1916

by Gabriel Doherty

  Central to the formation of Sinn Féin was Arthur Griffith’s abandonment of his long-standing republican opposition to the Catholic church’s stance on education matters, after he realised that the predominantly Catholic population of Ireland was never going to accept republicans’ secular nationalist ideology. Indeed, it was precisely by encouraging greater Catholic control over the primary (national school) education system that Griffith was able to prompt many to consider his proposal that Sinn Féin could potentially become an ideal replacement for the Irish party.23 In turn, like the Irish party’s press, the Sinn Féin newspaper refused to publish any material that was critical of the role of the Catholic church in Irish politics. After Whitehall had granted state recognition to the Catholic University/UCD and following Rome’s promulgation of the Ne Temere decree in 1908, some Catholic bishops, being satisfied that the future well-being of Catholic Ireland had been safeguarded, encouraged Joseph Devlin’s AOH (heretofore the backbone of support for the long-faltering Irish party) to begin supporting Sinn Féin,24 which was already popular among young ecclesiastical students in Maynooth College.25 Meanwhile, following in Maud Gonne’s footsteps, Countess Markievicz, an aristocrat and former debutante, joined Sinn Féin and helped turn the semi-militaristic boy scouts unit, Fianna Éireann (a separate body to the IRB), into a fairly popular youth movement.26 Significantly, Markievicz felt it necessary to become a Catholic if her nationalism was to be taken seriously.27

  These developments were crucial to the creation of the so-called ‘revolutionary generation’ in early twentieth century Ireland, but it should be stressed that Tom Clarke’s impact on the IRB from 1907–16 rested upon a very different and far more localised dynamic. Central to his rise in the IRB was the removal from authority of P.T. Daly, a Dublin labour activist, committed Irish speaker and printer with An Cló Cumann . Having become the secretary of a (nominally) reunited IRB in 1904, Daly marginalised all IRB veterans and directed all young members to work only in the public Irish-Ireland social movements, thereby causing the revolutionary underground to dwindle away through the lack of an organisational nucleus.28 In time he also misappropriated IRB funds while, in one way or another, reports of some IRB meetings he chaired were received by Dublin Castle.29 During the early to mid 1900s, P.N. Fitzgerald, the old IRB chief organiser, was critical of Daly’s mismanagement of the IRB,30 while Daly in turn worked to counteract Fitzgerald.31 Soon after Clarke arrived in Ireland, he discovered that IRB veterans were correct in claiming that Daly was acting against the IRB’s best interests and had misappropriated their funds. With the support of P.S. O’Hegarty, the leader of the Wolfe Tone clubs, John O’Hanlon (a veteran IRB figure from the 1880s) was soon able to co-opt Clarke onto the IRB Supreme Council along with three other veteran figures, Fred Allan, John MacBride and M.F. Crowe.32 Daly was thereafter expelled, causing Allan (the IRB leader of the 1890s) to resume his old position as IRB secretary, while Clarke became the new IRB treasurer.33 Allan soon discovered to his horror that the IRB had been reduced from the organisation of about 10,000 members that he had led a decade before to one containing little over 1,000 men, confined mostly to the Wolfe Tone clubs in Dublin, and that little or no communications existed between its followers countrywide.34 This situation was not about to change, however.

  Clarke’s next significant impact on the IRB revolved around the attempt of two young republican journalists, P.S. O’Hegarty and Bulmer Hobson, to form a rival journal to Sinn Féin . Previous efforts, The Republic and the Irish Nation and Peasant , had been boycotted by Catholic opinion and were short-lived, but Hobson persuaded Allan and Clarke to take up the idea by forming Irish Freedom ( Saoirse na hÉireann ) in November 1910.35 However, after Patrick McCartan (a recent American envoy sent by the somewhat controversial figure of Joseph McGarrity)36 sent Fr Eugene Sheehy to Philadelphia to forward an IRB progress report, Allan was incapacitated in his role as IRB secretary, while both Markievicz and Gonne began supporting McCartan’s efforts to wrest control of Irish Freedom out of Allan’s hands.McCartan appealed to Clarke, as IRB treasurer, to support him, but Clarke, feeling divided loyalties, first hesitated and then refused. McGarrity, the Clan treasurer since the autumn of 1904, then gave McCartan the necessary funds. Thereafter, Allan, MacBride, O’Hanlon, Crowe and other IRB veterans offered their resignations when they learned that McGarrity was financially supporting his envoy McCartan, and deliberately not funding the IRB Supreme Council. Many members of the Wolfe Tone clubs resigned with them, but Clarke and a majority of the younger members of the clubs (who were also Gaelic League members) opted not to resign and so the veterans were not reinstated and a new Supreme Council had to be created.37 McCartan and Hobson thereafter encouraged many of their non-IRB associates to become lead writers for Irish Freedom , a fact that played a significant role in making this a more popular journal. It should be stressed, however, that neither revival nor decline of the IRB occurred as a consequence.

