by Neil Hegarty
For the rebels, Easter approached in a miasma of confusion and ill fortune. Early in April, Pearse had flatly denied to MacNeill that any rising was planned for the Easter weekend; several days later, Pearse again met his commander – but now to tell him that a rising was indeed imminent and that the Volunteer movement had in fact long been secretly controlled by the IRB. On 20 April, Volunteers in County Kerry failed to make contact as planned with the German vessel Libau, which, following negotiations by Casement, had been dispatched to Ireland with twenty thousand guns and a million rounds of ammunition on board.* When news of this reverse reached Dublin, the administration in the Castle relaxed still further – if trouble had in fact been planned, it would surely not now go ahead – and began looking forward to the upcoming horse-racing festival at nearby Fairyhouse.
At the same time, MacNeill stood down the Volunteers – and it was now that the fragmentation and competing agendas of the leaders of the rising came starkly to the surface. On Easter Sunday, the IRB leadership voted to ignore MacNeill’s instructions and to summon the Volunteers on to the streets; but on the following day, the abiding confusion meant that a mere fifteen hundred Volunteers – including some two hundred women – turned out, supported by a handful of members of the ICA who took up their positions on St Stephen’s Green. Their intention was to occupy and hold a medley of buildings and positions in Dublin, the general idea being to control both the city centre and, eventually, communications across the country. And indeed, the General Post Office was taken by Connolly and Pearse as planned, the latter reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the front of the building. But the strategic importance of some of the other targets was questionable; and to make matters worse, the lines of communication between the various positions could not be secured.
The rebels failed to capture the castle, even though it was occupied that holiday Monday by only a skeleton staff. A constable at the gates of the compound was shot dead, after which the gates were hastily shut and the rebels forced to retreat into the adjoining City Hall. This failure was repeated across the city: in taking up their positions, the rebels were hampered consistently by a lack of numbers and a sense of confusion, and many other strongpoints thus remained unoccupied. Beggar’s Bush Barracks to the southeast of the city centre lay essentially undefended and might have been smoothly taken by the Third Battalion under Éamon de Valera: no attempt, however, was made to occupy the compound. The rebels also made no attempt to occupy the easily defensible grounds of Trinity College, in the heart of the city; and, fatally, the railway stations at Amiens Street and Kingsbridge continued to function. Some of the rebels, meanwhile, displayed a glaring lack of understanding of the nature of urban warfare: those members of the ICA who had occupied St Stephen’s Green, for example, busied themselves with the digging of trenches across the park, evidently heedless of the ranges of tall buildings overlooking the area. Before long, sniper fire from the roof of the Shelbourne Hotel forced them to take refuge inside the College of Surgeons building on the west side of the square.
By the end of that first day, order was breaking down across the city centre: public transport had stopped running and shops were being looted. By the following morning, government forces were pouring into the city by train and ship and were beginning to tighten the noose around the rebel positions. Trinity College had become both a barracks – with some four thousand soldiers and their horses stationed in its quadrangles – and a field hospital catering to ever larger numbers of military and civilian casualties. Food began to run short, and over the next few days the various rebel battalions across the city surrendered one by one. By Friday night, much of central Dublin had been devastated: Pearse and Connolly were forced to abandon a GPO in flames; and on Saturday, 29 April the final, formal surrender was announced. Some 450 people had died in the course of the week: of these, one hundred or so were British military personnel and 64 were rebels. The rest were civilians.
The Easter Rising was always doomed to failure. The mood in the country, buoyed by the modest prosperity of wartime, was not in its favour; and in practical terms, the numbers and resources at its leaders’ disposal were nowhere near sufficient to ensure a victory against the power of the state. For some of those leaders, of course, the rising’s failure was beside the point: for Pearse, for example, the sacrifice of a short-term defeat contained the promise of a larger and more substantial victory in the longer term, even if he would not live to see it. For others less moved by such emotion, a good and sturdy battle was an end in itself and might succeed in lighting a fire of resistance among the people; and Connolly, at any rate, must have carried with him the bitter knowledge that the strategy for holding Dublin city centre, flawed though it was, might have worked a little better had sufficient numbers cut through the fog of order and counter-order and turned out in support.
Women had been present in all theatres of activity, with the exception of the Third Battalion: de Valera refused to have females in his ranks. Although the Proclamation read by Pearse claimed ‘the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman’, the substantial female part in the rising was downplayed in subsequent histories of the period. Later events, as we will see, had a crucial role to play in this; in addition, the death of men such as Connolly, for example, removed from the scene important proponents of egalitarian policies. This airbrushing is best – indeed, literally – encapsulated in the fate of Elizabeth O’Farrell, a member of Cumann na mBan and one of three women among the last group of rebels to leave the GPO. Farrell was later given surrender orders to be distributed across the city, and was with Pearse when he was photographed formally surrendering on 29 April. Later, however, her image was excised from the photographic record, albeit in a most clumsy manner: her disembodied feet remain in evidence behind Pearse.
