had it been enacted for all of Ireland in 1914. His presence in the Senate, along with other former unionists can be seen as helpful pluralism, as Elaine Byrne argues here, but could also be seen by anti-Treatyites as confirming the ‘treachery’ and ‘pro-British’ tendencies of those who accepted the Treaty.

Secondly, while several contributors understandably decry the anti-Treatyites’ campaign against civilian pro-Treatyites (including senators and TDs) in 1922-23, there is no discussion of the state’s judicial execution of some 80 prisoners in 1922-23 and extra judicial summary killing of perhaps 150 more prisoners in the field (outside of those killed in combat).

The new state also interned over 12,000 people without trial, most of whom were not released until 1924. These emergency powers were renewed in mid 1923 and 1927, with the result that there were several hundred political prisoners in the Free State at any one time throughout the 1920s. Justified or not, it is not a great leap of imagination to see how this maintained a substantial constituency who saw the Free State not as a liberal democracy but a repressive pro-British regime.

Nor was it only republicans who thought this. Farrell is right to point out that Cumann na nGaedheal in fact had a rather rocky relationship in the 1920s with the National League (the remnants of the Home Rule party) but fails to mention why this party almost voted Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail into coalition government in 1927. As Cathal Brennan showed here on this Irish Story it was because in the wake of the IRA assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, the government reintroduced emergency powers of internment and execution. William Redomond of the National League argued that,

We, here on these benches, object to seeing our Government perpetrating the stale old blunder of attacking the legitimate exercise of constitutional rights and political action under the pretext of seeking to suppress or to prevent crime… But even the British Government, with all its difficulties, never passed so drastic a Coercion Bill as the present Public Safety Act, That …brings the country and the State into odium and contempt with the people who suffer from the tyranny of unconstitutional repression.

Finally and probably most important were the Free State’s economic failings. Basically what this amounted to was that Ireland unlike virtually anywhere else in western Europe, was haemorrhaging people, who emigrated throughout this period in massive numbers. In Ireland there was high unemployment, low wages and a distinct lack of opportunities. All of this was true under British rule and in independent Ireland until the 1960s.

Why was this a partisan issue and what did it have to do with the nationalist revolution? For one thing, Irish nationalists had always hoped that independence would reverse these problems of underdevelopment, clearly the Free State was failing to do so. Moreover its policy in the wake of the Civil War was to cut public spending and to cut taxes on the wealthy at the same time – favouring the existing possessing classes.

In the aftermath of the Civil War it had used its Army to put down strikes, reverse land seizures and collect unpaid rent. Strikers and land agitators were among those shot at and imprisoned. Its land reform of 1923 involved securing loans from the British government so that tenant farmers could buy out their leases to landlords but it did not redistribute any land. Republicans also argued, inevitably, that it was mainly a way of spreading patronage mong pro-Treaty supporters. The Cumann na nGaedheal policy of free trade with Britain favoured cattle exporters but did not, republicans argued, help to build up Irish industry. It provided only very limited public housing and few social services. There was a genuine famine scare in the west of the country in 1924-25.

In short, republicans could argue, as the Free State cosied up to former ‘imperialists’ so its economic policies simply ruled in favour of a wealthy, favoured minority of farmers and exporters. O’Neil’s chapter here gives a good account of the evolution of Fianna Fail’s thinking. But there is a general lack of appreciation among contributors that a significant section of the population did feel that the promises of the independence movement had not been achieved either in political or economic terms.

That Fianna Fail’s economic nationalism, statism and land re-distribution of the 1930s were only very partially successful remedies is not the point. It was not only ‘purist’ ‘absolutist’ republicans who were disappointed in the Free State in the first decade of its existence.

In sum, this collection of essays has much in it of interest but needs also to be read with a critical eye.

Gerard Shannon on Arthur Griffith, Sinn Féin and the insurrection of Easter 1916.

‘The Sinn Féin Rebellion’ became a popular, though paradoxical, term given to the 1916 Easter Rising during it’s aftermath.

A commemorative photographic album published by the Irish Times after the insurrection is one such example of how this name was cemented in the popular imagination of the Irish public[1] – and likely even further in the eyes of an unimaginative and confused British administration in Ireland.

However, though the Sinn Féin party had certain leadership figures and other combatants amongst it’s ranks, as an organised body it had absolutely no involvement in the planning or fighting on the rebel side.[2] By the time of the Rising, over a decade since it’s founding, Sinn Féin was regarded as miniscule, separatist movement on the fringe of Irish nationalist politics; public support mainly given to the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party.

Sinn Féin’s later association with violent revolution was unusual given the party’s origins, most especially given the ideology espoused by the man who founded it, Arthur Griffith; an avowed Irish separatist and notable figure in advanced Irish nationalism.

By 1916, Griffith was a noted political activist and self-published journalist who wrote passionately and skillfully about matters of Irish nationalism, politics, culture, and – above all – the flaws of British rule in Ireland in many, often banned pamphlets, newspapers and books. Criticisms of the Irish Parliamentary Party were a frequent theme in Griffith’s articles, thereby positing him outside mainstream politics, and making him more of an advanced nationalist.

His own radical nationalism he articulated into theories collected in his most celebrated work, The Resurrection of Hungary. Here, Griffith detailed ideas of passive (non-violent) resistance and economic self-sufficiency, in the latter chiefly drawing on the work of the German economist, Frederick List.

Griffith’s most striking idea however would be that of withdrawing Irish representatives from Westminster to form an independent Irish parliament based in Dublin; with the British monarch still reigning as the head of state. Drawing on the historical example of Hungary within the Austrian empire in the mid-19^th century, this ‘dual-monarchy’ concept was a crucial plank in what became known as the ‘Sinn Féin’ policy that Griffith hoped would appeal to both nationalists and unionists. (Sinn Féin being an Irish phrase for ‘Ourselves’ sometimes translated as ‘Ourselves Alone’).

Though Griffith was not opposed to the idea of an independent Irish republic – a popular separatist idea since the period of the United Irishmen –  he felt to avoid partition, a dual monarchy system in Ireland would be the most acceptable to both nationalists and unionists.[3] How much stock Griffith ever put in the notion of an independent Irish republic as a political goal is a recurring theme in many biographical works about him.[4]

Since he first articulated his Sinn Féin concepts in 1905, his failure in the decade since to unite moderate Home Rulers and radical nationalists did not deter his belief in the long term of the validity of this theory of abstentionism and passive resistance. As the historian Michael Laffan best puts it, Griffith became “the most fervent convert” to his own ideas.[5]

However, if not his ideas, then the acknowledged brilliance of his writing would become a recurrent theme in firsthand accounts of the period. C.S. Andrews summed up Griffith for many as “a voice crying in the wilderness of national apathy.”[6] Kevin O’ Shiel, who would later be a Judicial Commissioner in the Dáil Courts, felt Griffith was a “master of a superb and enviable prose style – simple, concise and as clear and fresh as a spring well.”[7]

Though he became the focus of Griffith’s emnity during the later Treaty debates, Erskine Childers, would still feel compelled to write in an obituary that Griffith was “the greatest intellectual force stimulating the tremendous national revival which took shape in Easter Week.”[8]

In spite of this, by the beginning of Easter Week, Arthur Griffith made clear in words and action he was deeply opposed to the Rising, or indeed, to any kind of violent revolution against British rule in Ireland – consistent with the development of his Sinn Féin policy.

However, this did not make Griffith in the traditional sense a pacifist, as certain contemporaries point out. P. S. O’Hegarty, for instance, felt Griffith was “a physical force man of the old philosophic school, which held that physical force was permissible and necessary, that Ireland would eventually gain her independence only by means of it, but which held also that a Rising by a minority was unjustifiable … “[9]

Writing only two years after his Griffith’s death, George Lyons felt that “some recent fiction has written [Griffith] down as a mild and timid man.” He goes on further to say that Griffith was “not afraid of war. Though he abhorred militarism, he readily consented himself to action when such became necessary or feasible.”[10] Lyons also places emphasis on Griffith publicly supporting many IRA actions against British forces through the War of Independence from 1919 up until the Truce of 1921.[11]

Ultimately, one of Griffith’s most recent biographers, Brian Maye, felt that when it came to physical force, that when it came to weighing Griffith’s words and actions it “is not immediately clear… whether [Griffith] was opposed to it’s use on practical rather then principled grounds (believing it justifiable in certain circumstances)”.

To demonstrate this ambiguity, Maye points out Griffith was a greater admirer of Irish constitutionalists like Jonathan Swift and Henry Grattan, while also of revolutionaries like Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet.[12]

Given this ambiguity into his thinking on physical force as a revolutionary instrument, Griffith’s own actions during the events of Easter Week 1916 are worth looking at in detail.

Griffith, the IRB and the Irish Volunteers

By 1914, Griffith maintained a close association with the secret society known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, otherwise known as the IRB. The IRB itself shared membership with many of those in Sinn Féin, and over the previous decade had funded several of Griffith’s publications. Though he had joined the group at the outset of his political activism in the 1890s, Griffith himself had not been a member for several years, ultimately preferring his own independence but also more keen on building up a political profile for the Sinn Féin party.[13]

Ironically, because of his more direct involvement in Sinn Féin, Griffith’s standing in advanced nationalist circles had diminished since 1910. During that year, as leader of Sinn Féin, he took the decision to have the party stand aside in several by-elections. Though Griffith had little time for the Irish Parliamentary Party, he did not wish to disrupt the seeming inevitably of the success of its Home Rule campaign, feeling his own party could perhaps play a part in a new national parliament.[14]

This stance almost certainly resulted in the departure of more radical, younger nationalists from the party, who by then already took issue with other aspects of Griffith’s autocratic style of leadership.[15]

In 1912, Patrick Pearse critiqued Griffith’s influence on Sinn Féin at this point in the form of an open letter published in Pearse’s political weekly, An Barr Buadh:

“You were too obstinate… too narrow-minded… You over-estimated your own opinion. You distrusted people who were as loyal as yourself. You would follow no-one’s advice except your own. You preferred to prove to the world that no one else was right except yourself… No progress was possible for an association which had that kind of man at it’s head.”[16]

Not surprisingly, Pearse never joined the party, though he was present when Griffith first presented the Sinn Féin policy in a speech in 1905.

By the outbreak of war in Europe in mid-1914, the current secretary of the IRB Supreme Council, Thomas Clarke convened a meeting of people ‘representative of advanced national opinion’ in the headquarters of the Gaelic League, where Griffith was present with other notable figures outside the political mainstream. It would appear that the prospect of a national rising was at least mooted, though not agreed on. Also, a second meeting was to have taken place, which never occurred.[17]

In September 1914 the Supreme Council of the IRB approached Griffith to join. Griffith refused, preferring to maintain his own independence in his publications, but feeling his stance on the war and IPP would compliment their work.

However, he seemed to believe he had secured an agreement from Tom Clarke and Seán MacDiarmada [aka Sean MacDermott]  – as Secretary and Treasurer of the Supreme Council respectively – that they would inform him of any development in the planning of an insurrection. As later events would prove, Griffith appeared to take this promise very seriously.[18]

Clarke and MacDiarmada by early 1915 had formed a Military Committee within the IRB to plan such an insurrection, with the hope the nationalist paramilitary body, the Irish Volunteers, could be used to ensure its success. The Chief-of-Staff, the cultural nationalist and writer Eoin MacNeill, was not a member of the IRB, though many on the Volunteer executive were.

Griffith himself has whole-heartedly supported the Volunteers on their founding in November 1913, seeing it’s formation as laying the groundwork for a national army. Though not on the Volunteer executive, Griffith joined a company as a private, and was later present at the landing of arms by the Asgard in Howth on 26^th July, 1914.

When it came to the prospect of the Irish Volunteers leading any kind a revolution at that point in time, Griffith said to Piaras Beaslaí prior to Easter 1916: “As long as the Volunteers remain on the defensive we are winning. The only thing that would ruin us would be to take offensive action.” Beaslaí, of course, was an IRB member well aware of Clarke and MacDiarmada’s conspiracy. He felt that Griffith “sounded like the voice of common sense dispelling romantic dreams.”[19]

Stop The Rising

Griffith had developed a friendly association, if not necessarily a close friendship with Sean MacDiarmada over the several years leading up to 1916. MacDiarmada had become a major organiser for Sinn Féin branches across the country – while also as a chief recruiter for the IRB – which brought him into frequent contact with Griffith.

Griffith later told his friend, Robert Brennan, that he had noticed in the week preceding Easter Week 1916 MacDiarmada had been unusually active in the Sinn Féin offices and been receiving many visitors.[20] In any event, it would be the future Irish President, Sean T. O’Kelly, then a prominent Sinn Féin activist, who would first inform Griffith of major developments related to the Rising.

On Good Friday, April 21st, O’Kelly approached Griffith in a barbershop on O’Connell Street. There, O’ Kelly informed Griffith of the scuttling of the Aud, and Roger Casement’s capture and arrest in Kerry. O’Kelly noted Griffith was “greatly shocked and wondering what the meaning of it was.”

As they left the barber’s, Griffith made a “bitter complaint” to O’Kelly of how Clarke and MacDiarmada had promised to keep him informed of any insurrection; being “very hurt that Clarke and MacDermott had not taken him, according to their promise, into their confidence.”

Suspicious at these turn of events, both men made their way by taxi to the home of the Volunteers’ Chief-of-Staff, Eoin MacNeill, in the south of the city. There, MacNeill was already drafting countermanding orders to Volunteer units in the country to disrupt the IRB conspiracy.[21]

MacNeill directed O’Kelly and Griffith to go the house of a sympathiser to the Volunteers, Dr. Seamus O’Kelly (no relation), based Rathgar Road that night where there would be a gathering of his own allies on the Volunteer executive.

Griffith himself arrived at the house on Rathgar Road at around 10pm. Liam Ó’Briain met Griffith there, then a member of the Volunteers and IRB. (Though Ó’Briain, not alone in the IRB ranks, was unaware of the Military Committee’s plans). Ó’Briain recalls Griffith standing with his back to the fire, putting in an “occasional murmur of assent or very brief comment.”

O’Briain felt many of those present seemed almost frightened by the escalating situation, with the exception of Griffith, “who seemed almost as usual, certainly far cooler and more ‘normal’ than anyone else – like himself when he was very serious, thinking hard and keeping rigidly cool and very taciturn – a mood that all his old friends will remember well.” Griffith clearly was in agreement with the cancellation of manouveres as desired by MacNeill.[22]

That Griffith eagerly planned to assist MacNeill is not surprising in respect of his prior beliefs on violent revolution. Yet, Griffith’s friend, George A. Lyons, wrote that Griffith’s lack of support for the Rising was chiefly down to him not only being “reserved for political, historical and diplomatic reasons”; but that these ideological concerns “became all the more imperative on the disappearance of Casement.”[23]

The house owner, Seamus O’Kelly would recall the surreal sight of so many well known public figures crowding into his house on that evening. He observed MacNeill and Griffith signing some of the countermanding orders in his front room at one point. (While Griffith probably assisted in preparing the orders, it’s unlikely he signed any, given his lack of leadership role in the Volunteers).[24]

On Easter Sunday, Griffith made his way to Bray to issue MacNeill’s countermanding order to Joseph Kenny, a Captain in the Volunteers (as well as a member of the IRB). Kenny would recall how he met Griffith that morning outside Sunday mass.