  During the first thirty years or so of its existence, the IRB had been a nationwide organisation with tens of thousands of members, a central force in Irish popular politics, a quite effective underground party, and a would-be revolutionary citizens’ defence force. Before and after 1912, however, it was little more than a tiny committee, struggling to stay alive. Hence Major Nicholas Gosselin, the head of special branch since the mid-1880s, had retired happily in December 1904, satisfied that an Irish nationalist threat no longer existed. It was not until 1919 that special branch funding would again equal the level reached during the mid 1880s.38 The youths who joined the IRB during the 1900s via the Gaelic League or Dungannon clubs (a group of short-lived literary and debating societies operated by Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough) had no experience of being part of a disciplined revolutionary movement. Instead of being a priority, the IRB was to them little more than an interesting, American-funded subset of the new Irish-Ireland and Sinn Féin movements that existed in the light of day and were built around the Gaelic League. It was the latter movement that was most important to them, for which they acted as propagandists, decided their loyalties and which, indeed, had a significant power over Irish public attitudes.

  Tom Clarke was virtually the only member of the IRB’s post-1912 leadership who knew that the organisation was but a shadow of its former self. Considered by some former IRB leaders of the 1880s as a ‘republican through and through’, Clarke was nevertheless very conscious of the fact that he had never before played a role in directing the organisation.39 From 1909 onwards, therefore, he constantly sought the counsel of John Daly, his wife’s uncle and former boss in the IRB (having been chief organiser from 1872 to 1880), who had extensive experience both in politics and as a revolutionary leader. Like Clarke himself, Daly had spent over a decade in prison after being framed by spies and agent provocateurs during the spring of 1884.40 Most recently, he had been a pro-labour mayor of his hometown of Limerick (1899–1902) where, since the 1870s, he and all republicans had been denounced by the local Catholic bishop, Dr O’Dwyer.41 Nevertheless, during the late 1890s Daly was able to become a prosperous baker. At Clarke’s request, he funded various IRB ventures after 1909. Notwithstanding his illness and old age, Daly also advised Seán MacDermott – the man Clarke appointed to replace the veteran figure of Fred Allan as IRB secretary – about the reorganisation of the IRB. Indeed, alone of all the younger men, MacDermott was brought into very close counsel with the Daly-Clarke family, who were hypersensitive about maintaining security in the IRB.42 While Clarke admired the young propagandists who wrote for Irish Freedom (particularly Hobson),43 he evidently had a much greater sense of respect for his old revolutionary cohorts.44 His tendency to trust in IRB veterans was perhaps best demonstrated by his choosing Clontarf Town Hall (an establishment run by another old revolutionary comrade, Michael McGinn)45 for most Supreme Council meetings right up until January 1916.46

  Not until after the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force was Clarke able to persuade the young Irish Freedom propag
andists to consider the idea of bearing arms, or to follow the lead of James Stritch, an IRB veteran who had built a drilling hall behind the site of the republican movement’s former headquarters during the mid 1880s.47 Meanwhile, after the lockout of all Dublin transport workers in the summer of 1913, the socialist-republican James Connolly and the IRB man Seán O’Casey formed the Irish Citizen Army to defend the workers’ rights. Bulmer Hobson, however, tried to popularise the idea of forming a volunteer force specifically by targeting the editorial staff of the Gaelic League organ, An Claidheamh Soluis , namely Pádraig Pearse, The O’Rahilly and Eoin MacNeill, who was also a leading UCD academic. The fact that the Catholic press was now generally critical of the home rule proposals for granting Ireland no legislative or fiscal autonomy (no such criticisms had been made in 1886 or 1893), allied with Hobson’s close friendship with Countess Markievicz (with whom he was co-leader of Fianna Éireann), no doubt played a significant part in encouraging MacNeill to support the idea. This led to the formation of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913. Its executive included several leaders of the stridently Catholic AOH, who were then wavering between the Irish party and Sinn Féin in their sympathies.48