The reactions of the public to the rising were inevitably various and fragmented. For the relatives of those serving in the war the rising was an evident betrayal, the work of stay-at-home cowards who would not go and join in the fight overseas; and the so-called ‘separation women’ – those separated from their men fighting on the western front and as a result in receipt of government funds – were involved in a number of confrontations with the rebels. For the socially conservative Catholic ‘shopocracy’,3 the presence of such figures as Connolly in the body of the rebels added a fearful socialist taint to the events in Dublin: the Irish Independent condemned the rising as ‘insane and criminal’ and pressed for Connolly’s execution;4 and Redmond, speaking in the Commons at the end of April, voiced what he considered to be the revulsion of the Irish public. While many Dubliners were enraged by the destruction of much of the city centre and the widespread civilian deaths, there was also a degree of support in some quarters for the rebels: ‘We tried hard to get the women and children to leave North King Street area,’ wrote Sir John Maxwell, the British commander in the city. ‘They would not go. Their sympathies were with the rebels….’5 In the end, the response of the government was decisive in bringing together many of these disparate elements and in proving the events of Easter week to be, in hindsight, a pivotal moment.
In the aftermath of the rising, over three thousand men and just under a hundred women were shipped off and interned in Britain. Approximately a third of these internees, once it became evident that they had had no involvement in the events of the rising, were within a fortnight sent back to Ireland. Those who remained quickly developed networks and close bonds of solidarity in such a claustrophobic environment, as well as a new understanding of the necessity of taut and well-oiled organization, if nationalist objectives were ever to be realized. The prisoners were returned to Ireland later in the year – the authorities reasoning that it did more harm than good to keep a large number of prisoners in conditions that fostered such a degree of resistance and resentment – more convinced than ever of the justice of their cause.
Furthermore, they came back to a country whose mood had changed fundamentally: for by mid-May, fifteen of t
he leaders of the rising – including Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, MacDonagh, Plunkett and John MacBride – had been brought into the stonebreakers’ yard at Kilmainham Gaol and executed by firing squad. Connolly, who had shattered his ankle during the rising itself, was bound to a chair to be shot. Casement was executed in London in August.* Many of these figures died with Catholic prayers on their lips and crucifixes about their persons – on the edge of death, Casement had converted to Catholicism, while Connolly had returned to his Catholic faith – and their all-too-evident martyrdom at the hands of the British authorities now struck the clearest of chords with the public.
There had been no shortage of voices counselling moderation: the Irish playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘the shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland and beside the heroes of Poland and Serbia and Belgium in Europe…the military authorities and the British Government must have known that they were canonising their prisoners’;6 and even Herbert Asquith, now in his final months as prime minister, had been clear in his own mind that too harsh a reaction would only engender further trouble.
By mid-May, Redmond was condemning the executions at Kilmainham – but now his party’s hold over public opinion was even more tenuous. In Belfast in June, a congress of his party consented reluctantly to a government plan that would exclude the six northeastern counties from the provision of Home Rule, on the understanding that such a partition would be strictly temporary: the majority of delegates at the conference (though certainly not all of them) felt this a price worth paying for the early implementation of Home Rule. But events were sweeping away all such fine calculations: the mounting death toll on the western front continued to gnaw away at Redmond’s support, and in July the Ulster Division sustained horrifying losses in the battle of the Somme, with the result that Ulster Unionism gained a new traction, respectability and sympathy in British political circles. ‘I am not an Ulsterman,’ gasped a correspondent in the British press, ‘but yesterday, as I followed their amazing attack, I felt I would rather be an Ulsterman than anything else in the world.’7
Furthermore, the government’s proposals were already being interpreted in a host of ways. Unionism already viewed this new Irish border as being decidedly permanent in nature: its leaders extracted a promise that the partition of Ireland would end only with the consent of the people of this six-county Ulster – consent that, in a new Unionist-dominated entity, would never be forthcoming. Redmond’s party was condemned for agreeing to the principle of partition in exchange for nothing: it was now eclipsed by a surging Sinn Féin, the cause of which had been unwittingly aided by the government’s practice of referring to all rebels and malcontents as Sinn Féiners, regardless of whether they had been associated with that decidedly marginal party; most, of course, had not.
Throughout 1917, this new Sinn Féin scored a number of by-election victories – including that of de Valera in County Clare in July, a result that saw him replace Arthur Griffith as leader of the movement – and in the process began to occupy the space on the political spectrum previously held by Redmond’s party. In carving out a position as a broadly anti-British political force, however, Sinn Féin was also creating problems for itself: many of those who gravitated towards the movement had little in common except the wish to be free of British rule; internal tensions were inevitable. While loudly critical of the Irish Party’s apparent willingness to stomach partition, for example, Sinn Féin itself held no coherent stance on the issue. Yet this fact did little to halt its political success, and the Irish Party reaped this particular whirlwind instead: when Redmond died in March 1918, his party’s support had crumbled. Sinn Féin was able to exploit opposition to the threat of conscription being imposed on Ireland in order to build on a heavy-handed British response that saw many party members arrested and jailed; and to voice an abstentionist policy towards representation at Westminster. In the general election of December 1918 (held as the country was being ravaged by the postwar global influenza epidemic) the party won seventy-three seats to the Irish Party’s six.
