Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  A whole hive of weekly publications, however, was ready and willing to sting, like wasps, the imperial lion: Nationality, Republic, Honesty, Volunteer, Hibernian. Their proprietor was J. J. Walsh of 26 Blessington Street, and their printer was the Gaelic Press, Upper Liffey Street, which was raided and destroyed some years later, on 24 March 1916. The editor of The Spark, Ed Dalton, in a scathing editorial of 2 April 1916, described as an atrocity the raiding of the Gaelic Press by ‘an armed deputation of forty Defenders of the Rights of Small Nationalities’. Having hurled this piece of irony (the alleged reason for Britain’s entering the First World War), Dalton pointed out that the raid concerned yet another nationalist paper, The Gael – not one of J. J. Walsh’s but one also printed by the Gaelic Press. Dalton argued that if anyone should be arrested then it should be the editor: the printer had been merely doing his job.[2] In the same issue, a letter from J. J. Walsh appeared in which he described how the printing machinery had been destroyed by ‘the military tyrants’ from Dublin Castle and both type and print matter confiscated, including some issues of The Spark. Walsh set up a fund to help the Gaelic Press, then almost ruined.[3]

  The advertisements in The Spark make typical Irish Ireland reading. A céilí is advertised for Óglaigh na hÉireann (Dublin Brigade) at 25 Parnell Square; Domhnall Ua Buachalla advertises bilingually his Luciana bicycles; Gleeson’s of O’Connell Street are ‘the pioneer Irish goods only store’; the Hon. Secretary of the Sinn Féin Bank, Alderman T. Kelly, seeks subscriptions; Whelan & Son of Ormond Quay offer green, white and orange badges at one penny each. The Spark itself cost a halfpenny.[4]

  It was Griffith’s newspapers, The United Irishman and Sinn Féin (before he modified his republican stance), which, more than any other publication, swung opinion in Ireland towards national freedom. Griffith was in full, unmodified republican flight when these words of his appeared in his issue of 13 July 1908: ‘Let us renounce the disastrous policy of making the parliament House of England the arena of the Irish struggle. Let us make the dissolution of the British Empire our immediate object.’

  Catering for the other extreme, the Ascendancy elite, were two publications. One was Irish Society and Social Review (price one penny), founded in 1887 and covering, to use its own phraseology, ‘Balls, Parties, At Homes, etc.’. It also covered society weddings where minute details included not only the people, the church, the residence, clothing and flowers, but also the gifts (some in the luxury class) given to the several bridesmaids. The Irish Figaro, owned and edited by Ramsay Colles, concentrated more on Dublin Castle, vice-regal personalities and general Anglo-Irish ‘hangers-on’. However, it was not above taking a snipe at republicans. In fact, its chief claim to fame, in a résumé of Irish Ireland propaganda and counter-propaganda, is an incident that followed a derogatory reference in one of its editorials to Maud Gonne (who had herself been a one-time habitué of Anglo-Irish social gatherings): Arthur Griffith went into the newspaper office and vigorously whipped the editor. It was a most uncharacteristic act of violence from the mild-mannered founder of Sinn Féin and earned him ten days in jail, because he would not pay the fine imposed by law.

  Other nationalist publications included James Connolly’s Irish Worker and (after its suppression) the resurrected Workers’ Republic. James Connolly used editorial manipulation in his Workers’ Republic to extract wage rises, to recruit for his Irish Citizen Army, to extend greetings to workers in all nations and to keep alive the spirit of Irish nationalism. An editorial of the suppressed Irish Worker flung the following challenge to Westminster:

  If you leave us at liberty we will kill your recruiting, save our poor boys from your slaughterhouses, and blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike at, imprison or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you and mayhap rise a force that will destroy you.

  The Irish Ireland periodicals, newspapers, news-sheets and pamphlets had much in common: an almost complete lack of funding, plenty of material from unpaid journalists – ranging from mediocre to excellent – and an enormous drive to say their republican or separatist piece in defiance of the ruling power; one might say that they were daring the British authorities to close them down – a matter in which they sometimes obliged. The Irish People, mouthpiece of the Fenians, suffered a punitive raid of its premises and destruction of its plant in Parliament Street, Dublin.

