1916

by Gabriel Doherty

  The main cause célèbre just before the Rising was not local, however, but was in nearby King’s County (Offaly), in Tullamore. On 20 March 1916, Sinn Féiners in the town were trapped in their Volunteer Hall by a hostile crowd. Stones were thrown and shots were then fired from the hall. The crowd dispersed, but the police tried to enter the hall to disarm the Sinn Féiners. One police sergeant was shot and seriously wounded and thirteen men were subsequently charged with attempted murder.32 Ten of these were still untried and under arrest at the time of the Rising. The anti-party Midland Reporter , controlled by the inveterate conspiracy-theorist Tully brothers, demanded to know who had supplied Union Jacks to the mob and had started them on their mission to attack the Volunteer Hall. However, it was the pro-war, pro-party Westmeath Independent that most strongly defended the Sinn Féiners.33 The scuffle should never have taken place: both the police and Sinn Féiners had acted foolishly. Patience and not coercion was needed to win over young men and if England had not been able to win over all the elements of Irish life, was it to be wondered at? The lever moving Sinn Féin was not pro-Germanism but love of country, ‘for, above all the wrangling in connection with the Sinn Féin movement, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is the product of patriotic inspiration’.34

  The cases of Moraghan, Dyar, McCabe and the Tullamore men all triggered sympathy for individuals, if not for the Sinn Féin movement as a whole, but only once they had become prisoners of the police and ‘Dublin Castle’. Many of the constitutional nationalists who followed these cases had themselves clashed repeatedly with the authorities over the years; a significant number had been imprisoned and some were still highly-regarded former Fenians. Moreover, such arrests occurred during a period in which repeated calls for active Irish participation in the war did not generate popular enthusiasm. The local refrain in late 1915 and early 1916 was that the war was not one of ‘sentiment’. The majority of Irishmen were indifferent. As the Longford Leader put it at the beginning of 1916, it was ‘never a peoples’ war’ and ‘we see no prospect for an immediate end to our cruel period of suspense’.35 The war itself was perceived to be going badly. Nothing occurred to change the general view that it would be long and its cost enormous. Recruiting in provincial Ireland, outside of its larger towns, remained slow. Politically, the perception was reinforced that nationalists were ‘mere puppets in a continuously losing game’:36 the operation of home rule was stalled indefinitely; taxes were raised; public services cut; and bitter, unionist enemies admitted into the coalition government formed in May 1915. Throughout 1915 the fear of military conscription was pervasive, as was the belief that its imposition would end nationalist Ireland’s support for the war.

  In this period before the Easter Rising, the sense of victimhood and anglophobia that had long permeated nationalist political language was given full expression, not just in the ‘mosquito press’ of the anti-war opposition, but throughout the party-supporting press. This took the form of incessant complaints and denunciations of Tories, ‘conscriptionists’, the congested districts board, Dublin Castle, orangemen, the war office and the Ulster division. Consistently, such complaints were suffused with the belief that nationalist Ireland was treated unfairly relative to Ulster and to ‘England’. Such a state of anglophobic hostility was at variance with the hopes and outlook of John Redmond.37 His party might still pledge its loyalty to the ‘leader of the Irish race’, but the tone of much of the comment from its leading figures, both national and local, was distinctly sour. At the beginning of 1916, for example, the Western Nationalist wrote of John Dillon that ‘there was a touch of the old, rebel spirit’ in a parliamentary speech that Dillon made against conscription. Dillon declaimed that if England had treated Ireland decently in the past she would now have far more Irishmen fighting her battles. Incompetent officers had sacrificed Irish regiments at Gallipoli. ‘I tell you that before this [Military Service] bill is passed we will demand their blood at the hands of the government.’38

