1916- the Easter Rising
Page 4
…their supporters in Ireland (quaintly called ‘loyalists’) with place and power. The enlightened Liberal Administration introduced a new system of buying up Nationalists. Positions in the gift of the Government began to be secured by the patronage of the Irish Party.
Beaslai sourly commented that ‘The astute Mr Birrell, the ablest of Irish Chief Secretaries, flattered the Irish people by witty speeches and declined to imprison popular agitators’. Yet despite Beaslai’s criticism of him, Birrell realised that Ireland was fundamentally distrustful of the English connection. ‘It is not,’ he said in 1907, ‘that Dublin Castle is a sink of jobbery or corruption. But it is, to use a familiar expression, “switched off” from the current of National life and feeling. No pulse of real life beats in its breast. The main current of Irish thought as they surge around its walls, pass almost unheeded.’ He judged ruefully and truly that: ‘Nobody in Ireland, north or south, save a handful of officials, was, or ever had been, loyal to England in the true sense of the word.’ One wonders if Birrell himself fully understood how that Irish interpretation of the word ‘loyalty’ was arrived at. Another view of how the Castle operated, prepared for Michael Collins by Castle civil servant Thomas Markham, also had a certain jaundiced validity:15
The British system was based on:
(a) The grasp of human weakness and vanity.
(b) A correct appreciation of the value and use of duplicity and Pecksniffianism.
(c) A clear conception of the truth that success in governing depends on well-contrived antagonisms in the economic and social structure of the state.
A new Chief Secretary is powerless to alter the system fundamentally, or even ‘materially’. Yet all departures (in policy) went to him. All staff are vetted by the police with exhaustive descriptions of family tree in all its hues and activities.
Belfast staff is very carefully selected as to loyalty. Numerical strength makes it a Staff-in-Waiting prepared to work for the whole Irish service if and when the opportunity arises.
Dealing with police and politics were the pivotal props of the system…The Royal Irish Constabulary, organised in Counties, Districts…During his training his vanity, ignorance and intelligence were each subjected to the treatment designed to make the British Government his servant and his God. The RIC had something to do with every phase of governmental activity.
The constable records everything in his diary. What he frightens from the child and coaxes from the cailin. What he hears, sees, infers. The sergeant transfers the constable’s report, never abbreviating. It is not his part to select. The policeman moves in a social atmosphere, he writes down everything, gossipy servants, what the RIC pensioner says. A ‘Someone’ whose name is never written down. He’s a ‘reliable source’. He could be the publican. The rail spy could be the inspector. He frequently is.
The road to the Castle is paved with anonymous letters, deriving from the besetting Irish sin, jealousy. The depth and widespread nature of this treachery would make a good Irishman despair. The local Loyalist could have a good post and be merely a disreputable spotter…what was said at a Volunteer meeting; where arms were kept; the eavesdropping prison warder; the opening of letters in the post. Ambiguity and elasticity are the marked features of the system enabling the Administration to sanction in Belfast what it refused in Dublin. The exact standard of Irish morality, public and private, was taken, and rule measured in accordance. Ideology was ignored.
Markham, who was writing a few years after 1916, judged that the Nationalists were in reality ‘kicking down a rotten door’. True, the trains ran on time and the postal service was far better then than it is at the time of writing; an inevitable consequence, one might say, of a state’s revolutionary birth occurring in a post office. But as Birrell correctly noted, there was a gulf between the governed and the governing. In Dublin and throughout the country in Catholic areas, there was a heightened consciousness of being Irish. Whether this consciousness took the form of sporting, literary, political or even military activity, it was clearly distinctive. The energy of the Irish, their Celtic apartness from both the English and the bowler-hatted Orangemen could be seen in the plays of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory put on in the Abbey Theatre which they had founded. A survivor of 1916, speaking in propagandist rather than literary terms, once remarked to me wonderingly of Yeats: ‘The bloody auld bastard! You’d think by tradition he’d be a proper old Unionist, but be God he was a great help to us!’ A host of writers, poets and polemicists, George Russell, D. P. Moran, the editor of the Leader, and above all, Arthur Griffith, poured forth their individual visions of Ireland. Griffith was born in Dublin in 1872 and educated by the Christian Brothers. He left school early to work in a Dublin newspaper office. He supported Parnell and when his leadership ended, Griffith emigrated to South Africa. At the outbreak of the Boer War he returned to Dublin and began work as a journalist. He founded Sinn Fein (We Ourselves) in 1905. Two of his works, Thomas Davis: Thinker and Teacher, and in particular, The Resurrection of Hungary – a Parallel for Ireland, became standard Nationalist texts.