  ‘John Brennan’ established her name firmly as a republican writer during these years, not only in Bean na hÉireann, but also in Seán Mac Diarmada’s Irish Freedom and in Griffith’s Sinn Féin. The quality of her work is obvious, especially in the engaging and informative The Years Flew By, but the remarkable aspect of it was that she was a young woman leaving the unionist island of Rathmines and swimming fearlessly in the turbulent waters of Irish republicanism. She was unable to share the happiness of her success with her parents, who were not pleased with what they could grasp of any of their daughters’ involvement with this new movement, and the more explicit republicanism expressed by ‘John’ would have appalled them.

  The Gifford daughters were also attracted to the Irish Ireland stage. They had behind them their childhood experiences of the early dramas of Ada and Gabriel and of Gabriel’s home-made toy theatres. Now they became involved not merely as onlookers but as prompters, bit-part actors and providers of ‘things’ (props) in a few of the many amateur and semi-professional performances in Dublin City. Dublin was awash, you might say, with such entertainments, though there was nothing amateurish about the last-formed of these pre-Rising companies – at least as far as its well-equipped little theatre in Hardwicke Street was concerned. This group, which called itself the Irish Theatre, was set up in 1914 by Joseph Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, Edward Martyn and Jack MacDonagh. The theatre, which included dressing rooms, was provided by Joseph’s mother, Countess Plunkett, and, in the typical, multi-faceted Irish Ireland fashion, on the floor beneath the theatre the sisters of W. B. Yeats, Lily and Lolly, were producing exquisite, miscellaneous items of Celtic-embroidered linen.

  The Irish Theatre’s aims were the production of Irish plays other than peasant plays, plays in the Irish language and foreign masterpieces. Grace Gifford had no acting ability, but she helped out with the scenery. ‘John’ was a devotee and supporter of the Irish Theatre productions and assisted with the props. Nellie got ‘bit’ parts in the company’s plays. She has left us a glimpse of her future brother-in-law, Joseph Plunkett, playing the part of a wandering poet and being excellent in it. His melodious voice, she said, spoke the opening lines of the play – ‘How beautiful the Volga looks tonight’ – but, when not on stage, he sat quietly looking on and saying little; during that period he was far from well and his lungs were causing him trouble.[5]

  Nellie also described a first night at which she was confronted with a typewriter for the first time in her life. She was supposed to clackety-clack on the keyboard to appear to be recording the words of an actor. That was all right until she came to the end of the carriage. Not knowing what to do, she sat there, consumed with embarrassment, and had to let the actor continue his dialogue unaccompanied.[6]

  It was undoubtedly their love of Irish that inspired the tutor Thomas MacDonagh and his pupil Joseph Plunkett to go out on a limb to produce Gaelic-speaking plays. Plunkett amicably disagreed with the other directors of the Irish Theatre when they chose Swedish writer August Strindberg’s Easter for production and so he resigned from the group. Despite the execution of Thomas MacDonagh after the 1916 Rising, the Irish Theatre continued on under John MacDonagh, Thomas’ brother, and Edward Martyn.

  At the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, during a production by Count Markievicz of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, it was considered a ‘fun’ thing to get a walk-on part. So ‘John’ Gifford and her friend Máire Perolz got themselves two minor roles. The play being about the American War of Independence, the Count had the bright idea of casting his pro-English ‘Castle’ acquaintances as the English
soldiers while Constance supplied actors for the rebels from her republican cronies. One theatre critic said that the scuffles on stage were very realistic.[7]

  Concerts must also be included in any Irish Ireland survey. Moore’s melodies, the poetic rhetoric of Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders, harps, fiddles and bagpipes were featured, and young heroes such as Teddy O’Neill were enshrined in melodic verse. They were all part of the musical agenda. Dancers obliged with jigs, reels and hornpipes. Often a tableau vivant would feature Dark Rosaleen or Éire and Her Four Daughters (the four provinces). The participants’ gowns were Gaelicised with Celtic embroidery. In one, Countess Markievicz featured, in full armour, as Joan of Arc. The Gifford girls also took part. Muriel’s long red hair was suitably dramatic for her to be Queen Maeve, and ‘John’ became Robert Emmet’s housekeeper, Anne Devlin. Less elitist than drama, these concerts were very often the soul food of those whose families had clung on to life through famine and evictions and uprisings. The stuff of these concerts reflected and nurtured the affective, emotional nature of their political thinking and prepared them for the 1916 Rising. What they saw, heard and felt was deeply rooted in truth. No one needed to spell out for them what had happened to their forebears. They had heard it all in their béal oideas and in their songs and ballads.