Earlier, Griffith had previously called to Kenny’s family home that morning and in Kenny’s absence talked to his servant girl. Though Griffith did not give his full name, Kenny, mindful of the authorities, later prevailed on the young woman to agree to say she never encountered Griffith at Kenny’s front door.

Kenny directed Griffith to wait until they reached the local train station to hand him the order as Kenny suddenly noticed a police spy at the church gates. Griffith then handed Kenny the order and instructed him to take it to the Secretary of the local Volunteer company.[25] This appears to have been Griffith’s sole involvement in issuing MacNeill’s countermanding order.

The Rising 

By Monday, April 24th, with Sunday having passed without any incident instigated by the Volunteers, it appeared to Griffith that the insurrection had been successfully halted through the efforts of himself and the rest of MacNeill’s allies.

In the meantime, Griffith’s wife, Maud, decided to take advantage of the reduced train rates for the Easter weekend to go to Queenstown, to see off a visiting sister who would depart from there on a ship to America, while her husband would looking after their two young children, son Nevin and daughter Ita, for the day.

In her BMH witness statement, Maud recalls her husband warning her not to go prior to the cancellation of the Volunteers’ manoeuvres, only deciding to go to Cork early on Easter Monday when that had seemingly occurred.[26] It was to be strictly a day visit, mainly due to the Griffiths’ limited finances and Maud had never intended to stay even one night in Cork. Of course, due to the fighting beginning in Dublin, normal train services back to the capital were abruptly cancelled.[27]

Unaware of this, late on Monday afternoon, Griffith decided to bring the children to visit their grandmother when a series of shots were heard some distance away that sounded more considerable then what may have been typical for shooting practice.[28]

Maud Griffith says neither Griffith and their children had reached the end of their road when her husband was informed – we do not know by whom or how – of the beginning of the insurrection.[29] Bulmer Hobson, a formerly prominent IRB figure who tried to stop the Rising, later met Griffith in the week. Hobson recalled Griffith was informed by a mobilisation order issued to him as a member of the Volunteers, which of course he disobeyed.[30]

Griffith’s first priority, understandably, was the welfare of his children before investigating any further. However, he quickly found he was unable to get any of his neighbours to agree to take Nevin and Ita in his absence, being turned away in most cases. As the full scale of the activity in Dublin became known, the assumption with some of Griffith’s neighbours appeared to be that the trouble being caused by the ‘Sinn Féiners’ (a popular term for the Volunteers, however inaccurate) was somehow related to him.[31]

However, not all of the refusals to take the Griffith children seemed to have been due to this, Maude Griffith recalls one unnamed neighbour who deliberately tried to keep her husband in the family home, so as to protect him from the danger of venturing into the city.[32]

It was at some point on Monday that Griffith opted to send a message to Sean MacDiarmada, who he seemed to have been aware was based with the garrison in the GPO. In the message, Griffith told MacDiarmada “what he thought of them”  for not keeping him posted on the insurrection plans, seeing it as breaking the earlier promise by the Supreme Council to him in September 1914. And yet in light of his anger, Griffith was now eager to stand alongside the Volunteers in the fight.[33]

While it’s unclear how this message reached the GPO, it was likely not by Griffith going there in person as is only ever vaguely suggested in several secondhand accounts.[34]

There is the account of Gearoid O’ Sullivan, then a Volunteer stationed in the GPO, who told Liam Ó’Briain that MacDiarmada mentioned: “We have got a very nice letter from Griffith” and further indicated that Griffith’s offer to join in was appreciated, and the reason behind his anger was understood.[35]

However, the collective decision of the rebel leadership – or at least that of MacDiarmada – was that they did not wish for Griffith to be present in the GPO or to take part in the fighting, conveyed in some sort of a message sent around Wednesday. Rather, that it was more important for Griffith’s “pen and brain to survive” and continue his work, and “to some day defend and justify them.”[36]

Maude Griffith recalls Sean MacDiarmada expressing similar sentiments in a letter to her husband that was smuggled out of Kilmainham Gaol – in which he also asked for Griffith’s forgiveness for not having kept his earlier promise.[37]

In any case, Griffith eventually managed to resolve the issue with his children by mid-week, helping them over the rear garden wall to a sympathetic neighbor’s residence – one biographer, Padraic Colum, believing this was due to Griffith’s suspicions the family home was now being watched.[38]

Having resolved the issue of his children’s well-being by Wednesday, Griffith was able to get to Eoin MacNeill’s home in Dundrum to discuss the accelerated rate of developments.[39]

Having procured a bike, Griffith decided to take a somewhat roundabout way to MacNeill’s home to avoid the city centre. Having made his way north of the Liffey from Clontarf, he then crossed the river at Lucan and then made his way to the southside of the city to the MacNeill residence.

As he cycled on, Griffith later conveyed to his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty he feared what his children would think of him if he was captured and not near the fighting.[40] Indeed, Robert Brennan recalled Griffith telling him of “the agony” he felt cycling through the Dublin streets: “He feared he might be taken and that it would be represented he was running away from the fight. On his way back to the city, he was almost happy and made up his mind that the Rising should be made a National one at all costs.”[41]

Having safely reached MacNeill, the two men talked late into the evening, and concluded only a national rising of the Irish Volunteers could help the rebel units in Dublin. For this to occur, the best approach would be a proclamation to be issued and signed by both Griffith and MacNeill, with the former taking to the country to issue it to the Volunteer units. However serious this plan was, the fighting in the city made would have made printing such a proclamation difficult, and indeed, by the surrender on Saturday, a moot notion.[42]

When Liam Ó’Briain was writing a retrospective article on the now-dead Griffith in late 1922, he sought out Eoin MacNeill – then Minister for Education in the Provisional Government – to clarify details of this intriguing exchange. MacNeill confirmed that a possible proclamation to be issued to the Volunteers in the country was discussed between him and Griffith, but was also never written up. Ó’Briain concurred, concluding also it was difficult to believe Griffith would be foolish enough to leave MacNeill’s home with such a dangerous document on his person that would never be put to any use.[43]

Griffith himself seems to have told Robert Brennan that “other counsels” prevailed against issuing a proclamation.[44] There is also the account of Maire O’Brolchain, that suggests Griffith vaguely hoped MacNeill might change his mind on the matter. Marie’s husband, Padraic, then active in the Volunteers, visited Griffith to prevail on him to issue a national proclamation.

Griffith told him that he had already attempted to talk to MacNeill on the Wednesday about a national rising. O’Brolchain felt Griffith supported his own attempt to talk MacNeill into rallying a national rising of the Volunteers, but he was also unsuccessful.[45]

As the week progressed, Griffith’s wife, Maud, was helped by a kindly, unnamed priest who found her somewhere to stay in Cork.[46] She frequently went to the station in Queenstown in the hope a train would run. The priest later brought her to the Volunteers HQ in Cork city at one point, where she met both Volunteer leaders Tomas MacCurtain and Terrence McSwiney, recalling the latter “was in a terrible state of anxiety as he did not know what to do, having got conflicting instructions from Dublin.” It was only by Saturday that she was able to get one train that allowed her to get back to Lucan.[47]

The train was stopped by the Dublin Castle secret service at a station outside the city. While each of the passengers were scrutinised on the platform, Maud was surprised that a detective who frequently followed her husband did not appear to recognise her.[48]

Finally reaching the family home later that evening, she was delighted to find her entire family safe on her return. However, it was only inevitable that Griffith would be arrested following the rebel surrender early on the Saturday. Indeed, MacNeill had advised Griffith the best approach for them both was to just sit in their homes and wait out the inevitable arrest, with Griffith agreeing.[49]

In this respect, the reasoning behind this decision for Griffith was likely similar to what MacNeill had expressed to Bulmer Hobson when the latter faced a similar predicament: “MacNeill told me that we would have no political future if we were not arrested… “[50] In any event, given Griffith’s propaganda being well known to the authorities – not to mention his association with the Sinn Féin name – it was likely at some point he would be arrested.[51]

Aftermath

Griffith would leave behind a striking account of his reaction to the executions of the Rising’s leaders, many whom, such as Clarke and MacDiarmada he had known in activist and political circles, and others such as the Boer War veteran John MacBride and the socialist James Connolly, he had known as friends.

“Something of the primitive awoke in me… I clenched my fists with rage and longed for vengeance. I had not believed they would be stupid enough to do it. Had I foreseen that, perhaps my views on the whole matter might be different.”[52]

Whatever his ideological disagreements, Griffith’s sentiments were firmly on the side of those who had fought in the Rising following his imprisonment and subsequent deportation with other detainees to England. In November 1916, from Reading Prison in England, Arthur Griffith wrote an angry, though firm letter to the MP Arthur Lynch, a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Lynch made an intercession on behalf on Griffith in Parliament, emphasising Griffith should be released as he had no part in the rebellion of several months before. Griffith had issues with Lynch over political differences in the past, though was incensed as this development.

Griffith wrote: “I gave to you nor to any other member of that body no authority to put questions concerning me in the British Parliament. Your action is reprehensible – your questions I regard as an insult in their suggestion that I dissociate myself in any way from the action of my brother-Irishmen, now dead or in prison, and in suggestion of what you term compensation.” Griffith goes on further to suggest Lynch and other IPP colleagues do not speak on his behalf until himself he can do so.[53]

With the amnesty given to most Irish prisoners in late 1916, on his return to Dublin, Griffith was eager to revive the Sinn Féin policy in new publications.[54] Griffith also remained as leader of the newly popular Sinn Féin through many successful by-elections in the months ahead; but now he and his allies had to contend with an influx of young radicals in the ranks – many of whom shared membership in the similarly revived Irish Volunteers.

Michael Collins, now high-ranking in IRB, was particularly eager to curb the influence of Griffith’s more moderate polices over the movement.[55]

The numerous convulsions amongst advanced nationalists and radical republicans resulted in the dramatic Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in October 1917. By it’s conclusion, the sole surviving commandant of the Rising, Eamon de Valera was the new leader of Sinn Féin, with Griffith at Vice-President. And most strikingly, the aim of an Irish republic was now the official goal of the party, however an intriguing clause in the party constitution said it would ultimately be for the Irish public to decide their future form of government after independence.[56]

Thus, an uneasy alliance now emerged in the newly energised Sinn Féin party. As the historian Virginia Glandon wrote of the party in late 1917: “It is apparent that the many elements which compromised the advanced-nationalists’ movement had only pastured over and camouflaged their differences… “[57]

When the differences between these allies ruptured over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, once again, Arthur Griffith would be a crucial player at the centre of events.

 Conclusion

Robert Brennan, who later worked alongside Griffith in the Dáil, was particularly struck by the latter’s reflection on the 1916 Rising in the years thereafter:

 “Griffith could never concede that the Rising of 1916 was the turning point in Irish history. To all of us who had been through the period, there was no question but that the Rising was responsible for changing a people whose sense of national honour had all but vanished… AG could not and would not see that. The change was inevitable, he said. It was bound to come sooner or later. The Rising has hastened it a little. That was all… he had a personal grievance about the Rising…. He was very sore that Sean MacDermott had not trusted him…”[58]

This last point was something that Griffith’s wife, Maud, also noted; the Rising itself the only event in her husband’s political career she wrote at any length on.[59]

Griffith’s genuine upset at a close associate like MacDiarmada for this lack of trust must have a bearing when considering the Sinn Fein founder’s reaction to the 1916 Rising, alongside any of his ideological and pragmatic concerns. Yet, his actions during the rebellion itself were of a convoluted nature, having deeply disapproved of it he initially tried to stop it, then his offer to take part in it was refuse, though he then still seemed to seriously contemplate seeking aid for it.

Much is made in historical commentary of how Griffith’s Sinn Féin party grew in popularity of because the Rising. Indeed, the party itself would have gradually faded away had the Rising not occurred, yet as an organized body it provided a viable social and political framework for moderate separatists and radical republicans in which to operate in the months (and years) thereafter.[60]

Given this, Griffith’s own political career was on the ascent in the years thereafter until his death in 1922, having himself previously experienced a period of low standing amongst advanced nationalists prior to the Rising. Thus, while it’s unusual to give him a close personal association with the events of Easter Week 1916, it is important to do so when considering the overall historical estimation for a figure of his stature.

Gerard Shannon is a committee member of Skerries Historical Society. In June 2013, he presented his first researched paper before the Society on the death in 1917 of Muriel MacDonagh, wife of the executed 1916 Rising commandant, Thomas MacDonagh. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gerry_shannon and contacted by e-mail here.

References

[1] Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Irish Times, Dublin (1917)

[2] See Laffan, Michael, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party 1916 – 23, Cambridge University Press, New York (2005), pages 69 – 70; Maye, Brian, Arthur Griffith, Griffith College Publications (1997), page 12

[3] Younger, Carlton, Arthur Griffith, Gill and MacMillian Ltd, Dublin (1981), page 50

[4] One such example, see Maye, pages 94 – 111

[5] Laffan, pages 19 – 20

[6] Andrews, C.S., Dublin Made Me, The Lilliput Press Ltd, Dublin (2001 edition), page 1

[7] O’Shiel, Kevin, BMH/WS, page 710

[8] Poblacht na hEireann, 14/08/122, page 1

[9] O’Hegarty, P.S., Classics of Irish History: The Victory of Sinn Féin – How It Won It and How It Used It, University College Press, Dublin (1998 edition), pages 96 – 97

[10] Lyons, George A., Recollections of Griffith and his times, Talbot Press, Dublin (1923), page 74

[11] Lyons, page 76

[12] Maye, page 84

[13] For a take on Griffith’s relationship with the IRB, see Maye, pages 112 – 116

[14] Younger, 38 – 41

[15] Maye, pages 100 – 108; Glandon, Virginia E., Arthur Griffith and the advanced nationalist press: Ireland, 1900-1922 (American University Studies), Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften (1985), page 88

[16] English translation by Donal McCartney in ‘The Making of 1916’ (edited by Kevin Nowlan), page 43, cited on Glandon, page 88

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

[18] Ó’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, page 2

[19] Colum, Padraic, Arthur Griffith, Browne and Nolan, Dublin (1959), page 139

[20] Brennan, Robert, BMH/WS, pages 498 – 499

[21] O’ Kelly, Sean T., BMH/WS, pages 231 – 233

[22] O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, pages 6 – 7, 10

[23] Lyons, page 75

[24] O’Kelly, Seamus, BMH/WS, pages 5 – 6

[25] Kenny, Joseph, BMH/WS, pages 3 – 5

[26] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 1 – 2

[27] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 2

[28] Colum, page 149

[29] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 1

[30] Hobson, Bulmer, BMH/WS (Subject: The Rising, Easter Week 1916), page 14

[31] O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, page 3

[32] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 1

[33] O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, page 3

[34] Colum, page 149; dismissed in Younger, page 56

[35] Michael Noyk quotes this correspondence with O’Briain on this conversation between O’Sullivan and Mac Diarmuida, see Noyk, Michael, BMH/WS, pages 10 – 11

[36] See O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, page 3 – 4; and again, O’Briain’s letter to Noyk in Noyk’s witness statement, Noyk, Michael, BMH/WS, pages 10 – 11

[37] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 2

[38] Colum, page 150

[39] See Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, pages 1- 2; and Hobson, Bulmer, BMH/WS (Subject: The Rising, Easter Week 1916), page 14

[40] Arthur Griffith Michael Collins, [Commemorative booket], Martin Lester, Dublin (1922), page 53

[41] Brennan, Robert, BMH/WS, page 499.