Griffith noted that Hungary had won its independence by refusing to send members to the imperial parliament in Vienna, rejecting its claims to legislate for Hungary’s internal affairs. He advocated a dual monarchy for Ireland, similar to that of Austro-Hungary, with two separate legislatures for England and Ireland; in effect a restoration of Grattan’s parliament. In economic matters he was a disciple of Friedrich List, the German protectionist, and advocated tariffs as a means of building up Irish industries.
The Gaelic League founded by Douglas Hyde, and the Gaelic Athletic Association established by Michael Cusack, were recreating and repopularising the Irish language and Irish games, notably Gaelic football and the incredibly skilful and dangerous sport of hurling. It was via these two organisations that most of the ardent young Nationalists of that time first passed through the portals of revolution, although neither of the two bodies’ founders created them for that purpose. Hyde, in particular, who was a Protestant, academic, poet and playwright, was horrified when he discovered that the IRB was manipulating the Gaelic League for its own purposes. Some of the artistic depictions, the imagery used to convey this rediscovered Celticism, was wishful thinking based on the familiar syndrome of a Nationalist feeling in an era of colonialism, expressing itself in terms of an imagined Golden Age of the past. Legendary High Kings, beautiful queens, harps and round towers, all bound up with tales of the days when Ireland was the Land of Saints and Scholars, found their way into revivalist culture.
The ‘Celtic Dawn’ is the term used to describe all these happenings and it was an accurate enough description of what occurred at many levels in Irish society. As injustices were rectified and some educational and economic opportunities created, there was a recommencement of some of the growth and cultural expansion that had been halted by the Act of Union. As a result, there was an unusually high population of young people in the country, young Catholics who would otherwise have had to emigrate. But while there was some economic outlet, where was the political outlet for this younger generation? In life, in nature, a tree, a family, a business or a political development either grows or it dies. Thus it was with the natural, constitutional, organic movement towards self-government in Ireland. The Dawn was rising on a deceptively calm Nationalist landscape. Under the surface, the effects of the political stultification caused by the manipulation of power from outside Dublin, the nominal capital of the country, were beginning to be felt. Although Dublin didn’t have industries, it had all the evils of the slumlands associated with industrial Britain. Dublin’s slums were some of the worst in Europe.16
In 1910 a survey found that in the slums 20,000 families were living in one room each. Infant mortality was 142 per thousand compared with 103 in London. The Poor Law Commission’s Report for the same year states that among the 1254 families investigated, weekly wages ranged from a maximum of £3, down to a minimum of five shillings, the average being
£1 2s 2d a week. In these conditions, crime and drunkenness flourished. The national average in Ireland for crimes like forgery, rape and murder was 21.02 per ten thousand, but in Dublin it was 100 per ten thousand. Twenty-two Dublin public houses were kept under observation for a fortnight and it was found that 46,574 women and 27,999 children patronised them in that period – and not merely because most of them sold groceries as well. Insanity frequently caused by drinking methylated spirits or turpentine was estimated at 63.5 per thousand.
