by Joe Power
We now know how foul the stuff in which our young people are being fed in that Hell shop. Our duty is clear and unmistakeable; it is to shun the place as infected by a plague.
It is said it brings £200 to the rates, but it takes double that amount out of the town, and from the very class who can least afford it. But are we for any price however great, sunk to the level of those vile wretches who live on white slavery?
It is suggested to have the films censored by a local committee. It is hopeless. I doubt if there are decent films enough to last a week.
These films are not made in Ireland for the Irish mind, they are made in England and America for a people steeped in sensuality. We may check them or a week or two. But, Satan will bide his time, gradually thickening the dose until our palate will relish the worst he can serve.
No, the sooner this source of corruption leaves our town the better for Ennis. It should never have come here. The Town Hall is no place for it. I ask the people to shun its doors. No girls especially should enter them. Let us shun its doors and they will soon close.
I am, yours sincerely,
M Fogarty,
Bishop of Killaloe8
Other forms of social life such as drinking did not seem to cause much concern at this time. At a sitting of the local court, District Inspector Townshend objected to the granting of a licence for another public house in Ennis. He said that the population of the town was about 5,200 and there were already 112 pubs in the town. However, trade may have been bad as there were few reports of drunkenness in the town.
INCREASED SEPARATION ALLOWANCES
For soldier’s wives and children
Corporal, Sergeant, or Private
Wife
12/6
to
15/-
wife & 1 child
17/6
to
20/-
wife& 2 children
21/-
to
23/6
wife & 3 children
23/-
to
25/6
with an addition of 2/- for each subsequent child.
Each motherless child 5/-.
Allowances for other dependants:
Full particulars at any Post Office
God save the King
God Save The King.
Saturday Record, 18 January 1917.
At the Ennis petty sessions court in January Mr George McElroy, RM, said that there was only one case of drunkenness in the town. This, he said, spoke well of the morals of Ennis. Addressing the Clare grand jury, Judge Bodkin KC, congratulated them on the state of the county, for the entire calendar of the court consisted only of the larceny of a goat! He offered condolences to the Grand Jurors – respectable farmers – ‘for wasting their valuable time, like using a steam roller to crack a nut!’ Later, at Kilrush quarter sessions court, Judge Bodkin was presented with a set of white gloves by Mr William Healy, clerk of the commission and peace. It was a symbol of the peaceful state of West Clare, as there were no indictable cases before the court. There was, it seems, little or no petty crime in the county around this time.9
This virtually crime-free phenomenon may be explained by the fact that a huge proportion of the previously unemployed labouring classes of the towns in Clare seemed to have enlisted in the armed forces of the Crown. This meant that probably most of the previously unemployed young men of the community had found steady employment and the ‘separation money’ given to the wives of serving soldiers and sailors was significant as well. For instance, Mr P. Kelly, from The Glen, Kilrush, wrote a letter to the Clare Journal in January in which he said that ‘in response to His Majesty’s call, 500 boys of Kilrush are now in the battle front hammering the barbaric and savage German Kaiser’s hordes.’ He had two brothers, six cousins and other relatives fighting in the battlefields of France ‘and the government are nobly treating their dependants in Kilrush’.10
There was, however, still much hardship in the county due to the war. A concert was organised by Miss Maunsell of Island McGrath in the Boy’s National School at Clare Castle, with songs ‘comical, sentimental and patriotic, pianoforte solos, recitations and step dancing.’ A sum of £11 9s was raised, including ‘a very generous donation of £2 given by Mr Patrick Power, to be divided among the poor of the village’. Of the sum collected, £1 was voted to the Clare Needlework Guild, £1 to the Royal Munster Fusilier’s Prisoners of War Fund, and the balance of £9 9s was given to the poor, ‘many who deserve better, suffering severely from the hardships of high prices of food and the lack of employment’.11
While the army and navy were desperately seeking more volunteers, one young man was discharged from the army because of his age. Patrick Leahy from Kilkee enlisted when he was only 15 years old! When his mother, Mrs Bridget Leahy, found out she was tried to get him discharged, but the War Office were reluctant to release the enthusiastic young man. She sought the assistance of the local MP, Col Arthur Lynch, and, following his representations, the War Office sent the boy home.
