1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  The organisation was riven on the question of support for the war. Despite Bachelors Walk, a majority was in favour of recruitment to the British Army. Traditionally, Catholic Ireland had greater links with Catholic France than with Lutheran Germany, and the destruction of Louvain with its Celtic manuscripts elicited sympathy in another small country for ‘plucky little Belgium’. Given the long history of Irish recruitment to British regiments, Redmond’s pledge that Ireland was so loyal that Britain could safely withdraw her troops also struck a chord. The press was overwhelmingly pro-British, the public wore Union Jack badges and young Irish men were told that it was their patriotic duty to fight for England. White feathers fluttered about those who did not. Redmond joined with Asquith in promoting recruitment. This was anathema to the MacNeill-led faction. Their view was articulated by Griffith in his paper, Sinn Fein:30

  Ireland is not at war with Germany. She has no quarrel with any continental power. England is at war with Germany, and Mr Redmond has offered England the services of the National Volunteers to defend Ireland. What has Ireland to defend, and whom has she to defend it against? Has she a native Constitution or a National Government to defend? All know that she has not. All know that both were wrested from her by the power to whom Mr Redmond offers the services of National Ireland. All know that Mr Redmond has made his offer without receiving a quid pro quo. There is no European Power waging war against the people of Ireland. There are two European Powers at war with the people who dominate Ireland from Dublin Castle. The call to the Volunteers to ‘defend Ireland’ is a call to them to defend the bureaucracy entrenched in that edifice.

  Our duty is in no doubt. We are Irish Nationalists, and the only duty we can have is to stand for Ireland’s interests, irrespective of the interests of England, or Germany, or any other foreign country. This week the British Government has passed measures through all stages – first reading, second reading, committee, third reading, and report – in the House of Commons in the space of six hours. Let it withdraw the present abortive Home Rule Bill, and pass in the same space of time a full measure of Home Rule, and Irishmen will have some reason to mobilise for the defence of their institutions. At present, they have none. In the alternative, let a Provisional Government be set up in Dublin by Mr Redmond and Sir Edward Carson, and we shall give it allegiance. But the confidence trick has been too often played upon us to deceive us again.

  If the Irish Volunteers are to defend Ireland they must defend it for Ireland, under Ireland’s flag, and under Irish officers. Otherwise they will only help to perpetuate the enslavement of their country.

  The dichotomy between the Griffith-Redmond positions almost precipitated a premature mini-1916 when it became known that Redmond and Asquith were to speak in Dublin at the Mansion House in favour of recruiting. A group of Volunteers led by James Connolly, Sean MacDermott and Tom Clarke met in a hall at Rutland Square where a plot was hatched to prevent the meeting taking place by seizing the hall and holding it by force of arms, fighting to the death of the last Volunteer if necessary. This particular sacrifice was rendered unnecessary by the discovery that the Mansion House was already strongly guarded by armed troops. However, Redmond brought the dispute within the Volunteers to a head by making a recruiting speech at Woodenbridge, County Wicklow, on 20 September, in which he urged his listeners to join the war ‘in defence of right, freedom and religion’. Afterwards the MacNeill wing of the Volunteers issued a statement saying:31

  Mr Redmond, addressing a body of Irish Volunteers on last Sunday, has now announced for the Irish Volunteers a policy and programme fundamentally at variance with their own published and accepted aims and pledges, but with which his nominees are, of course, identified. He has declared it to be the duty of the Irish Volunteers to take foreign service under a Government which is not Irish. He has made this announcement without consulting the Provisional Committee, the Volunteers themselves, or the people of Ireland to whose service alone they are devoted. Having thus disregarded the Irish Volunteers and their solemn engagement, Mr Redmond is no longer entitled, through his nominees, to any place in the administration and guidance of the Irish Volunteer organisation.

  By far the larger portion of the paper strength of the 180,000-strong Volunteer force went with Redmond, styling themselves National Volunteers and leaving the Irish Volunteers with an estimated 12,000.

