1916
Page 36
The letter to Hagan was much more radical than his missive the previous day to O’Riordan. It continued:
But despite suppression of papers, the censor, deportation, imprisonment and executions, I never saw such literary activity … Have to see specimens of the mosquito press. The Catholic Bulletin for July was sold out in a week and thousands are going around begging, borrowing and stealing the copies among their friends. Gill won’t reprint it, though pressed to do so. The number of MS poems in circulation is amazing – mostly very good. The latest I saw is one ‘Shall Casement die?’, a fine but perfervid protest as to what will happen if the inconceivable event takes place. It is thought that Casement will be reprieved. There will be ructions in America if he is executed. I don’t know whether you can appreciate American influence in our affairs through the American College. At any rate it predominates everything at present. Wilson knows he will be forced out if Casement is executed and the English don’t want Hughes. It is said (we had it from Mrs Green) that Doyle, the American attorney, was an agent of Wilson’s. He had an interview with Grey [the British foreign secretary]. Grey asked him: ‘Who will be elected president?’ ‘I’ll tell you that,’ said Doyle, ‘when I know Casement’s fate.’
Curran concluded: ‘John Redmond and co. are in a hopeless minority in Ireland at present. The party would not carry 20 seats. That is why there are to be no elections or diminution of the present members.’107
On 25 July Walsh broke his public silence. In a strong letter to the press he said that he had never had a moment’s doubt for years that the cause of home rule for Ireland was being led in parliament along a line that ‘could only bring it to disaster’. He lamented that the majority of those who still retained faith in the efficacy of constitutional agitation had become hopelessly possessed of the disastrous idea that the party or its leadership could do no wrong. Fair criticism had come to an end, he wrote, and anyone who ventured to express an opinion at variance with that of the party at once became a ‘fair mark for every political adventurer in the country to assail with the easily handled epithets of “factionalist”, “wrecker” or “traitor”’. With what the archbishop described as the abandonment of the policy of independent opposition, ‘our country is now face to face with a truly awful prospect’. Home rule was still on the statute book but, he asked, would Irish nationalists any longer be fooled by a repetition of the party cries that this fact made them masters of the situation? He did not think so.
On 28 July Walsh motored from Wicklow to meet an American relief delegation led by Archdeacon John Murphy and John Gill. The archbishop considered the meeting very important as it allowed him to be briefed on Irish-American opinion.108
Meanwhile the fate of Roger Casement became the focus of nationalist attention in Ireland. This was a further source of radicalisation. The manner in which the government conducted itself appalled many in Ireland. Frantic efforts were made to mobilise international public opinion to prevent him meeting the same fate as other leaders of the Rising. It is worth noting that on 18 July, while convalescing in Wicklow, Walsh motored to Courtown, Co. Wexford, to meet Mrs Alice Stopford Green, who had written to him concerning Casement. Curran did not accompany Walsh on that occasion but surmised that the archbishop ‘could only express his sympathy and confess his inability to achieve anything useful’.109
Casement’s trial lasted three days. He was sentenced to death on 29 July. Strenuous efforts were made to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Members of the clergy and hierarchy, including Walsh and Logue, lent their names to the campaign. In a letter published in the press on 20 July 1916, Cardinal Logue wrote: ‘From motives of mercy and charity, and not from any sympathy whatever with the unfortunate course which was taken, I shall be prepared to sign any petition for the reprieve of Roger Casement.’ The archbishop of Dublin and several other Irish bishops also signed the doomed appeal.110 It was to no avail. On 3 August Casement was hanged in Pentonville gaol.