Another Clare youth who volunteered to fight was an Ennis boy named Luke Coote, who enlisted in the Royal Munster Fusiliers when he was 16. On 16 June 1917 he was shot in the arms, stomach and chest, just after the Battle of Messines Ridge in France. By then he had been promoted to the rank of corporal. When he had recovered from these very serious injuries he returned to Ireland. Later, he used his military experience to support Michael Collins in the War of Independence.12
The Death of Willie Redmond, MP
Maj. Willie Redmond, MP, was not so lucky, as he was killed at the Battle of Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917. Bishop Fogarty, in a letter to John Redmond, MP, leader of the Home Rule Party, seemed to have become disillusioned with the war: ‘This accursed war has claimed one of its expiating victims, our brave and beloved member, your dear brother Willie’.13
Willie Redmond, MP, had joined the Royal Irish Regiment in January 1916 and was commissioned as a captain. He was one of five Irish MPs who actually served in the British forces during the war, two of whom came from County Clare. He was first elected to parliament in 1883 and had been elected for various constituencies including Wexford, where he was born, and North Fermanagh. He was imprisoned along with Charles Stewart Parnell in Kilmainham Jail in 1880-81. When the Home Rule Party split over Parnell’s affair with Mrs O’Shea, he stood by Parnell and was chosen and elected as a ‘Parnellite’ candidate for East Clare, even though Parnell was dead, in 1892. The election of 1895 was also bitterly contested, but he was re-elected for East Clare. Since that election he had been returned unopposed for the East Clare constituency. Thus, he had been an MP for the East Clare constituency for twenty-five years. At the age of 54 he was deemed to be too old for actual service in the field and served in an administrative and promotional capacity in the regiment, touring the country and encouraging young men to enlist and join Irish regiments.14
While on active service, he occasionally addressed the House of Commons, urging the British to keep their promise with regard to Home Rule for Ireland. He also wrote regular columns on his wartime experiences for a British newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. Perhaps his finest hour in parliament was his last one, in which he delivered his ‘Cheerio’ speech in March 1916. His last speech made a profound impression on all sides of the House of Commons and indeed throughout the country. In what the Manchester Guardian described as ‘a masterpiece of simple eloquence, he made another heartfelt, yet helpless appeal to the government in the name of Irishmen in the trenches to solve the Irish question’. He addressed the House of Commons dressed in his military uniform. He had just come back from the frontline in France and described in glowing terms the gallantry of the Irish men from all parts of the country in the trenches of France and Belgium. He highlighted the comradeship among the troops from all parts of Ireland in the Irish regiments. He finished his speech, ironically prophesising his own death, with a plea to the British to grant self-government to Ireland:
In
the name of God, we, who are about to die, perhaps, ask you to do that which largely induced us to leave our homes; to do that which our mothers and fathers taught us to long for; to do that which is all we desire, make our country happy and contented, and enable us, when we meet the Canadians, the Australians and the New Zealanders side by side in the common cause and the common field, to say to them: ‘‘our country, just as yours, has self-government within the empire’’.15
Maj. Redmond wrote one more letter to his friend, Councillor P.J. Linnane, JP. In this letter he expressed the hope that he might see his friend again and that he was having a difficult time. The letter was written on 26 May 1917, just twelve days before he was killed:
D.H.Q,
16 Div,
B.E.F.
Dear PJ,
I got your letter as to John Coffey. I need not say I should be glad to do as you wish, but I fear I have absolutely no power or means of doing so. I hope you and your family are well and that I may meet you some day again. I often think of our many days together. I am having a by no means easy time but I am still convinced Ireland should take her side in the war – especially now with America in.