In January 1919, the first Dáil met at the Mansion House in Dublin. A mere twenty-seven members took their seats in this phantom parliament: although invitations had been extended to all members returned in the December election, the Unionists and a handful of constitutionalists had unsurprisingly failed to turn up; while most of the Sinn Féin representatives were in prison. The session was short: within a few hours a brief constitution had been adopted, providing for a unicameral parliamentary system in what was ostensibly a new Irish republic; and a statement of social intent, focused squarely on issues of welfare and education, had been tabled and passed. A parallel administration now gradually took shape: de Valera, who had spectacularly escaped from Lincoln prison, convened a cabinet in April; and Michael Collins was appointed minister for finance. Collins organized the finances of this new government so rapidly and efficiently that it was able quickly to assume the status of a parallel administration within the country.
Collins was an excellent candidate for such a role. Born in County Cork in October 1890, he was a widely read workaholic steeped in nationalist politics, with administrative and financial abilities to match. Described as ‘one of the few Irish revolutionary leaders to be at ease with a card index system’,8 he had worked as a bank clerk in London before returning to Ireland in advance of the rising. Collins had spent much of Easter week inside the GPO, as an aide to Joseph Plunkett. Interned afterwards at Frongoch camp in north Wales, he had demonstrated a talent for administration that would later stand him in good stead; since then he had developed a network of friends and supporters that encompassed the world of nationalist Ireland.
This communications web Collins could now put to excellent use, for he was also appointed director of this new administration’s intelligence operations. At once he drew upon his many contacts now embedded within the British administration, and at the same time paralysed British spy operations with a campaign of assassinations carried out by a hand-picked ‘squad’. De Valera was absent from Ireland for most of this period: the eighteen months from June 1919 he spent in the United States raising cash, political support and awareness of the Irish situation. De Valera’s safe passage was ensured by the presence of Collins’s operatives at the seaports; in the former’s absence the latter’s stock continued to rise, much to de Valera’s chagrin.
This shadow government also established its own parallel legal system in Ireland: by the summer of 1920, the ‘Dáil courts’ were a widespread phenomenon and made the effective wielding of power by the British authorities even less possible. They dealt mainly with minor social issues and were recognized as prompt and often useful arbiters of justice – but they also, perhaps inevitably, brought in their wake a degree of confusion and chaos that mirrored the situation in Ireland as a whole. The new government was also equipped with an army: the Volunteers became increasingly known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA); and its members began an armed campaign against Crown forces in Ireland which escalated after the government’s suppression of the Dáil later in the year.
The definition of Crown forces would come to include civilians: individuals suspected of assisting the state ‘whether by accusation, supposition, employment or sentiment’ were regarded by the IRA as legitimate targets.9 This campaign is generally considered to have begun in January 1919 with an ambush at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary, in which two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) policemen were killed. This operation had gone ahead without the authorization of the republican leadership – an indication of the degree of confusion between civilian and military authority that characterized this period. Soloheadbeg also highlighted other kinds of moral and political blurring: the dead policemen were part of the local community and – as was the case with the National Volunteers who had joined the British army – much of the general membership of the constabulary had enlisted for simple economic reasons.
But th
e forces of the State itself came to be increasingly feared at this time, especially as new players entered the arena. The British government sent a further forty thousand soldiers into the country; gradually, however, its efforts to maintain a degree of order in Ireland began to depend less on these regular forces and more on irregular militias. Some twelve thousand Black and Tans – named after their distinctive initial uniforms – and Auxiliaries were drafted into the country, ostensibly as support for the RIC. The Auxiliaries in particular were characterized by violence: the membership of the force for the most part consisted of men who had seen action in World War I and who were unable or unwilling to be reassimilated into civilian life. They rapidly built a reputation for excess: Austin Clarke writes in his poem ‘Black and Tans’ that no man could drink quietly in a pub for fear of the door being broken in by ‘these roarers’ looking for trouble.10
Cycles of violence became the norm. The war became a struggle of ambush, assassination and retaliation. On the morning of Sunday 20 November 1920, for example, an IRA squad acting under the order of Collins killed fourteen suspected British intelligence agents, including twelve former army officers, in various locations across Dublin. Later that day at Croke Park, Black and Tans fired into a crowd of spectators at a Gaelic football match: twelve were killed, and another two crushed in the resulting stampede. A week later, a troop of eighteen Auxiliaries was ambushed and killed at Kilmichael in County Cork; a fortnight after that, the centre of Cork city was torched by the Black and Tans. Such ceaseless violence was extensively covered in the British press and had its effect on public opinion; it also inevitably took its toll on Britain’s image abroad. But there were also indications that the British were beginning to gain the upper hand in this conflict. Collins’s intelligence machine had been thoroughly infiltrated by British agents, and in May 1921 an IRA attack on Dublin’s Custom House, which destroyed the building and its precious store of archives, also resulted in the deaths of five IRA members and the capture of a hundred or so more.