[42] O’Brian, Liam, BMH/WS, pages 4 – 5

[43] O’Briain, Liam, BMH/WS, pages 5 – 10

[44] Brennan, Robert, BMH/WS, page 499

[45] O’Brolchain, Marie, BMH/WS, pages 2 – 3

[46] Colum, page 151

[47] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, page 2

[48] Colum, page 155

[49] Younger, pages 57 – 58, Colum page 151

[50] Hobson, Bulmer, BMH/WS (Subject: The Rising, Easter Week 1916), page 15

[51] Maye, page 117

[52] Nyok, Michael, BMH/WS, page 11

[53] Colum, pages 163 – 64

[54] Maye, pages 121, 130

[55] Maye, pages 125 – 26

[56] Laffan, pages 116 – 121; see also Maye 125 – 130

[57] Glandon, page 202

[58] Brennan, Robert, BMH/WS, page 498

[59] Griffith, Maud, BMH/WS, pages 1 – 2

[60] Maye, page 120

By John Dorney

Friday April, 29 1916. The General Post Office in Dublin, occupied on the Monday as the headquarters of republican insurrection, was burning fiercely. The insurgents inside had decided they had to make their escape across Henry Street to the network of small houses and shops on Moore Street.

A small party of twenty armed men dashed across the open street to establish a toehold there and to clear out a British barricade. At their head was a distinguished looking gentleman in green uniform, complete with Victorian moustache and sword.

The charging party was hit by volleys of British bullets from the barricades on both sides. Four Volunteers were killed outright. Their leader, the moustached gentleman, fell wounded in the face. He managed to drag himself out of the line of fire to Sackville Lane, where he lay, bleeding, grievously injured. His name was Michael O’Rahilly, better known as ‘The O’Rahilly’.

It was not until after the insurgents, who had escaped from the GPO to Moore Street, surrendered, over 24 hours later, that O’Rahilly’s comrades, or any help, could reach him. According to Bulmer Hobson, an ambulance driver named Albert Mitchel was the first to come upon him. He had since died of blood loss. Mitchel took his personal belongings including his watch to his sister.[1]

A Prosperous background

Michael Joseph Rahilly, later O’Rahilly and later still (self-styled) The O’Rahilly was born in 1875 making him 41 in 1916, at the time of his death. In many ways he was an odd example of what Patrick Pearse later called ‘the Risen People’.

He was the son of a merchant family in Ballylongford, County Kerry. Having also invested in property they left Michael, by adulthood, with an income (very substantial in those days) of £900 per year. [2]

He was educated at Clongowes Wood, the elite Catholic boarding school in County Kildare and subsequently studied medicine in New York. In short Michael Rahilly, as he then was, was the product of the up and coming Catholic upper middle class.

Rahilly married an American woman, Nancy Browne from Philadelphia, in 1900 and the couple had three sons. They lived in New York and then in Paris for a time until they returned to Ireland in 1909. Moving to Dublin, they bought a large house on Northumberland Road, Ballsbridge – then as now one of Dublin’s most desirable addresses – a sure sign that money was not an obstacle for them.

Like many distinguished gentlemen of his generation, the poet W.B. Yeats would be one example, Rahilly was attracted to the ideas of cultural nationalism. According to his sister it was in America that he first developed an interest in the Irish language and immediately on his return to Ireland he joined the Gaelic League. He also bought a house in Ventry on the Dingle Penninsula (in the Kerry Gaeltacht) and employed an Irish-speaking nanny to look after his sons.[3]

An indication of his shifting cultural allegiances came in his changing titles. First he added an ‘O’ to his surname bringing it somewhat closer to the original Irish O Rathalaigh, then he adopted the pseudo-clan chieftain title of ‘The O’Rahilly’. The connection to Gaelic clan society was entirely in his own mind (no such title had ever existed before in any case), but he nevertheless appears to have succeeded in getting those in ‘advanced nationalist’ circles to call him by this title.

He was a prominent nationalist in the pre-war years, manager of the Gaelic League newspaper An Claidheamh Solais and a personal friend of Arthur Griffith, the founder of the separatist party Sinn Fein. Among his activities were protesting the visit to Dublin in 1911 of King George V and researching Irish place names at the Ordinance Survey in order to one day change them back from their anglicised forms to Irish. He was involved with Griffith’s party Sinn Fein though never the secret, illegal Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) -he was apparently put off by the Church’s ban on oath-bound secret societies. He did though pen a number of bellicose articles for the Brotherhood’s newspaper Irish Freedom.

Advanced nationalist

In 1912-1914 Ireland was pitched into crisis when Home Rule, or autonomy for Ireland, was blocked by the armed mobilisation of the unionist Ulster Volunteers. In response, nationalists formed their own militia the Irish Volunteers.

Michael O’Rahilly was to forefront of the Volunteers, publishing an article by historian Eoin MacNeill in An Claidheamh Solais calling for their formation and throwing himself into the organisation. He became Treasurer and later Director of Arms. ‘The O’Rahilly’ was not unusual in the generation of 1914 in glorifying militarism. According to his sister Aine; ‘Michael was very keen on having his uniform correct and well finished’.

Though his lack of contacts in the IRB must have impeded his access to the inner workings of the Volunteers, he was nevertheless an important figure in the militia. As Director of Arms, he was involved in buying guns for the Volunteers and involved in the celebrated Howth gun running, in which the Volunteers publicly imported nearly 1,000 rifles into Dublin. By 1914 he was routinely followed by ‘G-men’ or Dublin Metropolitan Police detectives, who sometimes also raided his house for arms.

O’Rahilly was militant enough to reject John Redmond – leader of the mainstream Irish Parliamentary Party –and his support for Britain in World War I, and to support Redmond’s ejection and that of his movement from the Volunteers. But he was not militant enough to be included in the plans of the IRB hardliners, Tom Clarke, Sean MacDermott and laterally Patrick Pearse and others (together the Military Council) for an insurrection before the war’s end.

Like his fellow gentleman scholar and Volunteer Chief of Staff Eoin MacNeill, he opposed any armed action by the Volunteers unless it was defensive – a reaction to the British suppression of the movement or the introduction of conscription into Ireland.

So when the secret plan of the Military Council was revealed to the formal leadership of the Volunteers at the last minute on Good Friday 1916, O’Rahilly opposed it and supported MacNeill in trying to call it off.

We see something of his headstrong character in his opposition to the insurrectionists. On Good Friday after hearing that Clarke and MacDermott had had Bulmer Hobson, an ally of MacNeill’s, arrested at gunpoint, O’Rahilly drove to Pearse’s school at St Endas and threatened him with a revolver. Supposedly he told Pearse, ‘whoever tries to kidnap me had better be quicker on the draw’. [4]

MacNeill meanwhile had issued a countermanding order calling off the planned Rising and sent messengers around the country to deliver his orders. Over the next 24 hours O’Rahilly drove (in fact he had a heavy cold and hired a taxi, which must have been expensive) through Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary on Saturday night to Sunday morning, telling the Volunteer units there not to mobilise and that MacNeill had been deceived. There at least, in his native Munster, he seems to have been effective, as the Volunteers did not stir.[5]

‘Glorious Madness’

Arriving back in Dublin, exhausted and ‘covered in grime’ O’Rahilly assumed the rebellion had indeed been averted. But it had only been put off for a day. On Easter Monday, he was greeted, unexpectedly with the sounds of battle. In the capital the insurrection had gone ahead despite his and MacNeill’s efforts.

In a quixotic gesture, worthy perhaps of his class and generation, he joined the fighting anyway at the rebel headquarters at the GPO. He turned up ‘immaculately uniformed’ and driving his top of the range De Dion automobile.[6] Two famous quotes are attributed to him. “Well, I’ve helped to wind up the clock” he is said to have declared – “I might as well hear it strike!” And just as telling, “it is madness but it is glorious madness”. [7]

By the end of the Rising he commanded the top floor of the GPO, having been welcomed back into the fold by the Military Council. He volunteered to lead a desperate charge from the burning GPO to carve out an escape route onto Moore Street. Like officers killed on the Western Front in 1914, he was shot down leading a charge, sword in hand. According to one Volunteer, ‘he had covered only a few yards when he was shot from the barricades and he fell forward, his sword clattering in front of him’.

There is no doubting the bravery of his actions in leading the charge from the GPO to Moore Street, but O’ Rahilly’s death was more agonising than glorious. After being shot he lay for hours overnight alone dying slowly of blood loss. He managed to scribble off a farewell note to his wife and that night was heard crying for water. [8]

According to the ambulance man Albert Mitchel, it was Saturday afternoon before they came upon his body –‘a man in a green uniform on Moore Lane’, and he was still alive. ‘An English Officer’ told them not to load the man onto a stretcher but to leave him where he was. A Sergeant in the Ambulance surmised, ‘he must be someone of importance. The bastards [officers] are leaving him there to die of his wounds, it’s the easiest way to get rid of him.’ At 9 o’clock that evening, Mitchel returned and found the body, now dead, still guarded by officers, he was later told it was The O’Rahilly.[9]

Michael O’Rahilly was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. His two sisters and their friend Austin O’Donoghue were the only people at the funeral.[10]

References

[1] For the action where O’Rahilly was killed see Micheal MacDonnacha, An Phoblacht, http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/21534 for Bulmer Hobson’s statement, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0083.pdf#page=2

[2] http://www.1916rising.com/bioORahilly.html

[3] See Aine O’Rahilly BMH http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0333.pdf#page=1 and Humphreys Family Tree http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ORahilly/the.orahilly.html

[4] Michael Foy, Brian Barton, the Easter Rising p 61Irish Volunteers website articles on O’Rahilly http://irishvolunteers.org/tag/the-orahilly/

[5] Foy, Barton, Easter Rising pp 61-63, 69

[6] Charles Townshend Easter 1916, p158

[7] http://irishvolunteers.org/tag/the-orahilly/

[8] Foy Barton The Easter Rising, p 197

[9] Albert Mitchel BMH http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0196.pdf

[10] Aine O’Rahilly BMH http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0333.pdf#page=1

Barry Sheppard looks at attempts at slum clearance through the eyes of the Irish Press.

Throughout the early 20^th century, the Irish capital Dublin was a city notorious for its inner city slums. Many hoped that independence from Britain would solve the problem, but by the 1930s Irish governments had still failed to deal with it. In 1936 an Irish Press editorial opined;

In truth, it is not the want of inquiry that can be complained of, rather want of action, of driving power of the determination at any cost to abolish an evil, the existence of which had been so abundantly demonstrated…The Dublin slums remained all the time, as they are today, Ireland’s most pitiable and heart-breaking tragedy.[1]

While urgent calls for action by a politically engaged newspaper are not surprising, the identity of the newspaper was. The Irish Press had been founded as a forum, even a mouthpiece for Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fail.

The paper’s campaign for slum clearance therefore in 1934-36, a time when Fianna Fail was in government, is therefore worthy of close inspection.

 The Irish Press

The now defunct Irish Press newspaper (1931-1995) has been described as a revelation in Irish print media.  When it launched in September 1931, the publication quickly proved itself to be a ‘brilliant journalistic endeavour’, comparable to William O’Brien’s United Ireland (1882) in its immediate impact.  Written with rumbustious flair, it achieved a meteoric rise in circulation within its first two years of publication.[2]

Politically aligned to Fianna Fáil, the paper was credited with being a ‘fine propaganda tool’ for the party on the run-up to the all-important 1932 general election.[3] Indeed, it was credited with helping sway undecided voters towards Fianna Fáil in both the 1932 and 1933 elections.

The paper’s close relationship with Fianna Fáil is evident, given that two of the State’s first three Taoisigh (de Valera and Sean Lemass) and three of the first five presidents (de Valera, Erskine Childers and Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh) all held senior positions on the paper.[4]

Under the watchful eye of its first editor, Frank Gallagher (who has been allocated the extreme title of ‘The Irish Dr Goebbels’, for his mastery of Irish Republican propaganda), the paper elevated Fianna Fail, through Gallagher’s direction and the charisma of de Valera to be the guardian of the nation’s Catholic soul.[5]

The first editorial set out the paper’s mission, it was to be “a newspaper technically efficient in all departments, assured of material success, yet seeking above all thing the freedom and well-being of the nation.”[6]

Despite the apparent success in terms of circulation and political influence, prolonged friction between Frank Gallagher and the board saw his resignation in June of 1935, less than four years after the paper’s first edition.  His departure proved unpopular among the staff and some of those who sat on the board, especially those who were card-carrying Fianna Fáil members.  Fianna Fáil Senator and Irish Press board member Joseph Connolly was particularly despondent about Gallagher’s departure, stating:

 Under Frank Gallagher’s editorship the paper established itself as a trustworthy and reliable journal, bright without being cheap, cultured without being ponderous and above all Irish through and through in the things that mattered. It was to me a tragedy not only for the paper but for the country when Gallagher ceased to be editor.[7]

Connolly further stated that in the wake of Gallagher’s departure the tone of the paper gradually deteriorated, with a new undesirable streak creeping in.[8]  It should be no surprise that someone with such close ties to the board of the paper and the ruling party lamented the departure of a man credited with harmonising the two.  For an alternative take on the situation, Joe Lee suggests that “for a stridently popular paper, it descended to the gutter level remarkably rarely”.[9]

There is no doubt that with Gallagher’s departure the paper was afforded the chance under two of his successors, John O’Sullivan and John Herlihy to distance itself further from Fianna Fáil than it had been under Gallagher.

Arguably, one of the first real opportunities to do this was in late 1936, when the paper began a very public campaign against the continuing problem of slum conditions in Ireland’s large towns and cities.  Such an ambitious exposé couldn’t exactly be classed as falling into the ‘gutter’ category, although it may have led to uncomfortable reading for some connected with the ruling party.

This ambitious campaign could easily have been a source of embarrassment to some in Fianna Fáil who had, in part presided over these conditions four years into their role as the governing party of the state.

Slums

Urban dwellers in slum conditions were seen as being forgotten by Fianna Fáil in favour for their rural-centred vision for Ireland, as outlined in the party’s 1926 manifesto.  It has certainly been argued that programs of unemployment assistance, relief works, and subsidies for local authority and private housing tended to favour rural households rather than city dwellers.[10]

The slums of Ireland and in particular Dublin had long been a pressing issue, to the point that they have now been granted an almost legendary notorious stature in the nation’s history.  Following one of the most infamous incidents involving slum housing, the Church Street tenement collapse in September 1913, increased calls for a remedy to the situation led a housing inquiry to be established by the Local Government Board for Ireland.

Published in 1914, the report found that around thirty percent of Dublin’s population lived in slums in various parts of the city, with three quarters of tenement households living in single rooms.

The inquiry also found that 60,000 people in the city occupied housing which was almost or actually “unfit for human habitation” and needed to be re-housed and that the signs were that the housing problem was getting worse and that even a massive renovation program would not suffice to solve it.[11]  This report was one of a number of times attention had been drawn to the appalling conditions people had been forced to exist in.

The Irish Press Crusade

In 1936, in the post-Gallagher era the Irish Press mounted a public crusade to highlight the plight of those still wedged in sub-standard accommodation over a decade into independence.  The appointment of Gallagher’s replacement, John O’Sullivan was in itself controversial.

When Gallagher resigned in June 1935 he was consulted by de Valera as to who would succeed him.  Gallagher’s choice for editor was either Bill Sweetman, at that point lead writer, or sub-editor Patrick O’Reilly.