Curran wrote to O’Riordan on 30 August. He noted: ‘Things are fairly quiet as compared with Lent and Easter, but the least thing will cause uproar. Some ‘loyalists’ are terribly anxious for conscription and there is no limit to the blundering and bigotry of govt.’ Referring to the murder of Sheehy Skeffington, he was anxious to have inquiries into other extra-judicial killings investigated: ‘If we can only get the King’s st and other murders examined we will have revelations! Outside the executions, all the murder and tyranny was due to the lower grade officers and Orange and English Tommies.’ In a postscript he set out what in his view were the real causes of the Rising. The breakdown of the constitutional movement, he wrote, was due to two things: ‘(1) Carson and Curragh rebels and the weak govt (2) the abandonment of independent opposition by the Irish party through corruption and jobbery. Old men could stand by calmly, if helplessly, but young blood could not.’111
Bishop O’Dwyer was one such ‘old man’ but his hostility to the British was akin to the feelings felt amongst the younger generation. His antagonism to the Irish party had grown even stronger and he wrote to O’Riordan on 31 August:
It has been good of you to tell me of the Holy Father’s most kind remark. It is the approval that is worth something. Our national affairs are in a strange muddle. P. Albion has been true to her name, and the wretched creatures who have got possession of ‘the machine’ are not men enough to meet the crisis. They will get nothing, and they know it, but keep on duping the people at home with promises.112
O’Dwyer showed compassion on hearing of the death of the Irish MP, Tom Kettle. He wrote to O’Riordan on 21 September 1916: ‘Poor Tom Kettle, a very brilliant fellow, was killed last week in the battle of the Somme, in which the slaughter sees to be enormous. Kettle they tell me, was a good fellow, but for the past few years turned on “the bottle”, which explains a good deal.’113
The topsy-turvy world of Irish politics in the wake of the Rising was perhaps best captured in a letter, dated 5 September, from the radical nationalist Fr Michael O’Flanagan to John Hagan. In it he remarked:
I suppose you have an idea of how the world would look from this camera obscura – everything would end upsidedown, but we are hoping against hope that they will right themselves somehow. As far as the intellectual side of Ireland is concerned, things are better than ever, and I suppose that is the germ out of which everything grows in the long-run.114
Bishop O’Dwyer, by now the toast of Limerick and a celebrity in the international Irish Catholic world of the United States, Australia and New Zealand, was to be honoured by his native city. To that end, a decision was taken to make him a Freeman of Limerick. On 14 September a special meeting of the corporation was called. Members of the public were in attendance. O’Dwyer’s speech recalled the earlier days of his episcopacy when he had been regarded in a critical light for his condemnation of violent methods used in land agitation. Aware of the fickle nature of public opinion, he said he would remind himself that ‘the weather may change at any moment, and the wind blow from another quarter’. Drawn again into public controversy with General Maxwell, O’Dwyer stated Maxwell had had ‘the effrontery to give me directions for the government of my diocese but I hardly think he will repeat the experiment’. Maxwell did not ‘know much about Irish ecclesiastics, who have a proud tradition and who have shown by our predecessors to stand up to English brutality’. Even if the Rising was not justified theologically, he asked whether he was to join in the condemnation of Pearse, MacDonagh and Colbert, who ‘were shot without trial, and of the men and women who, without trial, were deported from this country in thousands’. His speech then became a virtual justification of the actions of the men who rose in 1916. He questioned whether Prime Minister Asquith, were he an Irishman, would have the patience to accept the ‘tantalising perfidy’ of the British who put home rule on the statute book, then hung it up and later announced that before it could be put into practice it would have to be amended. He concluded, to rapturous applause: ‘Ireland w
ill never be content as a province, God made her a nation, and while grass grows and water runs there will be men in Ireland to dare and die for her.’115 Despite censorship, the speech was widely circulated and met with enthusiastic approval.