These conditions created one of the flints – the Irish Citizen Army – that helped to spark off the 1916 Rising. The Army was founded to defend strikers from police brutality during the great Dublin lockout of 1913. This was a battle between the forces of capitalism led by William Martin Murphy at the head of the Dublin employers, and the workers led by the mesmeric trade unionist James Larkin. The lockout ended in defeat for the workers and Larkin departed for America. But his colleague James Connolly, who with Larkin had founded the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, remained in Dublin with his tiny Citizen Army operating from the union’s headquarters, Liberty Hall.
Connolly was born in County Monaghan in 1870. His parents moved to Edinburgh where he started work at the age of eleven. He educated himself by reading, married and returned to Ireland as a socialist organiser. He printed and edited the first Irish socialist paper, The Workers’ Republic. He worked in America from 1903 to 1910 as an organiser for the Independent Workers of the World, the ‘Wobblies’, founded an Irish Socialist Federation and edited The Harp. He was a staunch believer in the emancipation of women and made Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth) an officer in the Citizen Army. She was born to the ‘Big House’, daughter of a Protestant landowner at Lissadell in County Sligo in 1868. Her sister was the poet, Eva Gore-Booth. Both were beautiful and talented, moving Yeats to describe them and the destiny that befell Constance as follows:
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring amongst the ignorant.
At one stage in her career Constance had led an active social life, studied painting and produced plays. She married a Polish count, Casimir Dunin Markievicz and founded Fianna Eireann, the IRB’s, and later the IRA’s Boy Scout Movement. The assistance she rendered the strikers by working in Liberty Hall’s soup kitchens during the great lockout persuaded Connolly to appoint her an officer in his Citizen Army. An old nun who had lived through the period described to me once how the poor saw her. Constance was speaking at an election meeting, after the Rising, during which she made frequent references to what Sinn Fein intended to do in the Dail (the Irish Parliament in which she was appointed Minister for Labour, the first woman cabinet minister in Europe). After listening to the cultivated voice’s frequent references to the ‘Dawll’ one Dublin ‘aul one’ turned to another and remarked audibly: ‘The doll! Ah, will you look at her blouse. She’s lovely. She’s a real doll herself!’
Connolly was a man of international outlook, his nationalism and his socialism were fused together in outrage at the appalling slum conditions that British rule had produced in Ireland. His enthusiasm for a protest in arms was such that in January of 1916 the IRB kidnapped him and after some days of parley during which Markievicz threatened to release him by force, they co-opted him into their councils to stop him going ahead with only the support of the Citizen Army, which would have brought down an avalanche on all of them. This Army was founded to defend the workers from police brutality during the lockout at the instigation of Captain Jack White, the son of a British field-marshal. White had won a DSO for his services to the Crown during the Boer War. Another prominent Boer War figure who would train, fight and die with the insurgents was Major John MacBride who had led his own Irish, pro-Boer Brigade during the conflict. He was the estranged husband of Maude Gonne, the woman that Yeats loved.
The apparently unassailably controlling political leaders of the day, John Redmond and his colleagues John Dillon, Joseph Devlin and William O’Brien, were in fact dangerously removed from the country, locked into the parliamentary battle at Westminster, influenced by ‘the tone of the house’; the insidious tendency to see things Irish in an English light. And well out of sight of that light there was the minuscule Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to whom the Carsonites now proffered the opportunity to act as the detonator of Irish Nationalism.
As Europe moved inexorably to war and England seemingly towards civil war over the Home Rule issue, there occurred an incident which more than any other helped to convince elements within the larger Nationalist Ireland community that Home Rule might not be achieved solely by constitutional means after all. This was the Curragh mutiny17 affair which appeared to demonstrate that Bonar Law’s ‘overwhelming majority’ included the British Army. By March 1914 the progress of the Home Rule Bill at Westminster had reached a stage where, at least according to rumour, the Liberal Government intended to use the Army to curb the activities of the drilling Orangemen. The Army was to have moved troops from the Curragh in County Kildare in the south, to Ulster in the north in order to guard military installations and other strategic strong points. However, on 20 March, 1914, the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, General Sir Arthur Paget, telegraphed the War Office that General Hubert Gough, an Ulster man, and fifty-seven officers of the Third Cavalry Brigade had stated that they would prefer dismissal to the prospect of moving north. Earlier in the month, a British version of the Ulster Covenant had been launched in the British press by Lord Alfred Milner. This stated:
I…of…earnestly convinced that the claim of the government to carry the Home Rule bill without submitting it to the judgement of the nation is contrary to the spirit of our constitution, do hereby solemnly declare that if that bill is passed I shall hold myself justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent it being put into operation, and more particularly to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom.