  London IRB men like O’Hegarty and Collins (both of whom came from old Cork IRB families)49 would later claim that the Irish Volunteer movement was virtually the IRB’s invention.50 So it might have seemed to them from a distance. However, the volunteer movement was led by what might be best described as the ‘Gaelic League party’. Men like MacNeill, The O’Rahilly and Pearse were neither republicans nor revolutionaries, but Catholic intellectuals who, like the Catholic bishops, were sympathisers with both the Irish party and Sinn Féin. Like the former, they also felt aggrieved by the British government’s handling of the home rule crisis. At the time, the Irish party was accusing the British government of betraying its trust by allowing the formation of the Ulster Volunteers. Some Irish party supporters attempted to portray this as a ‘betrayal of democracy’ but the reality was that the Ulster and Irish parties were nothing more than marginal constituencies, representing collectively less than one tenth of the total electorate of the United Kingdom; democracy, thus, had nothing to do with the matter. The only ‘betrayal’ involved was the British government’s reneging on the unofficial, and far from democratic, concordat-like arrangement established in 1886, whereby the Irish party understood that they were to become the future mediators of the Union in Ireland.

  Over the previous thirty years, establishing the political and educational basis of a Catholic governing class for the Union in Ireland was central to the Irish party’s purpose. However, if it and the Catholic church formerly had a strong common cause due to their mutual concern for providing for Catholic education, unlike the Irish party, the church’s primary concern with education had always been religious, not political, and stemmed not least from its desire for missionaries. Indeed, as Ireland had the only predominantly Catholic population in the English-speaking world, the Irish population was central to Roman Catholic missionary work in North America, Australia and all British territories. The church’s role in inspiring D.P. Moran’s generation to advocate a ‘philosophy of Irish-Ireland’, whereby Irish people were encouraged to view themselves as a special race destined to become a spiritual beacon for the rest of the world, and as morally superior to all secular or Protestant societies, was rooted in this same missionary concern. To some extent this concern had become even more acute with the passage of time because of the ever-growing secularisation of European and British society – a development from which the church was naturally determined to protect Irish society at all costs.

  Within a few months, the Irish Volunteers acquired tens of thousands of members, generally through the AOH, the largest social organisation among Irish Catholics. Unlike the IRB, however, the Irish Volunteers was neither a revolutionary nor a republican movement. Rather it was a public body that identified with the mainstream of Irish Catholic society and, as such, was to receive support from some of the Catholic bishops.51 Recognition of this fact is important to understand the role the IRB played in the organisation of the 1916 Rising and events thereafter, as well as the history of the Irish Volunteer movement and the conflicting attitudes that emerged between various IRB and Volunteer (later ‘IRA’) figures. Meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that owing to their very status as volunteers, the members of the Irish Volunteers were not only almost entirely unarmed but also unsalaried. Consequently, a large proportion, having little opportunity to earn good money (or to bear arms), were prepared to enlist in the British army, via John Redmond’s ‘National’ Volunteers, once the call arose not long after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The ‘Gaelic League party’ generally opposed Redmond’s initiative, however. Their supporters included G.N. Plunkett, a papal count, and his son, Joseph Mary Plunkett, both of whom attempted to contact Rome and the German government after they realised that the outbreak of the First World War had brought about a completely new situation in Europe.52 The first instigators of the latter initiative, however, were two men who were formerly prominent British civil servants, namely Erskine Childers and Roger Casement. Both men opposed the British war effort (they had long foreseen a war with Germany) and supported the Irish Volunteers’ efforts to import arms. (They arranged the Howth gun-running in July 1914 once Whitehall renewed the special coercive arms acts for Ireland that it had dropped temporarily in 1912 to facilitate the formation of the Ulster Volunteers.)53

  As Clan na Gael had begun raising funds for the Irish Volunteers that spring,54 and as the IRB hoped to use the Volunteers as a recruiting ground to revive its organisation, Clarke, MacDermott, John Daly and Devoy were very angry with Hobson for not using his influence in the Volunteers to prevent its members from enlisting in the British army.55 This decision on Hobson’s part was interpreted by them as a political surrender to Redmond’s party – an attitude that demonstrated the importance of the ‘generation-gap’ in Irish nationalist circles at this time. Hobson and many leaders of the Irish Volunteers did not consider Redmond’s success in persuading men to enlist in 1914 as being of great importance. This was because they knew perfectly well that the influence of the Irish Volunteers and Gaelic League, the movements upon which they intended to base their future careers in Irish public life, had not been significantly lessened as a consequence.