THE IRISH COLLEGE AND THE 'RED BOOK'
There must have been rumours of a papal peace initiative in late summer 1916, for on 20 August the rector of the Irish College received a letter from Cardinal Logue, which stated: ‘As far as I know there is not a word of truth in the report that the pope has sent any message, directly or indirectly, to the Irish bishops. Had any message been sent, it would likely be sent through me.’116
The rector and vice rector had worked throughout the summer compiling an authoritative account in Italian of the events surrounding the Rising. Aware that many Irish clergy and religious in Rome were still supportive of the Irish party and hostile to radical change at home, the two men sought to produce a clear factual account of the events in Dublin and elsewhere. This became known as the ‘Red Book’.117
Entitled La recente insurrezione in Irlanda, it was forty three pages in length. It was dated on the final page, 1 September. The text was heavily footnoted. It spoke of the 1916 leaders as being university professors, lawyers and some members of families of elevated rank: ‘All were practising Catholics. There was one exception [ James Connolly]. The person who was the exception was born in Great Britain of Irish parents and was a type of socialist; he came to Dublin three years ago, and was not a member of the Volunteers at the time of the insurrection.’ The book quoted from the letters sent by three of the condemned men, to a mother, a sister and a wife. It spoke of Pearse seeking reconciliation with God and preparing for his death like a good Catholic. It recorded that Countess Markiewicz, who was a Protestant, had asked to be received into the Catholic church. Roger Casement, also a Protestant, had sought to be recognised as a Catholic while in Pentonville, according to the testimony of the Catholic chaplain there. The account also noted that the insurgents had recited the rosary in the various buildings they occupied during the Rising, and that, despite being surrounded by British forces, mass had been celebrated therein.118
The work unfavourably compared the disciplined behaviour of the insurgents with unruly and brutal actions by the British forces. Under the heading, ‘ il clero e il moviemento insurrezional ’, the writer spoke about the denunciation by the bishop of Kerry, issued before the Rising, of the practice of opening mail going to convents in his diocese. It instanced two episodes of sacrilege and violation of the eucharist. In the diocese of Clogher a priest who lived a good distance from the church kept the sacred host in a tabernacle in a private oratory in his house. A British military raiding party was ordered by the officer commanding to break into the tabernacle in search of arms. There was another act of desecration at a convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Kinvara, Co. Galway. The book went on to reproduce the correspondence between General Maxwell and Edward O’Dwyer.119
The work concluded that the British government, working through its representatives and civil servants in Ireland, never forgave the Irish bishops and clergy, for three reasons: 1) they had managed to keep the Irish people faithful to the Catholic church, despite generations of injustice; 2) they still had the complete trust of the Irish people; 3) in spite of pressure from the civil authorities to take on the role of civil servants or of policemen, they had persisted in acting independently and as priests. The section ended: ‘For similar reasons the government has never forgiven the Catholics of Ireland: Primum humani ingenii est odiesse quem laeseris.’120
The final section of the book set out a simple thesis. The British government had passed home rule into law. The Irish party had accepted this but the government then broke the agreement. This was not the first time, according to the book, that the British had concluded an agreement and then failed to honour it. The last line in the text was a strong indictment of British rule in Ireland: ‘ Ad ogni modo il ‘pezzo di carta’ e stato lacerate e la slealtà rimane un fatto.’ [‘In any case, the piece of paper has been torn up and the perfidiousness remains a fact.’]121
O’Riordan took a copy of the document to the Holy See sometime after 1 September. It is not clear to whom he gave it. It is probable that he gave a copy directly to Pope Benedict. He most probably also gave it to the cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri. No evidence has yet come to light as to how the document was received. But the argument running throughout the text implicitly warned the Holy See against intervention. It had presented the idea of a Protestant British government seeking unsuccessfully to drive a wedge between the Catholic church and her people. The manner in which the bishops and clergy had acted in the wake of the Rising had ensured that would not happen, just as their actions in the past centuries had prevented such an eventuality.