In the end, Gallagher suggested Sweetman for the job as he was already moulded to the role.  However, this was not to be the end of the matter.  The man who eventually was given the job was former Irish Times reporter John O’Sullivan.

Only a day after O’Sullivan’s appointment an article which he had co-written appeared in several regional papers blaming Frank Gallagher for The Irish Press’ perceived close relationship with Fianna Fáil, resolving that the direction of the paper would now be less partisan than it had been up to that point.[12]

The public campaign highlighting urban deprivation in a number of Irish cities and large towns began in late 1936.  It can be argued this was a dramatic departure from the previous cosy relationship with Fianna Fáil.

Regardless of whether this campaign brought it into friction with the Government, the paper was in no doubt of where the root of the problem of Ireland’s slum housing was to be found, the legacy of British occupation.  Under a headline ‘Demand for an End to Tenement Squalor: Tragic British Legacy’, the paper stated that the slum situation had to be taken in retrospect in order that its extent, its enormity, and its deep-seated nature may be fully appreciated.

This piece was merely a continuation of anti-treaty Sinn Fein editorials from the early 1920s onwards.  In An Phoblacht (which Frank Gallagher had previously edited) in 1925, over a decade prior to this campaign Sean Lemass asked: “Who could walk through the slums of Dublin and see the squalor and misery which foreign domination has brought in its train and console himself with this grandiloquent philosophy”?[13]

Noting the previous inquiries into slums, eleven in total, the paper showed that the number of families in dire conditions had not changed significantly over the previous 138 years. In fact, it was pointed out that in many cases they had gotten worse.[14]

While the finger of blame is squarely pointed at the British who were responsible for ten of the eleven inquiries held into Dublin slums, it is of importance that one of them was undertaken under a native Irish administration, Fianna Fáil, with its connections to the Irish Press all too obvious.  Therefore, they too shared some blame in this ‘nightmare of shame’.

Religious Leaders

The Press crusade not only cut through party political lines with its ambitious project, it also cut across denominations, and not only ‘traditional’ Irish denominations.  As mentioned above, there was a view that Fianna Fáil had been elevated to guardian of the nation’s Catholic soul with the help of the paper.

Now the paper sought to bring on board souls of other faiths.  It sought the help of the heads of other churches in the state and received very public backing from leaders of the Protestant denominations, and the Jewish community within Ireland.

According to the paper, the Chief Rabbi of the Free State’s Jewish Community, Dr Isaac Herzog (who was later to be elected as Chief Rabbi of Palestine) was so ‘shocked and mortified’ by the conditions which he saw first-hand, that he waived his usually inflexible principle of never issuing statements to the press on Feast days.  Dr Herzog sated:

If the public treasury cannot afford to provide the necessary funds for the abolition of these awful slum conditions in Dublin, then a public appeal should be made to the generosity of the Irish nation.  I will go so far as saying that it would be advisable to appeal to the vast body of Irishmen living in America who, I am sure, will contribute generously towards a fund which aims at removing so serious a blot from the capital of Ireland, which is, to all Irishmen, the historic symbol of the Irish spirit and whose historic and national glamour is dimmed in no small measure by these wretched slums.[15]

The appeal to America itself must have been of embarrassment to the ruling party, and to de Valera, who had raised American money on his extensive tour of the country in 1919-1920.  This fundraising trip became a political hot potato itself, given that this was in part the source of funding from which the Irish Press was established.

The call for American financial intervention was not echoed by the Rev Dr John Gregg, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.  Dr Gregg also praised the work of the Irish Press in bringing this public attention.  In contextualising what he saw as the gravity of the situation, he compared the work to missionary work in the developing world.

‘I agree with the Irish Press that the problem must be tackled courageously and comprehensively in our time and not left to posterity…It is really missionary work…Missioners go abroad and risk their lives and are often killed for their zeal, as in China.  Here is as great a missionary effort at home.  It is a religious question embracing all, for we are all brothers and members of the one family of God’.[16]

Other Cities

Historically, much of the focus upon sub-standard housing was on Dublin.  The Irish Press took the decision to expand upon this to include some of the larger towns and cities around the Free State.  Exploring the situation in Limerick, Cork and Waterford, the paper gave much-needed publicity to these locations.  On 20 October 1936, the paper launched its ‘National Slum Survey’, which carried the headline ‘Beginning the Story of Ireland’s Other Slums’.

It was claimed that following repeated requests from various sections of the country to the Irish Press to investigate this shame on Ireland’s name it would widen the scope of slum articles to ‘a national aspect’.  With Dublin conditions set as the benchmark of the worst of housing, Waterford was described as being ‘as bad as’ the capital with half a million pounds, and 15 years needed to eradicate the menace.  It was further claimed that some 1,300 families were in dire need of rehousing, with overcrowding being ‘worse than in Dublin’s most teeming tenements’.[17]

In Cork, the City Manager Mr Philip Monaghan accompanied an Irish Press ‘investigator’ around the city’s slums.   Monaghan informed the paper that it would take a million and a half pounds, approximately 4,000 and ten years eradicate the slums which honeycombed the city. In the years since 1932, approximately 766 dwellings had been erected at an expenditure of £550,000.[18] This, however was a drop in the ocean of what was required to bring housing up to standard.

The majority of reports carried by the paper were accompanied by the obligatory pictures which have since come to symbolise what we today view as slum conditions.  However, one report and accompanying set of photographs relating to a particular Limerick family really brought home the severe conditions which were prevalent in many dwellings in that city and beyond.  The Dillon family of White Wine Street allowed the Press photographer to record their squalid conditions.

Living in an insanitary two-room dwelling, two of the couple’s seven children (one blind) were forced to sleep on a pallet of straw.  Swathed in rags, the blind child was ‘cadaverous and pale as the sheen of death’.

The father, John Dillon was unemployed, hungry, and suffering from tuberculosis.  He cut a pathetic figure, unable to properly provide for his family.  Asking ‘Is Ireland Blind To Their Tragedy?’,[19] the paper called into question the very reason why Ireland had sought to become and independent nation. While by no means an exceptional case, allowing the public to see such depravation as the Dillon family were subjected to would highlight the urgent need for action.

Journalistic Opposition

Unsurprisingly rival newspapers looked unfavourably on the Irish Press crusade.  The Limerick story was dismissed as ‘Stunt Journalism’ in an October edition of the Irish Independent.[20]  The paper said that any attempt at such journalism would not prove effective in the matter of getting rid of slum conditions.  The paper further claimed that details contained within the report on the Dillon family of White Wine Street, Limerick were fabricated or exaggerated.

It was claimed that the Dillon family received more in financial assistance than what the Irish Press had reported.  It was also claimed that John Dillon was not suffering from tuberculosis, and that the family’s case was an exceptional one, which through the Irish Press article had generated ‘harmful publicity’ to the city.[21]

These claims were repeated the following month in the Irish Examiner, where it was reported that ‘some redress was due to the city by The Irish Press’.  A member of the council also stated he objected ‘to any Dublin journalist coming to Limerick to dictate to the (City) Manager’.[22]

Outcomes

There had been some, not insignificant attempts to tackle the slum problem in Dublin by the time the Irish Press began its crusade.  The acquisition of land in Crumlin was ordered under a compulsory purchase act by Sean T. O’Kelly on 18 August 1934.  The Housing Committee wanted to build 1,100 dwellings in Crumlin and nearby Dolphins Barn within a year of the report. A total 2,328 dwellings were proposed for the whole of the Corporation’s district. This was an impressive undertaking, however there were over 11,000 applications for new accommodation during 1934.

This meant that three out of every four families who applied for new accommodation would not get a new place to live.  At the peak of the scheme in 1936-7 when the Press coverage began, 1000 homes were built.[1] While this had made an impact, the adverse publicity which accompanied the series of articles still highlighted an uncomfortable truth, that over a decade into life in an independent Ireland people were still living in such conditions.  It also spurred some citizens into action.  In Dublin, The Citizens’ Housing Council was formed out of a ‘spontaneous offer of help on the part of citizens of all shades of religious and political thought’.

On November 3, 1936 an open invitation was published calling the citizens of Dublin to action, to join this growing body and tour the slums of Dublin ‘to see with your own eyes the stark realities of the situation here where it is worst’.[23]  The purpose of the council was two-fold; 1) The making of a thorough survey of conditions and the correlations of suggested remedies and 2)  The creation of a public opinion which will assist local and national bodies to remove the legal, financial and other obstructions which are hampering progress.[24]

The group consisted of a number of prominent citizens such as church leaders and physicians.  Interestingly, members of the Irish Press, including then Editor-In-Chief John Herlihy were also prominent members.

The group published a report in 1937 which was in turn was replied to by the Housing Committee of Dublin Corporation in the form of a report in 1938 detailing their achievements, and plans for the future.

The report highlighted what was the Corporations hopeless position, constricted by legislative and financial problems. The problem of overcrowding had become cyclical as the majority of the families re-housed by the Corporation on the basis of overcrowding were simply replaced.

The Corporation served notice on the tenement owner requiring compliance with the bye-laws (on overcrowding). The room was re-let, usually to a young couple, only for it to become overcrowded again in 2-3 years, due to natural increase. Secondly, the report quoted the Corporation’s own figures for the latest available year, 1935, showed the rate at which new dwellings were being provided (approx. 1,500 annually).

On this basis the Citizens’ Housing Council Report concluded that the housing problem in Dublin was insoluble, and for the city’s slum dwellers in the 1930s the decade ended with their housing conditions little better, if not worse than those of their parents. [25]

Friction also occurred between central and local government in regard to housing.  Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance, Sean MacEntee was opposed to giving Dublin Corporation the necessary funds to deal with the housing crisis. An internal memo on the 4 April 1937 to An Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera from MacEntee revealed his opposition.  It sated that ‘it would be unwise to keep giving Dublin Corporation large sums of money’, and the Corporation ‘must shoulder a large part of blame themselves for not being able to finance its housing programme’.[26] It is argued that this was symptomatic of an overall hostility towards the cities from the government of the time.[27]

There were some successes in regard to housing redevelopment in the 1930s, but they were small in scale. In Cork, The Irish Builder records a commission of 28 terraced houses (probably Sarsfield’s Terrace) for Youghal UDC in 1936, as well a significant project of 82 houses in Mallow (Glenanaar and Fair Street area) to cope with the slum problem.  While in Limerick, where the slums were considered on a par with Dublin and where the plight of the Dillon family garnered much publicity, seemed to have fared better in terms of redevelopment.

The redevelopment and increase in local authority housing had already begun by the time the Irish Press crusade commenced. In contrast to the 297 units of local authority housing built in 1887- 1932, 942 units were provided from 1932-40.  In 1932 the Corporation built a scheme of 22 houses in the courtyard of King John’s Castle.[28]

A major housing scheme of almost 400 houses in St Mary’s Park which was completed in August 1935 went some way to eradicating the slum problem in the city.  However, there was some way to go, as the Dillon case and others proved.

On completion of the St Mary’s scheme on 19 August 1935 the city’s Mayor Mr M.J. Casey stated the slums of Limerick would soon disappear with God’s help, as a scheme for the building of one thousand additional houses was at present under consideration.[29]  Nevertheless, as the severity of some of the examples the paper exposed showed, it gave much needed publicity to what was happening behind closed doors.

At the Irish Press

After Frank Gallagher’s departure, the Irish Press was in something of a state of turmoil, in terms of its Editorship.  Several people occupied the editor’s position in the mid-1930s, during which the paper conducted it’s ‘slum campaign’.   The board of the Press would eventually return to Gallagher’s own choice of successor, Bill Sweetman.

When Sweetman was appointed in 1938, de Valera summoned him to government buildings to deliver a long lecture on Fianna Fáil policy and philosophy. Sweetman replied that there was nothing in Fianna Fáil’s policy and philosophy which conflicted with his own conscience.[30] It was clear that any editor had to conform to the party line, and in most cases the Irish Press remained steadfast in its support to Fianna Fáil.

This was clearly exhibited in relation to the paper’s promotion of the 1937 Constitution.  Nevertheless, as the slum campaign demonstrated during this period the paper wasn’t afraid to draw attention to the uncomfortable realities of what was now Fianna Fáil’s Ireland.

References

[1] J. O’Reilly ‘Dublin’s Outstanding Problem’: An analysis of the debates, policies and solutions regarding the housing crisis: 1922-39 pp 26-29

[1] Ibid, p. 9

[2] J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, (Cambridge, 1989), pp 168-217

[3] D Keogh, Twentieth Century Ireland: Revolution and State Building, (Dublin, 2005), p 60

[4] http://www.nli.ie/blog/index.php/2012/03/07/newspaper-descriptors-project/

[5] G. Walker, ‘The Irish Dr Goebbels': Frank Gallagher and Irish Republican Propaganda’ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 149-165

[6] Irish Press, 5 Sept 1931.

[7] Connolly, Sen J. (1958) Memoirs o f Senator Joseph Connolly, a Founder o f Modern

Ireland, Dublin: Irish Academic Press (1996 reprint)

[8]M. O’Brien, De Valera, Fianna Fáil and The Irish Press (Dublin, 2001), p. 67

[9] J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, p. 217

[10] M.E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland 1920-1973, p 31.

[11] R McManus, Blue Collars, “Red Forts,” and Green Fields: Working-Class Housing in Ireland in the Twentieth Century, International Labor and Working-Class History/ Volume 64 / October 2003, pp 38-54

[12] O’Brien, ‘De Valera, Fianna Fáil and The Irish Press’, p.67

[13] Maher. J, ‘The Oath Is Dead And Gone’ (Dublin, 2011), p. 136.

[14] Irish Press, 2 October 1936, p. 9

[15] Irish Press 9 Oct 1936, p 9.

[16] Ibid, p 9.

[17] Irish Press, 20 Oct 1936, p. 9

[18] Irish Press, 20 Oct 1936, p. 9

[19] Irish Press, 23 Oct 1936, p. 9

[20] Irish Independent, 26 Oct, 1936, p 3.

[21] Irish Independent, 25 Oct, 1936, p. 2.

[22] Irish Examiner, 11 Nov, 1936, p. 7.

[23] Irish Press, 3 Nov, 1936, p. 9.

[24] Irish Press, 14 Nov, 1936, p. 1

[25] F. Murphy Slums in the 1930s in Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 37, No. 3/4 (Jun. – Sep., 1984), pp. 104-111

[26] J. O’Reilly ‘Dublin’s Outstanding Problem’: An analysis of the debates, policies and solutions regarding the housing crisis: 1922-39 p. 31.

[27] M. E. Daly

[28] http://www.lThe Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973, (London, 2006), p. 49 imerickregeneration.org/NewPlan/Appendices_Social_Housing_in_Limerick_City.pdf

[29] http://www.limerickregeneration.org/stmarysparkLkLeader.html

[30] M. O’Brien, De Valera, Fianna Fáil and The Irish Press (Dublin, 2001), p. 72

Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland

Edited by Jennifer Redmond, Sonja Tiernan, Sandra McAvoy and Mary McAuliffe

Published by Irish Academic Press, Dublin 2015.

Reviewer: John Dorney

Inevitably women’s role in history never gets its due attention. In virtually every society that comes to mind, until very recently, women’s role was subservient to men, who dominated all positions of power and influence.

