Riotous Assemblies

by William Sheehan

  A public meeting in support of the demand for the release of republican prisoners or their treatment as prisoners of war was planned for the Markets Field in Limerick City on 13 June. The meeting was ‘proclaimed’ and 200 extra constabulary were drafted into the city; at the same time 200 soldiers of the Leinster Regiment were moved from the New Barracks to William Street RIC station. The meeting was eventually held outside the city.22 When the internees were released in June over a thousand ‘Sinn Féiners’ and two companies of Volunteers welcomed Richard Hayes and Con Collins to Limerick.23 A feis under the auspices of the local Sinn Féin club was held at Doon on 24 June and 3,000 people attended.24 On 24 June in Newcastlewest former internee Con Collins, on a Sinn Féin platform, said that people were sick of oratory and wanted guns and bullets, and he advised every young Irishman to get rifles and ammunition.25

  De Valera’s by-election victory in East Clare on 11 July further boosted the popularity and membership of Sinn Féin. The rapid expansion of the party in Limerick gave the police ‘reason to fear that the movement will later on become both dangerous and troublesome’.26 Quite clearly, however, the republican movement was already dangerous and troublesome for the police in Limerick. Armed Volunteer units had been sent from Limerick to about ten polling stations in East Clare.27 These kinds of activity helped to forge closer contacts between the Volunteers in Limerick and elsewhere, which were to come to fruition in the shape of joint operations during the Tan War. The Ballylanders Feis on 22 July attracted 6,000 people. Large bodies of Volunteers marched and carried republican flags despite the presence of extra police.28 The effect of events outside Limerick was also evident when the news of Cosgrave’s success in Kilkenny in August led to celebrations in the city, as well as in Abbeyfeale and Glin, where 250 members of the Con Colbert Sinn Féin club marched with wooden rifles.29 On 16 September, in another important escalation of Volunteer activity, three men armed with revolvers confronted two RIC men armed with rifles at Ballinacurra in a failed attempt to seize the police arms.30 When Volunteer Edward Punch was arrested, he had keys to the back doors of three police stations and to the side entrance of the Castle barracks. Various military manuals and a rudimentary hand grenade made at a factory in Limerick were found in his house.31 The Limerick Volunteers were preparing to intensify their efforts. Punch was convicted and sentenced to five years’ hard labour but was released from prison on 17 November, having gone on hunger strike.32

  The death of Thomas Ashe acted as another accelerator of political excitement. Demonstrations took place around the county in September. County Inspector Yates lamented the fact that, just as the ‘suppressed feeling of political excitement’ that prevailed around Limerick was gradually decreasing, Ashe’s death had provided ‘a good excuse for inflaming public opinion again’. Richard Mulcahy, chief-of-staff of the Volunteers, credited Ashe’s death with being the catalyst that ‘transformed a bewildered political and military situation into an effective and cohesive national movement’. The Volunteers’ executive decided on a show of strength through open drilling, the main expression of this being the order to each unit to drill openly during the second week of December 1917. The Volunteers had been drilling publicly in Limerick before Ashe’s death, but now they intensified their activities, with drilling, route marching and wearing of the Volunteer uniform becoming more common. Drilling took place in Croom on 26 September despite warnings from the police. There was also drilling in Galbally and the wearing of unauthorised uniforms at Hospital, where the Volunteers drilled on 28 and 30 September. Eighty men drilled in ‘various bits of Volunteer uniforms’ at Newcastlewest. Wooden guns were carried at Cappamore and Oola. Unauthorised uniforms were worn at Cappamore.33 Two hundred and fifty Volunteers paraded in Limerick on 25 October and 360 on 28 October. Arms, however, were not yet being carried.34