Clearly Gough and his colleagues agreed with the passage ‘I shall hold myself justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent it being put into operation’ particularly insofar as ‘the armed forces of the Crown’ were concerned. More importantly, powerful figures in the establishment were prepared to manipulate Gough’s defiance after he was summoned to London for a confrontation with the Minister for War, Colonel John Seely. Gough emerged not to face the prospect of a court martial but with a document of capitulation which he had wrung out of Seely with the aid of the Director of Military Operation, General (later Field Marshal) Sir Henry Wilson. The last paragraph was in fact dictated by Wilson and appeared on the document in Gough’s own handwriting. It stated:
I understand the reading of the last paragraph to be that the troops under our command will not be called upon to enforce the present Home Rule Bill on Ulster, and that we can so assure our officers.
The import of that piece of paper became apparent a month later. In view of the dangerous situation in Ireland (as we shall shortly see, the Nationalists had taken a leaf out of the Orangemen’s book and begun to organise), a ban on arms importation had been announced the previous December. But during the night of 24-5 April, 1914, the Ulster Volunteers landed 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition from the Clydevalley at Larne Harbour. In the process police and customs officials were held up, but the Army did not intervene. The Clydevalley weapons were then loaded into several hundred waiting motorcars and transported around the province to safe hiding places, again without any interference from the authorities.
It is time now to examine the forces that lay behind the decision to organise a Nationalist volunteer force in reaction to the foregoing events – the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Fenian Movement as it was popularly known. All the revolutionary traditions of Wolfe Tone and the United
Irishmen and of the various separatist leaders thrown up in earlier centuries of dispossession and war were distilled into the philosophy of the Fenians, named after the legendary Irish version of the Japanese Samurai. But the IRB, though some of them acquired mythic proportion, were far from being mythical figures. They were real-life, practical conspirators whose movement came into being in New York and Dublin in 1858.
James Stephens, who had taken part in the abortive uprising of 1848, formally launched the movement on St Patrick’s Day on the basis of an £80 donation from fellow survivors of 1848 then living in the US, where its principal moving spirit was John O’Mahony. The Movement was modelled on the revolutionary societies which Stephens had encountered while living in Paris after the 1848 Rebellion. It was organised on a circle basis in which each circle or cell contained only one person who knew who the members of the next circle were and so on. Sean Cronin, an historian of the Fenians, has correctly said of Fenianism that:18
Its victories were few, yet Fenianism remained a weapon of the Irish poor wherever they were; radical in outlook, fiercely non-sectarian, and because of the anathemas of the bishops – anti-clerical. Fenians shouted defiance from the dock, challenged their jailers and walked erect to the gallows. The rank and file, not the leaders, saved Fenianism.
Cronin could have been describing the character of the 1916 Volunteers. From the outset the Fenians were riddled with informers and bedevilled by splits, but it soon became a force to be reckoned with in Irish affairs. In 1865 the American wing of the Movement established what some regarded as a government-in-exile. John O’Mahony was its president. It had an army drawn from the Irish who had fought on both sides of the American Civil War, a senate, a house of delegates and a cabinet. In the eyes of O’Mahony and those who thought like him, the Irish Republic was ‘now virtually established’. However, a section of the cabinet did not think like him and wanted to devote the Movement’s energies to an invasion of Canada, which would put pressure on the British to negotiate the independence of Ireland. The Fenians split and the upshot was not one but two attempts to invade Canada.19