With every good wish,
Yours very truly,
Willie Redmond,
26-5-’1716
One commentator wrote, ‘Major Willie Redmond, MP, was a leader and was not prepared to ask other men to do what he would not do himself’. He had frequently requested to be sent to the front line to join the rest of his battalion in action as they ‘went over the top’. His wish was finally granted. On 7 March 1917 at 3.10 a.m., he led the men of B company Royal Irish Regiment, 16th Irish Division, over the top at Passchendaele in the Battle of Messines, near Ypres. He allegedly went over the top shouting: ‘Up the County Clare!’ He was wounded about twenty minutes afterwards in the leg and in the wrist and he died about three hours later. A subaltern in his company described Redmond’s demeanour on the day of his death: ‘Major Redmond exhibited the dash and exuberance of a schoolboy on the morning of his death. He had a joke and a smile for every man, and as we flew over the parapets to the shouts of ‘’Up the County Clare!’’, Maj. Willie showed us a clean pair of heels’.17
In the introduction to Trench Pictures from France, E.M. Smith-Dampier described how Willie Redmond was determined to share the danger with the ordinary soldiers. According to Smith-Dampier, the only criticism ever heard against Willie Redmond, one of the most popular officers in the regiment, was that ‘he could not bring himself to be hard enough with the men’:
Here was a man who felt he would die, who nevertheless never swerved for a moment from the determination to face death … Others who knew him are agreed that Willie Redmond foresaw his death. More than that, he may be said to have sought it. He refused to be content with any sort of post, however honourable, which kept him behind the firing line. Not only was he determined to share danger with the men, not only did his religion lift him above all fear of the end, but he was convinced that his blood would prove a sacrament of unity to his own countrymen and lift up their hearts to a higher place.
The end was near at hand. When the great push came on in June 1917, he was in permanent HQ at the village of Lucre … Fr Kelly, chaplain to the forces wrote in a letter to Monsignor Ryan:
During the three nights previous to the battle he and I slept in the same cellar under the chapel at the hospice, and I can assure you that he felt absolutely miserable at the idea of being left behind. He had used every influence with the general to get over the top with the men, and he had little hope of succeeding. He spoke in the most feeling manner of what awaited the poor fellows and longed to share their sufferings and their fate. However, he was not to be denied, and to his extreme delight, was given leave to charge with his old battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. He put on his equipment in Fr O’Connell’s room and was simply bubbling over with joy … when the men saw him they gave a cheer.
May God have mercy on his soul! No purer-hearted man, no braver soldier ever died in the battlefields. He was absolutely convinced he was dying for Ireland … In my humble opinion, Willie Redmond deserves the admiration of every man capable of admiring sanctity in a Catholic, valour in a soldier, and the most unselfish love of country in a patriot.18
Tom Johnstone gives a different view of the motivation behind Willie Redmond’s determination to go over the top, suggesting a baser motive, implying that Redmond wanted to prove that he was not a coward by going over the top: ‘At the battles of Guillemont and Ginchy Gen. Hickey had insisted that Redmond remain at divisional HQ, considering him too old at 56. Following this, Redmond had received letters (anonymous) accusing him of cowardice. Nevertheless, Redmond was deeply hurt. For this reason he requested Hickey to allow him to join his battalion for the Messines attack. At first Hickey remained obdurate, but Redmond implored so insistently that at last the general gave way’.19
There were messages of sympathy from Pope Benedict XV and from King George V, among many others, and the French Government posthumously awarded him the Legion of Honour. Bishop Fogarty wrote a letter of sympathy to John Redmond, MP, brother of Willie Redmond. The letter was published in the Freeman’s Journal and in the Saturday Record of 16 June:
Dear Mr Redmond,
Alas what I long dreaded has come at last. This accursed war has claimed as one of its expiating victims our brave and beloved member, your dear brother Willie. I feel for you greatly, I could see in our many talks of over twelve years how strongly devoted were he and you to one another. It will be some particle of consolation to you to know that his death is deplored and lamented by almost everyone in Clare, even by those who differed politically from him and you. As for myself, I not only esteemed him, but was fondly attached to him. I lament and mourn his sad death more than I could tell you. May God grant him eternal rest. He was fit to go. His life in the trenches, as it was everywhere else, was religious, manly and Catholic. We shall not see his like in Clare again and perhaps do not deserve it. I beg you to accept the expression of my profoundest sympathy and sorrow.