  Susan Mitchell’s aforementioned anti-conscription ballad, a great favourite at concerts and céilís, sums up the ironic rejection of Britain’s recruitment posters for manning its armies with Irishmen. It is about a boy from Carrick who ‘took the Saxon shilling’:

  He didn’t see much glory and he didn’t get much good.

  In most unrighteous places he freely shed his blood.

  The best years of his manhood he spent across the foam.

  But when they had no use for him they up and sent him home.

  He has bullets in his right arm and bullets in his leg,

  So he had no grá for working, nor had he leave to beg.

  The peelers have their eye on him – twice he’s been in gaol.

  By now he’s in the workhouse. Glory be to God![8]

  Audiences sang the last sentence with much gusto.

  The Irish Ireland movement was in flood, veering towards a situation where it would, at last, burst its restraints. The daughters of Frederick and Isabella Gifford, in defiance of their upbringing, were very much part of the whole dramatic change.

  Notes

  [1]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 44.

  [2]Ed Dalton, ‘Robbery Under Arms’, The Spark, vol. III, no. 60, 2 April 1916, pp. 1, 4.

  [3]Ibid.

  [4]Ibid.

  [5]NGDPs.

  [6]Ibid.

  [7]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 35.

  [8]Ibid., pp. 44–45.

  8 - Darker Dublin

  Apart from the plays, concerts, céilís, Gaelic games and a feisty republican press, there was a very much darker side to the Dublin of the early twentieth century, and this increasingly became the concern of those involved in the Irish Ireland movement, including the Gifford sisters. James Connolly’s daughter Nora described Dublin’s housing conditions, which she observed while electioneering for the Labour Party in Townsend Street in December 1910: ‘I went up pitch black stairs, my feet slipping and squelching in the filth on them; some wide, some of them with steps missing. And the smell … the smell!’[1]

  The hopelessly inadequate sewage and limited water supply caused horrific conditions. The one water closet in a yard, clogged and stinking, was supposed to take away the waste. Instead, ordure (human and animal) built up in the small courtyards and was removed by a sanitary cart once a week – in theory at least. Winter found shivering children in inadequate clothes and with little in their stomachs. Their bodies and immune systems were deprived of proper nourishment, and their bare feet were blue with the cold and wet. Most of the ruling class had moved out to the salubrious suburbs such as Rathmines and Rathgar, ridding themselves of the stench and infectious danger of abject poverty. The Irish who lived in the little villages around the city, such as Coolock, Blanchardstown, Lucan and Tallaght, were the lucky ones. Their cottages were infinitely superior to the rat-infested city slums where death from fever and starvation was endemic.

  A law was passed in Britain, in 1906, to feed those school-going children who were in want. No such law was passed for Ireland, where the situation was infinitely worse, despite several attempts made by the Irish MPs at Westminster. The only thing to be said in its favour, from the Irish Irelanders’ point of view, was that this neglect recruited new supporters for their policy. A native government, the argument ran, could not possibly be so indifferent to its wretched poor.

  The Giffords became involved when Maud Gonne MacBride (the beloved muse of W. B. Yeats, one of the founding members of Inghínidhe na hÉireann (INE) and estranged wife of Major John MacBride), returned from France. Seeing the horror of the Dublin poor, she proposed to get school meals for the starving children through the munificence of the Dublin Corporation. ‘John’ Gifford, by then a member of Inghínidhe na hÉireann, described Maud Gonne MacBride’s deep warm-heartedness, which had been greatly moved by the pitiful children on the Dublin streets. She saw them not only barefoot and hungry, but also wearing buttonless hand-me-down coats kept closed by their own cold hands or by a large safety pin. One virtue of the Ascendancy elite having moved out to new suburbs with their own town councils, was that Dublin Corporation’s members were now more likely to be tradespeople and merchants. They agreed with Inghínidhe to strike a rate for school meals, but their legal advisers told them they could not do so without the determinedly withheld Westminster permission. Maud Gonne MacBride went ahead anyway, without official help, and with other members of Inghínidhe formed the Ladies School Dinner Committee (LSDC). Canon Kavanagh, parish priest of one of the most deprived Dublin parishes, St Audeon’s, asked her to supply meals to his school’s children. She and the Canon had been friends since the time she had been part of the Ladies Committee for the Patriotic Children’s Treat, which had organised a picnic for deprived Irish children in Drumcondra to counter that provided officially to honour Queen Victoria on her visit to Ireland in 1900.