  Meanwhile, Redmond’s only real political power since 1910 stemmed from his personal status as an accepted and senior figure of the British political establishment (like Carson, he was viewed by many as a potential cabinet member); the Irish party itself was moribund. Its unpopularity at this time was reflected by the fact that numerous Catholic writers championed the Irish Volunteers and denounced the Irish party for supporting Britain’s war effort against the last great Catholic power in Europe, Austria-Hungary. ‘Sceilg’s’ Catholic Bulletin , an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Volunteers and fierce critic of the National Volunteers, likewise opposed the war by expressing fears regarding what effect it might have on the future of the papal states.56 Such concerns were shared by several devout Volunteer officers whom Hobson provided with Irish-American contact details during 1914. These included Pearse, who went to America to collect funds for his dying Irish language school, and Thomas Ashe (at that point considering entering a monastery), who went on a Gaelic League fund-raising tour.57

  Veteran revolutionaries viewed the course of events in Ireland in a very different light. Being an old anti-clerical republican, Devoy was no more in favour of Ireland’s future being determined by a Catholic party than were the Ulster Presbyterians.58 Meanwhile, Clarke evidently entertained a hope that the Ulster and Irish Volunteers (he supported both) might join together in Ireland, since they were both seemingly opposed to Whitehall’s politics of home rule, as upheld by Redmond.59 To such men, as well as John Daly and even Griffith (whose basic politics were formed long before the arrival of the Irish-Ireland generation), the Irish party still appeared powerful bec
ause they had been fighting against its politics and machinations for decades. Indeed, nothing would make Devoy happier during the 1910s than to see all the old Irish party candidates defeated, given that he viewed them as having betrayed the Irish nationalist movement of the later nineteenth century.60 Veteran figures like Devoy, Daly and Clarke felt a very strong need for a revolutionary gesture to destroy the Irish party and desired to make the IRB the instrument for this. By contrast, individuals such as McCartan and Hobson, both of whom followed Casement’s lead, tended to view such old revolutionaries as ‘narrow partisans’ and desired instead to go with the general flow of opinion with the public Volunteer and Gaelic League movements.61 Neither of these movements was in favour of revolution or rebellion in the country, but they were clearly in a very strong position to take over from the Irish party as the political leaders of the Irish Catholic community.

  It was Roger Casement, not the IRB, who initiated diplomatic contacts with Germany during 1914. Casement offered to raise an Irish brigade to fight for Germany and represented himself as an official political representative of MacNeill, Hobson and the Irish Volunteer executive. Clarke and the IRB did not like Casement’s involvement in revolutionary affairs and were wholly opposed to this idea of working with Germany. Devoy, the Clan’s secretary, did not like it either,62 but J.T. Keating, the Clan chairman, and McGarrity, its treasurer, supported Casement’s initiative, and so Devoy had to follow suit, meeting Casement and a German emissary in New York. From October 1914 until April 1915, the Clan’s funds were sent to Casement in Germany instead of the IRB in Ireland, though Casement accomplished, and generally did, nothing with this money.63

  Following the outbreak of the First World War, Irish Freedom was suppressed under the new censorship regime and several members of the post-1912 Supreme Council simply resigned once Clarke argued that the IRB needed to use the war as an opportunity to launch a revolution. In turn, having been deprived of all Clan funding, the IRB was in no position to revive its organisation. Indeed, the IRB would probably have completely collapsed at this time were it not for the fact that, at the bidding of Clarke, John Daly funded MacDermott when he travelled the entire country during late 1914 and early 1915 in an attempt to swear several Irish Volunteer officers into the IRB, thereby nominally recreating a Supreme Council.64 In May 1915, however, MacDermott was arrested after making a seditious speech, thereby bringing this push to re-establish the IRB to a sudden halt.65 Clarke responded by appointing in his place as IRB secretary Diarmuid Lynch, a New York Gaelic Leaguer who had worked occasionally for Devoy as a Clan-IRB envoy since 1911, until such time as MacDermott was released from prison. Thereafter, in June 1915, Lynch invented a strange three man ‘Military Committee’, consisting of Pearse (the ‘director of organisation’ of the Irish Volunteers), Joseph Mary Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt. This committee technically did not belong to the IRB and only Clarke and Lynch knew of its existence.66