  At the local level, the mood was captured in a letter to the press at the end of 1915 from Patrick McKenna, the UIL national director who had so angrily protested about Moraghan’s gaol term (and who would, in 1917, be the party’s unsuccessful candidate in the South Longford by-election). McKenna was incensed because an official order had been made to control the sale of shotgun cartridges. The whole attitude behind this order was one of ‘we cannot trust the Irish’. While, he wrote, 250,000 Irishmen could fight for the empire, in Ireland they could not be trusted to shoot snipe. Ireland was just as entitled to be an armed nation as any of the small nations fighting in the war. McKenna thanked God for being ‘what they call an agitator … Whatever we gained was by agitation while we uniformly lost by moderation.’ Referring to the arrested and deported Volunteers, he stated that there was no fair play for Ireland under DORA – an Irish anti-war dissident would get three to six months in jail while his Scottish equivalent got only five days. McKenna concluded, re-affirming his own political loyalties: ‘I may mention that I am not in any sense a pro-German or a Sinn Féiner.’39

  IV

  Over the winter of 1915–16, political hostility to Sinn Féiners, therefore, co-existed with disillusionment with the war, outbursts of antipathy to England and sympathy for fellow nationalists in trouble. As a result, the subsequent response of the Irish party to the Easter Rising was anything but homogeneous. This is not to say that the rebellion was approved of: as already seen, it was condemned across the local nationalist press. Nevertheless, party comment on the Rising, even before the succession of executions and mass provincial arrests, made it clear that there were different levels of culpability among the rebels. It also sought to assign blame away from them and emphasised Ireland’s victimhood. Calls for mercy and attacks on Ulster (particularly on Sir Edward Carson and the UVF) were both commonplace.

  Such an emphasis was prominent in the Westmeath Independent as early as 29 April, before any of the executions and when the Dublin nationalist press was still unobtainable. This paper’s condemnation of the Rising has already been noted, as has its immediate analysis of the threat posed to home rule. Its owner, Thomas Chapman, was a Protestant home ruler and Westmeath County Councillor who had two sons serving in the army. Its editor, Michael MacDermott-Hayes, was secretary of the south Westmeath UIL. Its leading article made it clear that the Rising was the action of ‘a section of irresponsibles’, but then went on to state that the Rising would almost certainly not have happened if home rule had been in operation (if it had happened, it would have been suppressed by Ireland alone, just as de Wet’s 1915 rebellion in South Africa was suppressed without any need for imperial forces). The key people to blame for the uprising were Sir Edward Carson, for legitimising and justifying physical force, and James Larkin, the wild Dublin socialist. The paper contrasted the ‘mistaken ideas of patriotism’ of the Irish Volunteers with the ‘pure scoundrelism’ of the socialist Citizen Army – only the latter were looting in Dublin. ‘A lot of regret must be for the young men who have been unfortunately led into this business.’40

  A week later, the paper developed these themes. It still lamented what it called ‘an outbreak of Larkinism’ and an epidemic of madness in Dublin (it was not an Irish rebellion), but it now linked the rebels with the tradition of Irish ‘valour’. ‘These young men are Irishmen. They are the class from whom has been drawn the Irish soldier, who has made the world ring with his valour.’ It also made an explicit plea for mercy and for there to be no more executions. ‘Notwithstanding their crime, and it cannot be minimized, it is the duty of Ireland to plead for mercy for the misguided fellows dragged into this movement.’ The crime of all the rebels was no worse than that of de Wet in South Africa. ‘Mercy for the men; punishment, if it must be, for the leaders – but not the punishment of death!’41

  The other major Irish party newspaper in the five counties was the Sligo Champion , mouthpiece for the shopkeepers, merchants and professional men who led nationalist politics in Sligo t
own, Co. Sligo and north Leitrim. The Champion produced no leading article on 29 April, but on 6 May the paper extensively quoted the opinions of an ‘imperial contemporary’ and was able to blame just about everybody except the rebels for the Rising. Both the government and those classes who represented ‘the government of Ireland by England’ were culpable. The seeds of rebellion were sown by Carson, the UVF and unionism, and were bearing bitter fruit. The government had withheld the benefits of the home rule Act from Ireland. The war office had given no help to Redmond’s efforts to retain the Volunteers as a constitutional force. Would the government now settle old scores against ‘those fellow Irishmen who had apparently been led into a tragic cul-de-sac’? It was a tragedy that Irishmen had raised their hands in anger against other Irishmen.42