  This accelerated activity was matched by an increased organising drive. Police records indicated the presence of fifty-six Sinn Féin clubs in Limerick at the end of 1917 with a membership of 3,828, though the accuracy of these figures is highly questionable: Sinn Féin figures showed eighty affiliated clubs in County Limerick on 17 December 1917.35 More importantly, the RIC were faced by an increasingly hostile and secretive population. The Volunteers’ policy of selective public drilling meant that, while some companies largely escaped police scrutiny, the RIC were able to catalogue and analyse the activities of others. In January 1918 the average strength of the Limerick companies known to the police was sixty-eight, whereas in April 1916 it had been forty. By the end of 1917 the Irish Volunteers had been successfully reorganised at local and national level; recruitment was promising, morale was high and formal training and leadership structures were in place.36 Patrickswell Company, for instance, had only eight or nine Volunteers in early 1917, but by December it had sixty men and was linked into a battalion with neighbouring companies in Adare, Kildimo, Mungret and Ballybrown.37

  Subversive separatist newspapers published in Limerick further fanned republican sentiment and fervour. The first of these was the Factionist in January 1917. It proudly claimed the title of ‘the smallest paper in the world’ and, for the first few issues, the editor sarcastically declared that ‘As we are kept up by “German Gold” we can afford to distribute our Official Journal free’. It was printed on both sides of a single sheet. The characteristic tone of the Factionist was a mixture of humour and acerbic invective directed against all non-republicans. It exhibited the same pious Catholicism as the Bottom Dog – Limerick’s first socialist newspaper, published between October 1917 and November 1918 – and, on the dock labourers’ strike in May 1917, the Factionist commented that ‘We do not like to advocate syndicalism but we do think Jim Larkin is needed in Limerick’.38 The attitude of the Factionist to violence was unambiguous: when the police ‘severely batoned several people’ at a republican demonstration in the city in May the paper recommended that:

  ... the police could be well taught a lesson, that they would not forget for some time, and we suggest that in future if any crowd of young men feel inclined to demonstrate they ought to come prepared to meet the peelers at their own game.39

  Its tone became increasingly militant over time, in June stating: ‘The way to Freedom is a sword-track through our enemies. Whether we hew it or whether it will be opened for us, is as may be. If we are to have National Freedom we must at least be prepared to fight.’40

  The Factionist, which was circulated privately among republicans, gloried in the failure of the authorities to suppress it and defied the ‘imitation detectives and fat-headed peelers of Limerick to locate us’. In their efforts to suppress the paper, the police had twice searched the printing premises of Michael Gleeson at 6 Cornmarket Row between the middle of July and the start of August. They seized copies of the paper as well as destroying the principal parts of Gleeson’s machinery and all his type, though the Factionist (falsely) declared that Gleeson was not involved in its publication and it continued to appear after the raids. The publication was deliberately provocative, reflecting the declining respect for authority among at least some in the city: it pledged, following the raid on Gleeson’s, to send a copy of each issue to Dublin Castle to save the police the trouble of doing so and to show that it had not been suppressed.41 However, the last of its thirty-two issues was published on 6 September 1917. Both the Chronicle and the Leader reported that the Factionist ‘had a fairly large circulation’ during its brief lifetime, but its resources and possibly its circulation were obviously insufficient for survival.42

  But underground subversive publication continued. The first issue of the Soldier Hunter on 23 February 1918 took a different approach, combining anti-army feeling with a strong expression of Catholic morality by detailing its plans to guard against the moral corruption of young Limerick women by the British garrison: ‘We are out to clean up the town. Social Hygiene, if you will, is our objective.’ It listed ‘dens of infamy where immorality stalks naked and unabashed’ and advocated the use of
tougher tactics to help the clergy who had been doing ‘police work as well as priest’s work’. The paper published a letter from a city priest about a military chaplain who had been assaulted by a Welch Fusilier when he tried ‘to protect a girl of sixteen years of age against the lustful passion of this low clodhopper’. The priest called on ‘the support of the young men of Limerick for the parish clergy in their efforts to uphold public morality’. A leading article described khaki-clad ‘demons in human form’, one of whom had apparently tried to take advantage of a young girl by offering her drugged chocolates.