In practice, real women did wield power in the past, as mothers, as wives as heads of households, as lovers and mistresses. You can make the argument that men’s obsession with controlling or repressing female sexuality over the centuries was an implicit acknowledgement and even fear of this power.

But this was not the kind of power that tends to survive in written sources. It was only in the twentieth century that women began to play an active part in politics for example, and much the same is true of other fields of influence such as business or higher education. And so virtually all written history really is ‘his story’.

This book, a collections of articles by historians, sociologists and others goes some way towards redressing the balance in an Irish context. It contains a range of essays on topics as various as women convict deportees to 19th century Australia to sexual education in modern Ireland.

It is always difficult in reviewing a book of this type to pull all the strands of the various contributors together.

One tendency among the contributors was to search for ‘counter’ or ‘oppositional’ narratives to the historically dominant  male, heterosexual (and in Ireland Catholic) ones. Thus in a fascinating chapter, Blaithnead Nolan takes us back to the experience of Irish and English women locked up in ‘female factories’ – really prison or holding centres – in early 19th century Van Dieman’s Land. Some women were being held there for crimes such as theft or prostitution, others detained there until they were assigned to free settlers as domestic servants.

It sounds like it was a grim experience. Nolan shows how the ‘factories’ were dominated by tough gangs of convict women, who were also frequently unashamed lesbians. Such was their resistance to the patriarchal system that on at least one occasion – after two prisoners engaged in a sexual relationship were split up – they rioted, forcing the authorities to recruit male prisoners armed with crowbars to put the revolt down.

I did feel that Nolan romanticised these women somewhat. They were, after all convicts, sometimes violent criminals, who ruled over other prisoners by force. She also reports that their sexual advances on other prisoners were often unwelcome. Other women may have seen them as much as predators as freedom fighters.

At the same time, the point is well made that the struggle within the prison does show themes such as the struggle against male domination and uniform heterosexuality are not new inventions.

In a somewhat similar vein, Conor Reidy looks at attempts by the state (at this point British) and private charities to rehabilitate ‘inebriate prostitutes’.  A world of almost stunning human suffering is opened up.

Take the case of ‘Annie’, a native of Derry an inmate at Ennis ‘inebriate reformatory’. In 1903, she was 40 years old.  She had a long list of convictions for theft, prostitution and drunkenness, had spent most of her life in and out of prison, was an alcoholic (and also a snuff addict) and on more than one occasion had tried to hang herself in prison.

Her only living relative was her mother, who was also a an alcoholic and prostitute. She was discharged in 1905 but within a year the local RIC (police) reported she was again in trouble for ‘drunkenness and vagrancy’. And so the stories go on. Reidy points out that none really had a happy ending.

He argues that the inebriate homes were conceived of as ways of controlling as well as rehabilitating women. They were seen not only as victims but as corrupters of society.

Similarly, moving on to independent Ireland of the 1930s, Jennifer Redmond describes the ‘moral panic’ about young single Irish women emigrating to Britain, where, again that word, they might be ‘corrupted’, or to speak plainly, might have sex or even conceive children outside of marriage. Redmond’s point is that there was no such outcry over the ‘morals’ of young Irish male economic migrants.

The theme of resistance to conservative forces that wished to control women is also taken up by Mary Muldowney in a chapter on ‘pro-choice’ activism since the 1980s.

Some other contributions however merely set out to describe changing gender roles, as in John Johnstone Kehoe’s essay on female Garda assistants in 1950s Dublin. The standout chapter for me however in this regard was the contribution of Maeve O’Riordan on the courtship of Mabel Smyly and Dermod O’Brien in 1901-1902.

An upper middle class couple in their 30s, the two were engaged to be married and we follow their relationship through their letters from chaste walks (with chaperone, as people might talk), to following engagement, more intimate moments of kissing and finally to the consummation of their sexual life following marriage. It is fascinating and oddly charming to read how Dermod and Mabel discovered each other sexually  and, to both of their surprise, that women could enjoy sex.

Before engagement the couple were not allowed to be alone together. After betrothal they were discretely allowed private time together behind closed doors but it was only after marriage that they could be fully sexually active. In fact Dermod had some previous experience with women, but Mabel seems to have led a life of total chastity prior to her engagement. These were not, the 21st century reader should remember, teenagers but mature, well educated adults in their 30s.

Although by upbringing a conservative and religious member of the Church of Ireland, Mabel was in her way, something of feminist. Writing to her husband to be, she wrote that she wanted to be a partner, ‘not an ornament’ in the marriage; ‘of course times change but I suppose it is the actions of people like ourselves that make them change’.

In an Ireland where women can still die in childbirth from entirely preventable causes, due to outdated and impractical laws, Mabel’s quote seems a good way to end this review.

Daniel Murray on anti-Treaty attempts to revive the IRB during the Civil War. See also his article on the IRB after 1916.

 Liam Lynch

By November 1922, five months into the Irish Civil War, Liam Lynch was a busy man as Chief of Staff to the Anti-Treatyite IRA. Not too busy, however, to turn his thoughts towards an issue that he believed needed serious consideration: the state of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). With that in mind, he wrote to one of his most trusted lieutenants, Liam Deasy. Displaying a sentimental streak, he asked Deasy for advice on how best to “save the honour of this splendid historic organisation.”

As a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council, Lynch had watched with dismay the direction the Brotherhood’s leadership had taken. With the death of Harry Boland, and the imprisonment of Joe McKelvey and Charlie Daly who had also taken the anti-Treaty line, he was now the sole remaining Council member opposed to the Treaty who was alive and at liberty.

Determined not to let opportunities pass by, Lynch outlined to Deasy his idea that the IRB Division Council call on its secretary to reopen an adjourned meeting from before. Represented at this meeting would be the Supreme Council and a number of IRB middle-tier officers. If necessary, signatures would be taken of as many officers could be had, as most of them had been against the Treaty at the last session. Lynch was clearly aiming to go into such a showdown with the numbers loaded in his favour.

At this hypothetical congress, each member of the Supreme Council would be held to account for their sanctioning of the hated Treaty and their waging of war against fellow Republicans. The guilty individuals – and Lynch clearly had certain people in mind – would be removed, leaving the Supreme Council free to be reformed on appropriately anti-Treaty lines. If such individuals were to refuse such a meeting, the Supreme Council could be reorganised without the guilty members who would be dropped altogether.

Lynch asked Deasy to show his letter to other IRB members, including Seán O’Hegarty and Florence O’Donoghue. Although both men had taken a neutral stance for the Civil War, Lynch believed they would support him in bringing the IRB “back to the old idea.” All three of them, after all, had formed close bonds from serving together in the Cork IRA during War of Independence and remained his confidants even as they had backed away from either side in the succeeding conflict.[1]

 Playing Possum

The IRB – also known as the Organisation to insiders – provides a challenge to researchers in that the sources do not necessarily provide a clear narrative. Being a secret society, it was not in its nature to advertise itself or leave convenient records for historians.

Nonetheless, some paperwork was essential to maintain communications between the various groups and individuals making up of the IRB, and enough has survived to make sense of the society as it went through one of the most turbulent times in modern Irish history.

This article does not aspire to explain the IRB at this period in its entirety at this period. Instead, it will attempt to shed some light on the thoughts of the men within the Brotherhood and what they hoped to achieve with it.

Part of the problem of studying the IRB in the later stages of the War of Independence and afterwards is that even contemporaries were not sure if this secretive fraternity was still around in any meaningful sense. It was the viewpoint of James Hogan, “on the eve of the Truce the IRB was semi-moribund beneath, and alive only on top or in its upper levels.”[2]

As Hogan was Director of Intelligence in the Free State army, this was a substantial opinion, and one supported by others. Two of the leading figures in the Athlone IRA Brigade characterised the Organisation as falling into disuse during the later stages of the War of Independence as British efforts intensified and communications became difficult. But they also described the IRB as being revived during the breathing space provided by the Truce.[3]

This spoke of one of the Brotherhood’s great strengths: the ability to lie dormant until the pressure had slackened, allowing it to pick itself up again. It survived the Easter Rising which had seen its senior leaders executed and their replacements forced to start anew. As Liam Lynch saw it, there was no reason why the Organisation could not be recovered again, this time from its split over the Treaty.

The IRB would be condemned by critics as the instigator behind the acceptance of the fateful Treaty. Éamon de Valera cursed the machinations of “secret societies” within the Dáil as the Treaty was debated. When the Dáil ended up carrying the Treaty by a small majority, Seán T. O’Kelly held the IRB to blame, and rhetorically asked how such a crowd could be held as honest men.[4]

So there is then a certain poignancy in how Lynch, who would similarly be censured by many for leading the Anti-Treaty side into a doomed fight, did not lose his faith in the Brotherhood and what it could accomplish.

 Dissent in the Ranks

Given the policy of the IRB to focus its recruitment among the IRA on officers and others with influence, it is perhaps not surprising that onlookers like James Hogan saw the Brotherhood as essentially an elitist society, one with a head but not necessarily much of a body.

It was a view that Florence O’Donoghue was keen to challenge in his later writings. To him, the IRB had been a living, active group. If there had been anything moribund about it, it was its upper tiers who had forsaken the Republic when they had accepted the Treaty.

The rank and file of the Organisation, O’Donoghue stressed, “believed with passionate intensity in the de facto existence of the Republic, and they hotly resented that any group of men, even chosen leaders, should attempt to assume the power of destroying what they had sworn to uphold.”[5]

As an example of this intensity to the point of disobedience, O’Donoghue cited a meeting of all the officers in the County Board officers and District Centres of the IRB on the 21^st of January 1922. There, they protested to the Supreme Council against the latter’s support of the Treaty. “Only a high sense of duty could have driven a group of disciplined officers into such open conflict with their superiors,” was how O’Donoghue explained it, with pride and no small sense of wonder.[6]

 A Democratic Conspiracy

It would be worthwhile at this point to assess how the IRB was structured. A detailed description is found in the nine-page IRB Constitution from 1920. It was marked as “revised to date”, making it the most current version that would have been available to Lynch and O’Donoghue.

The basic unit of the society was its Circles, which were divided into sections of not more than ten men each, and which elected an officer, or Centre, for the Circle.Each county in Ireland was divided into two or more Districts. Centres in each District formed a board which elected a committee for itself. Cities were enough to be considered Districts in themselves.

Further up the hierarchy were the County Centres, elected by the local Centres in each county. District Centres and County Circles were grouped into the eleven Divisions encompassing the IRB’s sphere of influence: eight Divisions for Ireland, two for the south and north halves of England, and one for Scotland.

At the apex of this pyramid was the Supreme Council. District Centres and County Circles in each Division elected by ballot a five-strong committee which in turn elected someone to represent the Division on the Supreme Council. These eleven men, one for each Division, would co-opt four additional members, leading to a total membership of fifteen for the Council.

As its name would suggest, the Supreme Council demanded, and for the most part, commanded the respect of the rest of the IRB: “The authority of the Supreme Council shall be unquestioned.” It claimed the authority to inflict punishments on errant members such as suspensions, dismissals or, in the cases of those termed treasonous, the death penalty.

But at the same time the IRB Constitution was at pains to ensure its leadership was a representative one, and that the middle and lower tiers had some say in the make-up of the ones above. It was that democratic tradition that Liam Lynch was hoping to tap into when he made his proposals to reform the Supreme Council.[7]

 Florence O’Donoghue

There would be few people better qualified to critique Lynch’s views on IRB reform than O’Donoghue, having risen through the fraternity’s ranks in the months before the Truce, allowing him opportunity to observe its inner workings.

He had been an early member of the Cork IRB in the opening salvoes of the War of Independence, and had remained with it even while troubled by the issues of a dual command within the IRA that a secret society would bring.

O’Donoghue’s decision to stay with the IRB seems to have been largely based on the realisation that the Brotherhood would continue to be a deciding force behind the scenes. Which is lucky for historians, as it is in no small part due to him and his meticulous note-taking that as much is known about the IRB for this time.[8]

O’Donoghue was promoted to responsibility over the Circles in Cork City and the county in March 1921. A letter from Séan Ó Muirthile, a member of the Supreme Council, explained to him that Liam Lynch and he had been recommended in a high-level IRB meeting in Dublin that had included himself, Michael Collins and Liam Deasy. Although Ó Muirthile did not say, Deasy was most likely the one who pushed his fellow Corkmen forward.

As Ó Muirthile described it, O’Donoghue’s elevation to acting County Centre was a temporary one until the proper elections could be held. It was also an overdue one, as the Cork IRB was in limbo due to the loss of two of its leading lights.

Tom Hales, who had represented South Munster for the IRB as a Divisional Commander, had been arrested in July 1920 by British soldiers. His replacement, Paddy Cahill, had been unable to come from Tralee to take over, so Lynch had been asked to instead.

O’Donoghue’s role would be to replace Domhnall O’Callaghan as County Centre, as the latter had left without telling anyone, leaving the local IRB floundering. O’Callaghan’s subsequent court-martial for his dereliction of duty would be just one of the many ongoing concerns O’Donoghue would be obliged to deal with.

In addition to updating the new acting County Centre, Ó Muirthile sent O’Donoghue eight copies of general orders from the Supreme Council to distribute. Ó Muirthile comes across in his correspondence as eager to please, almost cheery, and it is sobering to think that in a little over a year’s time, the two men would be on opposing sides in the Civil War.

 General Orders

Addressed “To All County Centres” and composed on behalf of the Supreme Council, the general order that Ó Muirthile told O’Donoghue to pass on provides for historians the direction the IRB leadership was planning on taking its membership. Dated to March 1921, the document opens by stressing the importance of maintaining the Organisation in a “virile and effective position throughout the country.”

In what would have made critics like Éamon de Valera and Cathal Brugha grind their teeth, the Supreme Council took unreserved credit for making possible the current fight against the British. Continued coordination with the IRA was called for, as “the military functions of both bodies are similar to each other, the success or failing of one is the success or failure of both.”

The IRB had spent a lot of time infiltrating the IRA, and could boast of a large amount of the latter’s officers as its own. It clearly looked forward to the persistence of such an advantageous relationship. The document ended by reminding its readers that only “physical force methods” would have a chance of winning them anything.

Such passages show that the Supreme Council was preparing its members for the possible continuation of the War. Also, that the IRB had no intention of stepping out of the shadows. It planned on remaining as it was before: an army within an army.

Another issue that the document addressed was that of elections throughout the levels in the IRB. The Circle elections were planned for the 15 of June 1921, the County elections on the 15^th of August, and the Divisional Elections on the 15^th of October. In a separate document, the County elections would be called for the 4^th of November, indicating they had been pushed back. The last round of elections for the IRB had been two years ago, and the Supreme Council admitted that a lot of work would have to be made up for.

Interestingly, there seems to have been no dates set for re-electing the Supreme Council, suggesting that the democracy within the Organisation may only have been intended to go so far at this delicate stage.[9]

 Treaty Reactions

O’Donoghue’s files do not indicate how these general orders were received by the Organisation audience. These files do, however, allow us insight into how some within the lower and middle ranks responded to the Treaty. By this time, O’Donoghue had gone from acting County Centre to the Divisional Secretary of South Munster, granting him supervision over the Circles in Cork, Kerry and Waterford.

The letters O’Donoghue received, or at least the ones he kept in his papers, were overwhelmingly against the Treaty. A letter from the 1^st of January 1922 from a County Centre spoke of the Organisation suffering due to the uncertainty over the Treaty and an impatience for the Supreme Council to issue instructions. What was clear in this letter was that the Cork IRB was generally against the Treaty, with three District Boards forwarding resolutions to that effect.

A letter to O’Donoghue on the 10^th of January from Liam Lynch, by then a recent addition to the Supreme Council, bemoaned the general lack of trust within the Council, and blamed it on the likes of Ó Muirthile and Michael Collins. The disquiet was evidently as much a feature of the upper tiers as it was of the rest of the Brotherhood.

 The New Political Situation

The Supreme Council released what was for many an overdue announcement. The title, ‘The Organisation and the New Political Situation in Ireland’, showed an awareness that it was treading into uncharted waters. The document was signed for the 12^th of December 1921, and issued to the rest of the Brotherhood, according to O’Donoghue, on the 12^th of January.

It began with a cautious, but telling, statement about how it had always been IRB policy to make use of all instruments, “political or otherwise”, towards the ultimate pursuit of the Republic. In case readers were in doubt as to what this talk of political instruments could mean, the announcement went on to state how the Supreme Council had decided that the “present peace Treaty between Ireland and Great Britain should be ratified.” The uncompromising stance from ten months back, when physical force methods were touted as the only way forward, must have seemed a long time ago.

The Supreme Council, however, appeared hesitant to push the point too far, as it allowed for IRB members doubling as TDs to vote as they saw fit on the matter. Perhaps the Council feared that to appear too domineering would push its followers into a split. Nonetheless, that was exactly what it got.[10]

 Cracks Widen

Another letter from a District Centre in Cork was about a meeting held on the 18^th of February 1922, where a resolution was passed expressing approval of County and Division Boards withdrawing their support from the Supreme Council over the Treaty, and calling for re-elections of the Supreme Council at the earliest date.

All of this would support O’Donoghue’s claim in his later writings that the South Munster IRB had overwhelmingly rejected the Treaty to the point of defying their leadership. This did not mean that the rebellious rank-and-file saw themselves as in opposition to the IRB as an organisation, just its Supreme Council. After all, the same resolution by the County and Division Boards condemned the Treaty in that it was contrary to the spirit of the IRB Constitution. Little wonder, then, that Liam Lynch assumed that he would have the numbers on his side when retaking control of the Supreme Council.

This attitude was not limited to the Cork IRB. A report from Co Kerry at the same period proudly told of how the Supreme Council orders had practically no effect on its Circles there, where the pro-Treaty members were very much a minority.

Otherwise, the Kerry IRB was doing well and holding regular meetings. Similarly, a report from the Waterford IRB from the 13^th of January 1922 enthused about how its membership had in the past month increased considerably in size to the point of having to subdivide some Circles and create new ones.

Whatever the divisions were in the ranks and at the top, the Organisation was far from moribund. Instead, it was thriving. Little wonder, then, that Liam Lynch saw that the IRB, if properly reformed under anti-Treaty lines like many of its membership already wanted, could continue to be a great asset.[11]

 The Replies

Deasy did as his Chief of Staff asked and forwarded the latter’s letter to the two neutrals, Seán O’Hegarty and Florence O’Donoghue. Deasy’s covering letter to the pair was cautiously optimistic about Lynch’s proposals, though he said he was keen to have their opinions before taking any steps.

O’Hegarty’s reply to Deasy was brief and unmoved. He had no idea at present on the subject of the IRB, and that in any case it seemed a waste to bother reorganising it while the war continued.

O’Donoghue’s first reply on the 2^nd of December went beyond dismissive to insulting. Lynch’s idea was absurd, which surprised O’Donoghue as he thought Lynch had more sense. The IRB as it stood was too sundered to be worth much. If the current Anti-Treatyite offensive was successful, then there might be a chance to such a reorganisation, but in which case the victorious party there would be no need for an IRB anyway.

A second reply from O’Donoghue almost a month later, on the 29^th of December, saw him in a more reflective and agreeable mood. He apologised for his curt tone from before, blaming it on his poor health at the time. Now he agreed with Lynch’s original points: that the IRB should be maintained to continue the fight for the Republic, and that in order for this to happen, the rotten and disloyal elements would have to be purged.

In addition, the influence of the IRB would have to be extended to include the “young virile Separatist and Republican elements”, as opposed to the “fogey” members that O’Donoghue held responsible for the disarray.

O’Donoghue was less sure about Lynch’s proposal to call a meeting for the Supreme Council. He feared that the pro-Treaty members already formed a majority who would stonewall any further arguments against the Treaty. It was, after all, as O’Donoghue admitted, the traditional IRB policy to use any concession by Britain as stepping-stone towards eventual Irish independence, and O’Donoghue doubted that his side had any good counter-arguments.

A more promising alternative would be to make a demand at a Supreme Council meeting – and this demand could be used as an excuse for getting the meeting agreed in the first place – for a reassembling of the complete society, with elections for a new Supreme Council by the Circles that made up the grassroots of the IRB.

O’Donoghue did not think the current Council could refuse such a demand and even if it did, the Anti-Treatyite faction would be justified in going ahead with such elections anyway, elections that O’Donoghue had no doubt would result in a Supreme Council more to their liking.

This was a more ambitious overhaul than Lynch’s, which was concerned only with the Supreme Council. O’Donoghue’s vision encompassed the whole of the IRB, a vision entirely in keeping with its Constitution, which was at pains to ensure that the leadership was a representative one.

As a side issue, such an election could also serve a secondary function as a way of ascertaining which of the Circles on paper actually existed. Keeping a society in the dark could be as much of a nuisance to those inside as it was to its opponents.[12]

 Liam Deasy

O’Donoghue admitted the difficulty in implementing such a grand scheme in the present war conditions, and was at a loss for a solution unless the opportunity of another truce presented itself. Deasy was taken with O’Donoghue ideas without being put off by the latter’s doubts.

Reporting back to Lynch, Deasy doubted the adjourned meeting could be reconvened, as Lynch as suggested, repeating O’Donoghue’s anticipation that the Supreme Council would just block it.

But the call for the meeting should be made all the same, with the County Centres made aware of it. If the Supreme Council were to stymie it as expected, the County Centres could act as a temporary Council in its place until the IRB was sufficiently reoriented to hold elections for a fresh leadership. Deasy’s concern was for when, not if, this could be carried out.

Deasy ended his discussion on the topic in his letter with a request for Lynch for the names of the IRB officers in the southern area outside of South Munster – parts Deasy was evidently foggy on – in order to pass these ideas onto them.[13]

 The End

There was to be no further correspondence relating to the ideas by Lynch, Deasy and O’Donoghue to take back the IRB, or, at least, none that has survived. Not that it would have made much difference in the end, as Free State forces simply steamrolled the opposition into submission. Lynch was killed on April 1923, five months after he had first aired his intention to re-establish the honour of the IRB as he saw it.

O’Donoghue had made the point in his first reply that if the Anti-Treatyites were to win, reforming the IRB would become an unnecessary endeavour. The Free State was to prove the truth of that initial assessment, though not in the way he had intended.

The new IRA Executive after Lynch was to be of a very different mindset to Lynch in regards to his “splendid historic organisation.” There was a meeting of eleven County Centres held on the 2^nd of November 1924, eighteen months after the Civil War had officially ended. Of the eleven Centres who had been summoned, four were absent; in one case, because the man had recently died.

The Brigadier-General read out the decision of the IRA Executive for the remaining IRB Circles within the IRA to disband. From then on, the IRA alone would be sufficient, and the use for a secret society had ceased. When it came to fulfilling the role of an underground army for a republican Ireland, the post-Civil War IRA would need or brook no distractions.

There was no amendment or counter-proposal, but each of the seven Centres was anxious to state his personal view. Three agreed that the IRB had outlived itself. One also agreed that the Organisation should be disbanded but with the caveat of it being re-established at a future time if necessary.

Three disagreed with the Executive’s decision. The IRB should instead be reformed – in an unknowing echo of the late Liam Lynch – and if properly controlled, it could still uphold the “National Tradition,” as one man put it. These views revealed the emotional attachment some of the members still had for their Brotherhood even after the trials of two wars. Another dissenter argued in favour of retaining the Brotherhood on the grounds of tradition, as it had represented the ‘physical force movement’ since the time of Wolfe Tone and even at the present, it had not ceased.

But it had. The Brigadier-General recommended that the County Centres present meet with the Circle Centres under their sphere of influence to inform them of the disbandment orders. The Circle Centres would in turn pass the message on the members of their Circles. The minutes of the meeting would be sent in circulars to the Circles who had not been represented at the meeting, including those in Britain and the United States.

The IRB had been designed under its constitution to be a compromise between a top-down and down-top structure: the leadership would decide on policy but the leadership would be chosen in part by the middle and lower tiers, ensuring a mixture of discipline and representation. Now the new command was having the final say, and the membership acquiesced. Although not, it was noted, without protest.[14]

 Conclusion

The Irish Republican Brotherhood in its later years is a complex picture to put together but not an impossible one. Sources such as the correspondence between Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy and Florence O’Donoghue allow historians to see how senior and long-term members who opposed the Treaty struggled to regain control of the Organisation.

The initial plan by Lynch was to reopen an adjourned meeting and use it to remove the pro-Treaty members of the Supreme Council. O’Donoghue’s extension of this idea was to call for elections that would rehaul the IRB from top to bottom. Both proposals were in keeping with the IRB Constitution that strove to create a leadership that was representative of its membership.

Files from O’Donoghue’s time as a middle-tier organiser within the IRB reveal many grassroots members as being vehemently against the Treaty, giving weight to Lynch’s and O’Donoghue’s ideas on reforming the Supreme Council. They also show the IRB stagnating in the months before the Truce before thriving afterwards in confidence and numbers. Even when the IRB Circles in the anti-Treaty IRA were disbanded in 1924, there were still members who felt a strong affinity for Ireland’s longest-running republican society.

Bibliography

National Library of Ireland – Florence O’Donoghue Papers

MS 31,233

MS 31,237(1)

MS 31,237(2)

MS 31,240

MS 31,244

Books

Ó Broin, Leon. Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858-1924 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976)

O’Donoghue, Florence (ed. Borgonovo, John) Florence and Josephine O’Donoghue’s War of Independence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006)

O’Donoghue, Florence. No Other Law: The Story of Liam Lynch and the Irish Republican Army, 1916-1923 (Dublin, Irish Press [1954])

Bureau of Military History Statements

O’Brien, Henry, W.S. 1308

O’Meara, Seumas, W.S. 1504

[1]National Library of Ireland (NLI), MS 31,240

[2]Ó Broin, Leon. Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858-1924 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976), p. 192

[3]O’Brien, Henry, (BMH / WS 1308), p.23-4 ; O’Meara, Seumas, (BMH / WS 1504), p. 53

[4] Ó Broin, pp. 198-9

[5]O’Donoghue, Florence. No Other Law: The Story of Liam Lynch and the Irish Republican Army, 1916-1923 (Dublin, Irish Press [1954]), p. 194

[6]Ibid, p. 194-5

[7]NLI, MS 31,233

[8]O’Donoghue, Florence (ed. Borgonovo, John) Florence and Josephine O’Donoghue’s War of Independence (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006) pp. 58-60

[9]NLI, MS 31,237(1)

[10] O’Donoghue, Florence. No Other Law, pp. 193-4 ; NLI, MS 31,244

[11]NLI, MS 31,237(2)

[12]NLI, MS 31,233

[13]Ibid

[14]NLI, MS MS 31,240

In the first of a three part series, John Dorney looks at how ‘ the gun re-entered Irish politics’ and how they were used.

The series of conflicts we now call the Irish Revolution raged from 1916 to 1923. They included a number of discrete episodes with different combatants arrayed against each other in each. The period was a political as much as military contest but it did see 4-5,000 people lose their lives in armed conflict.

Partisan debate raged at the time about whether the ‘Trouble’ amounted to political violence or warfare. The point has been made that it was not so much the quantity or quality of weapons that caused deaths and injuries as the willingness to use them.[1]

Pistols in the hands of determined gunmen could be responsible for many more deaths than a heavily armed military unit with rifles and machine guns. One could instance Bloody Sunday in 1920 in which IRA Squad and Dublin Brigade assassins killed 14 British officers in one morning (mostly in their beds) without any combat taking place. The same was true for the shooting of informers which accounted for 180 or so IRA victims in 1919-1921.[2]

Historians such as Peter Hart argued that rifles were above all of symbolic importance to the Volunteers of the IRA – a sign that they real soldiers and, he argued, real men. The real killing was done by clandestine operatives with concealed weapons. He made the point that both Irish factions in the Civil War of 1922-23 were considerably better armed than the IRA had been against the British but that casualties were not noticeably higher.

No one should doubt the symbolic importance of rifles to young Volunteers. In 1914 the Irish Republicans Brotherhood organ Irish Freedom wrote, ‘A dozen rifles are more effective than a thousand resolutions in Parliament’.[3] If rifles were merely symbolic of the IRA’s view of itself as an army and the real killing was done by assassination, then weapons and combat are not important in the study of the Irish revolution. But this argument has its limits.

Combat was not as infrequent as Hart made out. D.M. Leeson concluded that, ‘killing unarmed helpless men was more common than battle – but not that much more common: and what is more, most of those unarmed and helpless victims were killed by the police [in reprisals]’.[4]

The argument that combat was irrelevant, aside from its partisan implications (the IRA were cowardly ‘gunmen’ not soldiers) misses a number of important points. First, open warfare, which involved sustained fighting  and the use of heavy weapons, caused far higher casualties than clandestine political violence when it did occur – the insurrection of 1916 and the opening month of the Civil War in 1922 (respectively 487 dead in the 5 days of the 1916 Rising and by my count, about 350 in July/August 1922).

Secondly the body count was not the only way to measure military effectiveness. Well-armed troops or militias could cow worse-armed opponents, arrest them and cause them to flee for the hills, meaning that that side now administered an area. Clandestine assassination did not change this balance.

In actual combat, a revolver could not  take on a rifle except at very close range, rifles could not take on light machine guns, especially if they were mounted in armoured vehicles and no small arms could stand up to artillery in open warfare. Well-armed and motivated guerrillas could make it impossible for regular troops to patrol an area except in great force and prevent them from establishing posts except in considerable strength. Had they had mortars and light artillery (they never did) virtually all small rural police and military posts could have been made untenable.

In short; weapons and how they were used did matter.

The gun re-enters Irish life, 1914-1916

In the Ulster crisis of 1913-14, both rival Volunteer movements, Ulster and Irish armed themselves with an assortment of weapons from around Europe.

The UVF  imported as many as 37,000 rifles of various makes and around 3 million rounds of ammunition. Some 25,000 rifles were landed at Larne on April 25, in a spectacular defiance of the law and of Home Rule. [5]

The Irish Volunteers for their part unloaded at Howth harbour from the yacht the Asgard, a cargo of 900 rifles and 30,000 rounds of ammunition that Bulmer Hobson, the IRB leader, had secretly purchased in Germany and another 600 at Kilcoole, County Wicklow later in the summer of 1914.

These arsenals were both much less impressive than they looked on paper. The unionists imported better rifles than the nationalists but they were of three different types, German Mausers (1888 model), Austrian Steyr Manlicher rifles and Italian Vetterli rifles. All of these took a different calibre bullet so supply of ammunition to fighters would have been very difficult in the event of their being fired in anger.

Some of them were also old and in poor condition and in fact they were never used in action. Many of the Ulster Volunteers went off to war with the British Army in 1914. When conflict did come to Ulster in earnest in mid 1920, the British authorities collected most unionist arms to prevent the IRA getting them, though they effectively re-armed the loyalist militias in the newly formed Ulster Special Constabulary with standard British military small arms.

As it was though, the symbolic and propaganda effect of the UVF’s arms was highly effective. In the face of the prospect of armed unionist resistance, the British government backed down and in 1914 excluded 6 counties of Ulster from Home Rule – a status that was later confirmed in mid 1920.

As for the Irish Volunteers, they suffered a split in 1914 (the National Volunteers followed Irish Party leader John Redmond into support for Britain in the First World War) and as result lost some of the ‘Howth Mausers’. In practice as the war went on the National Volunteers’ enthusiasm waned, the core IRB-influenced group of the Irish Volunteers regained some of these weapons. They had, however, other problems with armament.

Easter Rising small arms

The 1871 or ‘Howth’ Mauser was a very long, very heavy, very old, single shot weapon. It was relatively slow to reload, its ammunition (11mm) was scarce and could not be resupplied in Ireland.

It was also black powder, creating a ferocious explosion and a cloud of black smoke when fired, thus giving away the position of the firer. In the words of one Volunteer who ended up using it in the 1916 Rising, ‘it was a bad weapon for street fighting’; ‘Flame about three foot long came out through the barrel when it was fired and a shower of soot and smoke came back in one’s face. After three shots were fired from it, it would have to be thrown away to let it cool and the concussion of it was so severe that it drove me back along the floor several feet’[6].

On On the other hand, the heavy lead bullet fired by the ‘Howth Mauser’, broke up on impact with human bodies, caused terrible exit wounds, and inspired significant fear among those on the receiving end.

They could also punch through sandbags and walls as British troops trying to set up a machine gun post as Digges Street near Jacob’s Factory found; according to Peadar Kearney ‘they were literally blown out of it. A dozen Howth Mausers could always do that’.[7]

It seems that the majority of Volunteer and Citizen Army fighters were armed with the Howth Mauser. Although were also a certain amount of Italian Vetterli Rifles in the hands of the Volunteeers and Citizen Army dating from early 1914, when they had been imported during the Ulster crisis, ammunition for them was scarce and it is not clear if they were used in the Rising.[8]

A much better bet for the Volunteers, where they could get them, were the British Lee Enfield .303 rifles. Apart from being newer, significantly shorter and lighter than the 1871 Mauser, the Lee Enfield held a magazine of ten rounds and by manipulation of the bolt action, could be fired rapidly in trained hands (perhaps 20-30 shots per minute for veteran troops). It also used smokeless powder and so did not give away the firer’s position.

The Volunteers borrowed, bought and stole Lee Enfields wherever they could in the months leading up the Rising. So many service rifles began to go missing in the months leading up to the Rising – mostly sold off by British ‘Tommies’ at Dublin port – that troops embarking at Hollyhead for Dublin were instructed to leave their rifles behind in Wales and pick up new ones at barracks in Dublin.[9]

The rebels also had a small number of Martini Henry carbines – a single shot lever action carbine – which at this date were issued to the Royal Irish Constabulary and some of which were imported from sympathisers in the United States. In Bolands Mill one Volunteer reported that there were three different kinds of rifle, the Lee Enfield, two different types of Martini-Henry (with different cartridges) and the Howth Mauser as well as shotguns, all of which had to be kept supplied with different calibre ammunition, ‘ even in the hottest of corners’. [10]

One surprisingly effective weapon in the hands of the Volunteers was what they referred to as the ‘Peter the Painter’ (after an anarchist terrorist who used one in turn-of-the-century London) or C96 Mauser automatic pistol.

This was clip fed semi-automatic weapon that held ten 9mm rounds. It could be equipped with a shoulder stock to make it more accurate and proved lethally effective in close quarters street fighting during Easter Week. At Mount Street Bridge Tom Malone , armed with a C96 and accompanied by a mere 12 Volunteers killed and wounded 240 Sherwood Foresters. Malone himself in one charge shot down ten British soldiers with his automatic pistol before taking up a Howth Mauser.[11]

Other Volunteers carried revolvers, shotguns or even pikes, the latter being virtually useless in a 20^th century fire fight.

Heavy weapons

Having occupied positions around Dublin on Easter Monday, many Volunteers actually saw little combat until they received the order to surrender. But those that were attacked in their fortified positions in general proved very difficult to dislodge despite their antiquated weapons.

By the end of the week, the only insurgent stronghold that had actually been forced to surrender was the rebel headquarters at the GPO.

The British forces massively outnumbered and outgunned the insurgents in 1916. By the end of the week they had assembled some 16,000 troops to take on the 1,600 odd rebels. Every infantryman was equipped with a Lee Enfield rifle, which in most cases was superior to what they faced.

More important though, were machine guns, of which the British had many and the Volunteers none. The Vickers heavy machine gun was belt fed and could fire continuously at a rate of 500 rounds per minute. The Lewis light machine gun was fed by a 47 round pan magazine and could be carried around easily by infantry troops, unlike the Vickers. Both, but especially the former, could ‘suppress’ a defensive position by spraying it with so many bullets that no one would be able to return fire.

Automatic weapons made a significant difference but the decisive weapon in 1916 was artillery. The British Army after the initial shock of the outbreak of the rebellion, deployed  four 18 pounder field guns in Dublin, taken from the garrison in Athlone along with a 12 pounder gun aboard the gun-boat Helga.[12]

A number of insurgent positions were fired at with artillery, but it made the most difference at the rebel headquarters at the GPO and O’Connell Street, where artillery fire by the Friday had made the Post Office a flaming inferno and levelled much of Dublin’s main street. This was the main factor in the insurgent surrender. It also seems likely that the use of heavy weapons in a densely populated urban area caused many of the 250 odd civilian fatalities.[13]

The disproportion in the weaponry available to both sides was a salutary lesson to the surviving Volunteers, notably Michael Collins, who resolved never to gain face the British military in open combat.

Watch out for part 2, Weapons of the Irish War of Independence.

References

[1] Historian Peter Hart wrote; ‘Arms limitations did set strict limits on the military conduct of the revolution, but they do not measure its violence. It is determination and activity we need to measure, not guns’Peter Hart, The IRA at War, p45

[2] According to Eunan O’Halpin, the number of civilians shot as informers by the IRA in 1919-21 was 183, O’Halpin, Problematic Killing during the Irish War of Independence and its Aftermath: Civilian Spies and Informers, in Death and Dying in Britain and Ireland  p329

[3] Irish Freedom July 1914

[4] DM Leeson, The Black and Tans p67

[5] Alvin Jackson, British Ireland, in Niall Fergusson Ed. Virtual History p220

[6] Robert Holland, quoted in Fearghal McGarry, The Rising, Ireland Easter 1916, p175.

[7] Charles Townshend Easter 1916 p201.

[8] Kenneth Smith Christmas, Guns of the Easter Rising, American Rifleman, September 2013http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2013/9/10/guns-of-the-easter-rising/

[9] Michael Foy, Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, P79

[10] Joseph O’Connor quoted in McGarry, The Rising p 177

[11] Kenneth Smith Christmas, Guns of the Easter Rising

[12] Townshend Easter 1916 p 191

[13] Fearghal McGarry, Violence in the Easter Rising in David Fitzpatrick Ed, Terror in Ireland, p 51

By John Dorney. See Part I, Weapons of the Irish Revolution 1914-16 here.

Conventionally, the conflict known as the Irish War of Independence, Anglo-Irish War or to Republicans, the ‘Tan War’ is said to run from January 1919 and the Soloheadbeg ambush to the truce of July 1921. The reality was much less clear cut.

Political violence never entirely ceased after 1916 but armed conflict in any recognisable sense did not take off until early 1920. This, second part of our series on the Weapons of the Irish Revolution will focus on the military dimension to these years.

Rearming the Volunteers

The Volunteers were almost completely disarmed after the Rising of 1916. Even where no rebellion had taken place, as in Cork city, the Volunteers arms were confiscated and their leaders arrested and interned.

Although all of the internees were freed by mid 1917, the weapons were not recovered. Moreover liberties the Volunteers had enjoyed before the Rising – drilling and carrying weapons openly and in public, would be unthinkable after it.

The anti-conscription crisis of the spring of 1918 (in which Irish nationalists protested against the imposition of conscription for the Great War) was largely bloodless because the Volunteer movement, which swelled to over 70,000 young men, was virtually unarmed. Instead of shootings there were mass protests and a general strike – tactics which proved highly effective in staving off conscription.

Indeed, in the wake of the republicans’ victory over conscription and then in the General Election of December 1918 it looked for a time as if civil and political resistance rather than armed struggle would be the future of the independence struggle. Though there was violence in the form of riots between young republicans, the police and the British military, combat was usually joined with fists, stones and sticks rather than guns in 1918-19.

This did not last. From late 1918, precisely in order to re-arm, the Volunteers began raiding and in some cases shooting state forces. According to one Volunteer in County Monaghan,

In 1919 we had little arms, some shotguns, a few pin fire revolvers-of antiquated make and some ammunition for the revolvers. We had to rely on what we had or on what we got by raiding for arms. I purchased a few revolvers myself. This was all the purchase of arms as far as I know in the Company area.[1]

Lethal arm raids occurred most famously at Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary, where two policemen were shot in order to seize the gelignite explosive they were escorting, an incident usually cited as the start of the war between republicans and Crown forces. But in fact two IRA Volunteers had already died in a similar arms raid in Kerry.[2]

As it had before the Easter Rising, the British Army proved to be a profitable source of weapons. Arms were sometimes stolen or seized – Liam Lynch for instance and a party of six Cork IRA men armed with revolvers shot one soldier and took rifles off 25 others in Fermoy in September 1919, incidentally provoking a wholesale military reprisal on the town.

However, arms did not always need to be taken by force. The IRA Dublin Brigade 4^th Battalion, for example, managed to surreptitiously buy hundreds of rifles from the Quartermaster at Wellington Barracks in Dublin and smuggle them out over the canal at the rear of the complex in 1917-18[3].

There was also some successful importation of arms. According to Richard Mulcahy – IRA Chief of Staff’s papers, some 289 handguns and 53 rifles along with nearly 25,000 rounds of ammunition were smuggled into Ireland from sympathisers in America. Larger scale efforts at buying guns in Europe from various militia groupings generally came to grief, however, either because the arms deals themselves went wrong or because they were intercepted by the Royal Navy.[4]

Handguns

In this period, Michael Collins also established his ‘Squad’ to assassinate RIC and DMP detectives charged with political work. Favoured weapons at this early stage of guerrilla warfare, where the emphasis was on clandestine raids and assassinations rather than military style attacks – were easily concealable handguns.

The ‘Squad’ men in Dublin found that the .38 revolvers they started out with were not up to the job. Their first victim, Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth, shot as he was stepping off a tram in July 1919, did not die for two weeks.

The Squad were apparently not troubled by the moral implications of the hit, but simply by practicalities, they wanted clean kills. They switched to from .38 calibre revolvers to .45 calibre weapons.[5]

The fulltime gunmen of the IRA came to fetishise their handguns. According to historian Anne Dolan, ‘they squabbled between killings over who was the best shot, about which was better the Webley, the Mauser or the Colt’[6]. Ernie O’Malley favoured, ‘a Smith and Wesson .45 and Parabellum [9mm handgun] under my coat’[7].

Pistols would account for many hundreds of victims in the conflict. It is a mistake to think that the War of Independence was all about brave combat on either side.

In the so-called Siege of Tralee in November 1920 for example, out of perhaps 20 victims (7 policemen at least killed by the IRA and between 8 and 15 locals killed by RIC, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries) none died in any kind of combat -that is while armed and defending themselves.

As noted in Part I of this article, over 180 civilians were killed as informers by the IRA, usually shot with revolvers at close range and dozens of  police and military personal were similarly assassinated at close quarters – most famously on Bloody Sunday in November 1920 when 14 British officers or agents were assassinated in a single morning in Dublin.[8] Covert state forces came to mimic the IRA’s methods of assassination and undercover RIC or Auxiliary ‘squads’ assassinated the mayors of both Cork and Limerick among many others. [9].

Flying columns

But though the IRA was chronically under-armed for the whole conflict, as they went on the offensive in early 1920 – first attacking isolated barracks and then attacking RIC or military patrols – they needed military infantry weapons.

They got these principally from their enemies the RIC (who had been re-armed with Lee Enfields, Lewis guns and grenades in 1919) the British Army and the Coast Guard (equipped with Canadian Ross Rifles). In many areas the IRA had few arms throughout the war but in active areas, fulltime flying columns could be surprisingly heavily armed.

One well-armed IRA force, for instance comprised of about 70 men from various companies of the Cork No 1 Brigade, assembled at the Ballyvourney ambush in West Cork in February 1921, equipped with 56 service rifles, two Lewis machine guns and ten shotguns.[10]

Cork columns though, where the war was most intense, were certainly unusually well armed by IRA standards. Elsewhere arms could only be got together in large quantities on the rarest of occasions.

At the Scramogue ambush in County Roscommon in March 1921, the IRA there had to scour the dumps in the whole county and borrow some guns from neighbouring County Longford and ended up with with 13 rifles (11 Lee Enfields, 1Winchester and 1 sporting rifle), 20 shotguns (some of them in bad condition) and 2 or 3 Webley revolvers.[11] And although the ambush was a success – killing 4 British soldiers and capturing a Hotchkiss machine gun – this was a one-off event in the county.

The Lewis light machine gun was fairly frequently captured by active IRA guerrilla units from British forces, as was the Hotchkiss machine gun – a weapon of French origin that British forces issued to cavalry units and often mounted on their armoured vehicles. But inevitably the guerrillas always had less automatic weapons than the Crown forces.

As in the 1916 Rising, the machine guns, particularly the belt-fed Vickers, which was mounted on armoured vehicles such as the Whippet Rolls Royce armoured car, gave the British forces a significant advantage in prolonged fire-fights, which was one reason the IRA generally tried to avoid prolonged battles.

The bolt action Lee Enfield rifle was not best suited to close quarters combat favoured by the IRA. While it was capable of being highly accurate over long distances, few IRA fighters possessed the training to use it effectively in this manner. Ernie O’Malley commented that while attacking barracks, riflemen were used as cover while the actual assault party were given revolvers and grenades.

In an ambush it was only where the IRA opened fire from prepared positions at point blank range –as at the celebrated Kilmichael ambush of November 1920 – that they inflicted very heavy casualties in combat, in that case killing 17 Auxiliaries. At longer range their accuracy was generally too poor and their ammunition too scarce to be really effective.

O’Malley noted that the shotgun also could be fearsome at close range. At one ambush in Cork in October 1920 he noted, that the riflemen were pinned down by machine gun fire in the woods, unable to respond, their Hotchkiss machine gun had jammed, ‘Only the shotguns worked properly…I saw again the effect of buckshot on a young soldier’s dead face; it made a wound sickening to look at. [12]

Though the IRA men usually preferred rifles to shotguns, sometimes for the former’s prestige as much as their effectiveness, they seized a large number of shotguns off civilians during the war, as much to disarm potential enemies as to collect arms.

In the border region, from Tyrone to Louth, in the summer of 1920 there was a concerted series of IRA raids on unionist households in order to seize shotguns and other weapons they were holding.

Border Protestants had in many cases been armed since the Home Rule Crisis of 1913-14 and the arms raids of mid 1920 led to a series of ugly killings in the area. [13] They were however a success for the IRA in seizing arms. One County Monaghan Volunteer recalled that in his area;

In this raid we captured 20 to 30 shotguns, about 3 Ulster Volunteer rifles and a parabellum pistol. We also got a number of other revolvers, mostly 32 and 38 bore. This general raid for arms was the first military activity as far as I can remember that we carried out.[14]

The effect of this in the Border region was however negated by the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary – a unionist militia armed along British military lines, in mid 1920.

Urban guerrillas

In the cities the IRA tended to eschew the awkward difficult-to -conceal rifles altogether. A typical IRA party on a ‘job’ in Dublin in 1921 carried improvised grenades and handguns only. [15]

The same was also true by and large of the IRA in Cork and Belfast cities. The close presence of so many British troops and paramilitary police meant that prolonged fire-fights in urban situations were suicide for the IRA and making a quick getaway (and mingling into civilian crowds) was more important than firepower.

These hit and run attacks were not without success. In March 1921 for instance, three British soldiers were killed and five wounded in a grenade attack on Wexford Street – a stretch known as the ‘Dardanelles’ such was the frequency of ambushes on it.[16]

On the rare occasions where the IRA in Dublin were forced to stand and fight, however, their hand guns and ‘bombs’ were no match for British rifles and machine guns, especially when combined with armoured vehicles. This was most obvious in the IRA operation to burn the Custom House (centre of local government) in May 1921.

Out of over 100 Volunteers committed to the operation, none was armed with anything heavier than a pistol and improvised grenade – some had only a revolver and six rounds. When the building was surrounded by heavily armed Auxiliaries and British soldiers, five guerrilla were killed and 70-80 captured, with only four Auxiliaries injured.[17]

Improvised weapons such as the grenades used in Dublin were important to the guerrillas. ‘Factories’ were set up particularly in urban areas to manufacture grenades. In Dublin one clandestine workshop was churning out up to 1,000 improvised grenades per week by late 1920.[18] These were not always the most reliable weapons however. Often they did not explode and sometimes they exploded in the hands of the thrower.

The newly invented sub-machine gun, compact, short range, but spewing out automatic fire that negated the need for a great deal of accuracy, appeared to be perfect for the IRA’s modus operandi.

Late in the war in the summer of 1921, Michael Collins managed to import a batch of Thompson submachine guns from sympathisers in America.

The Thompson was formidable weapon at close range, firing heavy .45 rounds fully automatic from a 50 or 100 round drum magazine, at a rate of 600 rounds per minute and at a local level would certainly have made a difference to IRA capabilities in sufficient numbers.

Though a huge shipment with 495 guns was intercepted by American police at the docks in New York, another did get through to Dublin via Liverpool (it is thought in the region of 150) and saw some action in the final month of the war, being used in several ambushes in Dublin in June 1921. The Thompson really arrived too late to make a significant difference in the ‘Tan War’ but was widely used in the Civil War of 1922-23. [19]

Disputes over weapons

Many IRA units however had very few weapons at all. There were constant disputes between regional units and IRA GHQ over the allotment of rifles. Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy, dismissed such complaints on the grounds that active areas did not wait from guns to be sent from Dublin but went out and took them from British forces.

In Cavan for instance in March 1920, local IRA men held up the mail van and took £75 with which a young Volunteer named Hugh Maguire was sent to Dublin, to buy weapons, returning with 8 rifles 12 grenades  and 15 revolvers.[20] This was more than enough for Maguire’s Ballinagh company to have attacked and probably taken the local RIC barracks where they could have taken more arms, but plans never quite seemed to come off. IRA GHQ for this reason refused to allot them any more scarce weapons.  It was the same in many localities.[21]

Many IRA companies had no better weapon than the shovel or the pick with which they blocked roads to impede the movement of police and military units.

According to British Army estimates, by the Truce of July 1921 the IRA was fatally short on weapons and ammunition. They cited a captured IRA report of May 1921 which said that the IRA was down to 2,000 active fighters, possessing between them no more than 569 rifles and 477 revolvers with a mere 20 rifle rounds per weapon.  [22] This is probably an underestimate of the IRA’s weaponry as they also had limited numbers of captured machine guns and large numbers of shotguns, but there is no doubt that sourcing ammunition was becoming a serious problem.

However, towards the end of the war, the IRA showed increasingly proficiency with explosives, in part because they were so short of infantry weapons. The IRA ‘mine’ was usually made of civilian explosives such as gelignite, placed in a petrol tin or milk churn and detonated using an electrical charge via a cable.

Although on many occasions they failed to explode, when they did ‘mines’ could be devastating. At Clonfin in Longford in February 1921, for instance, Sean MacEoin’s IRA unit blew up an Auxiliary tender killing 3 Auxiliaries and wounding 9, while in May 1921 a remotely detonated bomb at Youghal, Cork killed 7 military bandsmen in Cork and wounded 21.[23] By the end of the war the ‘mine’ was the IRA’s most effective weapon.

It is notable that modern insurgencies have gone through the self-same stages in terms of tactics as the IRA did from 1920 to 1921; from massed assaults to ambushes with small arms and finally more sophisticated ambushes using what is now known as Improvised Explosive Devices. The remotely detonated IED, in modern terminology, has the advantage of relatively low risk for the guerrillas with the potential for causing mass casualties on troops or police even in armoured vehicles.

British forces

The British forces for their part also adapted their weapons and equipment to the challenge of guerrilla warfare. Both the British Army and RIC police units were equipped with Lee Enfield rifles, Lewis and Vickers machine guns, Webley revolvers and Mills hand grenades. Some Auxiliaries however preferred automatic pistols and pump action shotguns to standard infantry weapons for their close range firepower.

As the threat to their armoured vehicles became more acute, both police and British military units learned to ‘up-armour’ their vehicles, first to withstand bullets and eventually to withstand explosives too. This combined with their increasing use of armoured cars, tanks and aerial surveillance made guerrilla ambushes harder and harder to pull off as 1921 went on.[24]

In this phase (in which the IRA took on British forces), artillery played a very limited role. The British military did not use it at all in counter guerrilla operations – there were no targets – and used it only once in the changed circumstances of 1922,to storm IRA fixed positions at Pettigo along the new border Northern Ireland in June 1922. Nevertheless at Pettigo, the same lessons applied as in 1916. The British brought up six field guns to support an infantry assault IRA were blasted out of their fixed positions in short order and forced to retreat.[25]

Artillery remained the biggest single advantage regular state forces possessed. The IRA dearly wanted to get their hands on some form of light artillery or mortars in order to assault medium sized police and army barracks, but with an efficient naval blockade in place, this did not prove possible. and efforts to create improvised home made alternatives came to nothing.

Were arms decisive in this phase of the conflict? No. The guerrilla war which cost some 2,000 lives, was ended with a negotiated truce in July 1921. The IRA had not beaten the British forces, physically (which given the disparity in numbers and weapons was impossible) or in terms of morale but nor was it defeated by the time of the truce.

By one reading, negotiations should have ended the conflict in December 1920 at the latest and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 meant that by the end of hostilities the partition of Ireland had already been decided. Nevertheless, weapons had and fighting were not finished in Ireland. Disputes over the Treaty signed in December 1921, setting up the Irish Free State, would lead to a final phase – the Irish Civil War of 1922-23.

Watch out the final part in this series Weapons of the Irish Civil War.

References

[1] Eugene Sherry BMh WS 576

[2] T Ryle Dwyer, Tans Terror and Trouble, Kerry’s Real Fighting Story, p126-130, the two Volunteers were John Browne and Robert Laide in a raid on Gortalea Barracks in April 1918

[3] See Bureau of Military History (BMH) statements of Edward Handley, Dublin Fusiliers, Joseph O’Connor Dublin 4 Batt and Kit O’Farrell, Dublin 4 Batt

[4] Hart, The IRA at War, p183

[5] Ibid. p47-48

[6] Anne Dolan, Ending War in Sportsmanlike Manner in Thomas Hachey Ed. Turning Points in Twentieth Century Irish History, p35

[7] Ernie O’Malley On Another Man’s Wound, p231

[8] According to Eunan O’Halpin, the number of civilians shot as informers by the IRA in 1919-21 was 183, O’Halpin, Problematic Killing during the Irish War of Independence and its Aftermath: Civilian Spies and Informers, in Death and Dying in Britain and Ireland  p329

[9] According to Eunan O’Halpin’s Dead of the Irish Revolution project, state forces actually killed more civilians, in reprisal or otherwise than the IRA – 381 to 281, O’Halpin, Counting Terror, David Fitzpatrick Ed.,In Terror in Ireland p155

[10] W.T. Kautt Ambushes and Armour, The Irish Rebellion 1919-1921, p131

[11] Ernie O Malley, Raid and Rallies, p101-102

[12] O’Malley On Another Man’s Wound p221.

[13] See for instance James Sullivan BMH WS 518, he notes that at least four Volunteers were shot and killed or fatally wounded raiding unionist houses for arms in the summer of 1920, testimony backed up by other Monaghan Volunteers such as P.J. Hoey WS 530. According to O’Sullian three local unionists, a man named Fleming and his son and another man named Duffy were later shot dead by the IRA in reprisal for these deaths.

[14] Euguene Sherry BMH WS 576

[15] Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p165

[16] James Durney, ‘How Aungier/ Camden Street became known as the Dardanelles’, The Irish Sword, Summer 2010 No. 108 Vol. XXVII They were Lance Corporal Jarvis and Private G. Thomas and Private Whiting, died from his wounds two days later.

[17] See Today in Irish History, the Raid on the Customs House.

[18] Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p149

[19] Peter Hart, The IRA at War p184

[20] Witness Statements, Sean Sheridan, Hugh Maguire, BMH

[21] Hugh Maguire, Witness Statement BMH

[22] McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels p 46

[23] Kautt, Arms and Armour pp164,179

[24] Kautt, Arms and Armour p 157-160

[25] Robert Lynch, The Northern IRA and the early Years of Partition p154-157.

Fionnuala Walsh on the impact the terrible Irish losses at Gallipoli in 1915 had back in Ireland.

On the 25th of April 1915,  joint British and Commonwealth forces landed at Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles Peninsula in an effort to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War.

Among them were several thousand Irishmen from the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers, who landed at V Beach. They took terrible casualties, as did another failed seaborne assault at Suvla Bay in August 1915. In all over 3,000 Irish soldiers were killed in the campaign.

Communal Mourning

The terrible losses suffered by Irish soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915 left a tangible impact upon Irish society back home. Enid Starkie, a schoolgirl in Dublin during the war, described in her memoir the sense of loss among Dublin families following the news of Suvla Bay:

“Many of Walter’s friends were killed at Suvla Bay in 1915, when there was scarcely a family among us that had not lost someone. At school my intimate friends lost brothers and cousins whom I knew well”.

Although her own brother, Walter, was rejected by the army as medically unfit, she wrote that the family felt ‘surrounded by sadness’. A similar sense of communal mourning in evident in Katharine Tynan’s memoir of the war years, published in 1919.

Tynan, a well-known writer and poet in her time, powerfully conveys the devastation wrought by the Gallipoli campaign in Dublin in 1915: ‘Dublin was full of mourning, and in the faces one met there was a hard brightness of pain as though the people’s hearts burnt in the fire and were not consumed’. Tynan had two sons serving in the British Army during the war and although neither were at Gallipoli, the family had many friends who were killed in the campaign.

On a visit from Mayo to Dublin in summer 1915, Tynan encountered two ‘new war-widows’ and another girl whose brother had been killed at Gallipoli. She powerfully evokes the desperate grief experienced by these young women: “One got to know the look of the new widows –hard, bright eyes, burning for the relief of tears, a high feverish flush in the cheeks, hands that trembled, and occasionally an uncertain movement of the young head”.

 Mobilisation for the War Effort

How did Irishwomen cope with the grief at the loss of a loved one or their anxiety when their husband or son joined the army? Many became involved in activities on the home front to support the war effort as a means of distraction and of feeling as though they were contributing something to the war.

Such activities included nursing wounded soldiers either on the home front or overseas, supporting Belgian refugees in Ireland, collecting sphagnum moss for surgical dressings, fundraising for specific regiments, and preparing parcels of food and clothing to send to Irish soldiers at the front or in the prisoner of war camps.

Across the island of Ireland almost 6,000 women were enrolled with the joint committee of the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance Association.Red Cross volunteers performed a variety of tasks and served both on the home front in Ireland and Britain and also further afield, including close to the front in France, and in Malta and Egypt.

One such Red Cross volunteer was Marie Martin, a Dublin Catholic, who served as a nurse in Malta and France in 1915 and 1916. Her younger brother Charlie had enlisted with the British Army on the outbreak of the war in 1914. Charlie Martin was injured at Suvla Bay but returned to active service before long. He was killed at Salonika in December 1915.

‘Separation Women’

Some women found it too difficult to cope and turned to alcohol for solace. During 1915 there were very frequent reports in the press about soldiers’ wives engaging in excessive drinking. This was linked to the separation allowance, a weekly payment to soldiers’ dependents granted by the British War Office during the First World War.

The separation allowance represented an increase in income for the families of unemployed men or casual labourers –among those most likely to enlist in urban areas. Many soldiers’ families in Dublin were living in tenements, indicating the very real economic motive for enlistment. The separation allowances became increasingly necessary as the war progressed due to the huge inflation in food prices.

However in 1915 there were concerns about how soldiers’ wives were spending their allowances and allegations that the majority of such women were engaging in excessive drinking. It was alleged that they were going straight to the public houses after collecting their allowances from the post office. There were also reports of child neglect by these women and of violent brawls between the women and their neighbours.

Such reports have proven to be greatly exaggerated and in fact the total number of women arrested for drink-related offences declined over the course of the war. The myth persisted however and those arrested for such offences met with little empathy for the anxiety and distress the women must have been suffering.

One Cork woman arrested for public drunkenness in 1915 attributed the incident to her grief over hearing that her husband had been killed at the front. She was nevertheless convicted and threatened with a prison sentence. Her case was very typical of the treatment of working class soldiers’ wives at this time.

 Lasting Impact

It has been estimated that approximately 35,000 Irish men (who enlisted from Ireland) were killed on active service in the war. In the majority of cases these men left bereft families behind. Thousands of Irishwomen lost husbands, sons or brothers, changing their lives forever. Marie Martin’s devastation at the loss of her brother Charlie is considered to be a significant motivating factor in her becoming a nun after the war’s end and her eventually establishment of the Medical Missionaries of Mary.

The Gallipoli campaign also affected Irish attitudes to the Great War. Katharine Tynan described the news of the causalities suffered by the 10^th division at Suvla Bay as being the first moment of bitterness for many Irish people in relation to the war: ‘we felt that the lives had been thrown away and that their heroism had gone unrecognised’.

The brutal reality of war had been brought home to the Irish people with the nightmarish horrors of the Gallipoli campaign and the casualties of Suvla Bay particularly difficult to accept and process: ‘Suvla –the burning beach, and the poisoned wells, and the blazing scrub, does not bear thinking on’.

Fionnuala Walsh, Trinity College Dublin, Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar. Fionnuala is working on the experiences of Irish women in the Great War. She is in receipt of an Irish Research Council Scholarship. This piece originally appeared on http://gallipoli.rte.ie/