Yours sincerely,
M. Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe
Dr Fogarty, who was on his diocesan visitation at the time, regretted that he could not say a memorial Mass in memory of Willie Redmond at Ennis Cathedral on Monday 18 June. He stated that if it were possible he would say the Mass himself, but unfortunately, he could not be available.
Expressions of sympathy were also recorded at Clare County Council, Ennis Urban Council, the AOH, the Ennis Labourers, the Ennis Brian Boru corps of the Irish National Volunteers, the Ennis Foresters and the Ennis Board of Guardians. On 17 June an empty coffin was paraded through the streets of Ennis, with a guard of honour provided by the Ennis Volunteers, while the O’Connell monument was draped in black. Councillor P.J. Linnane, JP, delivered an oration in memory of his great friend at the memorial Mass the next day.
One man, though he did not share Willie Redmond’s political philosophy, wrote generously about Willie Redmond after his death; Edward Lysaght of Raheen said, ‘Though I have not been able to see eye to eye with the policy which led him to join the British army, I recognise none the less that his death was a noble one and his life honestly given for Ireland’s sake’. In Limerick, Bishop O’Dwyer allowed a novena of prayers to be offered for the soul of Maj. Willie Redmond.20
However, not everybody in Clare was willing to express sympathy on the death of Willie Redmond. Indeed, his death caused some controversy both in the Catholic Church and in the Ennis Board of Guardians. At the meeting of the board of guardians a vote of sympathy was proposed, and seconded, but it caused a heated debate, when one member, Mr Hegarty, objected. He ‘heatedly’ declared that ‘Mr Redmond was not an Irishman – ever since he joined the Wexford Militia – since then, he was never a friend of Ireland’. Furthermore, he declared that Willie Redmond ‘never did anything for the Irish farmers’.
This outburst led to an animated discussion and uproar, which turned the
meeting into a ‘bear garden’, with Mr Kerin making a vehement protest against Mr Hegarty’s attack on ‘their dead chief’. He declared that Willie Redmond was a patriot who had been incarcerated in Kilmainham Jail along with Parnell in 1881. After many heated exchanges the room was ‘a regular bedlam’ as Mr Hegarty and Mr Kerin exchanged mutual insults. Mr Kerin accused Mr Hegarty of having taken the Oath of Allegiance for ambitious motives, while Willie Redmond, he said, took it for patriotic motives, for his love of Ireland. Mr Hegarty and Mr Kerin threatened each other, but order was eventually restored by the chairman, Mr Considine.
Then Mr Kerin launched a tirade against two unnamed clergy, who, he said, had refused to pray for the soul of Willie Redmond:
I am very sorry to have to say it the Catholic clergymen of two parishes adjoining closely this town refused to offer up a prayer on the altar of their God for the soul of poor Willie Redmond. That certainly was a deplorable scandal before God, while the murderer who would be executed for his offence would be prayed for, or the man who would commit suicide and even the hangman who executed the murderer would be prayed for. But for the soul of poor Willie Redmond, no prayer was offered up from the altar of God by those two clergymen. May God forgive them for their act. Even Cardinal Logue, no friend of the Home Rule party, paid tribute to Willie Redmond, that he was an Irishman worthy of his steel.
After further acrimonious debate and bitter personal insults, order was eventually restored and Mr Glynn proposed a vote of condolence to the widow and family of Willie Redmond. This motion was unanimously adopted, after further ‘animated discussion’.21