  In early March there were violent clashes in the city involving soldiers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, during which at least one soldier and two policemen were seriously injured. The source of the tension was reported in the Leader as an issue of public morality rather than politics and concerned the conduct of soldiers towards the young women of the city. The situation in rural Limerick was apparently somewhat different; Mossie Harnett’s experience was that the young women of west Limerick showed their patriotic ardour by their preference for Volunteers.43 After the city clashes, the military were confined to barracks for three nights.44 In reality, however, the violence may have had just as much, if not more, to do with the Volunteers’ lust for weapons as it had to with protecting the virtue of the girls of Limerick. Volunteer Michael Conway of Patrickswell Company described how the Patrickswell pipers’ band, accompanied by an escort of Volunteers, clashed with the Welch Fusiliers at the Crescent in early March and managed to capture some weapons. Patrickswell Company also attempted to bomb a police lorry, and successfully burnt a military lorry before the end of 1918.45

  The leadership of the Catholic church locally was drawn into the political arena. Bishop Dennis Hallinan lent his support to Sinn Féin on condition that it did not endorse armed rebellion.46 Hallinan understood the Sinn Féin principle to be self-reliance rather than collusion with secret societies and resort to violence.47 Yet, what exactly the Sinn Féin principle was remained somewhat unclear. The shouting down of an attempted sale of land at Newcastlewest and a large cattle drive at Castleconnell indicate the web of issues other than politics that complicated the movement’s policies.48 Land was probably just as important as nationalism and it is clear that Sinn Féin clubs, ‘whose members disregard all law and order’ according to the county inspector, were involved in incidents of agrarian unrest around the county.49

  The conscription crisis began in the spring of 1918 as British forces in France came under critical pressure from the German army and the government made moves to apply conscription to Ireland. Limerick’s board of guardians used such strong language in its objection to conscription that thirty-three of its members were summoned on various charges of unlawful assembly and sedition.50 The scale of the public reaction to conscription was obvious when up to 20,000 protestors gathered in the city on 21 April and Limerick participated in the general strike on 23 April.51 After the arrest of a Volunteer in Newcastlewest on 15 April, when 10,000 people congregated, the police came under such heavy attack that they were forced to open fire. The telegraph wire had been cut to prevent them calling for assistance, showing that the operation was conducted with a degree of sophistication. County Inspector Yates reported that ‘the whole city and county are seething with hatred against the government for passing conscription. This is egged on by the Sinn Féiners whose movement has swallowed all others.’52

  The ‘German plot’ arrests in May put a temporary check on the progress of Sinn Féin and heralded a period of military rule. Limerick was proclaimed in June and drilling largely ceased. Apart from an increase in organised raids for arms by the Volunteers, who planned to resist conscription by force if necessary, republican activity diminished considerably and there was a strong public police and military presence.53 The real move from potentially violent protest to the deliberate use of force came on 6 September 1918, when Volunteer Tommy Leahy of Tournafulla fired shots at a police patrol near Abbeyfeale, wounding one constable.54 This was the first time that a Volunteer had shot a member of the crown forces in Limerick. Sinn Féin’s general election manifesto demanded an Irish republic, the withdrawal of Irish representatives from Westminster and the establishment of a constituent assembly. It committed itself to achieving these aims ‘by any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection by military force or otherwise’.55 When set in the context of the type of speeches being made by candidates like Con Collins, it seems quite clear that an implicit, and sometimes explicit, part of Sinn Féin’s pre-election policy was to condition its supporters for a campaign for independence in which the use of violence would potentially form a central method. The actions of the police, too, accelerated the move towards violence. On 2 November, the police in Broadford dispersed a crowd who had assembled to celebrate the release from prison of three Cumann na mBan members who had refused to pay a fine. Fr Tomas Wall witnessed the incident:

  The peelers at Broadford were so frightened by the magnitude of the turnout that they telephoned for military to Newcastlewest ... The peelers, who had kept very quiet till then, cheered their arrival. A mess was made of the crowd, the peelers using the butt-ends of rifles and batons. The military did nothing except march up to where I was and fix bayonets ... I announced that our meeting was over and called on the crowd to go home quietly – which they did. But the peelers, wherever they came on an isolated group around the village, they batoned fiercely. The disturbance was renewed by the police on Sunday night and two quiet young men got badly beaten by them. The whole incident will do good and has done good already. The village was one of those places overrun and bossed by police and police pensioners.56

  The general election of December 1918 showed how events had moved away from the political patterns of the past to a stage where the militant movement was in control. Sinn Féin’s Michael Colivet was unopposed in Limerick City in the general election of December. The long-standing representative of the city, Irish Parliamentary Party member Michael Joyce, did not contest the seat largely because of the almost complete absence of nationalist organisation in the constituency. The Sinn Féin campaign was highly organised and enjoyed the support of the local Catholic clergy. However, Joyce also cited ‘the opposition we would be faced with both inside and outside the polling booths ... the knowledge we had that many respectable citizens were afraid to sign a nomination paper for me’ and the desire to preserve ‘the peace and harmony of the city’ as reasons for his retirement. He had been pressurised by Colivet’s supporters.57 Con Collins was unopposed in West Limerick. Internee Richard Hayes defeated the Irish Parliamentary Party candidate Thomas Lundon by 12,750 votes to 3,608 in East Limerick.58 Lundon’s re-election campaign was basically non-existent and he ‘did not dare to hold an open-air public meeting’.59 Volunteers from all over the county had canvassed for Hayes in East Limerick and were heavily involved on polling day. Sixty Volunteers from Rathkeale, for instance, stood guard at the voting booths in New Pallas, while the RIC stood by. At the close of polling the ballot boxes were conveyed by Volunteers to the county courthouse for counting.60 Sinn Féin and the Volunteers were not only preventing the British administration from exercising its functions but acting as a substitute for that administration.

  Republicans with The Republic newspaper, one of the radical underground productions available in Limerick 1917–18. Reproduced from the Daly Papers, Glucksman Library, University of Limerick.

  10

  ‘NOTORIOUS ANARCHISTS?’

  The Irish smallholder and the Irish state

  during the Emergency, 1939–45

  BRYCE EVANS

  On St Patrick’s Day 1943 Éamon de Valera delivered one of his most renowned speeches, one which came to define popular memory of the Emergency (1939–45). In the Taoiseach’s dream of Ireland, her countryside would be ‘bright with cosy homesteads ... with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, and the laughter of comely maidens’
.1 In recent times this crackly recording has been roundly derided for its rustic quality, but the conscious archaism of the Long Fella’s addresses in the early 1940s was in keeping with Irish state propaganda at the time, which deliberately distinguished spiritual Ireland from the destructive materialist mêlée engulfing the outside world.

  De Valera’s rhetoric was sentimentalist, but it was designed to justify the deprivation that the Irish endured during the Emergency, for Ireland was not isolated from world events except in the green dreams of propaganda. In common with nearly every other European nation during the Second World War, Ireland experienced serious shortages of essential supplies. After the fall of France in June 1940, grave concerns arose that Ireland would run out of food altogether, and from early 1941 Irish people began to suffer the acute pain of a British trade squeeze aimed at bullying the neutral island onto the Allied side. By the end of that year, Ireland was importing 1,000 tons of grain a week. Consumption, though, was 1,000 tons a day.2 This clearly unsustainable situation underlay the urgent need to increase productivity in the Irish countryside. Braving vicious maritime fighting, Ireland’s plucky merchant fleet was too minuscule to reliably maintain supplies of food. To press home the importance of growing more food, government propaganda invoked a historical spectre almost 100 years old: the Great Famine.