  The tone of both of these prominent, establishment papers was not one of lambasting Sinn Féiners and pro-Germans. It was very much in tune with the Dublin Freeman’s Journal which, when it re-appeared after the Rising, immediately blamed Carson, cited the South African precedent for leniency, and called for mercy. Its tone was one of sorrow for the misguided actions of fellow-Irishmen and anger at the malice and/or folly of those who were really to blame for the Rising – whether Carson, Larkin, Kitchener, Asquith, unionists, the UVF, the government or all of them. Such views effectively pre-dated the bulk of the official repression that followed the Rising. By 6 May (and the provincial papers went to print the day before that) only the first few executions of the Rising’s leaders had taken place. Arrests outside Dublin were still limited. The papers’ comments, therefore, reflected pre-Rising sentiments as much as post-Rising repression. When officials and the military embarked on an almost panicky coercion after the Rising, they were pouring petrol on the flames.

  Military repression, and the nationalist response to it, now took hold. For weeks, the press would catalogue the workings of martial law (censorship, the ban on public meetings – initially including sports meetings – disarmament, house searches) and long lists of executions, prison sentences, arrests and deportations. As the inspector general of the RIC dryly put it in his monthly report for May 1916:

  As time passed, however, a reaction of feeling became noticeable. Resentment was aroused by the number of persons punished by courts martial and by the great number of those arrested and deported. It is reported that, as a result of the arrests in counties which remained quiet a belief is springing up in some quarters it is sought to brand the Sinn Féin rebellion as a Catholic and nationalist Rising.43

  In the five counties, the impact of coercion was dramatic and brought home to small provincial towns the realities of the Rising. Under martial law powers, flying columns of soldiers and police toured the counties, formally disarming the Volunteers but also rounding up suspected rebel supporters using police lists of local, pre-Rising Sinn Féiners. In towns that had not had a military presence for some years, the effect of this military visitation was more marked and the scale of the official over-reaction even more apparent. On 7 May, Roscommon town (population in the 1911 census 1,858) saw no less than 700 soldiers arrive and take over the market square, post office, Harrison Hall and courthouse. The town was sealed off, pickets posted and houses and shops searched. All vehicles were stopped and inspected, including a hearse on its way to a funeral. Twenty seven men were then arrested in a town which had seen no incidents in the Rising, other than the hoisting of the tricolour over the old castle (for one day – it was taken down by boy scouts on Easter Monday).44 The arrested men were detained and interviewed over two days and twenty were then released. The remaining seven were marched under military escort to the railway station. On their way they were given chocolates and cigarettes by local ladies.45 Similar events unfolded in Longford, Athlone, Boyle, Strokestown, Cliffoney, Carrick-on-Shannon and Manorhamilton (but not in Mullingar or Sligo town, where, presumably, the local police did not generate lists of suspects). In Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, an armoured car and 150 mounted soldiers arrested just one man; a teacher who was ‘quite a juvenile’.46 In Longford, the town was sealed off on 5 May and arrests took place on the following day. Parties of soldiers then fanned out from the town to make arrests elsewhere. On 14 May 400 soldiers arrived back in Longford escorting seven Leitrim prisoners from Manorhamilton. The prisoners were surrounded by troops with fixed bayonets as they were marched through the town.47 In total 133 men were interned and deported from the five counties, not counting a significant number picked up in the first few days but released before deportation.48