  It should be noted here that descriptions of the Volunteers containing so many tens of thousands in this or that section can be misleading. Numbers tended to go up in moments of excitation, such as the initial formation in the Rotunda, a new recruiting campaign, or rumours that London was thinking of imposing conscription. But when things settled down, numbers fell off. However, there was a core which took the Volunteers seriously, drilled determinedly, turned up when called for, and made whatever sacrifices were necessary, including paying out of their own, generally very meagre, wages for their rifles. The men who would turn out on Easter Monday were the core of the corps. Men like the Northumberland Road defender, James Grace, whom we shall encounter later. He had been in Canada where he had joined a territorial regiment to learn how to handle a rifle and returned to Ireland early in 1916 when he got a letter telling him:32 ‘We are waiting for you’.

  On 19 May, 1915, Asquith reorganised his government. He formed a coalition with the Conservatives. It included eight Unionists, amongst them Bonar Law who became Secretary of State for the Colonies; Sir Edward Carson was made Attorney-General with a seat in Cabinet and F. E. Smith was given the post of Solicitor-General. The seamless manner in which those who preached treason one year were rewarded with Cabinet posts the next, not only underscored the unscrupulous use which the Conservatives and Unionists had made of the Home Rule issue, it raised the question as to how much of their campaign and the support it elicited had been animated not so much by anti-Liberal as anti-Irish feeling.

  But an attempt to more fully explore such psychological labyrinths, while fascinating, would take us too far from our story. What we can be certain of is that the pain and political destruction that Redmond was to endure because of his belief that to act as he did would induce England to keep faith with Home Rule after the War was badly repaid. His son was one of the many Nationalists who was refused a commission. His brother was killed in the War. Nationalists were not allowed to form their own regiments. Ulster Protestants were, in spite of the fact that they had lately being planning a coup d’état. Lord Kitchener, the Minister for War, so detested Irish Nationalists that at a public gathering he ordered the removal of a banner emblazoned with a harp by patriotic ladies, for a Nationalist regiment which never materialised, while one embroidered with the Red Hand of Ulster was honoured. Lloyd George later judged that ‘this sinister order constituted the first word in a new chapter of Irish history’.33 Kitchener’s action was but one of many factors which now contributed to the swelling Republican theme.

  Augustine Birrell later said of the Unionists’ inclusion in Cabinet that it was ‘impossible to describe or over-estimate the effect of this in Ireland. The steps seemed to make an end of Home Rule’.34 Redmond was offered a place in the Cabinet, but in face of the growing threat to his position from the Nationalists, turned it down, stipulating instead that Birrell remain Chief Secretary. Birrell had long realised that by caving in to the Tories and the Ulster Rebels over the Curragh mutiny, the British were storing up trouble for themselves, writing: ‘Politics often consist of balancing one set of grave evils against another set, and after consideration the Cabinet, with my concurrence, decided to leave it alone, although by doing nothing they almost negate their right to become a Government at all’. By 1915, his judgement of the Government’s performance was even more gloomy. His job had become ‘odious and hateful’, and he felt that the conceding of Cabinet posts to Unionist extremists had sounded the deathknell of Home Rule. He feared that the introduction of conscription would precipitate ‘shipwreck and disturbances on a big scale in Ireland’. ‘Ireland’, he said, ‘is,
I am sure, in a rotten state – ripe for a row, without leadership.’35

  In trying to avoid that row Birrell faced an impossible task. He wanted recruitment to succeed, but after the leniency shown to the UVF he knew that the introduction of conscription would be disastrous. After all that had gone before, there was no question of cracking down on the Nationalists for their drilling, increasingly strident sedition and anti-recruitment activities. Yet the War Office, the military and rightists in Cabinet were pressing for both a crackdown on what they saw as the Sinn Fein ‘hate’ press and the introduction of conscription. Some 150,000 Irish troops joined up voluntarily, but this did not satisfy the military securocrats like Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. To their basic ideological approach that it was Ireland’s duty to provide her patriotic percentage of cannon fodder was added the pressure for manpower caused by the appalling carnage in the trenches. By this stage (from the outbreak of war to 15 February, 1916) the House of Commons was informed that approximately 100,000 Irishmen had joined up voluntarily. This lower total may have been artificially deflated to highlight the figures given in reply to a question to Birrell from Sir J. Lonsdale concerning the scale of the prize sought by the securocrats, the pool of military-aged manpower still remaining:

  Ulster 159,640

  Leinster 167,492

  Munster 133,237

  Connaught 80,330

  It was indeed a temptingly untapped source of cannon fodder. For a time, however, Birrell managed to steer a skilful course between the Scylla of coercion and the Charybdis of rebellion. Piaras Beaslai wrote of Birrell years after he had resigned in disgrace:36

  There exists a curious idea in England to this day that Mr Asquith and Mr Birrell were in some mysterious way responsible for the Insurrection of Easter Week. As one who was working tooth and nail to bring about an insurrection, I can testify that the biggest obstacle that we had to contend against was the cleverness of Mr Birrell’s policy. The one thing that would have rallied support to our side was drastic coercion on the part of the English Government; but Mr Birrell cleverly contrived to appear as not interfering with us, while taking care that we were effectually silenced. The Editors of anti-English papers and pamphlets were not proceeded against; the papers were not officially suppressed; but, under the Defence of the Realm Act, the printers who produced them were liable to be closed down.

  As a result of the Defence of the Realm Act, there sprang up what became known as ‘the mosquito press’ – pamphlets by Pearse and other Republican polemicists, a succession of short-lived newspapers with names like The Spark, Honesty and even Scissors and Paste, which consisted of an effort to get around the Dublin Castle censorship by only printing items which had already appeared in mainstream publications. Both the IRB’s paper Irish Freedom and Griffith’s Sinn Fein were closed down. Appropriately enough, a weekly Nationality edited by Griffith managed to survive until the eve of the Rising itself. This comparative longevity and that of the Volunteers’ newspaper The Irish Volunteer owed itself to the Republicans’ utilisation of the Nationalist adage that the Orangemen were loyal ‘not to the Crown but the half Crown’ – they got the seditious journals printed by an Orange firm in Belfast.

  The energy, the polemics and the excitation of Nationalist fervour, coming on the heels of the sabotaging of the Home Rule Bill, had their effect. While no section of the public at large favoured insurrection, juries began acquitting men charged with making anti-recruiting speeches after Sean MacDermott was sentenced to six months in prison for the offence. Even possession of explosives was not deemed a crime, following a landmark case in which, after convincing evidence of possession had been produced, a school-teacher, Alex McCabe, was acquitted. The authorities began resorting to deportation as a weapon. However, senior IRB men like Denis McCullough and Ernest Blythe elected to disregard the deportation orders and were brought before magistrates who only had the power to sentence them to six-month terms, albeit with hard labour. The defendants reckoned that the publicity and the sympathy generated by that Irish clarion call ‘release the prisoners’ more than justified the hardship.

  Beaslai was correct in his assessment of Birrell’s policy. The papers from 1916 (available in the Irish National Archives) make it clear that the authorities had a fairly clear idea of who the disaffected were; a particular eye was kept on those with known Sinn Fein sympathies who worked in radio transmission or the postal services. The Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, appointed in 1915, constantly urged that stern action should be taken against the Volunteers. Formerly Sir Ivor Churchill Guest, he was a cousin of Winston Churchill’s and like his great relative, fond of brandy. He had been elevated to the peerage in 1910 as part of the Liberal move to strengthen its representation in the House of Lords. Three incidents which occurred in the run-up to the actual Rising should have swung the authorities to Wimborne’s side of the argument.

  Firstly, St Patrick’s Day (17 March) was celebrated by the Volunteers staging a takeover of Dublin. The entire centre of the city was cordoned off as MacNeill took the salute during an impressive march past. The mock attacks on strategic buildings which characterised this display became more realistic three weeks later. At Tullamore, County Offaly, the Volunteers demonstrated against an Irish Regiment leaving for France, drawing on themselves the wrath of local Loyalists who attacked the Sinn Fein hall the following night. They were driven off by gunfire and for a time police and Volunteers traded shots with each other.

  The GOC of the Irish Command, Major-General L. B. Friend, correctly divining that a new spirit of militarism had entered the Volunteers, directed that Liberty Hall be raided, but his initiative was countermanded by Birrell, who feared that it would spark off widespread disorder. British Intelligence captured a letter from a Sinn Feiner that talked about an early Rising. But Sir Matthew Nathan, the Under Secretary, wrote in its margin:37 ‘The outbreak in the Summer I look upon as vague talk’. To which Birrell added: ‘The whole letter is rubbish!’

  Only Wimborne, imbued with Churchillian pugnacity, sensed that real trouble was imminent and pressed for arrests. In addition to the foregoing and many other indications of disaffection, the Irish Executive by this time also had the copies of messages which the famous British spymaster, Admiral Hall had intercepted between the Fenians in New York and the Germans in Berlin. However, Hall was so keen to keep his sources of information secret that the rulers of Ireland did not realise that the movement of ships referred to was not from New York, but Germany.

  Birrell and Nathan do not appear to have smelt a rat as late as 19 April, Spy Wednesday, when a document purporting to be signed by General Friend, allegedly copied from Castle files, was made public. It gave a detailed account of a planned swoop on Sinn Fein. The document was a forgery which was passed on to the Dublin Evening Mail in an effort to precipitate a crisis. The censor killed the story but the paper’s editor gave it to an alderman who read it out at a meeting of Dublin Corporation. The forgery produced the reaction it was intended to, a widespread belief that the British Government did not intend to implement Home Rule when the war ended and intended to justify its perfidy by provoking an insurrection. Birrell and Nathan merely dismissed the letter as a forgery. Friend thought so little of it that he departed to London for the weekend and was out of the country when the Rising commenced. None of the three realised that their administration was not the forgery’s intended target. This was MacNeill. All along he opposed violence unless it was first directed at the Volunteers or if an effort was made to prevent the introduction of Home Rule by force. But now he fell for the forgery, issuing a general order to the Volunteers to be in readiness to defend both themselves and their arms.

  To the last, Birrell acted out of a combination of distrust for the approaches favoured by the military mind and an acute awareness of the propaganda value to would-be insurgents of a too heavy-handed approach on the part of the authorities. The Irish language, like the carrying of hurley sticks (popularly known as the Tipperary rifle) by Volu
nteers at public meetings, was regarded as a badge of sedition38 by some. Lawrence Ginnell made skilful use of this fact to ridicule the application of the Defence of the Realm Act in the House of Commons when he raised the question of a man being described as a German spy by police. The gentleman in question turned out to be a Mr Claude Chavasse, BA, Christ Church, Oxford, who when stopped by police near an Irish College at Ballingeary, replied to them in Irish. A fracas ensued, in the course of which Chavasse was told by the police that an Englishman should not speak Irish. By way of illustrating that this proposition did not appear unreasonable in some quarters at least, Hansard notes that there was ‘laughter in the house’. Not at the police, but Ginnell who, in the course of raising Chavasse’s case, stated that ‘Irish was an asset in the neighbourhood of an Irish College’. The laughter came when the Speaker interrupted him saying: ‘that is a matter of argument’. The argument between the two concepts of nationality was about to enter a bloody phase.

  The final rehearsals for the 1916 drama before the curtain eventually went up on Easter Monday was a combination of Murphy’s Law and stark tragedy. The blundering and mishaps on the part of the three central actors, the Irish, the British and the Germans would have been funny had they not been so fateful.

  Taking the Germans first, it would appear that the behaviour of the Carsonites and the Conservatives was a factor in the German decision to go to war.39 The Germans rendered assistance to both Orange and Green factions in the hope of making trouble for the British and to a degree, the Americans. When the Ulster Volunteers’ weapons were being loaded at Hamburg, simultaneous and far larger loadings were going on aboard the Bavaria, Kronprinzessin Cecilie and the Ypiranga destined for Mexico where the Germans were contesting American influence. The openly declared sentiments of Unionist figures like the UVF gunrunner Fred Crawford that they would prefer Kaiser rule to that of John Redmond prompted the Ulster Liberal Association to publish a pamphlet entitled The Kaiser’s Ulster Friends. The threat of civil war posed ‘the Kaiser’s Ulster friends’ and their Conservative allies also caused experienced foreign observers in Berlin and Vienna to speculate on England’s being unable to take any active part if war should come.