News of the existence of the book began to circulate in Ireland in early October 1916. The Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, wrote to O’Riordan on 14 October: ‘I got your red pamphlet. It is a great blessing that we have one at Rome so able, and so watchful about the interests of Ireland.’122 Cardinal Logue wrote to O’Riordan on 28 October: ‘I have read the “Red Book” with interest. It is cleverly written, but there are some minor mistakes. The Bank of Ireland was never in the possession of the insurgents.’123 Bishop O’Dwyer wrote to O’Riordan on 29 September, thanking him for the presentation of ‘my case’ before the pope. (A defence of O’Dwyer’s statements and actions figured very prominently in the pages of the book.) The bishop continued: ‘If you were within my mind you could not do it better. I fear, however, that when complaints are formulated against my speech on getting the “freedom” [of Limerick] you will have to supplement my apologia.’124 O’Dwyer explained that the ‘military censored the speech, and I know that many of a certain class resent it, but I spoke, honestly, ex abundantia cordis ’. He then made his views on the Rising crystal clear:
The Irish Volunteers were wrong, and I have said so explicitly but while my judgment condemns them, all my sympathy is with them, as strongly as I condemn the government, and despise the party. It is the old story. Time wears away all the circumstances of our rebels, except the fact which survives in the heart of the country, that they died for Ireland.125
O’Dwyer thus summed up the ambivalence of many, clerical and lay, towards the Rising.
While the existence of the Red Book was quite widely known about in Irish episcopal circles, it was not widely circulated in Ireland and may have been sent to only a select few of the bishops given the sensitivity of its contents. It is probable that the text was also sent to carefully chosen and wholly reliable bishops in the USA and in Australia and New Zealand. The book had been compiled to inform the decision-makers in the Holy See. The Irish College sought to counter British influence at the Vatican. Neither the rector nor the vice rector wanted Pope Benedict XV to issue a condemnation of the Rising. The real danger had passed. Such a statement might have been issued in May or June. But the policy of executions, the mass arrests, and the hanging of Roger Casement had enflamed Irish public opinion at home and abroad, particularly in the strongholds of the Irish diaspora.
Although the Red Book was submitted in the name of Michael O’Riordan and he was widely acknowledged as being its author, there is little doubt that the Italian text was also the work of John Hagan. It has a directness which is associated with his writing style. The volume of work required to produce it, particularly the amount of translation, indicates that both men were involved, together with a native Italian speaker. Irrespective of who wrote the book, however, its intention was to dispel any idea put about by those who sought to advance British interests at the Holy See that the 1916 Rising was a secular, laic, anti-clerical insurrection. Dr J. MacCaffrey, the vice president of Maynooth, articulated that salient point in a letter to Hagan on 20 December:
Yesterday I got a copy of La recente insurrezione in Irlanda, kindly lent me by one of the bishops, and I am perusing it with great interest. It will certainly sho
w Their Eminences that those ‘out’ in Easter week, whatever else they might have been, were not Carbonari.126
In other words, what had happened in Ireland during Easter week 1916 was very distinct in every aspect from the ideas which motivated the revolutionaries of the Risorgimento and of the new Italian state. The Irish men and women who went out in 1916 were driven by Catholic values and ideals. Those who were executed died as Catholics with the last rites of their church. The Red Book argued that thesis very strongly.
The Irish College, already known as a stronghold of Irish nationalism in British circles in Rome, was a source of even deeper suspicion following the Rising. Both Hagan and O’Riordan were seen as highly politicised prelates and advanced nationalists. Count de Salis, a Limerick man, was sent to take up residence in Rome and represent British government interest at the Holy See. What role had the Irish College played in the general reaction of the Irish Catholic church to the Rising and its aftermath? The visit of Count Plunkett to Pope Benedict XV to forewarn him about the pending uprising on Easter Sunday remains an episode yet to be explained satisfactorily. The College may have only played a passive role in that initiative. The British government and its lay and clerical supporters in Rome may have repeatedly exaggerated the radicalism of the rector and vice rector. Their unlearned lesson was that moderates such as O’Riordan and Hagan were being radicalised by draconian tactics of Crown forces in Ireland. The centre had shifted leftwards.