  Maud Gonne MacBride spent several weeks in Ireland in the autumn of 1910, and during this time 250 children were served hot stew with potato and beans by herself, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Countess Markievicz, Helena Molony, Kathleen Clarke (wife of Thomas Clarke), Helen Laird and Muriel, Nellie, Grace and ‘John’ Gifford.[2] The Patriotic Children’s Treat had been a one-off children’s party timed to coincide with the Queen’s visit; the LSDC’s meals, vital for health, were sustained for as long as possible.

  Most of the children had never tasted beans before, and they were a special favourite. School attendance improved, and Fr Thomas Keane, another nationalist priest, asked the LSDC’s help for his school in John’s Lane. The children’s meals were served on great trestle tables in the school yard, and the volunteer caterers worked hard at cooking, washing up and raising funds to buy the ingredients.

  Meanwhile, the Sisters of the Holy Faith, founded by Margaret Aylward, ran three ‘poor schools’ – one in Temple Bar (one room in which they had all their fifty pupils), one in Little Strand Street and a third in the Coombe. At these schools, food, books and clothing were provided.[3] Margaret Alyward’s Catholic charity schools received help from some Protestant sympathisers, who were as aware as she was of the dire lives her pupils led. Their aim was not proselytism.

  On Nellie’s first visit to St Audeon’s she noticed what she thought were little bundles of wet rags left to dry around the fire, but then discovered that the teacher allowed the very smallest toddlers to lie there, where they often fell asleep. Their mothers were using the school as a kind of crèche while they went out to work or to seek it.[4] Many of the children had no underwear. This fact was brought to the attention of an appalled Canon Kavanagh when one of them inadvertently exposed her bare bottom. The very next day he arrived with what we
re described as red woollen garments, mostly too big. But, as Nellie Gifford wrote in her notes, the kind man had been generous in good faith. It is a cheerful, comforting thought with which to leave the wretchedness of it all – scrawny little tummies full of warm food and cold little bottoms clothed against the winter in voluminous red flannel.[5]

  Despite the moving description Nellie has left us of St Audeon’s, she did not put as much work into the school meals as did her sisters, because of her absence on work in County Meath. She cut her political teeth, as it were, in ‘Meath of the Pastures’, where she spent most of her years as a domestic economy instructress.

  At Sandymount, Countess Plunkett was also feeding the hungry, and there were other such kindnesses around the city. The work of these women was a great help, but the enormity of the problem required state aid. Westminster had turned its back once again on the suffering in Ireland. Its callousness was not forgotten, a repeat of the Famine laissez-faire, and this time there was the added insult of the comparative care of the parliament for London’s poor, enshrined in legislation.

  The Irish MPs at Westminster were a motley lot. Some parlia-mentarians were mere lickspittles, dressed up in the required customary garb of the day – frock coats and tall silk hats; some were in politics with an eye to whatever was the equivalent of today’s brown envelopes and Ansbacher accounts; but others were gutsy participants, opposing a parliamentary system where empirical needs were satiated at the expense of the colonies.

  All the Giffords would have been aware in their childhood, from the talk amongst their father’s friends at Temple Villas, of such parliamentary personalities as Parnell, Butt, Biggar and Davitt. But it was a contemporary MP, Laurence Ginnell, the Member for Meath, whom Nellie Gifford most admired, particularly for his very practical approach. His legal booklet, The Brehon Laws, recorded the fact that, while the land of the old Gaelic clan was communal, the maighin digona, or farmhouse and attached small garden, was a sanctuary for the family unit, protected by law – roughly the equivalent of an Englishman’s home being his castle.