  Many of the arrested men were undoubtedly Sinn Féiners, but in every town the immediate response was not to take pleasure at the discomfort of the Irish party’s ‘pro-German’ enemies, but to protest at the arbitrary arrest of innocent men. J.P. Farrell denounced ‘peripatetic bands of military … intensifying the bitterness’ and sending ‘misled young men’ to England, ‘many of them young men wholly innocent of any evil intent whatsoever’. Thomas Scanlan, MP for Sligo North, designated the Cliffoney deportees ‘prisoners of war’ and the Sligo Nationalist noted that ‘they were merely members of the Volunteer force and had not seen any prohibition regarding arms.’ They were aged from fifteen to twenty three years and their leader was only nineteen years old. Some, the paper reported, were the only support for their widowed mothers. Writing on the Athlone arrests, the Westmeath Independent’ s leading article was entitled ‘Our twelve’. It wrote that they were Irish Volunteers ‘openly and above board’, had complied with the law and were just as legal as Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. Their arrest risked creating feelings of disgust and repugnance. They were ‘almost all young men, all upright, of respectable character, sober, and the making of good citizens in any well-governed country in the world’.49 The immediate release of all the internees was added to the growing list of nationalist demands – the end of martial law, no more executions, political status for the convicted men. Unlicensed protest meetings having been banned under martial law, a wave of council resolutions, parliamentary questions and appeals for funds duly followed.

  It was in this environment, in which ‘an extraordinary revulsion of feeling has taken place’, that John Dillon’s parliamentary condemnation of British stupidity, on 11 May, had such an impact in Ireland.50 As noted above, Dillon freely admitted that the rebels had been ‘our bitterest enemies’, but he emphasised that ‘the executions, house-searching throughout the country, wholesale arrests … have exasperated feeling to a terrible extent.’ The elements of his speech which had the greatest impact were his defiance of Britain and his praise for the conduct and character of the rebels. British MPs were told that they were ‘washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood’, and were informed by Dillon that: ‘It is the insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would have been a damned good thing if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’51

  The local nationalist press without exception reported Dillon’s speech. It was described as ‘great’, ‘a sensation’ and ‘thrilling’. Interestingly, the speech was immediately contrasted with the more restrained utterances of the party’s leader, Redmond. The veteran factionist Jasper Tully (who for the last thirteen years had been an incessant critic of Dillon) now ironically praised Dillon more than Redmond: ‘While we are all thankful to Mr Redmond for what he has done, there is hardly a man who has read Mr Dillon’s speech who is not proud of it.’52 As the Sligo Champion put it in a leading article, until Dillon spoke the response of the Irish party to the rebellion seemed mild and half-hearted.53

  Local party rhetoric from the time of the arrests and Dillon’s speech hardened appreciably. For example, the north Roscommon executive of the UIL met on 4 June under T.J Devine, who at the end of 1916 would be the Irish party’s candidate in the Roscommon North by-election. Its demands were clearly expressed, and showed just how much local party sentiment towards the Rising had developed in just five weeks. It demanded:

  From early June onwar
ds, almost every town in the five counties witnessed the launch of appeal funds; typically for the Irish National Aid Association (INAA), but sometimes for the more radical Volunteer Dependants’ Fund (VDF). The former, ostensibly a relief fund for all who had suffered in the Rising, was undoubtedly more popular than the latter, which was specifically for the dependants of those who had actually taken part. Across Ireland up to 30 June, the INAA collected over £4,480 outside Dublin: the VDF some £1,131.55 Irish party MPs, council leaders and town bosses initially maintained their political distinctiveness from Sinn Féiners by acting as prominent organisers and collectors for the INAA rather than the VDF. However, the merger of the two funds in August, which, according to the police, placed both under Sinn Féin control, made little or no difference to levels of activity, nor to the local participation of Irish party figures.56

  Sometimes the sympathy of Irish party figures for the rebels was clear from the outset of the relief effort. One such figure was John Jinks, the mayor of Sligo. Jinks was by far the most prominent Irish party supporter in Sligo town and had a son serving in the army. At the beginning of June, he chaired the meeting held to launch the INAA in the town. He did state, like so many contemporaries, that the rebellion had been ‘disastrous’, but went on to say that there was a clear need to relieve the appalling distress of the rebels’ dependants. He continued: